The Year of the Jackpot Read online

  He slowed down as they approached Taft, let her spot the turn north onto the state road, and turned into it. Almost at once a figure jumped out into the road in front of them, waved his arms violently. Breen tromped on the brake.

  The man came up on the left side of the car, rapped on the window. Breen ran the glass down. Then he stared stupidly at the gun in the man’s left hand.

  “Out of the car,” the stranger said sharply. “I’ve got to have it.”

  Meade reached across Breen, stuck her little lady’s gun in the man’s face and pulled the trigger. Breen could feel the flash on his own face, never noticed the report. The man looked puzzled, with a neat, not-yet-bloody hole in his upper lip—then slowly sagged away from the car.

  “Drive on!” Meade said in a high voice.

  Breen caught his breath. “But you—”

  “Drive on! Get rolling!”

  They followed the state road through Los Padres National Forest, stopping once to fill the tank from their cans. They turned off onto a dirt road. Meade kept trying the radio, got San Francisco once, but it was too jammed with static to read. Then she got Salt Lake City, faint but clear;

  “—since there are no reports of anything passing our radar screen, the Kansas City bomb must be assumed to have been planted rather than delivered. This is a tentative theory, but—”

  They passed into a deep cut and lost the rest.

  When the squawk box again came to life, it was a crisp new voice: “Air Defense Command, coming to you over the combined networks. The rumor that Los Angeles has been hit by an atom bomb is totally unfounded. It is true that the western metropolis has suffered a severe earthquake shock, but that is all. Government officials and the Red Cross are on the spot to care for the victims, but—and I repeat—there has been no atomic bombing. So relax and stay in your homes. Such wild rumors can damage the United States quite as much as enemy bombs. Stay off the highways and listen for—”

  Breen snapped it off. “Somebody,” he said bitterly, “has again decided that ‘Mama knows best.” They won’t tell us any bad news.”

  “Potiphar,” Meade said sharply, “that was an atom bomb, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. And now we don’t know whether it was just Los Angeles—and Kansas City—or every big city in the country. All we know is that they are lying to us.”

  He concentrated on driving. The road was very bad.

  As it began to get light, she said, “Potty, do you know where we’re going? Are we just keeping out of cities?”

  “I think I know. If I’m not lost.” He stared around them. “Nope, it’s all right. See that hill up forward with the triple gendarmes on its profile?”

  “Gendarmes?”

  “Big rock pillars. That’s a sure landmark. I’m looking for a private road now. It leads to a hunting lodge belonging to two of my friends—an old ranch house actually, but as a ranch it didn’t pay.”

  “They won’t mind us using it?”

  He shrugged. “If they show up, we’ll ask them. If they show up. They lived in Los Angeles.”

  The private road had once been a poor grade of wagon trail; now it was almost impassable. But they finally topped a hogback from which they could see almost to the Pacific, then dropped down into a sheltered bowl where the cabin was.

  “All out, girl. End of the line.”

  Meade sighed. “It looks heavenly.”

  “Think you can rustle breakfast while I unload? There’s probably wood in the shed. Or can you manage a wood range?”

  “Just try me.”

  Two hours later Breen was standing on the hogback, smoking a cigarette and staring off down to the west. He wondered if that was a mushroom cloud up San Francisco way. Probably his imagination, he decided, in view of the distance. Certainly there was nothing to be seen to the south.

  Meade came out of the cabin. “Potty!”

  “Up here.”

  She joined him, took his hand and smiled, then snitched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She exhaled it and said, “I know it’s sinful of me, but I feel more peaceful than I have in months.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you see the canned goods in that pantry? We could pull through a hard winter here.”

  “We might have to.”

  “I suppose. I wish we had a cow.”

  “What would you do with a cow?”

  “I used to milk four of them before I caught the school bus, every morning. I can butcher a hog, too.”

  “I’ll try to find you a hog.”

  “You do and I’ll manage to smoke it.” She yawned. “I’m suddenly terribly sleepy.”

