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The Scream by Kate Wilhelm

First published in Orbit 13, ed. Damon Knight, Putnam, 1974

The sea had turned to copper; it rose and fell gently, the motion starting so deep that no ripple broke the surface of the slow swells. The sky was darkening to a deep blue-violet, with rose streaks in the west and a high cirrocumulus formation in the east that was a dazzling white mountain crowned with brilliant reds and touches of green. No wind stirred. The irregular dark strip that was Miami Beach separated the metallic sea from the fiery sky. We were at anchor eight miles offshore aboard the catamaran Loretta.

She was a forty-foot, single-masted, inboard motorboat.

Evinson wanted to go on in, but Trainor, whose boat it was, said no. Too dangerous: sand, silt, wrecks, God knew what we might hit. We waited until morning.

We had to go in at Biscayne Bay; the Bal Harbour inlet was clogged with the remains of the bridge on old A1A. Trainor put in at the Port of Miami. All the while J.P. kept taking his water samples, not once glancing at the ruined city; Delia kept a running check for radiation, and Bernard took pictures. Corrie and I tried to keep out of the way, and Evinson didn’t. The ancient catamaran was clumsy, and Trainor was kept busy until we were tied up, then he bowed sarcastically to Evinson and went below.

Rusting ships were in the harbor, some of them on their sides half in water, half out. Some of them seemed afloat, but then we saw that without the constant dredging that had kept the port open, silt and sand had entered, and the bottom was no more than ten to fifteen feet down. The water was very clear.

Some catfish lay unmoving on the bottom, and a school of big-eyed mullet circled at the surface, the first marine life we had seen. The terns were diving here, and sandpipers ran with the waves. J.P.’s eyes were shining as he watched the birds. We all had been afraid that there would be no life of any kind.

Our plan was to reconnoiter the first day, try to find transportation: bicycles, which none of us had ridden before, skates, canoes, anything. Miami and the beaches covered a lot of miles, and we had a lot of work; without transportation the work would be less valuable — if it had any value to begin with.

Bernard and Delia went ahead to find a place to set up our base, and the rest of us started to unload the boat. In half an hour we were drenched with sweat. At first glance the city had seemed perfectly habitable, just empty of people, but as we carried the boxes to the hotel that Bernard had found, the ruins dominated the scene. Walls were down, streets vanished under sand and palmettos and sea grapes. The hotel was five stories, the first floor covered with sand and junk: shells, driftwood, an aluminum oar eaten through with corrosion. Furniture was piled against walls haphazardly, like heaps of rotting compost. The water had risen and fallen more than once, rearranging floatables. It was hellishly hot, and the hotel stank of ocean and decay and dry rot and heat. No one talked much as we all worked, all but Trainor, who had worked to get us here and who now guzzled beer with his feet up. Evinson cursed him monotonously. We carried our stuff to the hotel, then to the second floor, where we put mosquito netting at the windows of three connecting rooms that would be used jointly. We separated to select our private rooms and clear them and secure them against the mosquitoes that would appear by the millions as soon as the sun went down.

After a quick lunch of soy wafers and beer we went out singly to get the feel of the city and try to locate any transportation we could.

I started with a map in my hand, and the first thing I did was put it back inside my pack. Except for the general areas, the map was worthless. This had been a seawalled city, and the seawalls had gone: a little break here, a crack somewhere else, a trickle of water during high tide, a flood during a storm, the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

pressure building behind the walls, on the land side, and inevitably the surrender to the sea. The water had undermined the road system and eaten away at foundations of buildings, and hurricane winds had done the rest. Some streets were completely filled in with rubble; others were pitted and undercut until shelves of concrete had shifted and slid and now rested crazily tilted. The white sand had claimed some streets so thoroughly that growth had had a chance to naturalize, and there were strip-forests of palm trees, straggly bushes with pink and yellow flowers, and sea grapes. I saw a mangrove copse claiming the water’s edge and stopped to stare at it for a long time, with curious thoughts flitting through my brain about the land and the sea in a survival struggle in which man was no more than an incidental observer, here, then gone. The afternoon storm broke abruptly, and I took shelter in a building that seemed to have been a warehouse.

The stench of mold and decay drove me out again as soon as the storm abated. Outside, the sun had baked everything, the sun and rain sterilizing, neutralizing, keeping the mold at bay, but inside the cavernous buildings the soggy air was a culture for mold spores, and thirty years, forty, had not been long enough to deplete the rich source of nutrients. There was food available on the shelves, the shelves were food, the wood construction materials, the glues and grouts, the tiles and vinyls, the papers neatly filed, the folders that held them, pencils, everything finally was food for the mold.

I entered two more buildings, same thing, except that one of them had become a bat cave. They were the large fruit bats, not dangerous, and I knew they were not, but I left them the building without contest.

At the end of the first day we had three bicycles and a flat-bottomed rowboat with two oars. I hadn’t found anything of value. The boat was aluminum, and although badly corroded, it seemed intact enough.

Trainor slouched in while J.P. was cooking dinner and the rest of us were planning our excursions for the next day.

“You folks want boats? Found a storehouse full of them.” He joined us for dinner and drew a map showing the warehouse he had found. His freehand map was more reliable than the printed ones we had brought with us. I suspected that he was salvaging what he could for his own boat. Unless he was a fool, that was what he was doing. When Evinson asked him what else he had seen that day, he simply shrugged.

“How’s chances of a swim?” I asked Delia after we ate.

“No radiation. But you’d better wait for Corrie to run some analyses. Too much that we don’t know to chance it yet.”

“No swimming, damn it!” Evinson said sharply. “For God’s sake, Sax.” He issued orders rapidly for the next day, in effect telling everyone to do what he had come to do.

Strut and puff, you little bastard, I thought at him. No one protested.

