Chains of the Sea

  “See,” said Paul, “somebody’s taking this awful serious. That’s what it’s been like out there. That’s why I want to get out of the city so bad. People are starting to panic. If you got outside at all, you’d see it, too; but you just want to sulk in the apartment. You’re not going to be able to save your skin like that. Not next month, when there isn’t anything left to buy at the A & P.”

  “That film wasn’t from the city,” she said, her voice sounding frightened for the first time.

  “No,” said Paul, “I think that was supposed to be some little New England town. But it’ll happen here, sooner or later. The city sort of insulates you against things. You get the idea that anything you want will be around somewhere, nearby. It’s all an illusion. Everything we need has to be trucked in. We’re more dependent on the outside world than anybody on earth. If food gets scarce, you can bet there won’t be any happy farmers driving their own share over the bridge to feed us. It’s happening already out in the country. The small-town stores are being emptied by hoarders.”

  “Paul,” said Linda. He looked at her, but she was staring straight ahead. He hoped that she’d cry but knew that she wouldn’t.

  “What?”

  “We can’t go. The baby.”

  “I think that’s a pretty good reason to get out while we can. We’ve got to find a place to hole up and wait for people to come to their senses.”

  “That won’t work, Paul. It’s people doing just that who are making the situation worse.”

  “So? Two more won’t make any difference.”

  She turned to look at him. “Paul, I don’t like this,” she whispered.

  “Me neither,” he said, taking her hand and rubbing it. He was shocked to find her palm hot and clammy with sweat. “I’m supposed to be the protector and all that stuff. Just let me figure it out and we’ll be okay. The three or four or five of us.” He breathed heavily, then laughed when he saw her sudden smile.

  “Just three,” she said. “Don’t overwork me.”

  The condition of life was degenerating. The frequent speeches by the scientists, far from making things clear, served only to confuse the already volatile situation. It was commonly accepted that Dr. Waters’ warning was true, that certain species of animals and plants were spontaneously dying out. There seemed to be no pathological reason behind the situation, and no one, neither technologist nor clergyman, cared to offer an explanation. People were far too concerned with the effects to care about the reasons.

  Paul doubted whether those effects were serious enough to justify the rioting and the looting, which were becoming more frequent every day. Sure, the order of things had been shaken up; important niches in the ecology had been suddenly left vacant. But the cumulative threat to mankind couldn’t be very large, nor could whatever danger threatened become real in the near future.

  In the meantime, the scientific community had plenty of time to avert a general tragedy.

  So Paul thought, until the ninth of December, the morning all the dogs were dead. On the way to the subway he saw one of the neighborhood mongrels lying on the sidewalk, its head and front legs falling over the curb. Paul felt a faint distaste, and hoped that someone would remove the dog’s corpse before he came home. Less than thirty yards away was another dead dog, a German shepherd that belonged to an old Hispanic lady on the block. It always sat in the open window of the woman’s apartment, staring at Paul as he walked by. Now it hung over the windowsill, its tongue swollen and protruding, its eyes opened sightlessly to the ground. A few flies hovered and settled on its muzzle. Paul suffered a touch of disgust, then a quick shock of fear. The dogs! Even the most stubborn of Waters’ opponents would have a moment’s alarm now.

  Vindication was a poor trade for what the extinction of Cams familiaris would do to the teetering popular mind. Unable to understand what was happening, people everywhere were returning to primal instincts. There was no definite way to answer the challenge, though; no one could say just where the danger might arise. It was this helplessness, this failure of logic to advise one on how best to prepare, that destroyed man’s thin shell of culture.

  The Jennings Manufacturing Corporation was closed when Paul arrived. There were no signs, no explanations; large steel gates were drawn over the doors and locked with heavy chains. Workmen were busily bricking up the windows on the ground floor.

  Paul went up to one of the men. “They’re not even going to let me go in and clean out my locker?” he said.

  The workman didn’t turn around. “Nope,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until things settle down a little.”

  “Old Man Jennings must be figuring on a pretty long wait.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I just wanted the instant coffee I left inside. You got a dog?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Was he all right when you left home this morning?”

  “I guess so,” said the workman, putting down his trowel to gaze curiously at Paul. “I don’t know; I didn’t see him. Why?”

  “He’s dead.” Paul shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket and started walking back to the subway.

  The bricklayer called after him. “Dogs, today? For God’s sake, why dogs?” Paul shook his head and kept walking. Sooner or later the world was going to be in awful bad trouble. People needed to keep their emotions out of it. There had to be a sensible way to live in spite of the problem. Paul had seen the situation develop long before most of the rest; it was his long exposure and his uncertainty that held him from running into the street, screaming. Linda, who had tried to ignore the hints of calamity as long as possible, had at last admitted her blindness. Suddenly forced to deal with a nightmare of doubts, she had thrown herself completely into Paul’s care, hoping that he knew better what to do. It had been a bitter trial for her; she had always prided herself on her independence and her reasonable outlook. Now it seemed that reason had little survival value. Confronted with a completely illogical environment, she preferred to have someone else assume the responsibilities. She hid from herself the fact that Paul was no better equipped to take over those functions.

