Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

Preface by David Drake




Because I lived through the 1950s, I find the concept of Fifties Nostalgia hard to fathom. It was a terrifying time for me, and I don't think I was that unusual.

People—perfectly ordinary people in Middle America—actively expected nuclear war to break out. I knew families in Clinton, Iowa, with bomb shelters in the back yard. We had air raid drills, huddling in the elementary school basement, and we were taught to duck and cover if we saw the flash of a nuclear weapon. Mass circulation magazines—Collier's, Popular Science, The Saturday Evening Post—ran stories on fallout and nuclear holocaust. On the Beach and Alas, Babylon were New York Times bestsellers.

If you were a kid who read SF, the feeling of dread was even more acute. It wasn't formless for us, you see: there were hundreds of stories to describe nuclear war and its aftermath of lingering death, deformity, and savagery in vivid detail. "Thunder and Roses," which I read in The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology when I was thirteen, is one of the earlier stories of the type. It's possibly the best, because Theodore Sturgeon at his peak was one of the best writers of SF ever.

For those of you who haven't read "Thunder and Roses" before: Welcome to the fifties, my friends.

 

 

When Pete Mawser learned about the show, he turned away from the GHQ bulletin board, touched his long chin, and determined to shave, in spite of the fact that the show would be video, and he would see it in his barracks. He had an hour and a half. It felt good to have a purpose again—even the small matter of shaving before eight o’clock. Eight o’clock Tuesday, just the way it used to be. Everyone used to say, Wednesday morning, “How about the way Starr sang The Breeze and I last night?”

That was a while ago, before the attack, before all those people were dead, before the country was dead. Starr Anthim—an institution, like Crosby, like Duse, like Jenny Lind, like the Statue of Liberty. (Liberty had been one of the first to get it, her bronze beauty volatilized, radio-activated, and even now being carried about in vagrant winds, spreading over the earth . . . )

Pete Mawser grunted and forced his thoughts away from the drifting, poisonous fragments of a blasted liberty. Hate was first. Hate was ubiquitous, like the increasing blue glow in the air at night, like the tension that hung over the base.

Gunfire crackled sporadically far to the right, swept nearer. Pete stepped out to the street and made for a parked truck. There was a Wac sitting on the short running-board.

At the corner a stocky figure backed into the intersection. The man carried a tommy-gun in his arms, and he was swinging it to and fro with the gentle, wavering motion of a weather-vane. He staggered toward them, his gun-muzzle hunting. Someone fired from a building and the man swiveled and blasted wildly at the sound.

“He’s—blind,” said Pete Mawser, and added, “he ought to be,” looking at the tattered face.

A siren keened. An armored jeep slewed into the street. The full-throated roar of a brace of .50-caliber machine-guns put a swift and shocking end to the incident.

“Poor crazy kid,” Pete said softly. “That’s the fourth I’ve seen today.” He looked down at the Wac. She was smiling. “Hey!”

“Hello, Sarge.” She must have identified him before, because now she did not raise her eyes nor her voice. “What happened?”

“You know what happened. Some kid got tired of having nothing to fight and nowhere to run to. What’s the matter with you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean that.” At last she looked up at him. “I mean all of this. I can’t seem to remember.”

“You—well, it’s not easy to forget. We got hit. We got hit everywhere at once. All the big cities are gone. We got it from both sides. We got too much. The air is becoming radioactive. We’ll all—” He checked himself. She didn’t know. She’d forgotten. There was nowhere to escape to, and she’d escaped inside herself, right here. Why tell her about it? Why tell her that everyone was going to die? Why tell her that other, shameful thing: that we hadn’t struck back?

But she wasn’t listening. She was still looking at him. Her eyes were not quite straight. One held his, but the other was slightly shifted and seemed to be looking at his temple. She was smiling again. When his voice trailed off she didn’t prompt him. Slowly, he moved away. She did not turn her head, but kept looking up at where he had been, smiling a little. He turned away, wanting to run, walking fast.

How long could a guy hold out? When you were in the army they tried to make you be like everybody else. What did you do when everybody else was cracking up?

He blanked out the mental picture of himself as the last one left sane. He’d followed that one through before. It always led to the conclusion that it would be better to be one of the first. He wasn’t ready for that yet. Then he blanked that out, too. Every time he said to himself that he wasn’t ready for that yet, something within him asked “Why not?” and he never seemed to have an answer ready.

How long could a guy hold out?

He climbed the steps of the QM Central and went inside. There was nobody at the reception switchboard. It didn’t matter. Messages were carried by jeep, or on motor-cycles. The Base Command was not insisting that anybody stick to a sitting job these days. Ten desk-men could crack up for every one on a jeep, or on the soul-sweat squads. Pete made up his mind to put in a little stretch on a squad tomorrow. Do him good. He just hoped that this time the adjutant wouldn’t burst into tears in the middle of the parade ground. You could keep your mind on the manual of arms just fine until something like that happened.

He bumped into Sonny Weisefreund in the barracks corridor. The Tech’s round young face was as cheerful as ever. He was naked and glowing, and had a towel thrown over his shoulder.

“Hi, Sonny. Is there plenty of hot water?”

“Why not?” grinned Sonny. Pete grinned back, wondering if anybody could say anything about anything at all without one of these reminders. Of course, there was hot water. The QM barracks had hot water for three hundred men. There were three dozen left. Men dead, men gone to the hills, men locked up so they wouldn’t—

“Starr Anthim’s doing a show tonight.”