The same ruins lay everywhere in the city. After the first hour it was simply boring. My bicycle was more awkward than going on foot, since I had to carry it over rubble as much as I got to ride it. I abandoned it finally. I found the Miami River and dutifully got a sample. It was the color of tea, very clear. I followed the river a long time, stopped for my lunch, and followed it some more. Ruins, sand, junk, palm trees.

Heat. Silence. Especially silence. I was not aware of when I began to listen to the silence, but I caught myself walking cautiously, trying to be as quiet as the city, not to intrude in any way. The wind in the dry fronds was the only thing I heard. It stopped, then started again, and I jerked around. I went inside a building now and then, but they were worse than the ruined streets. Rusty toys, appliances, moldering furniture, or piles of dust where the termites had been, chairs that crumbled when I touched them, and the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

heat and silence.

I got bored with the river and turned in to what had been a garden park. Here the vegetation was different. A banyan tree had spread unchecked and filled more than a city block. A flock of blackbirds arose from it as I approached. The suddenness of their flight startled me and I whirled around, certain that someone was behind me. Nothing. Vines and bushes had grown wild in the park and were competing with trees for space — a minijungle. There were thousands of parakeets, emerald green, darting, making a cacophony that was worse than the silence. I retraced my steps after a few minutes.

There might have been water in there, but I didn’t care. I circled the park and kept walking.

The feeling that I was being followed grew stronger, and I stopped as if to look more closely at a weed, listening for steps. Nothing. The wind in some pampas grass, the louder rustle of palm fronds, the return of the blackbirds. And in the distance the raucous cries of gulls. The feeling didn’t go away, and I walked faster and sweated harder.

I got out my kit and finished the last of the beer in the shade of a live oak with branches eighty feet long spreading out sideways in all directions. Whatever had poisoned Miami and reduced its population to zero hadn’t affected the flora. The wind started, the daily storm. I sat in the doorway of a stinking apartment building and watched sheets of water race down the street. After the storm passed I decided to go back and try to get Corrie to go to bed with me. It never occurred to me to snuggle up to Delia, who seemed totally asexual. Delia and J.P., I thought.

Corrie was alone, and she said no curtly. She was as hot as I was and as tired. But she had a working lab set up, complete with microscopes and test tubes and flasks of things over Bunsen burners. She glanced contemptuously at the collecting bottle that I handed her. They knew about me, all of them.

“What did I do wrong?”

“Label it, please. Location, depth, source, time of day. Anything else you can think of that might be helpful.”

Her tone said, and leave me alone because I have real work to do. She turned back to her microscope.

“So I’m not a hydrologist. I’m a pamphlet writer for Health, Education and Welfare.”

“I know.” She glanced at me again. “But why didn’t they send a real hydrologist?”

“Because we don’t have one.”

She stood up and walked to the window netting and looked out. Her shirt was wet under her sleeves and down her back, her hair clung to her cheeks and the nape of her neck. “Why?” she whispered. “Why?

Why? Why?”

“If they knew that we wouldn’t be here.”

She walked back to her chair and sat down again, drawing the microscope toward her once more.

“Is the bay all right?”

“Yes.” She adjusted the focus and forgot about me. I left.

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The warehouse where Trainor had found the boats was half a dozen blocks up the waterfront. I walked and sweated. Trainor had dragged some small boats outside, and I chose the smallest of them and took it down to the water. I rowed out into the bay, undressed, and swam for half an hour; then I started to row, going no place in particular.

The water was marvelously calm, and I felt cooler and less tense after the swim. I stopped to dive a couple of times around a sunken yacht; it had been stripped. I stopped again, this time ashore at what looked like a copy of the Parthenon. It had been a museum. The water lapped about the foundation; marble stairs and massive fountains indicated that it had been a grandiose thing. A statue had toppled and I considered it. A female form — vaguely female, anyway. Rounded, curving, voluptuous-looking, roughly hewn out of granite, it was touching somehow. The eye-hollows were facing out to sea, waiting, watching the water, waiting. The essence of woman as childbearer, woman as nourisher, woman as man’s sexual necessity. Her flesh would be warm and yielding. She would be passive, accept his seed, and let it come to life within her. Those great round arms would hold a child, let it suckle at the massive breasts. I wished I could stand the statue upright again. When it fell one of the arms had broken; it lay apart from the bulk of the work. I tried to lift it: too heavy. I ran my hand over the rough rock and I wanted to sit on the floor by the woman and talk to her, cry a little, rest my cheek against that breast. I began to feel suffocated suddenly and I turned and ran from the museum without looking for anything else. The sun was setting, the sky crimson and blue and green, incredible colors that looked like cheap art.

It was dark when I got back to headquarters. All the others were there already, even Trainor. Delia was cooking. I watched her as she added water to the dehydrated stew and stirred it over canned heat. She was angular, with firm muscles and hardly any breasts at all. Her hips were slim, boyish, her legs all muscle and bone. I wondered again about her sexuality. I had seen her studying Trainor speculatively once, but nothing had come of it, and I had seen almost the same expression on her face a time or two when she had been looking at Corrie.

I turned my attention to Corrie — a little better, but still not really woman, not as the statue had signified woman. Corrie was softer than Delia, her hips a bit rounder, her breasts bouncier, not much, but Delia’s never moved at all. Corrie had more of a waistline. My thoughts were confusing to me, and I tried to think of something else, but that damn statue kept intruding. I should have talked to her, I found myself thinking. And she would have looked at me with contempt. She would have looked at any of our men with contempt except, possibly, Trainor.

I watched and listened to Trainor then, speaking with Bernard. Trainor was tall and broad shouldered, his hair white, face browned by the sun, very lean and very muscular.

“Have you ever seen any wild animals as far north as the cape?” Bernard asked, sketching. His fingers were swift and sure: that characterized him all the way, actually. He was soft looking, but he moved with a sureness always. A dilettante artist, photographer, in his mid-thirties, rich enough not to work. There had been a mild affair with Corrie, but nothing serious. I didn’t know why he was here.

