Another story. Hard going. I hope you don’t think I’m a gloomy Gus, all woe and downcast, wallowingly emotional and morose and… But, then again, seeing the way the world is and the way it seems to be going, it’s hard not to be that way much of the time. But I still think that raising issues and feeling pain when it’s there can help us get past the road blocks on the path toward where we want to go. You tell me. Of course I realize that now the story may seem trite, old hat, been done, of an earlier time, not enough new. But I also realize that the problems are very real, not solved, that I would do anything to solve them, that the elements of my own life crush me and by the end of the story I am in tears. Sorry about that, don’t want to be maudlin, but I just can’t help it.

This story appeared in Modus Operandi, Volume 9, No. 5, May 1978.

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In the Tombs

He sat on the bench in the day room. He held the plastic cylinder in his hands. His fingers in that careful grip remembered a reverence. He was thinking of cemeteries.

The light was low in the day room. He felt himself in shadow, surrounded by shadows. The lights were down in this entire sector of The Tombs.

Farnsworth ran by in the corridor. There must have been another break in the outer wall. Four men ran after Farnsworth carrying heavy equipment, fear in their faces.

Must be bad this time. Bad every time. The shadows shaped his mind to cypress trees, cold stone in rows, iron fences, black smoke, ashes. Every cemetery, every heavy feeling. His blood was heavy, moveless, thick.

Death was in his head. Dead his childhood grandmother never known well enough, those last senile years of madness, the hospitals, the hushed veneer of family overlaying the incomprehension accompanying every loss always: unnaturally pale the body on view the teeth not quite fitting the mouth and not at all like sleep. Neighbors easing themselves with words and he small seeing their fear because he did not speak.

Tiana came to him from corridor seventeen stood before him pressed his hand and moved past toward her compartment. She knew that when he no longer wanted to be alone he would come to her.

So many changes in death and the rites of the living. His mother had died when the End was well advanced, when the first tunnels had been finished, reconversion of the larger surface buildings pushed with unnatural haste. After the fact. All too late.

His fingers touched his pocket, the paper which he carried with him as he kept always the cylinder, feeling for the words whose writing had left him empty:

Nothing left.

What a history we had while we were living it.

Institutional blindness, personal greed and government stupidity, then the shocked realization that life itself is the only real value; after all effective understanding of that value had been erased from the once human consciousness of civilization.

We’d been dead for years, didn’t know it.

Arguments. Counter arguments. Talk. Action. I was with them, eager, my breath burning the air.

The problems grew. No one accepts easily that his life is wrong. Must move inertia by indirection. Mistakes. The economy was taken over but never given to the people. Those same mass manipulations. Those beautiful American words—democracy, equality, justice, freedom—never meant anything.

Of course I tried. Public education. People must know. But education not enough.

Then I joined Farnsworth, the project privately organized; later the government bought in. Affiliated. Project for survival.

“Even if war doesn’t come,” Bernhard said at the first meeting, “we’re caught in the most vicious struggle for the basics of life; they’ve never been in total danger before. And no one’s exempt. It will be neighborhoods fighting for air and water and food. Unless someone secures those essentials, stockpiles them somewhere, and soon, there will be no air or food or water left anywhere on the face of the earth. Gentlemen, we can no longer prevent the End from coming. But we must insure that someone will live through it. And we must be those survivors.”

So I worked for Bernhard, his company, his private fortune. Corporate earnings now were not devoted to stemming the quick tides of dissolution but to building and equipping an island in the flood.

We consolidated, retrenched, withdrawing funds from useless media education and ecology action. The abortive attempt to push Nader for President came too late.

“The world’s building itself into a bomb,” Bernhard said. “At best a few may get through. Either nature will select them or we will or someone else. If we control that selection we have at least a fighting chance that the most decent, best balanced, most intelligent, finest human beings alive, if they live, can start the world over again. And this time maybe get it right.”

Words.

Too late.

The words were in his hands on the paper. He looked at the paper. With a pencil he wrote:

Tiana is pretty.

He put the pencil in his pocket. He looked at the paper.

Farnsworth Enterprises built the Tombs. International liaison for global survival, government chaos and private panic after the Collapse and the Tombs were sealed unfinished.

We are miles of tunnel and life support. Low grade food and supplements in small quantity, cryogenic chambers, mostly empty, power failures and rotting bodies. The protein converter installed to reconstitute our wastes and casualties into amino capsules for human consumption broke down three days after my father passed through it. We have lost contact with the outside. There are thirteen view ports but from them we can see nothing living.

He sat in the day room. Warning lights flashed around him, alarms rang down the corridors. Men and women ran back and forth. He held the paper in his hand. He took his pencil and began to write:

One week ago my father died. His cubicle was next to mine. I woke up that morning and pushed myself out into the hall on my sleeping shelf. I took the handle to my father’s shelf and pulled him out, like a drawer, like a slab. He was dead. He had killed himself during the night so that Tiana could have his cubicle and we could be married. He wanted us to have children. I slid his shelf back in and leaned my head against it. I pulled it out and touched him. I looked around for someone to help me. The protein converter gave me a cylinder of three hundred seventy five capsules. They are shiny. My friends say the new rules say I must share some of them. I will not share. Three days ago the protein wars started. I will not share. The outer wall is breaking down. It is too late for Tiana and me. It is myself I am holding in this cylinder. Myself.