  “Hey, Linda?” he called, when he got home.

  “Paul? Why are you back so soon?”

  He went into the bedroom, where Linda was already awake, watching an early women’s panel show. “Jennings closed down the plant. I guess he didn’t want the riffraff getting in and tearing up his pile of soldering irons. So it looks like I’m out of a job for a while.”

  “They were talking about how bad things are getting in Asia. This guy was saying that the people are falling back into tribes and all sorts of stuff. He says he can see it happening everywhere, even here. Everybody’s predicting the end of the world, but I look out the window and I can’t see anything different.”

  “You look out now, you’ll see a lot of dead dogs.”

  “Huh? Dogs? What happened?”

  “All the dogs died,” said Paul. “Like the trees and bugs and germs. Just that now the thing is a lot more obvious. If you think people were rattled before, just wait.”

  Linda hadn’t really accepted the news. “Is it some kind of disease? Why haven’t they come up with a shot or a pill or something?”

  “And give it to every living thing in the world? No, it looks like all we can do is watch. This isn’t something you can beat with a stick.”

  “Paul, would you lie here with me for a while?”

  He was glad to rest. He was very frightened; he knew that there must be a safe course to follow, some way to protect his family and himself. But he didn’t know how to find out about it.

  “It has come to the point where I must believe my own truisms,” said Dr. Johnson sadly. I had not been paying close attention, and had to ask him to explain. The sun was warm, though the mid-December air was chilly. I sat in our small boat, drowsing with the gently rocking motion, and gratefully deferred to my companion all intellectual activity.


  “We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he said, and I thrilled to the return of the old trite him. “We’re really in a pickle now, and there’s nothing for it but to muddle through. What guideposts have we? Only those we build ourselves, out of desperation and ignorance. Science, science, why have you forsaken us?”

  “That is not strictly so,” I said sleepily. “Science has not deserted us at all. Merely transcended. We fail to understand. Our fault, entirely. We’re looking for answers in the same dried-up old wells.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Johnson in his customary thoughtful way, “and perhaps not.” He was such a comical sight, sitting in the stern of our little rowboat, dressed in his wrinkled white lab coat and a beat-up old hat stuck with badly made fishing flies. He held his fishing pole stiffly, staring constantly at the point where the line disappeared beneath the slow ripples. I had warned him several times to relax, or suffer cramped muscles later, but he would not listen. He was determined to catch more fish than I, and to do it by concentration. I had not even brought my fishing equipment, to make it easier for him.

  “There’s a chance all these fish will be extinct tomorrow, so you’d better do as well as possible this afternoon,” I said jokingly. He nodded grimly. Only two days before we set out into the bayou area surrounding Cleveland, a popular local species of bait worm had died out, and the prices on everything else had immediately skyrocketed. Such is my luck.

  The great muddy river, carrying with it the rich effluvia of its mighty journey, rolled at last near its goal; the bayou country, where the river’s fresh water mingled with the salty fingers of the sea, was an eerie, lovely, hazardous place. Immense oak trees, all shaggy with Spanish moss still, though their own leaves had long since died, marked the scattered scraps of solid ground. The maple trees, each dead now, looked forlorn among the verdant splendors we had found not thirty miles from our laboratory on St. Charles Avenue. Cleveland itself was being slowly destroyed as its inhabitants grew more violently frustrated. But here, in the lonely beauty of the virgin marshlands, I could yet pretend that all was well, that some benevolent hand had created our earth as a bountiful park for man’s enjoyment.

  “We may never have to work again,” said Dr. Johnson, reeling in his line to see how much sourdough he had left. He never used his flies; they were mostly just for atmosphere. “I don’t see any reason to expect this perplexing situation—”

  “Disaster,” I said cheerfully.

  “Yes, disaster, you’re right. Anyway, I see no cause to believe that it will end suddenly.”

  “Other than the fact that it began suddenly as well.”

  Dr. Johnson grasped his fishing pole awkwardly, up at arm’s length, while he swung the line pendulum-fashion. Finally, with an inept jerk of the wrist, he loosed the weighted string into the water. He had not accurately coordinated his jerk with the line’s arc, and the hook and sinker splashed into the green stuff that lapped against the side of the boat. Dr. Johnson smiled happily. “You’re wrong again,” he said. “There’s no way of telling when these species began biting the dust. Who knows? Perhaps this is the explanation for the rather abrupt demise of the dinosaurs. It wouldn’t have taken much to alter fatally their unstable environment. Just a minor food plant becoming extinct overnight. That would decimate the herbivores; the carnivores would soon follow in the familiar domino theory.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?” I said. He only nodded, a simpleminded grin on his face.

  “I think I may go back to college and delve into German literature,” he said later, while he let the various aquatic creatures feast on his sourdough.