“Deer,” Trainor said in answer to his question. “There’s a lot of things up in the brush. Foxes, rabbits, muskrats, possum.”

“Anything big? I heard that lions were let loose, or escaped around West Palm Beach. Did they live, multiply?”

“Can’t say.”

“Heard there were panthers.”

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“Can’t say.”

“How about Indians? You must know if any of them are left in the swamps.” Bernard’s pencil stopped, but he didn’t look at Trainor.

“Could be. Don’t go inland much. No way to get inland, hard going by boat, hyacinths, thick enough to walk on. Too much stuff in the water everywhere. St. John’s River used to be open, but not now.”

“How about fish then? See any porpoises?”

“They come and go. Don’t stay around long. Hear they’re thick down around South America and in the Caribbean. Might be.”

I watched Bernard for a long time. What was he after? And Trainor? I had a feeling that the seven people who had come to the city had seven different reasons, and that mine was the only simple one.

Orders. When you work for the government and an undersecretary says go, you go. Why were the others here?

In bed later, I couldn’t sleep. The odors all came back in triple strength after dark. I could feel the mold growing around me, on me, in my bedroll. The humidity was a weight on my chest. I finally got up again, drenched with sweat, my bed soaked through, and I went back to the second floor where I interrupted Delia and Bernard in a quiet conversation. I got a beer and sat down near the window, my back to them both. After a moment Delia yawned and got up.

At the doorway she paused and said, “Why don’t you take him?”

I looked at her then. Bernard made a snorting sound and didn’t answer. I turned back to the window.

The silence was coming in along with the nighttime humidity, and I realized that I had chosen my room on the wrong side of the building. The night air blew from the land to the sea. There was a faint breeze at the window. The oil lamp was feeble against the pressure of the darkness beyond the netting.

“Night,” Delia said at the door, and I looked at her again, nodded, and she started through, then stopped.

A high, uncanny, inhuman scream sounded once, from a long way off. It echoed through the empty city.

The silence that followed it made me understand that what I had thought to be quiet before had not been stillness. Now the silence was profound; no insect, no rustling, no whir of small wings, nothing. Then the night sounds began to return. The three of us had remained frozen; now Bernard moved. He turned to Delia.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew!”

She was very pale. “What was it?” she cried shrilly.

“Panther. Either in the city or awfully close.”

Panther? It might have been. I had no idea what a panther sounded like. The others were coming down again, Evinson in the lead, Corrie and J.P. close behind him. Corrie looked less frightened than Delia, but rattled and pale.

“For heaven’s sake, Bernard!” J.P. said. “Was that you?”

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“Don’t you know?” Corrie cried. At the same time Delia said, “It was a panther.”

“No! Don’t be a fool!” Corrie said.

Evinson interrupted them both. “Everyone, just be quiet. It was some sort of bird. We’ve seen birds for three days now. Some of them make cries like that.”

“No bird ever made a sound like that,” Corrie said. Her voice was too high and excited.

“It was a panther,” Bernard repeated. “I heard one before. In Mexico I heard one just like that, twenty years ago. I’ve never forgotten.” He nodded toward the net-covered window. “Out there. Maybe in one of the city parks. Think what it means, Evinson. I was right! Wildlife out there. Naturalized, probably.”

He took a breath. His hands were trembling, and he spoke with an intensity that was almost embarrassing. Corrie shook her head stubbornly, but Bernard went on. “I’m going to find it. Tomorrow.

I’ll take Sax with me, and our gear, and plan to stay out there for a day or two. We’ll see if we can find a trace of it, get a shot. Proof of some kind.”

Evinson started to protest. If it wasn’t his plan, he hated it. “We need Sax to find water for us,” he said.

“It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what the beast is; it might attack on sight.”

I was watching Bernard. His face tightened, became older, harsher. He was going. “Drop it, Evinson,” I said. “They know about me. The only water I’ll find is the river, which I already stumbled across, remember. And Bernard is right. If there’s anything, we should go out and try to find it.”

Evinson grumbled some more, but he couldn’t really forbid it, since this was what the expedition was all about. Besides, he knew damn well there was no way on earth that he could enforce any silly edict.

Sulkily he left us to plan our foray.

It was impossible to tell how the waterways had been laid out in many places. The water had spread, making marshes, and had changed its course, sometimes flowing down streets, again vanishing entirely, leaving dry beds as devoid of life as the Martian canals. Ruined concrete and sand lay there now. And the ruins went on and on. No frame houses remained; they had caved in, or had been blown down, or burned. A trailer court looked as if someone had taken one corner of the area and lifted it, tipping the chrome and gaudy-colored cans to one side. Creepers and shrubs were making a hill of greenery over them. We rowed and carried the boat and our stuff all day, stopped for the storms, then found shelter in a school building when it grew dark. The mosquitoes were worse the farther we went; their whining drowned out all other noises; we were both a mass of swollen bites that itched without letup. We saw nothing bigger than a squirrel. Bernard thought he glimpsed a manatee once, but it disappeared in the water plants and didn’t show again. I didn’t see it. There were many birds.

We were rowing late in the afternoon of the second day when Bernard motioned me to stop. We drifted and I looked where he pointed. On the bank was a great gray heron, its head stretched upward in a strange but curiously graceful position. Its wings were spread slightly, and it looked like nothing so much as a ballerina, poised, holding out her tutu. With painful slowness it lifted one leg and flexed its toes, then took a dainty, almost mincing step. Bernard pointed again, and I saw the second bird, in the same pose, following a ritual that had been choreographed incalculable ages ago. We watched the dance of the birds in silence, until without warning Bernard shouted in a hoarse, strange voice, “Get out of here! You fucking birds! Get out of here!” He hit the water with his oar, making an explosive noise, and continued to scream at them as they lifted in panicked flight and vanished into the growth behind them, trailing their Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

long legs, ungainly now and no longer beautiful.

“Bastard,” I muttered, and started to row again. We were out of synch for a long time as he chopped at the water ineffectually.