  “So am I. And small wonder.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Uh, yes. Meade?”

  “Yes, Potty?”

  “We may be here quite a while. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Potty.”

  “In fact, it might be smart to stay put until those curves all start turning up again. They should, you know.”

  “Yes. I had figured that out.”

  He hesitated, then went on, “Meade, will you marry me?”

  “Yes.” She moved up to him.

  After a time he pushed her gently away and said, “My dear, my very dear—uh—we could drive down and find a minister in some little town.”

  She looked at him steadily. “That wouldn’t be very bright, would it? I mean, nobody knows we’re here and that’s the way we want it. Besides, your car might not make it back up that road.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be very bright. But I want to do the right thing.”

  “It’s all right, Potty. It’s all right.”

  “Well, then… kneel down here with me. We’ll say them together.”

  “Yes, Potiphar.” She knelt and he took her hand. He closed his eyes and prayed wordlessly.

  When he opened them he said, “What’s the matter?”

  “The gravel hurts my knees.”

  “We’ll stand up, then.”

  “No. Look, Potty, why don’t we just go in the house and say them there?”

  “Huh? Hell’s bells, woman, we might forget to say them entirely. Now repeat after me: I, Potiphar, take thee, Meade—”

  III

  OFFICIAL: STATIONS WITHIN RANGE RELAY TWICE. EXECUTIVE BULLETIN NUMBER NINE—ROAD LAWS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED HAVE BEEN IGNORED IN MANY INSTANCES. PATROLS ARE ORDERED TO SHOOT WITHOUT WARNING AND PROVOST MARSHALS ARE DIRECTED TO USE DEATH PENALTY FOR UNAUTHORIZED POSSESSION OF GASOLINE. BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AND RADIATION QUARANTINE REGULATIONS PREVIOUSLY ISSUED WILL BE RIGIDLY ENFORCED. LONG LIVE THE UNITED STATES! HARLEY J. NEAL, LIEUTENANT GENERAL, ACTING CHIEF OF GOVERNMENT. ALL STATIONS RELAY TWICE.

  THIS IS THE FREE RADIO AMERICA RELAY NETWORK. PASS THIS ALONG, BOYS! GOVERNOR BRANDLEY WAS SWORN IN TODAY AS PRESIDENT BY ACTING CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS UNDER THE RULE-OF-SUCCESSION. THE PRESIDENT NAMED THOMAS DEWEY AS SECRETARY OF STATE AND PAUL DOUGLAS AS SECRETARY OF DEFENSE. HIS SECOND OFFICIAL ACT WAS TO STRIP THE RENEGADE NEAL OF RANK AND TO DIRECT HIS ARREST BY ANY CITIZEN OR OFFICIAL. MORE LATER. PASS THE WORD ALONG.

  HELLO, CQ, CQ, CQ. THIS IS W5KMR, FREEPORT. QRR, QRR! ANYBODY READ ME? ANYBODY? WE’RE DYING LIKE FLIES DOWN HERE. WHAT’S HAPPENED? STARTS WITH FEVER AND A BURNING THIRST, BUT YOU CAN’T SWALLOW. WE NEED HELP. ANYBODY READ ME? HELLO, CQ 75, CQ 75 THIS IS W5 KING MIKE ROGER CALLING QRR AND CQ 75. BY FOR SOMEBODY… ANYBODY!

  THIS IS THE LORD’S TIME, SPONSORED BY SWAN’S ELIXIR, THE TONIC THAT MAKES WAITING FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD WORTHWHILE. YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR A MESSAGE OF CHEER FROM JUDGE BROOMFIELD, ANOINTED VICAR OF THE KINGDOM ON EARTH. BUT FIRST A BULLETIN—SEND YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MESSIAH, CLINT, TEXAS. DON’T TRY TO MAIL THEM—SEND THEM BY A KINGDOM MESSENGER OR BY SOME PILGRIM JOURNEYING THIS WAY. AND NOW THE TABERNACLE CHOIR FOLLOWED BY THE VOICE OF THE VICAR ON EARTH—

  —THE FIRST SYMPTOM IS LITTLE RED SPOTS IN THE ARMPITS. THEY ITCH. PUT PATIENTS TO BED AT ONCE AND KEEP ’EM COVERED UP WARM. THEN GO SCRUB YOURSELF
AND WEAR A MASK, WE DON’T KNOW YET HOW YOU CATCH IT. PASS IT ALONG, ED.