  “Which college?” I asked skeptically, aware that institutions were tumbling by the wayside all over the world.

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose the more established universities are having as much difficulty as the less exclusive.”

  “Sure they are,” I said. “They’re targets. Besides, you’re only seeking sanctuary. You’ve lost the real drive, the sincere passion for knowledge to which you devoted yourself in your youth.”

  “Times have changed.” He re-doughed his hook; I could only make scornful sounds, which he ignored.

  He had some points, of course. Things were different now, and no amount of prayer could make them back into what they had been. Football, for instance, had had to make great allowances for the insanity of the fans. The crowds shrank from week to week, until only a dozen or so spectators turned out for the eleventh game of the season, between the Browns and the Rams. After that, the remainder of the schedule was suspended. It was a shame, too, because at that time it looked like the Browns had great Super Bowl chances.

  The Detroit Lions had begun the season with a publicity stunt. Readers of the one still operating newspaper in the Motor City were asked to suggest an alternate nickname for the team, in the event of the current calamity befalling the species Panthera leo. The paper was stunned when not a single entry was submitted. The editor in charge of the contest came up with a phony winner—the Detroit Autoworkers, though it proved to be a shortsighted choice; when things deteriorated further, there were definitely fewer autoworkers around than lions. The Yale Bulldogs, however, stuck with more traditions than they could handle, stuck also with their nickname. The original bulldog, stuffed in a trophy case in the school’s gymnasium, took on a new and sadder significance.

  As darkness began to fall, we headed the little skiff back to the island campsite. Dr. Johnson had caught no fish, but had not lost his abounding good humor. He was still trying to save the last bit of sourdough from his rusty hook, in a mistaken attempt at economy. The light was failing, and I watched his clumsy maneuvers with some dismay.

  “Perhaps it’s well that we’re going back to Cleveland tomorrow afternoon,” I said, making an unkind reference to his total failure as a woodsman.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked innocently, looking up from his sticky labors.

  “Because we’re too isolated here. We have no idea of what’s going on in the world. We may have some terrifying surprises waiting for us.”

  “You’re an alarmist.”

  Yes, but not the way he meant. “It’s situations like this,” I said, “that so often breed subsidiary plagues and social unrest.”

  “You may have a point. It would be extremely unfortunate if, say, rats were among the next species to disappear.”

  That was an odd thing for him to say. For five minutes we glided across the turgid water, and I held myself in check. Finally I couldn’t stand it and asked him, “Why would it be so bad if the rats died?”

  He grinned. He knew he had scored a point; I was still well ahead, though, because he still hadn’t cleaned his hook. “It’s not rats that are so bad,” he said. “As far as your plagues are concerned, I mean. It’s the plague-carrying fleas on the rats. If the rats were gone, the fleas would have to find other hosts. And that has always meant humans in the past. The great black plagues of history have generally coincided with efforts to reduce the rat population.”

  “Oh.”

  And Us, Too, I Guess “Rats!”

  “Yes,” I said wearily, “I know. Let’s hope they thrive.”

  “No,” said Dr. Johnson, his voice strangely muffled, “that was an interjection. I stuck myself with this hook.”

  Another metaphysical point for me. I could barely see his outline against the now starry sky; one hand was raised to his mouth as he soothed the savaged thumb. He was a good friend, and I’ll probably never meet his like again. Of all my co-workers, my co- strivers after scientia, I guess that Dr. Johnson most closely filled my image of the truly wise man that I had formed in my undisciplined schooldays. But it is always the fittest who survive, not, as popular thought has it, the strongest. Perhaps it was fate that kept me from bringing my own fishing equipment; perhaps I have earned some special favor of destiny, I know not. But I thank my lucky stars that it wasn’t I fiddling with the sourdou
gh in that boat.

  When we pulled the little skiff up on the grass of our campsite, I noticed that Dr. Johnson was still sucking on his wounded thumb. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t want to stop bleeding,” he said.

  “You must have stabbed it pretty deep.”

  “No, not so bad. It ought to have quit by now.”

  “Have you tried direct pressure?”

  He sighed in the gloom. “I’ve been doing that for ten minutes.” I felt a tiny, cold glitter of something. Slowly the thought took shape. “You know what I think?” I said. “I think we’ve hit the big time. It’s possible that a couple of days ago the special little bacteria that live in our intestines died off. You know, the ones that produce most of the vitamin K our bodies use. You need that vitamin K because it’s vitally important to the clotting of blood. Hospitals give newborn babies doses of vitamin K because newborns don’t have colonies of that bacterium in their bowels. Now, if that little bacterium is extinct, we’re going to have a lot of people with blood that won’t stop bleeding. And then there’s going to be a rush on vitamin K. And then there won’t be enough, and people won’t be able to get their hands on it, and then—”

  “I think you’re getting carried away. That’s not very scientific at all, is it? I mean, you deduce all this from the bad cut on my thumb.”