We watched the rain later, not talking. We hadn’t talked since seeing the birds’ courtship dance. I had a sunburn that was painful and peeling; I was tired, and hungry for some real food. “Tomorrow morning we start back,” I said. I didn’t look at him. We were in a small house while the rain and wind howled and pounded and turned the world gray. Lightning flashed and thunder rocked us almost simultaneously. The house shook and I tensed, ready to run. Bernard laughed. He waited for the wind to let up before he spoke.

“Sax, we have until the end of the week, and then back to Washington for you, back to New York for me. When do you think you’ll ever get out of the city again?”

“If I get back to it, what makes you think I’ll ever want out again?”

“You will. This trip will haunt you. You’ll begin to think of those parakeets, the terns wheeling and diving for fish. You’ll dream of swimming in clean water. You’ll dream of the trees and the skies and the waves on the beach. And no matter how much you want to get it back, there won’t be any way at all.”

“There’s a way if you want it bad enough.”

“No way.” He shook his head. “I tried. For years I tried. No way. Unless you’re willing to walk cross-country, and take the risks. No one ever makes it to anywhere, you know.”

I knew he was right. In Health and Education you learn about things like public transportation: there isn’t any. You learn about travel: there isn’t any, not that’s safe. The people who know how to salvage and make-do get more and more desperate for parts to use, more and more deadly in the ways they get those parts. Also, travel permits were about as plentiful as unicorns.

“You wanted to go back to Mexico?” I asked.

“Yeah. For twenty years I wanted to go back. The women there are different.”

“You were younger. They were younger.”

“No, it isn’t just that. They were different. Something in the air. You could feel it, sniff it, almost see it.

The smells were…” He stood up suddenly. “Anyway, I tried to get back, and this is as close as I could get. Maybe I’ll go ahead and walk after all.” He faced the west where the sky had cleared and the low sun looked three times as big as it should have.

“Look, Bernard, I could quote you statistics; that’s my job, you know. But I won’t. Just take my word for it. That’s what I’m good at. What I read, I remember. The birth rate has dropped to two per thousand there. As of six years ago. It might be lower now. They’re having a hell of a time with communications.

And they had plague.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What? The birth rate?”

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“Plague.” He looked at me with a strange smile.

I didn’t know what he was driving at. I was the one with access to government records, while he was just a photographer. “Right,” I said. “People just died of nothing.”

“It’s a lie, Sax! A goddamn fucking lie! No plague!” He stopped as suddenly as he had started, and sat down. “Forget it, Sax. Just forget it.”

“If it wasn’t the plague, what?”

“I said to let it drop.”

“What was it, Bernard? You’re crazy, you know that? You’re talking crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m crazy.” He was looking westward again. During the night I wakened to hear him walking back and forth. I hoped that if he decided to start that night, he’d leave me the canoe. I went back to sleep. He was still there in the morning.

“Look, Sax, you go back. I’ll come along in a day or two.”

“Bernard, you can’t live off nothing. There won’t be any food after tomorrow. We’ll both go back, stock up, and come out again. I couldn’t go off and leave you. How would you get back?”

“When I was a boy,” he said, “my father and mother were rather famous photographers. They taught me.

We traveled all over the world. Getting pictures of all the vanishing species, for one last glorious book.” I nodded. They had produced two of the most beautiful books I had ever seen. “Then something happened,” he said, after a slight hesitation. “You know all about that, I guess. Your department. They went away and left me in Mexico. I wasn’t a kid, you see, but I’d always been with them. Then I wasn’t with them anymore. No note. No letter. Nothing. They searched for them, of course. Rich gringos aren’t

— weren’t — allowed to simply vanish. Nothing. Before that my father had taken me into the hills, for a hunt. This time with guns. We shot — God, we shot everything that moved! Deer. Rabbits. Birds. A couple of snakes. There was a troop of monkeys. I remember them most of all. Seven monkeys. He took the left side and I took the right and we wiped them out. Just like that. They shrieked and screamed and tried to run away, and tried to shield each other, and we got every last one. Then we went back to my mother and the next day they were gone. I was fifteen. I stayed there for five years. Me and the girls of Mexico. They sent me home just before the border was closed. All North Americans out. I got permission to go back to New York, and for seventeen years I never left again. Until now. I won’t go back, Sax.”

He leaned over and picked up a rifle. He had had it with his photographic equipment. “I have ammunition. I’ve had it for years. I’m pretty good with it. I’d demonstrate, but I don’t want to waste the shell. Now, you just pick up your gear, and toss it in the boat, and get the hell out of here.”

I suddenly remembered watching television as a child, when they had programs that went on around the clock — stories, movies. A man with a rifle stalking a deer. That’s all I could remember of that program, but it was very clear and I didn’t want to go away and let Bernard be that man. I stared at the rifle until it began to rise and I was looking down the barrel of it.

“I’ll kill you, Sax. I really will,” he said, and I knew he would.

I turned and tossed my pack into the boat and then climbed in. “How will you get back, if you decide to Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

come back?” I felt only bitterness. I was going back and he was going to be the man with the rifle.

“I’ll find a way. If I’m not there by Friday, don’t wait. Tell Evinson I said that, Sax.”

“Bernard…” I let it hang there as I pushed off and started to paddle. There wasn’t a thing that I could say to him.

I heard a shot about an hour later, then another in the afternoon, after that nothing. I got back to headquarters during the night. No one was up, so I raided the food and beer and went to bed. The next morning Evinson was livid with rage.

“He wouldn’t have stayed like that! You left him! You did something to him, didn’t you? You’ll be tried, Sax. I’ll see you in prison for this.” Color flooded back into his face, leaving him looking as unnaturally flushed as he had been pale only a moment before. His hand trembled as he wiped his forehead, which was flaky with peeling skin.

“Sax is telling the truth,” Delia said. She had circles under her eyes and seemed depressed. “Bernard wanted me to go away with him to hunt. I refused. He needed someone to help him get as far away as possible.”