“Yeah. Tuesday night. Not funny, Pete. Don’t you know there’s a war—”

“No kidding,” Pete said swiftly. “She’s here—right here on the base.”

Sonny’s face was joyful. “Gee.” He pulled the towel off his shoulder and tied it around his waist. “Starr Anthim here! Where are they going to put on the show?”

“HQ, I imagine. Video only. You know about public gatherings.”

“Yeah. And a good thing, too,” said Sonny. “Somebody’d be sure to crack up. I wouldn’t want her to see anything like that. How’d she happen to come here, Pete?”

“Drifted in on the last gasp of a busted-up Navy helicopter.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Search me. Get your head out of that gift-horse’s mouth.”

He went into the washroom, smiling and glad that he still could. He undressed and put his neatly folded clothes down on a bench. There were a soap-wrapper and an empty tooth-paste tube lying near the wall. He picked them up and put them in the catchall, took the mop that leaned against the partition and mopped the floor where Sonny had splashed after shaving. Someone had to keep things straight. He might have worried if it were anyone else but Sonny. But Sonny wasn’t cracking up. Sonny always had been like that. Look there. Left his razor out again.

Pete started his shower, meticulously adjusting the valves until the pressure and temperature exactly suited him. He did nothing carelessly these days. There was so much to feel, and taste, and see now. The impact of water on his skin, the smell of soap, the consciousness of light and heat, the very pressure of standing on the soles of his feet . . . he wondered vaguely how the slow increase of radioactivity in the air, as the nitrogen transmuted to Carbon Fourteen, would affect him if he kept carefully healthy in every way. What happens first? Blindness? Headaches? Perhaps a loss of appetite or slow fatigue?

Why not look it up?

On the other hand, why bother? Only a very small percentage of the men would die of radioactive poisoning. There were too many other things that killed more quickly, which was probably just as well. That razor, for example. It lay gleaming in a sunbeam, curved and clean in the yellow light. Sonny’s father and grandfather had used it, or so he said, and it was his pride and joy.

Pete turned his back on it, and soaped under his arms, concentrating on the tiny kisses of bursting bubbles. In the midst of a recurrence of disgust at himself for thinking so often of death, a staggering truth struck him. He did not think of such things because he was morbid, after all! It was the very familiarity of things that brought death-thoughts. It was either “I shall never do this again” or “This is one of the last times I shall do this.” You might devote yourself completely to doing things in different ways, he thought madly. You might crawl across the floor this time, and next time walk across on your hands. You might skip dinner tonight, and have a snack at two in the morning instead, and eat grass for breakfast.

But you had to breathe. Your heart had to beat. You’d sweat and you’d shiver, the same as always. You couldn’t get away from that. When those things happened, they would remind you. Your heart wouldn’t beat out its wunklunk, wunklunk any more. It would go one-less, one-less until it yelled and yammered in your ears and you had to make it stop.

Terrific polish on that razor.

And your breath would go on, same as before. You could sidle through this door, back through the next one and the one after, and figure out a totally new way to go through the one after that, but your breath would keep on sliding in and out of your nostrils like a razor going through whiskers, making a sound like a razor being stropped.

Sonny came in. Pete soaped his hair. Sonny picked up the razor and stood looking at it. Pete watched him, soap ran into his eyes, he swore, and Sonny jumped.

“What are you looking at, Sonny? Didn’t you ever see it before?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. I just was—” He shut the razor, opened it, flashed light from its blade, shut it again. “I’m tired of using this, Pete. I’m going to get rid of it. Want it?”

Want it? In his foot-locker, maybe. Under his pillow. “Thanks, no, Sonny. Couldn’t use it.”

“I like safety razors,” Sonny mumbled. “Electrics, even better. What are we going to do with it?”

“Throw it in the—no.” Pete pictured the razor turning end over end in the air, half open, gleaming in the maw of the catchall. “Throw it out the—” No. Curving out into the long grass. He might want it. He might crawl around in the moonlight looking for it. He might find it.

“I guess maybe I’ll break it up.”

“No,” Pete said. “The pieces—” Sharp little pieces. Hollow-ground fragments. “I’ll think of something. Wait’ll I get dressed.”

He washed briskly, toweled, while Sonny stood looking at the razor. It was a blade now, and if it were broken it would be shards and glittering splinters, still razor sharp. If it were ground dull with an emery wheel, somebody could find it and put another edge on it because it was so obviously a razor, a fine steel razor, one that would slice so—

“I know. The laboratory. We’ll get rid of it,” Pete said confidently.

He stepped into his clothes, and together they went to the laboratory wing. It was very quiet there. Their voices echoed.

“One of the ovens,” said Pete, reaching for the razor.

“Bake-ovens? You’re crazy!”

Pete chuckled, “You don’t know this place, do you? Like everything else on the base, there was a lot more went on here than most people knew about. They kept calling it the bakeshop. Well, it was research headquarters for new high-nutrient flours. But there’s lots else here. We tested utensils and designed vegetable-peelers and all sorts of things like that. There’s an electric furnace in there that—” He pushed open a door.

They crossed a long, quiet, cluttered room to the thermal equipment. “We can do everything here from annealing glass, through glazing ceramics, to finding the melting point of frying pans.” He clicked a switch tentatively. A pilot light glowed. He swung open a small, heavy door and set the razor inside. “Kiss it goodbye. In twenty minutes it’ll be a puddle.”