  —NO NEW LANDINGS REPORTED ANYWHERE ON THIS CONTINENT. THE FEW PARATROOPERS WHO ESCAPED THE ORIGINAL SLAUGHTER ARE THOUGHT TO BE HIDING OUT IN THE POCONOS. SHOOT—BUT BE CAREFUL; IT MIGHT BE AUNT TESSIE. OFF AND CLEAR. UNTIL NOON TOMORROW—”

  The statistical curves were turning up again. There was no longer doubt in Breen’s mind about that. It might not even be necessary to stay up here in the Sierra Madres through the winter, though he rather thought they would. It would be silly to be mowed down by the tail of a dying epidemic, or be shot by a nervous vigilante, when a few months’ wait would take care of everything.

  He was headed out to the hogback to wait for sunset and do an hour’s reading. He glanced at his car as he passed it, thinking that he would like to try the radio. He suppressed the yen; two-thirds of his reserve gasoline was gone already just from keeping the battery charged for the radio—and here it was only December. He really ought to cut it down to twice a week. But it meant a lot to catch the noon bulletin of Free America and then twiddle the dial a few minutes to see what else he could pick up.

  But for the past three days Free America had not been on the air—solar static maybe, or perhaps just a power failure. But that rumor that President Brandley had been assassinated—it hadn’t come from the Free radio and it hadn’t been denied by them, either, which was a good sign.

  Still, it worried him.

  And that other story that lost Atlantis had pushed up during the quake period and that the Azores were now a little continent—almost certainly a hangover of the “silly season”—but it would be nice to hear a followup.

  Rather sheepishly, he let his feet carry him to the car. It wasn’t fair to listen when Meade wasn’t around. He warmed it up, slowly spun the dial, once around and back. Not a peep at full gain, nothing but a terrible amount of static.

  Served him right.

  He climbed the hogback, sat down on the bench he had dragged up there—their “memorial bench,” sacred to the memory of the time Meade had bruised her knees on the gravel—sat down and sighed. His lean belly was stuffed with venison and corn fritters; he lacked only tobacco to make him completely happy.

  The evening cloud colors were spectacularly beautiful and the weather was extremely balmy for December; both, he thought, caused by volcanic dust, with perhaps an assist from atom bombs.

  Surprising how fast things went to pieces when they started to skid! And surprising how quickly they were going back together, judging by the signs. A curve reaches trough and then starts right back up.

  World War III was the shortest big war on record—forty cities gone, counting Moscow and the other slave cities as well as the American ones—and then whoosh! neither side fit to fight.

  Of course, the fact that both sides had thrown their Sunday punch over the North Pole through the most freakish arctic weather since Peary invented the place had a lot to do with it, he supposed.

  It was amazing that any of the Russian paratroop transports had gotten through at all.

  Breen sighed and pulled the November 1951 copy of the Western Astronomer out of his pocket. Where was he? Oh, yes, Some Notes on the Stability of G-Type Stars with Especial Reference to Sol, by Dynkowski, Lenin Institute, translated by Heinrich Ley, F. R. A. S.

  Good boy, Ski—sound mathematician. Very clever application of harmonic series and tightly reasoned.

  Breen started to thumb for his place when he noticed a footnote that he had missed. Dynkowski’s own name carried down to it: “This monograph was denounced by Pravda as ‘romantic reactionaryism’ shortly after it was published. Professor Dynkowski has been unreported since and must be presumed to be liquidated.”

