Women and Men (232 page)

We felt still asleep, but in a future that followed from Ash’s brief report. Our new bomb was resolving a multistage executive tower so that I-beams and bricks, bolted-down furniture and solidly transparent walls condensed to nothing. A thousand people in recognizable attitudes, and as if on an infra-material photograph, were caught by our vision still distributed according to the now vanished grid of their building’s floor levels.
This
was a bomb that left people more or less alone.

The voice on the telephone-speaker came through so matter-of-fact that one thing equaled another. Was the nuclear device in question no more earth-shattering than the experimental motel where Jim Ash had stopped for the night? This passive-energy accommodation had been built from ground-level downward to take advantage of year-round moderate temperatures just below the surface, but Ash was phoning from a hilltop pay booth, private if exposed. His voice would recede for a second as if he were turning away from the receiver to keep an eye out. "You see, this thing discriminates between what’s living and what isn’t."

"It does
what?"
we asked.

He meant what he said. The miracle of the bomb was that it would destroy non-living structures ("resolve" them) while leaving anything alive unharmed. We asked Jim if anyone else had it. He didn’t know. We felt it was
our
bomb. We believed Ash when he said it didn’t make any noise.

In those days the men and women in the labs dreamed of the unified force field, but they got up in the morning and did their work. Economists ran their cost-benefit breakdowns, and we all took it one day at a time because that is the way the job gets done. We knew roughly what to expect. But a device that wiped out everything
except
life? A bomb that leveled buildings but left people very much alive? How alive we did not reckon at first; for who was prepared to understand what was happening in the colossal quiet of this uniquely silent weapon. People it left standing, Ash quipped grimly—a joke that took hold in those days of queues and informal marches.

Left standing, maybe, but not sitting. Unless you were sitting in a live tree or on a live horse or upon fertile areas of organically arable soil. For if you were within the bomb’s silent scope hearing the clink of an unbreakable coffee cup in its saucer or a random radio playing, you could not hope to go on sitting on anything inanimate or inorganic. It would be blown out from under you. If you were sitting on your porch across the domestic hinterlands of the continent or at your office desk, get ready to be inconvenienced. Porch and rocker were instantly gone, your desk in the city likewise demattered. Not to mention the building that housed the desk—three hundred desks. For this bomb liked structures made of steel and stone and the more transparent substances.

That night when Ash phoned, none of us knew how close we were to the strange advances in personal power and self-possession soon to occur in a large number of citizens who now seem legendary. We slept and dreamed a dream so natural it did not come back to us as the answer to our waking question until later when what we had dreamed happened. Happened again and again on the limited but vivid video footage available showing a building’s entire population of dark, luminous persons making their way to earth like sky divers before the chutes open. Which answered our first, waking question the morning after Ash called: how would survivors descend?

The silent bomb would not be hush-hush for long, Jim Ash had predicted. His opinion was soon matched by hard fact. The desert, like the sea, had always seemed beautifully right for tests of megaduty devices. This time some sites were ruled out as being too near one or more of the hexagonal dwellings called hogans owned and/or inhabited by the Navajo. Then a man named Babe who had never contributed a dollar to a presidential campaign offered his jojoba plantation. He hoped to dramatize the hardiness of that remarkable bush whose pod contains a waxy liquid that was already replacing whale oil and would eventually find uses in auto lubrication, scalp treatments, and cooking. But this desert entrepreneur hoped also to prove the scientists’ claim for their bomb; and to this end he volunteered his ranch and his jojoba-processing plant. If the thing went well and the buildings were leveled, the government would replace his home according to his wife’s own plans, and would import, lock, stock, and barrel, a whole new processing plant from the Orient as if he had bought himself a Saudi mosque or a Roman bridge. His loyal staff would stay on the job during the test, whatever the uncertainty about the bomb’s "discrimination profile." Anyway, it would be an experience.

At detonation, however, to the surprise of practically everyone, sections of the desert as well were suddenly not there; they had dropped away, swept by some local collapse of time or accelerated into silence by some unseen wind. The sandy, alkaline landscape had vanished around the blast, leaving gaps deeper than craters. Two men and two women raced out to take samples along the rims. The targeted buildings had been not just leveled, they were now nonexistent, leaving their occupants shaken up but grinning with some knowledge not quite yet theirs.

Religious leaders wanted proof of the bomb’s powers. Unfriendly continents demanded Washington share its bomb. Reaction in the financial community and the construction industry was mixed. Meanwhile, we needed to know in a hurry what happened with larger structures. People who worked in them at first preferred not to take part in the upcoming tests. But when a sensational test in a major seaport "resolved" a modern three-story outerwear factory, employees in other buildings came forward. This was a double development, for people were volunteering not only themselves but also the buildings they worked in. Our man Ash, having covered the first test, had now covered this second one where, after the detonation, the factory workers were seen descending so slowly from the vanished upper floors that it seemed to be against their will; so slowly that many escaped with the simplest bruises.

Ash checked on the survivors of the first blast. Where the narrow, deep gulfs had opened east of the jojoba groves, soil samples tested out devoid of life. Not even a jojoba bush would grow there. When Ash phoned to ask the planter Babe if he was really going to get a new house out of this, and what were the authorities
doing
to his employees during the follow-up examinations, Babe thought Ash knew more than he did, and divulged the location of the lab where survivors had been sequestered for debriefing. Jim Ash flew there. He posed as a hermit and met a woman he had seen at the desert test. She moved among hillside trees with a grace so centered that, as Jim was able only much later to express it, she might have been a continuum present elsewhere as well as here.

She wore a linen headband, and her name was Mara. Through her,
Jim
Ash saw the grasses and the orchards as if he were on their far side looking back. Where were the fences? Wasn’t the place classified?