“I want to see that,” said Sonny. “Can I look around until it’s cooked?”

“Why not?”

They walked through the laboratories. Beautifully equipped they were, and too quiet. Once they passed a major who was bent over a complex electronic hook-up on one of the benches. He was watching a little amber light flicker, and he did not return their salute. They tip-toed past him, feeling awed at his absorption, envying it. They saw the models of the automatic kneaders, the vitaminizers, the remote signal thermostats and timers and controls.

“What’s in there?”

“I dunno. I’m over the edge of my territory. I don’t think there’s anybody left for this section. They were mostly mechanical and electronic theoreticians. Hey!”

Sonny followed the pointing hand. “What?”

“That wall-section. It’s loose, or—well, what do you know!”

He pushed at the section of wall which was very slightly out of line. There was a dark space beyond.

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing, or some semi-private hush-hush job. These guys used to get away with murder.”

Sonny said, with an uncharacteristic flash of irony, “Isn’t that the Army theoretician’s business?”

Cautiously they peered in, then entered.

“Wh—hey! The door!”

It swung swiftly and quietly shut. The soft click of the latch was accompanied by a blaze of light.

The room was small and windowless. It contained machinery—a “trickle” charger, a bank of storage batteries, an electric-powered dynamo, two small self-starting gas-driven light plants and a diesel complete with sealed compressed-air starting cylinders. In the corner was a relay rack with its panel-bolts spot-welded. Protruding from it was a red-topped lever.

They looked at the equipment wordlessly for a time and then Sonny said, “Somebody wanted to make awful sure he had power for something.”

“Now, I wonder what—” Pete walked over to the relay rack. He looked at the lever without touching it. It was wired up; behind the handle, on the wire, was a folded tag. He opened it cautiously. “To be used only on specific orders of the Commanding Officer.”

“Give it a yank and see what happens.”

Something clicked behind them. They whirled. “What was that?”

“Seemed to come from that rig beside the door.”

They approached it cautiously. There was a spring-loaded solenoid attached to a bar which was hinged to drop across the inside of the secret door, where it would fit into steel gudgeons on the panel. It clicked again.

“A Geiger counter,” said Pete disgustedly.

“Now why,” mused Sonny, “would they design a door to stay locked unless the general radioactivity went beyond a certain point? That’s what it is. See the relays? And the overload switch there? And this?”

“It has a manual lock, too,” Pete pointed out. The counter clicked again. “Let’s get out of here. I got one of those things built into my head these days.”

The door opened easily. They went out, closing it behind them. The keyhole was cleverly concealed in the crack between two boards.

They were silent as they made their way back to the QM labs. The small thrill of violation was gone.

Back at the furnace, Pete glanced at the temperature dial, then kicked the latch control. The pilot winked out, and then the door swung open. They blinked and started back from the raging heat within. They bent and peered. The razor was gone. A pool of brilliance lay on the floor of the compartment.

“Ain’t much left. Most of it oxidized away,” Pete grunted.

They stood together for a time with their faces lit by the small shimmering ruin. Later, as they walked back to the barracks, Sonny broke his long silence with a sigh. “I’m glad we did that, Pete. I’m awful glad we did that.”

At a quarter to eight they were waiting before the combination console in the barracks. All hands except Pete and Sonny and a wiry-haired, thick-set corporal named Bonze had elected to see the show on the big screen in the mess-hall. The reception was better there, of course, but, as Bonze put it, “You don’t get close enough in a big place like that.”

“I hope she’s the same,” said Sonny, half to himself.

Why should she be? thought Pete morosely as he turned on the set and watched the screen begin to glow. There were many more of the golden speckles that had killed reception for the past two weeks . . . Why should anything be the same, ever again?

He fought a sudden temptation to kick the set to pieces. It, and Starr Anthim, were part of something that was dead. The country was dead, a once real country—prosperous, sprawling, laughing, grabbing, growing, and changing, mostly healthy, leprous in spots with poverty and injustice, but systemically healthy enough to overcome any ill. He wondered how the murderers would like it. They were welcome to it, now. Nowhere to go. No one to fight. That was true for every soul on earth now.

“You hope she’s the same,” he muttered.

“The show, I mean,” said Sonny mildly. “I’d like to just sit here and have it like—like—”

Oh, thought Pete mistily. Oh—that. Somewhere to go, that’s what it is, for a few minutes . . . “I know,” he said, all the harshness gone from his voice.

Noise receded from the audio as the carrier swept in. The light on the screen swirled and steadied into a diamond pattern. Pete adjusted the focus, chromic balance and intensity. “Turn out the lights, Bonze. I don’t want to see anything but Starr Anthim.”

It was the same, at first. Starr Anthim had never used the usual fanfares, fade-ins, color and clamor of her contemporaries. A black screen, then click! a blaze of gold. It was all there, in focus; tremendously intense, it did not change. Rather, the eye changed to take it in. She never moved for seconds after she came on; she was there, a portrait, a still face and a white throat. Her eyes were open and sleeping. Her face was alive and still.

Then, in the eyes which seemed green but were blue flecked with gold, an awareness seemed to gather, and they came awake. Only then was it noticeable that her lips were parted. Something in the eyes made the lips be seen, though nothing moved yet. Not until she bent her head slowly, so that some of the gold flecks seemed captured in the golden brows. The eyes were not, then, looking out at an audience. They were looking at me, and at me, and at ME.