Evinson turned his back on her. “You’ll go back for him,” he said to me, snapping the words. I shook my head. “I’ll report you. I don’t believe a word of what you’ve said. I’ll report you. You did something, didn’t you? All his work for this project! You go get him!”

“Oh, shut up.” I turned to Corrie. “Anything new while I was gone?”

She looked tired too. Evinson must have applied the whip. “Not much. We’ve decided to take back samples of everything. We can’t do much with the equipment we brought. Just not enough time. Not enough of us for the work.”

“If you knew your business you could do it!” Evinson said. “Incompetents! All of you! This is treason!

You know that, don’t you? You’re sabotaging this project. You don’t want me to prove my theory.

Obstacles every step of the way. That’s all you’ve been good for. And now this! I’m warning you, Sax, if you don’t bring Bernard back today, I’ll press charges against you.” His voice had been high pitched always, but it became shriller and shriller until he sounded like a hysterical woman.

I spun to face him. “What theory, you crazy old man? There is no theory! There are a hundred theories.

You think those records weren’t sifted a thousand times before they were abandoned? Everything there was microfilmed and studied again and again and again. You think you can poke about in this muck and filth and come up with something that hasn’t been noted and discarded a dozen times? They don’t give a damn about your theories, you bloody fool! They hope that Delia can come up with a radiation study they can use. That Bernard will find wildlife, plant life that will prove the pollution has abated here. That J.P. will report the marine life has reestablished itself. Who do you think will ever read your theories about what happened here? Who gives a damn? All they want now is to try to save the rest.” I was out of breath and more furious than I had been in years. I wanted to kill the bastard, and it didn’t help at all to realize that it was Bernard that I really wanted to strangle. The man with the gun. Evinson backed away from me, and for the first time I saw that one of his hands had been bandaged.

Corrie caught my glance and shrugged. “Something bit him. He thinks I should be able to analyze his blood and come up with everything from what did it to a foolproof antidote. In fact, we have no idea what bit him.”

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“Isn’t Trainor any help with something like that?”

“He might be if he were around. We haven’t seen him since the night we heard the scream.” Evinson flung down his plastic cup. It bounced from the table to the floor. He stamped out.

“It’s bad,” Corrie said. “He’s feverish, and his hand is infected. I’ve done what I can. I just don’t have anything to work with.”

Delia picked up the cup and put it back on the table. “This whole thing is an abysmal failure,” she said dully. “None of us is able to get any real work done. We don’t know enough, or we don’t have the right equipment, or enough manpower, or time. I don’t even know why we’re here.”

“The Turkey Point plant?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about it, except that it isn’t hot. The people who built that plant knew more than we’re being taught today.” She bit her lip hard enough to leave marks on it. Her voice was steady when she went on. “It’s like that in every field. We’re losing everything that we had twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago. I’m one of the best, and I don’t understand that plant.”

I looked at Corrie and she nodded. “I haven’t seen a transplant in my life. No one is doing them now. I read about dialysis, but no one knows how to do it. In my books there are techniques and procedures that are as alien as acupuncture. Evinson is furious with us, and with himself. He can’t come up with anything that he couldn’t have presented as theory without ever leaving the city. It’s a failure, and he’s afraid he’ll be blamed personally.”

We sat in silence for several minutes until J.P. entered. He looked completely normal. His bald head was very red; the rest of his skin had tanned to a deep brown. He looked like he was wearing a gaudy skullcap.

“You’re back.” Not a word about Bernard, or to ask what we had done, what we had seen. “Delia, you coming with me again today? I’d like to get started soon.”

Delia laughed and stood up. “Sure, J.P. All the way.” They left together.

“is he getting anything done?”

“Who knows? He works sixteen hours a day doing something. I don’t know what.” Corrie drummed her fingers on the table, watching them. Then she said, “Was that a panther the other night, Davidson? Did you see a panther, or anything else?”

“Nothing. And I don’t know what it was. I never heard a panther.”

“I don’t think it was. I think it was a human being.”

“A woman?”

“Yes. In childbirth.” I stared at her until she met my gaze. She nodded. “I’ve heard it before. I am a doctor, you know. I specialized in obstetrics until the field became obsolete.”

I found that I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “You’re as crazy as Bernard.”

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“No. That’s what I came for, Davidson. There has to be life out there in the Everglades. The Indians.

They can stick it out, back in the swamps where they always lived. Probably nothing much has changed for them. Except that there’s more game now. That has to be it.”

“Have you talked to Evinson about this?”

“Yes, of course. He thinks it was Trainor who screamed. He thinks Trainor was killed by a snake, or something. After he got bitten himself, he became convinced of it.”

“J.P.? Delia?”

“J.P. thinks it’s a mystery. Since it has nothing to do with marine biology, he has no opinion, no interest.

Delia thought Bernard was right, an animal, maybe a panther, maybe something else. She is afraid it’s a mutated animal. She began to collect strange plants, and insects, things like that after you left. She even has a couple of fruit bats that she says are mutations.”

I took a deep breath. “Corrie, why are we here? Why did the government send this expedition here?”

She shrugged. “What you told Evinson makes as much sense as anything else. The government didn’t mount this expedition, you know. They simply permitted it. And sent an observer. It was Bernard’s scheme from the start. He convinced Evinson that he could become famous through the proofs for his schoolboy theory. Bernard’s money, Evinson’s pull with those in power. And now we know why Bernard wanted to come. He’s impotent.” She looked thoughtful, then smiled faintly at me. “A lot of impotent men feel the need to go out and shoot things. And many, perhaps most men are impotent now. Don’t look like that. At least you’re all right.”

I backed away from that. “What about Evinson? Does he believe a leak or an explosion brought all this about?”

“Bernard planted that in his mind,” she said. “He doesn’t really believe it now. But it leaves him with no alternative theory to fall back on. You can’t tell anything by looking at these rotten buildings.”

