The Old Reactor Read online

  “Did you hear me? I said I was going with you.”

  “It’s probably a false alarm. Somebody started a rumor. I’m not going to get excited.”

  Patrons were getting up and leaving in haste.

  Salmonella pointed her fork at Moldenke. “Look at them. We should go.”

  Moldenke polished off the last of his scrapple and stood up. “We have to get back to the Tunney and take care of those two…the things we discussed.”

  Salmonella smiled, showing teeth greened by the soda. “I’m ready.”

  They returned to the Tunney to find several of the roomers walking out with their few things. “Hell, man. We’re going back to Bunkerville. What about you? There’s a big boat leaving from the Point Blast wharf tonight.”

  “I haven’t gotten any official kind of notice,” Moldenke said. “I have responsibilities here.”

  “There’s no notice. You just go. We’re getting rotated. Don’t you get it? The radio is saying it’s time to head for the Point.”

  The men rushed toward the car stop reaching for their pass cards.

  Salmonella held Moldenke’s hand. “I’m going with you. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

  Moldenke worried. “We can’t leave the bodies.”

  Salmonella shrugged. “Why? We need to get to the Point. What if we miss the boat?”

  “Where is Udo’s motor?”

  “It must be parked near the Heeney. We can find it. I know where he hides the key. We don’t have to worry about the bodies.”

  Moldenke thought it over for a moment. “It does seem nicer where they are than anywhere else we could put them, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a beautiful place,” Salmonella said. “Let’s go.” She tugged on Moldenke’s finger. “Come on, we’re going to Bunkerville. Me and you. We’ll get along good.”

  “I have nothing to pack,” he said. “These are my only clothes.”

  “All I own is in this bag,” Salmonella said. “We have to find the motor.” She led Moldenke out of the Tunney and past the ruins of the Heeney. By then the site was abandoned, the embers out and the bodies taken away by family or friends, or those willing to help out of boredom.

  Around the corner from the Heeney, Udo’s motor was parked under a flickering street lamp, its roof coated with ash from the fire.

  “There it is,” Salmonella said excitedly. “The key is hidden in the well of the fifth wheel.”

  Moldenke sank into a funk. He was leaving behind a nice apartment with a commode and a kitchen. He was leaving behind the lofty feeling of being a concierge with the run of a two-story rooming house. And what would he find when he returned to the House on Esplanade? A shambles? With jellyheads living there?”

  The golfer, Brainerd Franklin, has died. A lover of the practical joke, he had asked to be buried in a lace nightgown, seated comfortably in a reclining chair, with an album of Misti Gaynor photos in his lap. “Tell them to hire a backhoe if they must,” he said to his nurse shortly before passing on, “move mud, get me in deep. Leave air space within so that beetles and worms have free passage.”

  The nurse, who says she knew the end was near, told reporters that in his last weeks Franklin had been spitting up whatever he swallowed. His house gown was a sour mess and he had bouts of quivering and loose bowels. He appeared discombobulated, petty and annoyed, clumsy and skittish. In a fit of self-mutilation, he scissored off both ear valves and ate them.

  The nurse said she knew the end was near when he took to his bed and refused all food and drink for five days. She remained beside him in the final moments. His last words, she recalls, were “Tell them I’ll be back for supper.” After uttering them, there was a groan, a gasp for breath, and the great golfer was gone.

  When the cortege arrived at the jellyhead cemetery, the excavation was ready, rimmed with green velvet and artificial grass, seeming to invite Franklin’s body, which could be seen atop a motor that streamed black bunting from the rear. There were hundreds in attendance, free people and jellyheads alike.

  Udo’s motor had been parked for weeks. Moldenke feared it wouldn’t start. He checked the level of heavy water in the tank and located the key in a small magnetic box hidden under the well of the fifth wheel. Salmonella rushed in when he unlocked the front door. There were spider webs in all the ceiling and door-frame corners and mice rustling in a kitchen drawer. Salmonella struck a match, lit a lantern, and the cockroaches scattered.