This was Biomorph Valley. The debriefing lab was in a bunker nearby. The survivors, most of them, were very much alive. Jim felt Mara saw through him, yet she seemed to tell the truth when she said it was natural for him to be a hermit now. Back at the lab it was important, she said, to seem to know less than she really did, in order not to disturb work going on. A friend had had all too much life in him, she said; he had died of his own very intensity yesterday at dawn. Only then had Mara found both a power of peace beyond attachment and a new connection
with
this friend. She loved him and Jim Ash too. She was one of the few women he had known who when they knew something did not ask him to guess what it was. He did not pass on to us what she had told him, or not until the late changes alluded to above were widespread. Tests went on apace.

The employees of the three-story outerwear factory had learned what was happening only one minute ten seconds prior to blast. Therefore, none experienced prolonged preblast anxiety. An outerwear executive who was a part-time major in the National Guard and so had kept secret the pacemaker he had had installed next to his erratic heart was restrained from jumping to safety during countdown; most of the building’s occupants did not take the test seriously. But when the countdown reached the ultimate silence of detonation, participants suddenly found themselves following the one simple instruction: concentrate on the locus area both between your eyes and between your ears and think of this as a source of both choice and buoyancy. But those who descended with surprising ease to ground level after the factory was resolved experienced this not only as the result of concentrating as instructed; they reported to postblast debriefers a veritable flair for this mode of concentration and controlled movement.

What
was
this? Where had this flair come from? The debriefers and lab analysts were not prepared to say; and the survivors were urged not to speak of what had happened to them. Who had given the instruction? The personal physician of the National Guard major objected to the sequestering of survivors, but when phoned by Jim Ash, the physician had no comment. Ash wondered which had come first, the "flair" or the blast. He told us he himself had concentrated on the locus area between his ears and between his eyes, and thought he recalled (unless he was wrong) Mara telling him the blast came before the inspiration. But we, whom he had not yet told of Mara’s other confidences, reminded him that Mara had experienced blast in a one-story jojoba-processing station, so she had faced no threat of falling or problem of descent. Yet there was a basement, there was a basement.

Pressure at home compounded pressures from abroad. The limited video footage available was shown again and again. The government was beset by demands for future tests.

But the government must decide more than merely who were to be the lucky survivors next time, assuming there would be a next time in the supposed increasing sophistication of our somewhat low-key device. Jim Ash reported that enemy tanks would vanish by the hundreds but not the soldiers occupying them; car factories and high-rise dwellings would "resolve" into nothing more than marginal weather, but not the people in them. However, Jim asked privately if we were not faced with a curious problem like what you do when you have achieved the capability of reducing the food supply but not necessarily the number of eaters.

He talked to slum redevelopers. Obviously we had within our grasp rubble-free demolition of buildings. But citizen groups pointed out that the buildings in question had been condemned and the risk to life and limb in getting people into position
prior
to blast was prohibitive. But when, one spring day, a thirty-five-floor insurance tower was resolved in a test to explore breadth as well as height, the government saw the truth in what a small group of observers had lately urged.

For the space vacated by the blast proved to be not just physical but mental and most mysteriously environmental. Visiting the site, the Secretary for Urban Communication said, "It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think."

Tests with the creation of space in mind began to be carried out in selected cities at sites where the authorities saw no special need for vertical economies in the housing of equipment or people. Meanwhile, the influential group of observers extolled unenclosed space as a virtue in itself. Philosophers argued there was no such thing as unenclosed space, but they were moved by the group’s tranquil conviction.

Now, Jim Ash knew the members of this group and was not surprised when a spokesman for the building trades pointed a finger at them as being bomb "survivors" one and all. Next thing, architects, anthropologists, and the incorporated Committee for a Sane Bomb converged upon the issue. They got hold of debriefing dossiers from the initial examinations right up to the present, including hard information from follow-up surveillance. Had not the survivors sparked a general disparagement of architecture, as if buildings were in the way? And had they not tried to give the awful crux of deterrent strategy an aura of charm? (The executive of the outerwear factory had resigned his National Guard majority and was seen ascending steep hills and surfing with a board.) Why had the survivors not been detained pending fuller analysis of changes in their behavior and further inquiry into their affiliations?

Two watchdog anthropologists insisted on attending the debriefing of five new survivors. They had not known they were within target range. No one else had known either. The five had been inside a local church the principal threat to which had been the ongoing excavation of a new subway branch directly under its east corner. The moment of blast came, and the house of God was gone into the middle of the afternoon. Two widows were arranging flowers; a male derelict was relaxing in a pew; the sexton, who had been fishing under his cassock for a coin to buy a paper, had significantly at the instant of detonation wondered why blast survivors had never to his knowledge wound up naked; and a boy in a baseball uniform was leaning up against a pillar enjoying a breather away from his friends. But these five found themselves suddenly at large in the city under the pale window of the sky and still supported by the old floor, doubtless because the church was half a mile from the main target.

More curious, they did not mind being naked; for that is what they were, and each knew the others didn’t mind. At the
post mortem,
as Jim Ash called it, the two anthropologists zeroed in on the sexton. He had ever been a man to accept coincidence below as design from above. Moreover, this paradox suited his everyday inkling that once you have noticed a phenomenon, you find it again and again. But had the bomb been
waiting
for him to spot its inconsistency regarding clothes? Which bomb? The bomb as developed tradition? The bomb as conscious formula? He granted that he and the boy baseball player had been wearing polyester, but the derelict who’d wound up like a really quite fine nude on the ancient stone of the holy floor had been wearing a tweed jacket made of natural fibers which, as any tailor will tell you, "breathe" as polyesters do not. On the other hand, Mrs. Holly had been wearing her plaid wool skirt, though mind you all but one of the chrysanthemums she had been arranging had gone up with the church.