“Hello—you,” she said. She was a dream, with a kid sister’s slightly irregular teeth.

Bonze shuddered. The cot on which he lay began to squeak rapidly. Sonny shifted in annoyance. Pete reached out in the dark and caught the leg of the cot. The squeaking subsided.

“May I sing a song?” Starr asked. There was music, very faint. “It’s an old one, and one of the best. It’s an easy song, a deep song, one that comes from the part of men and women that is mankind—the part that has in it no greed, no hate, no fear. This song is about joyousness and strength. It’s—my favorite. Is it yours?”

The music swelled. Pete recognized the first two notes of the introduction and swore quietly. This was wrong. This song was not for—this song was part of—

Sonny rat raptly. Bonze lay still.

Starr Anthim began to sing. Her voice was deep and powerful, but soft, with the merest touch of vibrato at the ends of the phrases. The song flowed from her, without noticeable effort, seeming to come from her face, her long hair, her wide-set eyes. Her voice, like her face, was shadowed and clean, round, blue and green but mostly gold.

When you gave me your heart, you gave me the world,
You gave me the night and the day,
And thunder, and roses, and sweet green grass,
The sea, and soft wet clay.

I drank the dawn from a golden cup,
From a silver one, the dark,
The steed I rode was the wild west wind,
My song was the brook and the lark.

 

The music spiraled, caroled, slid into a somber cry of muted hungry sixths and ninths; rose, blared, and cut, leaving her voice full and alone:

With thunder I smote the evil of earth,
With roses I won the right,
With the sea I washed, and with clay I built,
And the world was a place of light!

 

The last note left a face perfectly composed again, and there was no movement in it; it was sleeping and vital while the music curved off and away to the places where music rests when it is not heard.

Starr smiled.

“It’s so easy,” she said. “So simple. All that is fresh and clean and strong about mankind is in that song, and I think that’s all that need concern us about mankind.” She leaned forward. “Don’t you see?”

The smile faded and was replaced with a gentle wonder. A tiny furrow appeared between her brows; she drew back quickly. “I can’t seem to talk to you tonight,” she said, her voice small. “You hate something.”

Hate was shaped like a monstrous mushroom. Hate was the random speckling of a video plate.

“What has happened to us,” said Starr abruptly, impersonally, “is simple too. It doesn’t matter who did it—do you understand that? It doesn’t matter. We were attacked. We were struck from the east and from the west. Most of the bombs were atomic—there were blast-bombs and there were dust-bombs. We were hit by about five hundred and thirty bombs altogether, and it has killed us.”

She waited.

Sonny’s fist smacked into his palm. Bonze lay with his eyes open, open, quiet. Pete’s jaws hurt.

“We have more bombs than both of them put together. We have them. We are not going to use them. Wait!” She raised her hands suddenly, as if she could see into each man’s face. They sank back, tense.

“So saturated is the atmosphere with Carbon Fourteen that all of us in this hemisphere are going to die. Don’t be afraid to say it. Don’t be afraid to think it. It is a truth, and it must be faced. As the transmutation effect spreads from the ruins of our cities, the air will become increasingly radioactive, and then we must die. In months, in a year or so, the effect will be strong overseas. Most of the people there will die too. None will escape completely. A worse thing will come to them than anything they have given us, because there will be a wave of horror and madness which is impossible to us. We are merely going to die. They will live and burn and sicken, and the children that will be born to them—” She shook her head, and her lower lip grew full. She visibly pulled herself together.

“Five hundred and thirty bombs . . . I don’t think either of our attackers knew just how strong the other was. There has been so much secrecy.” Her voice was sad. She shrugged slightly. “They have killed us, and they have ruined themselves. As for us—we are not blameless, either. Neither are we helpless to do anything—yet. But what we must do is hard. We must die—without striking back.”

She gazed briefly at each man in turn, from the screen. “We must not strike back. Mankind is about to go through a hell of his own making. We can be vengeful—or merciful, if you like—and let go with the hundreds of bombs we have. That would sterilize the planet so that not a microbe, not a blade of grass could escape, and nothing new could grow. We would reduce the earth to a bald thing, dead and deadly.

“No—it just won’t do. We can’t do it.

“Remember the song? That is humanity. That’s in all humans. A disease made other humans our enemies for a time, but as the generations march past, enemies become friends and friends enemies. The enmity of those who have killed us is such a tiny, temporary thing in the long sweep of history!”

Her voice deepened. “Let us die with the knowledge that we have done the one noble thing left to us. The spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet. It will be blown and drenched, shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live if that song is a true one. It will live if we are human enough to discount the fact that the spark is in the custody of our temporary enemy. Some—a few—of his children will live to merge with the new humanity that will gradually emerge from the jungles and the wilderness. Perhaps there will be ten thousand years of beastliness; perhaps man will be able to rebuild while he still has his ruins.”

She raised her head, her voice tolling. “And even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed. If we retaliate, there will not be a dog, a deer, an ape, a bird or fish or lizard to carry the evolutionary torch. In the name of justice, if we must condemn and destroy ourselves, let us not condemn all other life along with us! Mankind is heavy enough with sins. If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves!”