  Moldenke sat in the driver’s seat, set the finder for Point Blast, and goosed the starter. The first several attempts failed to warm the water enough to send it flowing through the system. Until that happened, the motor could not be driven.

  “It isn’t going to start,” Moldenke said.

  “Pump that little red rod in and out a few times. That’s what my father used to do. He told me it was the hot rod.”

  Moldenke located the red-handled rod and engaged it over and over until it was warm to the touch without success. “I’m about to give up,” he said.

  Salmonella stomped her foot on the wooden floor. “Keep trying. It takes a while.”

  Moldenke did keep trying and in a few minutes he could hear water gushing through the main tube.

  “Goody, goody,” Salmonella cheered. “I’m going to dust out my nook and go to sleep. Wake me when we get to the Point.”

  “All right.”

  Moldenke geared up the motor and drove down Arden Boulevard, mostly past darkened buildings. Even Saposcat’s and the public privy were closed. Almost everyone had been reprieved and was leaving. Yet when he turned onto Old Reactor Road he could see the lights of the Quarter burning brightly. No one was leaving the gates. They knew that all those empty buildings on the west side would soon fill with new arrivals and customers would return. Now that Bunkerville was liberated, the dispossessed would be coming to Altobello in droves. The older Quarter dwellers had probably seen the cycle repeat more than once in their lifetimes and had come to accept it as the way things went. It was something to be counted on if not understood, like the tides.

  A reporter for the City Moon had a choice encounter with Mayor Grendon only twenty-four hours ago. The reporter was lunching at a Saposcat’s when the perennial candidate came in to eat. It was near freezing outside. A pre-snow sleet crusted the Deli window. The reporter was determined to find a story and intruded at Grendon’s table. “Will you make a statement, sir?”

  “Of course I will. Stay here and eat with me. The snow is a bluff. In an hour the sun will shine.”

  The reporter took out her pad and pencil and said she was a journalist.

  Grendon said, “Tell them I am long gone but not forgotten. I will run strong come the election. Tell them I have a plan. In the future I see underwater vessels as big as street cars, fish-like in shape, using lateral undulation as propulsion. This form of sub surface transportation will carry thousands at once—Bunkerville to Altobello, Altobello to Bunkerville—with every passenger as happy as a pig. And very inexpensively. Tell them all that.”

  “A beautiful idea, sir.”

  “Sublime would be a better word. The sublime always trumps the beautiful.”

  “What do you see in Bunkerville’s future?”

  “I can say this: that there will be no more rain. We’ll be in a sunspot minimum that will last for twenty years. We will tell the people that grasshoppers store water in their abdomens and that eight or more of them should be eaten every day. It won’t be long before we will require one hour of screaming as a daily practice.”

  Grendon went on to reveal plans to starve himself unless elected. He will be dead by Saturday, the fourteenth day of the fast unless he is elected the day before, in which case he will take food. He’ll go this Friday to City Park, rent a pedal boat, and pedal his way to the middle. There he may or may not succumb to starvation, depending on the election results.

  “What about housing, sir? Is Bunkerville prepared for the expected jellyhead immigrations?”

  “This i
s what I can say about housing: as jellyheads progressed, they acquired cattle and roamed about searching for pasturage. Then they built a cave of skins to live in. When they learned how to fashion crude bronze tools they began cutting down trees and building homes that resembled log caves. When ice descended from the arctic, driving jelly-heads southward where there were no caves, primitive jellies built crude mud huts.”

  “Thank you so much, sir. Good luck in the election.”

  “As I’ve said before, if I’m not elected, my suicide will follow. Ask Zanzetti if he’s willing to do the same?”

  While Salmonella slept in her nook, Moldenke fought to stay awake. The motor cruised monotonously down the Byway. There were other motors speeding to the Point. Happy riders waved from their windows. “We’re going home! We’re going home!”

  Moldenke felt excited by the prospect of returning to Bunkerville. With his late friend Ozzie exploded and gone from the house, he and Salmonella would assess the situation with the artisanal jellies and see if they could work with them to put the place in order. With attorneys and clerks out of business, the maintenance funds could never be recovered. After the liberation, the currency would be worthless.

