Читать онлайн «Mother to the World»

His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.

She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.

He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but still covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own.

His health was excellent. He’d never had a cavity Or an opera-tion and he fervently hoped he never would.

She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight, five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and well-spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She wore her hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown, straight back and long in two pigtails which she braided daily, after a ritualistic hundred brushings. Her figure was better than average for her age and therefore good, but she did nothing to emphasize it. Her disposition was cheerful when she was with someone; when alone her tendency was to work hard at the job at hand, giving it her serious attention. Whatever she was doing was the most important thing in the world to her just then and she had a compulsion to do it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but she liked, almost demanded, to be praised for what she did well.

Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to people but most people quickly became bored with what she had to say she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.

She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-year-old.

Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at eight bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a refresh-ing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original viewpoint on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a constant delight.

Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and three billion other people.

Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.

It was M. R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retaliation; from the Other Side.

When American bombs rained down from long-range jets and rocket carriers, nobody’d known the Chinese had what they had. Nobody’d suspected it of that relatively backward country which the United States had believed it was soften-ing up, in a brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.

Rolfe hadn’t been aware of any speculation that Peking’s scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons but on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There’d been prop-aganda from both sides about that, but nothing had been hinted about a biological agent, as it must have been, that could break down human cells and release the water.

“M. R. ,” he told her. “Better than nerve gas or the neutron bomb. ” Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact.

Unlike them, it didn’t leave any messy corpses only the bones, which crumbled and blew away. Except the bone dust trapped inside the pathetic mounds of clothing that lay everywhere in the city.