There was a shimmering flicker of music. It seemed to stir her hair like a breath of wind. She smiled.

“That’s all,” she whispered. And to each man listening she said, “Good night . . .”

The screen went black. As the carrier cut off (there was no announcement) the ubiquitous speckles began to swarm across it.

Pete rose and switched on the lights. Bonze and Sonny were quite still. It must have been minutes later when Sonny sat up straight, shaking himself like a puppy. Something besides the silence seemed to tear with the movement.

He said, softly, “You’re not allowed to fight anything, or to run away, or to live, and now you can’t even hate any more, because Starr says no.”

There was bitterness in the sound of it, and a bitter smell to the air.

Pete Mawser sniffed once, which had nothing to do with the smell. He sniffed again. “What’s that smell, Son?”

Sonny tested it. “I don’t— Something familiar. Vanilla—no . . . No.”

“Almonds. Bitter—Bonze!”

Bonze lay still with his eyes open, grinning. His jaw muscles were knotted, and they could see almost all his teeth. He was soaking wet.

“Bonze!”

“It was just when she came on and said ‘Hello—you,’ remember?” whispered Pete. “Oh, the poor kid. That’s why he wanted to catch the show here instead of in the mess-hall.”

“Went out looking at her,” said Sonny through pale lips. “I—can’t say I blame him much. Wonder where he got the stuff.”

“Never mind that!” Pete’s voice was harsh. “Let’s get out of here.”

They left to call the ambulance. Bonze lay watching the console with his dead eyes and his smell of bitter almonds.

Pete did not realize where he was going, or exactly why, until he found himself on the dark street near GHQ and the communications shack, reflecting that it might be nice to be able to hear Starr, and see her, whenever he felt like it. Maybe there weren’t any recordings; yet her musical background was recorded, and the signal corps might have recorded the show.

He stood uncertainly outside the GHQ building. There was a cluster of men outside the main entrance. Pete smiled briefly. Rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor gloom of night could stay the stage-door Johnnie.

He went down the side street and up the delivery ramp in the back. Two doors along the platform was the rear exit of the communications section.

There was a light on in the communications shack. He had his hand out to the screen door when he noticed someone standing in the shadows beside it. The light played daintily on the golden margins of a head and face.

He stopped. “S—Starr Anthim!”

“Hello, soldier. Sergeant.”

He blushed like an adolescent. “I—” His voice left him. He swallowed, reached up to whip off his hat. He had no hat. “I saw the show,” he said. He felt clumsy. It was dark, and yet he was very conscious of the fact that his dress-shoes were indifferently shined.

She moved toward him into the light, and she was so beautiful that he had to close his eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Mawser. Pete Mawser.”

“Like the show?”

Not looking at her, he said stubbornly, “No.”

“Oh?”

“I mean—I liked it some. The song.”

“I—think I see.”

“I wondered if I could maybe get a recording.”

“I think so,” she said. “What kind of reproducer have you got?”

“Audiovid.”

“A disc. Yes; we dubbed off a few. Wait, I’ll get you one.”

She went inside, moving slowly. Pete watched her, spellbound. She was a silhouette, crowned and haloed; and then she was a framed picture, vivid and golden. He waited, watching the light hungrily. She returned with a large envelope, called good night to someone inside, and came out on the platform.

“Here you are, Pete Mawser.”

“Thanks very—” he mumbled. He wet his lips. “It was very good of you.”

“Not really. The more it circulates, the better.” She laughed suddenly. “That isn’t meant quite as it sounds. I’m not exactly looking for new publicity these days.”

The stubbornness came back. “I don’t know if you’d get it, if you put on that show in normal times.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Well!” she smiled. “I seem to have made quite an impression.”

“I’m sorry,” he said warmly. “I shouldn’t have taken that tack. Everything I think and say these days is exaggerated.”

“I know what you mean.” She looked around. “How is it here?”

“It’s okay. I used to be bothered by the secrecy, and being buried miles away from civilization.” He chuckled bitterly. “Turned out to be lucky after all.”

“You sound like the first chapter of One World or None.”

He looked up quickly. “What do you use for a reading list—the Government’s own Index Expurgatorius?”

She laughed. “Come now, it isn’t as bad as all that. The book was never banned. It was just—”

“Unfashionable,” he filled in.

“Yes, more’s the pity. If people had paid more attention to it in the ‘forties, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.”

He followed her gaze to the dimly pulsating sky. “How long are you going to be here?”

“Until—as long as—I’m not leaving.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m finished,” she said simply. “I’ve covered all the ground I can. I’ve been everywhere that . . . anyone knows about.”

“With this show?”

She nodded. “With this particular message.”

He was quiet, thinking. She turned to the door, and he put out his hand, not touching her. “Please—”

“What is it?”

“I’d like to—I mean, if you don’t mind, I don’t often have a chance to talk to—maybe you’d like to walk around a little before you turn in.”

“Thanks, no, Sergeant. I’m tired.” She did sound tired. “I’ll see you around.”

He stared at her, a sudden fierce light in his brain. “I know where it is. It’s got a red-topped lever and a tag referring to orders of the commanding officer. It’s really camouflaged.”

She was quiet so long that he thought she had not heard him. Then, “I’ll take that walk.”

They went down the ramp together and turned toward the dark parade ground.

“How did you know?” she asked quietly.