  Pulling onto Wharf Road at Point Blast, Moldenke saw flood lights moving along the black hull of a freighter, the Pipistrelle. Passengers were boarding. He turned back toward Salmonella’s nook. “Wake up, girl. We’re almost there.”

  There were dozens of motors arriving, the drivers jockeying for places to abandon them.

  Salmonella hurriedly shucked her nightgown and got into traveling clothes.

  Moldenke had only begun to look for a good place when the motor ran out of heavy water and rolled to a stop in a cloud of steam.

  “It looks like the end of the line,” Moldenke said. “Goodbye, Altobello.”

  Salmonella felt a small touch of sadness at leaving her birthplace.

  It was an almost normal Friday night in Bunkerville, two days before the liberation, when radio-poisoned mud fish began to rain down. Anyone outdoors in much of the city was caught in the downpour. Dead fish piled up in gutters and sidewalks quickly. Walking or running was a slippery venture. Pedestrians, in their haste to get out of the shower, stepped on mud fish. Many fell in the process and sustained injuries in addition to a dose of radio poisoning that came with the fish.

  There have been other falling-fish events reported from time to time over many decades in Altobello, Bunkerville, and elsewhere. Because the Altobello-Bunkerville fish falls occurred just before the liberation, those prone to superstition thought of them as forewarnings of the momentous changes to come. Many a Bunkervillian shared the belief.

  “These fish had to travel from the Old Reactor pond in Altobello,” Scientist Zanzetti said. “Something, and we don’t know what, sucked them up into the air then carried them hundreds of miles to here. This has been a deadly rain and we expect many will die within months, especially the old and the young.”

  The affected areas of the city are depopulated and a cleanup is thought to be in progress. Among those poisoned that night was perennial mayoralty candidate, Felix Grendon, who had gone to see Misti Gaynor and Enfield Peters in the comedy hit, Eventually, Why Not Now? Hundreds of glowing mud fish fell on him as he emerged from the theater.

  With hundreds of returnees on the Pipistrelle, there was a shortage of cabin space. Most shivered on deck in the open air. Moldenke and Salmonella considered themselves lucky to find a space to sit down against the fo’c’sle, where they had something to lean back against.

  Moldenke closed his eyes for a few minutes of rest, but sat up when his bowel began to anger. There were free people sleeping everywhere. Could he find a place to relieve himself without stepping on them, or worse, cutting loose inside his uniform on the way to the ship’s rail? Given that choice, he elected to stay where he was and let go right there if it came to that. He thought back on what he had eaten that day.

  “I’m having an attack,” he told Salmonella. “That scrapple this morning. It was a mistake. I can’t stop it.” He lifted a hip and emptied his bowels into the leg of his uniform.

  In a moment, the Captain, standing on the fo’c’sle deck, looked over the rail and said to a mate, “Lower a lantern. I want to see what’s making that stink.”

  When the lantern was lowered, Moldenke felt the heat of it on his head. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s a condition. These attacks come at the worst times.”

  “You could have gone to the rail like everyone else.”

  “I didn’t have time to get there.”

  Salmonella affected a whine. “He’s my daddy and he’s very sick. Please. Leave him alone.”

  The Captain turned to the mate. “The returnees are always sick and stinking. I’m going to my cabin and I’m closing the door.” He waved to the crowd on the deck. “Good night, all. We’ll be in Bunkerville by morning.”

  In his conclusive study of the jellyhead gel sack, Scientist Zanzetti revealed his findings. These sacks have had a long history of study, always yielding contradictory evidence. The ontogenic contributions of the sack to the jellyhead brain vary greatly. Many theories have been proposed to account for its modifications. Whatever its phylogenetic significance, the gel sack is an important structure formed by invaginations of the head capsule.

  When pressed, Zanzetti admits puzzlement. “We can’t understand it. The sacks communicate with distant sentient beings or entities, but why? Do they mean us harm?”