I shook my head. “I know that was the popular explanation, but they did investigate, you know. Didn’t he get to any of the old reports? Why did he buy that particular theory?”

“All those reports are absolutely meaningless. Each new administration doctors them to fit its current platforms and promises.” She shrugged again. “That’s propaganda from another source, right? So what did happen, according to the official reports?”

“Plague, brought in by Haitian smugglers. And the water was going bad; salt intrusion destroyed the whole system. Four years of drought had aggravated everything. Then the biggest hurricane of the century hit and that was just too bloody much. Thirty thousand deaths. They never recovered.”

She was shaking her head now. “You have the chronology all mixed up. First the drop in population, the exodus, then the plague. It was like that everywhere. First the population began to sag, and in industrialized nations that spelled disaster. Then flu strains that no one had ever seen before, and plague.

There weren’t enough doctors; plants had closed down because of a labor shortage. There was no defense. In the ten years before the epidemics, the population had dropped by twenty percent.”

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in the water, Sax. It’s crawling with things that I can’t identify, but we pretend that they belong and that they’re benign. And God help us, we’re the ones teaching the new generation. Let’s swim.”

Lying on my back under the broiling sun, I tried again to replay the scene with my boss. Nothing came of it. He hadn’t told me why he was sending me to Miami. Report back. On what? Everything you see and hear, everything they all do. For the record. Period.

Miami hadn’t been the first city to be evacuated. It had been the largest up to that time. Throughout the Midwest, the far west, one town, one city after another had been left to the winds and rains and the transients. No one had thought it strange enough to investigate. The people were going to the big cities where they could find work. The young refused to work the land. Or agribusiness had bought them out.

No mystery. Then larger cities had been emptied. But that was because of epidemics: plague, flu, hepatitis. Or because of government policies: busing or open housing; or the loss of government contracts for defense work. Always a logical explanation. Then Miami. And the revelation that population zero had been reached and passed. But that had to be because of the plagues. Nothing else made any sense at all.

I looked at Corrie resentfully. She was dozing after our swim. Her body was gold-brown now, with highlights of red on her shoulders, her nose, her thighs. It was too easy to reject the official reasons, especially if you weren’t responsible for coming up with alternative explanations.

“I think they sent you because they thought you would come back,” Corrie said, without opening her eyes. “I think that’s it.” She rolled on her side and looked at me.

“You know with Trainor gone, maybe none of us will get back,” I said.

“If we hug the shore we should make it, except that we have no gas.”

I looked blank, I suppose. She laughed. “No one told you? He took the gas when he left. Or the snake that killed him drank it. I think he found a boat that would get him to the Bahamas, and he went. I suppose that’s why he came, to get enough gas to cruise the islands. That’s why he insisted on getting down by sail, to save what gas Evinson had requisitioned for this trip. There’s no one left on the islands, of course.”

I had said it lightly, that we might not get back, but with no gas, it became a statement of fact. None of us could operate the sail, and the boat was too unwieldy to paddle. The first storm would capsize us, or we would run aground. “Didn’t Trainor say anything about coming back?”

“He didn’t even say anything about leaving.” She closed her eyes and repeated, “There’s no one there at all.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t believe there was, either. Suddenly, looking at Corrie, I wanted her, and I reached for her arm. She drew away, startled. They said that sun-spot activity had caused a decrease in sexual activity. Sporadically, with some of us. I grabbed Corrie’s arm hard and pulled her toward me.

She didn’t fight, but her face became strained, almost haggard.

“Wait until tomorrow, Davidson. Please. I’ll ovulate tomorrow. Maybe you and I…” I saw the desperation then, and the fear — worse, terror. I saw the void in her eyes, pupils the size of pinpricks in the brilliant light, the irises the color of the endless water beyond us. I pushed her away and stood up.

Don’t bring me your fear, I wanted to say. All my life I had been avoiding the fear and now she would thrust it upon me. I left her lying on the beach.

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Evinson was sick that night. He vomited repeatedly, and toward dawn he became delirious.

J.P. and I took turns sitting with him, because the women weren’t strong enough to restrain him when he began to thrash about. He flung Corrie against the wall before we realized his strength and his dementia.

“He’s dying, isn’t he?” J.P. said, looking at him coolly. He was making a study of death, I thought.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s dying. It might take a while, but this is the start of it.” He looked at me fixedly for a long time.

“None of us is going back, Sax. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going back. You’re all a bunch of creepies, crazy as bedbugs, all of you. But I’m going back!”

“Don’t yell.” His voice remained mild, neutral, an androgynous voice without overtones of anything human at all.

I stamped from the room to get a beer, and when I got back, J.P. was writing in his notebook. He didn’t look up again. Evinson got much worse, louder, more violent, then his strength began to ebb and he subsided, moaning fitfully now and then, murmuring unintelligibly. Corrie checked him from time to time.

She changed the dressing on his hand; it was swollen to twice its normal size, the swelling extending to his shoulder. She looked at him as dispassionately as J.P. did.

“A few more hours,” she said. “Do you want me to stay up with you?”

“What for?” I asked coldly. “I must say you’re taking this well.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. What good would it do if I put on an act and wept for him?”

“You might care because he’s a man who didn’t deserve to die in this stinking city.”

She shrugged. “I’ll go on to bed. Call me if there’s any change.” At the doorway she turned and said, “I’ll weep for myself, maybe even for you, Sax, but not for him. He knew what this would be like. We all did, except possibly you.”

“You won’t have to waste any tears for me. Go on to bed.” She left and I said to J.P., “You all hate him, don’t you? Why?”