“Not too tough. “This ‘message’ of yours; the fact that you’ve been all over the country with it; most of all, the fact that somebody finds it necessary to persuade us not to strike back. Who are you working for?” he asked bluntly.

Surprisingly, she laughed.

“What’s that for?”

“A moment ago you were blushing and shuffling your feet.”

His voice was rough. “I wasn’t talking to a human being. I was talking to a thousand songs I’ve heard, and a hundred thousand blonde pictures I’ve seen pinned up. You’d better tell me what this is all about.”

She stopped. “Let’s go up and see the colonel.”

He took her elbow. “No. I’m just a sergeant, and he’s high brass, and that doesn’t make any difference at all now. You’re a human being, and so am I, and I’m supposed to respect your rights as such. I don’t. You’d better tell me about it.”

“All right,” she said, with a tired acquiescence that frightened something inside him. “You seem to have guessed right, though. It’s true. There are master firing keys for the launching sites. We have located and dismantled all but two. It’s very likely that one of the two was vaporized. The other one is—lost.”

“Lost?”

“I don’t have to tell you about the secrecy,” she said. “You know how it developed between nation and nation. You must know that it existed between State and Union, between department and department, office and office. There were only three or four men who knew where all the keys were. Three of them were in the Pentagon when it went up. That was the third blast-bomb, you know. If there was another, it could only have been Senator Vanercook, and he died three weeks ago without talking.”

“An automatic radio key, hm?”

“That’s right. Sergeant, must we walk? I’m so tired.”

“I’m sorry,” he said impulsively. They crossed to the reviewing stand and sat on the lonely benches. “Launching racks all over, all hidden, and all armed?”

“Most of them are armed. There’s a timing mechanism in them that will disarm them in a year or so. But in the meantime, they are armed—and aimed.”

“Aimed where?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I think I see. What’s the optimum number again?”

“About six hundred and forty; a few more or less. At least five hundred and thirty have been thrown so far. We don’t know exactly.”

“Who are we?” he asked furiously.

“Who? Who?” She laughed weakly. “I could say, ‘The Government,’ perhaps. If the President dies, the Vice-President takes over, and then the Secretary of State, and so on and on. How far can you go? Pete Mawser, don’t you realize yet what’s happened?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How many people do you think are left in this country?”

“I don’t know. Just a few million, I guess.”

“How many are here?”

“About nine hundred.”

“Then, as far as I know, this is the largest city left.”

He leaped to his feet. “No!” The syllable roared away from him, hurled itself against the dark, empty buildings, came back to him in a series of lower-case echoes: nononono . . . no-no.

Starr began to speak rapidly, quietly. “They’re scattered all over the fields and the roads. They sit in the sun and die. They run in packs, they tear at each other. They pray and starve and kill themselves and die in the fires. The fires—everywhere, if anything stands, it’s burning. Summer, and the leaves all down in the Berkshires, and the blue grass burnt brown; you can see the grass dying from the air, the death going out wider and wider from the bald-spots. Thunder and roses . . . I saw roses, new ones, creeping from the smashed pots of a greenhouse. Brown petals, alive and sick, and the thorns turned back on themselves, growing into the stems, killing. Feldman died tonight.”

He let her be quiet for a time. Then:

“Who is Feldman?”

“My pilot.” She was talking hollowly into her hands. “He’s been dying for weeks. He’s been on his nerve-ends. I don’t think he had any blood left. He buzzed your GHQ and made for the landing strip. He came in with the motor dead, free rotors, giro. Smashed the landing gear. He was dead, too. He killed a man in Chicago so he could steal gas. The man didn’t want the gas. There was a dead girl by the pump. He didn’t want us to go near. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay here. I’m tired.”

At last she cried.

Pete left her alone, and walked out to the center of the parade ground, looking back at the faint huddled glimmer on the bleachers. His mind flickered over the show that evening, and the way she had sung before the merciless transmitter. “Hello, you.” “If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves!”

The dimming spark of humankind . . . what could it mean to her? How could it mean so much?

“Thunder and roses.” Twisted, sick, non-survival roses, killing themselves with their own thorns.

“And the world was a place of light!” Blue light, flickering in the contaminated air.

The enemy. The red-topped lever. Bonze. “They pray and starve and kill themselves and die in the fires.”

What creatures were these, these corrupted, violent, murdering humans? What right had they to another chance? What was in them that was good?

Starr was good. Starr was crying. Only a human being could cry like that. Starr was a human being.

Had humanity anything of Starr Anthim in it?

Starr was a human being.

He looked down through the darkness for his hands. No planet, no universe, is greater to a man than his own ego, his own observing self. These hands were the hands of all history, and like the hands of all men, they could by their small acts make human history or end it. Whether this power of hands was that of a billion hands, or whether it came to a focus in these two—this was suddenly unimportant to the eternities which now enfolded him.

He put humanity’s hands deep in his pockets and walked slowly back to the bleachers.

“Starr.”

She responded with a sleepy-child, interrogative whimper.

“They’ll get their chance, Starr. I won’t touch the key.”

She sat straight. She rose, and came to him, smiling. He could see her smile, because, very faintly in the air, her teeth fluoresced. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Pete.”

He held her very close for a moment. Her knees buckled then, and he had to carry her.

There was no one in the Officers’ Club, which was the nearest building. He stumbled in, moved clawing along the wall until he found a switch. The light hurt him. He carried her to a settee and put her down gently. She did not move. One side of her face was as pale as milk.