  The poor geek! Well, he probably would have been atomized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in. He wondered if the army really had gotten all the Russki paratroopers. He had killed his own quota; if he hadn’t gotten that doe within a quarter-mile of the cabin and headed right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot them in the back and buried them beyond the woodpile.

  He settled down to some solid pleasure. Dynkowski was a treat. Of course, it was old stuff that a G-type star, such as the Sun, was potentially unstable; a G-O star could explode, slide right off the Russell diagram, and end up as a white dwarf. But no one before Dynkowski had defined the exact conditions for such a catastrophe, nor had anyone else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the instability and describing its progress.

  He looked up to rest his eyes from the fine print and saw that the Sun was obscured by a thin low cloud—one of those unusual conditions where the filtering effect is just right to permit a man to view the Sun clearly with the naked eye. Probably volcanic dust in the air, he decided, acting almost like smoked glass.

  He looked again. Either he had spots before his eyes or that was one fancy big Sun spot. He had heard of being able to see them with the naked eye, but it had never happened to him.

  He longed for a telescope.

  He blinked. Yep, it was still there, about three o’clock. A big spot—no wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech.

  He turned back and continued on to the end of the article, being anxious to finish before the light failed.

  At first his mood was sheerest intellectual pleasure at the man’s tight mathematical reasoning. A three per cent imbalance in the solar constant—yes, that was standard stuff; the Sun would nova with that much change. But Dynkowski went further. By means of a novel mathematical operator which he had dubbed “yokes,” he bracketed the period in a star’s history when this could happen and tied it down with secondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the time of highest probability.

  Beautiful! Dynkowski even assigned dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a good statistician should.

  But, as Breen went back and reviewed the equations, his mood changed from intellectual to personal. Dynkowski was not talking about just any G-O star. In the latter part, he meant old Sol himself, Breen’s personal Sun—the big boy out there with the oversize freckle on his face.

  That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it very clearly now.

  Everybody talks about “when the stars grow old and the Sun grows cold,” but it’s an impersonal concept, like one’s own death.

  Breen started thinking about it very personally. How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was triggered until the expanding wave front engulfed Earth? The mechanics couldn’t be solved without a calculation, even though they were implicit in the equations in front of him. Half an hour, for a horseback guess, from incitement until the Earth went phutt!

  It hit him with gentle melancholy. No more? Never again? Colorado on a cool morning… the Boston Post Road with autumn wood smoke tanging the air… Bucks County bursting with color in the spring. The wet smells of the Fulton Fish Market—no, that was gone already. Coffee at the Morning Call. No more wild strawberries on a hillside in Jersey, hot and sweet as lips. Dawn in the South Pacific with the light airs cool velvet under your shirt and never a sound but the chuckling of the water against the sides of the old rust bucket—what was her name? That was a long time ago—the S. S. Mary Brewster.

  No more Moon if the Earth was gone. Stars, but no one to gaze at them.

  He looked back at the dates bracketing Dynkowski’s probability yoke.

  “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by—”

  He suddenly felt the need for Meade and stood up.

  She was coming out to meet him. “Hello, Potty! Safe to come in now—I’ve finished the dishes.”

  “I should help.”

  “You do the man’s work; I’ll do the woman’s work. That’s fair.” She shaded her eyes. “What a sunset! We ought to have volcanoes blowing their tops every year.”

  “Sit down and we’ll watch it.”

  She sat beside him.

  “No
tice the Sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye.”

  She stared. “Is that a Sun spot? It looks as if somebody had taken a bite out of it.”

  He squinted his eyes at it again. Damned if it didn’t look bigger!

  Meade shivered. “I’m chilly. Put your arm around me.”

  He did so with his free arm, continuing to hold hands with the other.

  It was bigger. The spot was growing.

  What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.

  She snuggled to him. “Keep me warm.”

  “It will be warmer soon—I mean I’ll keep you warm.”

  “Dear Potty.” She looked up. “Potty, something funny is happening to the sunset.”

  “No, darling—to the Sun.”

  He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. 1739 A. D. and 2165. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that 1952 was…

  The End.