J.P. picked up his pen again, but he hesitated. “I hadn’t thought of it as hating him,” he said thoughtfully. “I just never wanted to be near him. He’s been trying to climb onto the glory train for years. Special adviser to presidents about urban affairs, that sort of thing. Absolutely no good at it, but very good at politics. He made them all think there was still hope. He lied and knew he lied. They used to say those that can do; those that can’t teach. Now the saying goes, those that can’t become sociologists.” He put his pen down again and began to worry at a hangnail. His hands were very long and narrow, brown, bony with prominent knuckles. “A real scientist despises the pseudoscientist who passes. Something unclean about him, the fact that he could get permission for this when his part of it was certain to be negligible from the start.”

“And yours was important from the start, I suppose?”

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“For fifteen years I’ve wanted to get back into field research. Every year the funds dwindled more.

People like me were put into classrooms, or let go. It really isn’t fair to the students, you understand. I’m a rotten teacher. I hate them all without exception. I crammed and worked around the clock to get as good a background as I could, and when I was ready, I forced myself on Albert Lanier.” He looked at me expectantly and I shook my head. Only later did I recall the name. Lanier had written many of the books on marine biology that were in the libraries. J.P.’s look became contemptuous. “He was a great man and a greater scientist. During his last years when he was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, I was his eyes, his legs, his hands. When he died all field research died with him. Until now.”

“So you’re qualified for this work.”

“Yes, I’m qualified. More than that fool.” He glanced at Evinson, who was breathing very shallowly.

“More than anyone here. If only my work is made known, this farce will be worth ten of him, of all of you. If. Would any one of my own students know what I’m doing? My own students!” He bit the hangnail and a spot of blood appeared on his thumb. He started to scribble again.

At daybreak Evinson’s fever started to climb, and it rose steadily until noon. We kept him in wet sheets, we fanned him, Corrie gave him cool enemas. Nothing helped. He died at one-thirty. I was alone with him. Corrie and Delia were both asleep.

J. P. knew when he looked at my face. He nodded. I saw his pack then. “Where the hell are you going?”

“Down the coast. Maybe down the Keys, as far as I can get. I’d like to see if the coral is coming back again.”

“We leave here Saturday morning at dawn. I don’t give a damn who’s here and who isn’t. At dawn.”

He smiled mockingly and shook his head. He didn’t say good-bye to anyone, just heaved his pack onto his back and walked away.

I rummaged on the Loretta and found a long-handled, small-bladed shovel, and I buried Evinson on the beach, above the high-water mark.

When I got back Corrie was up, eating a yellow fruit with a thick rind. I knocked it out of her hand reflexively. “Are you out of your mind! You know the local fruits might kill us.” She had juice on her chin.

“I don’t know anything anymore. That’s a mango, and it’s delicious. I’ve been eating the fruits for three days. A touch of diarrhea the first day, that’s all.” She spoke lightly, and didn’t look at me. She began to cut another one.

“Evinson died. I buried him. J.P. left.” She didn’t comment. The aromatic odor from the fruit seemed to fill the room. She handed me a slice and I threw it back at her.

Delia came down then looking better than she had in days. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes livelier than I had seen them. She looked at Corrie, and while she didn’t smile, or do anything at all, I knew.

“Bitch,” I said to Corrie bitterly. “Wait until tomorrow. Right. Bitch!”

“Take a walk, Sax,” Delia said sharply.

“Let’s not fight,” Corrie said. “He’s dead and J.P.’s gone.” Delia shrugged and sat down at the table.

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Corrie handed her a piece of the mango. “Sax, you knew about me, about us. Whether or not you wanted to know, you did. Sometimes I tried to pretend that maybe I could conceive, but I won’t. So forget it. What are you going to do?”

“Get the hell out of here. Go home.”

“For what?” Delia asked. She tasted the slice of mango, then bit into it. She frowned critically. “I like the oranges better.”

“These grow on you,” Corrie said. “I’ve developed an absolute craving for them in the past three days.

You’ll see.”

“I don’t know about you,” I said furiously, “but I’m leaving Saturday. I have things to do that I like doing.

I like to read. To see a show now and then. I have friends.”

“Are you married? Do you live with a woman? Or a man?” Delia asked.

I looked at Corrie. “We’re in trouble. It’ll take the three of us to manage the boat to get back. We have to make plans.”

“We aren’t going back,” Corrie said softly. “We’re going to the Seminoles.”

“Corrie, listen to me. I’ve been out farther than either of you. There’s nothing. Ruins. Rot. Decay. No roads. Nothing. Even if they existed, you’d never find them.”

“There’s the remains of the road. Enough for us to follow west.”

“Why didn’t you try a little bribery with me?” I yelled at her. “Maybe I would have changed my mind and gone with you.”

“I didn’t want you, Sax. I didn’t think the Seminoles would want to take in a white man.”

I left them alone for the rest of the day. I checked the Loretta again, swam, fished, groomed. That night I pretended that nothing had been said about Seminoles. We ate silently.

Outside was the blackness and the silence, and somewhere in the silence a scream waited. The silence seemed to be sifting in through the mosquito netting. The wind had stopped completely. The air was close and very hot inside the building. “I’m going out,” I said as soon as I finished eating.

Delia’s question played through my mind as I walked. Did I live with a woman? Or a man? I stopped at the edge of the water. There were no waves on the bay, no sound except a gentle water murmur. Of all the people I knew, I could think of only three that I would like to see again, two of them because I had lived with them in the past, and our relationships had been exciting, or at least not abrasive, while they had lasted. And when they were finished, the ending hadn’t been shattering. Two women, both gone from my life completely. One man, a coworker in my department. We did things together, bowled, swapped books, saw shows together. Not recently, I reminded myself. He had dropped out of sight.

A gust of wind shook me and I started back. A storm was coming up fast. The wind became erratic and strong, and as suddenly as the wind had started, the rain began. It was a deluge that blinded me, soaked me, and was ankle deep in the street almost instantly. Then, over the rain, I heard a roar that shook me through and through, that left me vibrating. A tornado, I knew, although I had never seen or heard one.

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The roar increased, like a plane bearing down on me. I threw myself flat, and the noise rocked the ground under me, and a building crashed to my left, then another, and another. It ended as abruptly as it had started.

