The farther it surged from the reshaped Finnish Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish. But they perished. The radiation-emitting particles filled their lungs, they contaminated their food, they polluted . their water and could not be filtered out.
Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and perished in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria—all.
Surrender of those who survived, the southern dwellers of the nation, was delayed because they could not find who should make the offer; they did not care how abject the terms might be. But days passed. A week. Two weeks. And the message winged from Tiflis. It was over. The last war was finished.
The last great obstacle to freedom had been removed from the human path.
17
On a sunny afternoon, just before June became July, during a Midwestern heat wave, a young man pushed a hand mower back and forth over a Walnut Street lawn in the city of Green Prairie.
He looked to be twenty-two or -three years old though, actually, Ted Conner was not yet nineteen. He had grown big, like his Oakley grandsire, the blacksmith, bigger than his father, a good deal bigger than his older brother. In addition, there was something about his face (besides the scar on the forehead) which suggested more years than the teens. He limped, too. It was noticeable when he walked over to a shady spot behind the ferns and picked up a glass jug of water. His right leg was slightly shorter than his left.
He took a bandanna handkerchief from the belt that held up his shorts; he wiped his mouth, then his brow. After that he returned to work. But before he started the mower’s clattering monody he looked at the house for a moment.
Two and a half years had passed, since the Bomb.
But only the attic windows were boarded up. Glass was still rationed-along with a hundred other things—but householders had enough, now, to take care of two floors per family.