He stood looking stupidly at it, wiped it on the sides of his trousers, looking dully at Starr. There was blood on her shirt.

A doctor . . . but there was no doctor. Not since Anders had hanged himself. “Get somebody,” he muttered. “Do something.”

He dropped to his knees and gently unbuttoned her shirt. Between the sturdy unfeminine GI bra and the top of her slacks, there was blood on her side. He whipped out a clean handkerchief and began to wipe it away. There was no wound, no puncture. But abruptly there was blood again. He blotted it carefully. And again there was blood.

It was like trying to dry a piece of ice with a towel.

He ran to the water cooler, wrung out the bloody handkerchief and ran back to her. He bathed her face carefully, the pale right side, the flushed left side. The handkerchief reddened again, this time with cosmetics, and then her face was pale all over, with great blue shadows under the eyes. While he watched, blood appeared on her left cheek.

“There must be somebody—” He fled to the door.

“Pete!”

Running, turning at the sound of her voice, he hit the doorpost stunningly, caromed off, flailed for his balance, and then was back at her side. “Starr! Hang on, now! I’ll get a doctor as quick as—”

Her hand strayed over her left cheek. “You found out. Nobody else knew, but Feldman. It got hard to cover properly.” Her hand went up to her hair.

“Starr, I’ll get a—”

“Pete, darling, promise me something?”

“Why, sure; certainly, Starr.”

“Don’t disturb my hair. It isn’t—all mine, you see.” She sounded like a seven-year-old, playing a game. “It all came out on this side. I don’t want you to see me that way.”

He was on his knees beside her again. “What is it? What happened to you?” he asked hoarsely.

“Philadelphia,” she murmured. “Right at the beginning. The mushroom went up a half-mile away. The studio caved in. I came to the next day. I didn’t know I was burned, then. It didn’t show. My left side. It doesn’t matter, Pete. It doesn’t hurt at all, now.”

He sprang to his feet again. “I’m going for a doctor.”

“Don’t go away. Please don’t go away and leave me. Please don’t.” There were tears in her eyes. “Wait just a little while. Not very long, Pete.”

He sank to his knees again. She gathered both his hands in hers and held them tightly. She smiled happily. “You’re good, Pete. You’re so good.”

(She couldn’t hear the blood in his ears, the roar of the whirlpool of hate and fear and anguish that spun inside of him.)

She talked to him in a low voice, and then in whispers. Sometimes he hated himself because he couldn’t quite follow her. She talked about school, and her first audition. “I was so scared that I got a vibrato in my voice. I’d never had one before. I always let myself get a little scared when I sing now. It’s easy.” There was something about a window-box when she was four years old. “Two real live tulips and a pitcher-plant. I used to be sorry for the flies.”

There was a long period of silence after that, during which his muscles throbbed with cramp and stiffness, and gradually became numb. He must have dozed; he awoke with a violent start, feeling her fingers on his face. She was propped up on one elbow. She said clearly, “I just wanted to tell you, darling. Let me go first, and get everything ready for you. It’s going to be wonderful. I’ll fix you a special tossed salad. I’ll make you a steamed chocolate pudding and keep it hot for you.”

Too muddled to understand what she was saying, he smiled and pressed her back on the settee. She took his hands again.

The next time he awoke it was broad daylight, and she was dead.

Sonny Weisefreund was sitting on his cot when he got back to the barracks. He handed over the recording he had picked up from the parade-ground on the way back. “Dew on it. Dry it off. Good boy,” he croaked, and fell face downward on the cot Bonze had used.

Sonny stared at him. “Pete! Where you been? What happened? Are you all right?”

Pete shifted a little and grunted. Sonny shrugged and took the audiovid disc out of its wet envelope. Moisture would not harm it particularly, though it could not be played while wet. It was made of a fine spiral of plastic, insulated between laminations. Electrostatic pickups above and below the turntable would fluctuate with changes in the dielectric constant which had been impressed by the recording, and these changes were amplified for the scanners. The audio was a conventional hill-and-dale needle. Sonny began to wipe it down carefully.

Pete fought upward out of a vast, green-lit place full of flickering cold fires. Starr was calling him. Something was punching him, too. He fought it weakly, trying to hear what she was saying. But someone else was jabbering too loud for him to hear.

He opened his eyes. Sonny was shaking him, his round face pink with excitement. The Audiovid was running. Starr was talking. Sonny got up impatiently and turned down the volume. “Pete! Pete! Wake up, will you? I got to tell you something. Listen to me! Wake up, will yuh?”

“Huh?”

“That’s better. Now listen. I’ve just been listening to Starr Anthim—”

“She’s dead,” said Pete.

Sonny didn’t hear. He went on, explosively, “I’ve figured it out. Starr was sent out here, and all over, to beg someone not to fire any more atom bombs. If the government was sure they wouldn’t strike back, they wouldn’t’ve taken the trouble. Somewhere, Pete, there’s some way to launch bombs at those murdering cowards—and I’ve got a pret-ty shrewd idea of how to do it.”

Pete strained groggily toward the faint sound of Starr’s voice. Sonny talked on. “Now, s’posing there was a master radio key—an automatic code device something like the alarm signal they have on ships, that rings a bell on any ship within radio range when the operator sends four long dashes. Suppose there’s an automatic code machine to launch bombs, with repeaters, maybe, buried all over the country. What would it be? Just a little lever to pull; that’s all. How would the thing be hidden? In the middle of a lot of other equipment, that’s where; in some place where you’d expect to find crazy-looking secret stuff. Like an experiment station. Like right here. You beginning to get the idea?”