I stumbled back to our building, shaking, chilled and very frightened. I was terrified that our building would be demolished, the women gone, dead, and that I would be alone with the silence and the black of the night.

Corrie opened the door on the first floor and I stumbled in. “Are you all right? It was a tornado, wasn’t it?”

She and Delia were both afraid. That was reassuring. Maybe now they would be frightened enough to give up the nonsense about staying here. The storm abated and the silence returned. It didn’t seem quite so ominous now.

“Corrie, don’t you see how dangerous it would be to stay? There could be a hurricane. Storms every day. Come back with me.”

“The cities will die, Sax. They’ll run out of food. More epidemics. I can help the Seminoles.”

Friday I got the Loretta ready for the return trip. I packed as much fruit as it would hold. Enough for three, I kept telling myself. Forbidden fruit. For three. I avoided Corrie and Delia as much as I could and they seemed to be keeping busy, but what they were doing I couldn’t guess.

That night I came wide awake suddenly and sat up listening hard. Something had rattled or fallen. And now it was too quiet. It had been the outside door slamming, I realized, and jumped up from my bedroll and raced downstairs. No one was there, anywhere. They had left, taking with them Corrie’s medical supplies, Delia’s radiation kit, most of the food, most of the beer. I went outside, but it was hopeless. I hadn’t expected this. I had thought they would try to talk me into going into the swamps with them, not that they would try it alone.

I cursed and threw things around, then another thought hit me. The Loretta! I ran to the dock in a frenzy of fear that they had scuttled her. But she was there, swaying and bobbing in the changing tide. I went aboard and decided not to leave her again. In the morning I saw that the sail was gone.

I stared at the mast and the empty deck. Why? Why for God’s sake had they taken the sail?

They’ll be back, I kept thinking all morning. And I’ll kill them both. Gradually the thought changed. They would beg me to go with them inland, and I would say yes, and we would go into the first swamp and I would take their gear and leave them there. They would follow me out soon enough. They had needed the sail for a shelter, I thought dully. After noon I began to think that maybe I could go with them part of the way, just to help them out, prove to them that it was hopeless to go farther.

My fury returned, redoubled. All my life I had managed to live quietly, just doing my job, even though it was a stupid one, but getting paid and trying to live comfortably, keeping busy enough not to think.

Keeping busy enough to keep the fear out. Because it was there all the time, pressing, just as the silence here pressed. It was a silent fear, but if it had had a voice, its voice would have been that scream we had heard. That was the voice of my fear. Loud, shrill, inhuman, hopeless. I felt clammy and chilled in the heat, and my stomach rejected the idea of food or drink.

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Come back, I pleaded silently, willing the thought out, spreading the thought, trying to make contact with one of them. Come back for me. I’ll go with you, do whatever you want to do. Please!

That passed. The storm came, and I shivered alone in the Loretta and listened to the wind and the pounding rain. I thought about my apartment, work, the pamphlets I wrote. The last one I had worked on was titled: “Methods of Deep Ploughing of Alluvial Soils in Strip Farming in Order to Provide a Nutritionally Adequate Diet in a Meatless Society.” Who was it for? Who would read past the title? No one, I answered. No one would read it. They were planning for a future that I couldn’t even imagine.

The silence was more profound than ever that evening. I sat on deck until I could bear the mosquitoes no longer. Below, it was sweltering, and the silence had followed me in. I would start back at first light, I decided. I would have to take a smaller boat. A flat-bottomed boat. I could row it up the waterway, stay out of the ocean. I could haul it where the water was too shallow or full of debris.

The silence pressed against me, equally on all sides, a force that I could feel now. I would need something for protection from the sun. And boiled water. The beer was nearly gone. They hadn’t left me much food, either. I could do without food, but not without water and maps. Maybe I could make a small sail from discarded clothing. I planned and tried not to feel the silence. I lectured myself on synesthesia — I had done a pamphlet on the subject once. But the silence won. I began to run up the dock, screaming at Corrie and Delia, cursing them, screaming for them to come back. I stopped, exhausted finally, and the echo finished and the silence was back. I knew I wouldn’t sleep; I built a fire and started to boil water.

I poured the water into the empty beer bottles and stacked them back in their original boxes. More water started to boil, and I dozed. In my near sleep, I heard the scream again. I jumped up shaking. It had been inhumanly high, piercing, with such agony and hopelessness that tears stood in my eyes. I had dreamed it, I told myself. And I couldn’t be certain if I had or not.

Until dawn came I thought about the scream, and it seemed to me a thing uttered by no living throat. It had been my own scream, I thought, and I laughed out loud.

I loaded an aluminum rowboat the next day and rigged up a sail that might or might not fall apart when the wind blew. I made myself a poncho and a sun hat, and then, ready to go, I sat in the boat and watched some terns diving. They never had asked me what I had wanted to do, I thought bitterly.

Not one of them had asked me what I would have liked to have done.

J.P. had complained about being forced into teaching, while I would have traded everything I had for the chance to write, to teach — but worthless things, like literature, art appreciation, composition. A pelican began to dive with the terns, and several gulls appeared. They followed the pelican down, and one sat on his head and tried to snatch the fish from his mouth.

I thought again of all the pamphlets I had written, all the thousands of pages I had read in order to condense them. All wasted because in reducing them to so little, too much had been left out. I started to row finally.

When I left the mouth of the bay, I turned the small boat southward. The sea was very blue, the swells long and peaceful. Cuba, I thought. That many people, some of them had to be left. And they would need help. So much had been lost already, and I had it, all those thousands of pages, hundreds of books, all up there in my head.

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I saw again the undersecretary’s white, dry, dead face, the hurt there, the fear. He hadn’t expected me to come back at all, I realized. I wished I could tell Corrie.

The wind freshened. If not Cuba, then Central America, or even South America. I put up my little sail, and the wind caught it and puffed it, and I felt only a great contentment.

The End

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