  An aide of Zanzetti’s added, “We think they may be trying to use the jellyheads to weaken or destroy our culture, but haven’t perfected the training regimen. That’s why jellies do crazy things now. But in the future we see them getting better and better at civil behavior. Their influence then will be so subtle, so insidious, we’ll never notice. If this keeps up, we’ll become them. We’ll be jellyheads.”

  A City Moon reporter on the scene asked the famous scientist if he meant that given enough time we could become indistinguishable from jellies.

  “If my thinking is right, you can bet on it,” Zanzetti said.

  “Is there no way to stop it? Is it too late?” the reporter asked.

  “Don’t worry. Individuals won’t feel any change. It will happen slowly, over generations. Every thirty years or so the populace forgets the past. No one’s ever the wiser. It’s a brilliant strategy. Hats off to whoever designed those sacks.”

  Salmonella pinched her nostrils closed. “You can’t sleep all night with that in your pants, or me either with the smell. Go over to the rail and dump it.”

  “All right.”

  Moldenke pulled his pant leg tight to contain the relatively small mass until he could get to the rail, stepping over sleeping passengers all the way.

  One of them spat at him. “Watch where you’re stepping, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  Once at the rail he extended his leg over the side and shook out most of the mass. There would be some streaks left behind in his unders and down the leg, but the better part of it was gone. Now he could sleep. He was tired enough that the slight odor that still clung to him wouldn’t interfere. He hoped there were still some of his clothes in the closet on Esplanade. He had a disturbing image of going into the house and finding the jellyhead tradesmen wearing them.

  Having made his way back to the spot under the fo’c’sle, he fell asleep beside Salmonella, who kissed him lightly on the cheek, then poked him to stop his snoring.

  As dawn broke, passengers awakened to a cloudy-butwelcome sunrise and Moldenke wasn’t alone in anxious anticipation. As the Pipistrelle made her docking maneuvers at Bunkerville Harbor, rumors flew among the passengers as they queued for disembarkation.

  “I hear the city is in chaos.”

  “No law, no money, no property, nothing. Just like Altobello. It’s crazy.”

  “Did they close the hospitals and throw out the doctors? I’m feeling sick. I got radio poisoning.”

  “A lot of us do. Will they take care of us?”<
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  “You think we’ll get pass cards or money?”

  Moldenke said, “If they make us wear uniforms, I hope they’re nicer ones than these.”

  There were Bunkervillians out in the streets, gathered into groups, gesturing and talking. Some looked around as if waiting for an indication of what was to come now that the city was liberated, as if waiting for a motorcade with flags, loudspeakers, announcements, and insignias. “Everyone be calm. The city is in good hands.” But nothing official appeared. No one knew what to do. Had the liberation been no more than rumor?

  Despite the anxiety and confusion on the streets, the Esplanade car from the Harbor to City Park was only an hour or two late. Moldenke and Salmonella ran to catch it. Through the windows they could see that there were only two or three seats unoccupied.

  The jellyhead driver turned the crank on his fare meter. “That’s a half mil for each.”

  Moldenke showed his Enfield Peters pass card. The driver cast a quick glance in his direction, then wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “That’s no good here, Peters. I don’t care who you are. We’re still using money until word comes down not to.”

  “This card is all I have,” Moldenke said. “We’ve been in Altobello.”

  Salmonella said, “I don’t have any money.”

  The driver shrugged and put the car in gear. “This could all change tomorrow, friend. But till they tell us different, we’ll be taking cash. So pay or get off, the both of you.”

  The passengers began to yell. “Get off! We can’t wait all day. You stupid morons.”

  The car stopped.

  “All right,” Moldenke said. He took Salmonella by the elbow and led her off.

  After walking a few blocks, they passed Bunkerville Charnel, where a jellyhead demonstration was in progress. Forty to fifty of them, faces inked black, stood in front of the building beating on gongs and kettles with dunce caps on their heads. Around their necks were buckets full of stones. The eldest, most enfeebled among them had a deep incision in his neck caused by the heavy weight. They all knelt down on crushed glass, lit candles, looked up at the night sky and repeated the phrase over and over: “Give us liberty or give us death…Give us liberty or give us death.”