“Shut up, I can’t hear her.”

“The hell with her! You can listen to her some other time. You didn’t hear a thing I said!”

“She’s dead.”

“Yeah. Well, I figure I’ll pull that handle. What can I lose? It’ll give those murderin’—what?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead? Starr Anthim?” His young face twisted, Sonny sank down to the cot. “You’re half asleep. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“She’s dead,” Pete said hoarsely. “She got burned by one of the first bombs. I was with her when she—she— Shut up now and get out of here and let me listen!” he bellowed hoarsely.

Sonny stood up slowly. “They killed her, too. They killed her! That does it. That just fixes it up.” His face was white. He went out.

Pete got up. His legs weren’t working right. He almost fell. He brought up against the console with a crash, his outflung arm sending the pickup skittering across the record. He put it on again and turned up the volume, then lay down to listen.

His head was all mixed up. Sonny talked too much. Bomb launchers, automatic code machines—

“You gave me your heart,” sand Starr. “You gave me your heart. You gave me your heart. You . . .”

Pete heaved himself up again and moved the pickup arm. Anger, not at himself, but at Sonny for causing him to cut the disc that way, welled up.

Starr was talking, stupidly, her face going through the same expression over and over again. “Struck from the east and from the struck from the east and from the . . .”

He got up again wearily and moved the pickup.

“You gave me your heart you gave me . . .”

Pete made an agonized sound that was not a word at all, bent, lifted, and sent the console crashing over. In the bludgeoning silence, he said, “I did, too.”

Then, “Sonny.” He waited.

“Sonny!”

His eyes went wide then, and he cursed and bolted for the corridor.

The panel was closed when he reached it. He kicked at it. It flew open, discovering darkness.

“Hey!” bellowed Sonny. “Shut it! You turned off the lights!”

Pete shut it behind them. The lights blazed.

“Pete! What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter, Son,” croaked Pete.

“What are you looking at?” said Sonny uneasily.

“I’m sorry,” said Pete as gently as he could. “I just wanted to find something out, is all. Did you tell anyone else about this?” He pointed to the lever.

“Why, no. I only just figured it out while you were sleeping, just now.”

Pete looked around carefully, while Sonny shifted his weight. Pete moved toward a tool-rack. “Something you haven’t noticed yet, Sonny,” he said softly, and pointed. “Up there, on the wall behind you. High up. See?”

Sonny turned. In one fluid movement Pete plucked off a fourteen-inch box wrench and hit Sonny with it as hard as he could.

Afterward he went to work systematically on the power supplies. He pulled the plugs on the gas-engines and cracked their cylinders with a maul. He knocked off the tubing of the diesel starters—the tanks let go explosively—and he cut all the cables with bolt-cutters. Then he broke up the relay rack and its lever. When he was quite finished, he put away his tools and bent and stroked Sonny’s tousled hair.

He went out and closed the partition carefully. It certainly was a wonderful piece of camouflage. He sat down heavily on a workbench nearby.

“You’ll have your chance,” he said into the far future. “And, by Heaven, you’d better make good.”

After that he just waited.

 

 

 

Afterword by Eric Flint




When editors put together an anthology like this one, sooner or later they have to deal with what may be the thorniest problem of all:

Which story do you end with?

In this case, the decision . . . almost made itself. Not quite, I suppose. But in the course of the discussions the three of us had on the subject, "Thunder and Roses"came to the forefront with a certain kind of inevitability. Some of that, no doubt, is due to the factor that Dave discusses in his preface: all three of us were children of the Fifties, and we were shaped to some degree, one way or another, by that ever-looming fear of nuclear obliteration. 

But there's more to it than that. "Thunder and Roses"is a horror story, but it's not just a horror story. It's also a story of transcendent courage, and, in the grimmest possible way, a very inspiring story.

I stated in my preface to the first story in the anthology, Arthur Clarke's "Rescue Party,"that since I was a boy of thirteen I associated that story, perhaps more than any other, with the inspiring nature of science fiction, which has always been to me its single most important characteristic. 

If it has a contender, though—perhaps even a superior—it's this story by Sturgeon. I knew that even as a boy, although I rarely let myself think about it.


Inspiration, like courage, comes in different forms. There's the sort of courage that Achilles exemplifies, which is inseparable from fame and glory and played out in front of a vast audience. And then there's what I think of as cellar courage—a quiet refusal to yield that goes unrecognized and is noted, if at all, only by the executioner. The courage of nameless heroes who die in the darkness.

I've never liked Achilles—and I wouldn't trust him any farther than I could throw him. Give me cellar courage. If the human race continues to survive, it will ultimately be due to that kind of heroism. Heroism which has none of the trappings of heroes, and is therefore all the more reliable.

We began this anthology with inspiration on a galactic scale, and we end it with a man sitting on a bench waiting to die. But not before he made the right decision, after wrestling with it like a quiet Titan. 

It seems . . . a very good way to end. A cycle, if you will. The logic of the first story depends, in the end, on the logic of the last. Without the one, you will never reach the other. The road to the stars begins in a cellar. Or, as the poet William Butler Yeats put it:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.