Stonecypher stood on Bay Knob, near the ruins of the old FM transmitter
station, looking down at the Tennessee Lakes. Catriona sat behind him
and held the revolver on her thigh. Stonecypher said, "I never see it
but I wonder how it looked before the water."
Before him, North Fork, an arm of Kings Lake, twisted across the
Virginia line four and one-half miles away, while to Stonecypher's
right, Boone Lake sparkled like a gigantic, badly drawn V. He did not
look toward Surgoinsville Dam securing Kings Lake far to the west.
The Tennessee Lakes were born in 1918 when Wilson Dam spanned the
Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama; but their growth was retarded
for fifteen years, until an Act of Congress injected them with vitamins.
Then the mile-long bastions of concrete crawled between the ridges.
Norris, Wheeler, Pickwick Landing, Guntersville, Watts Bar, Kentucky,
Cherokee, Fort Henry, Boone, Sevier, Surgoinsville--almost innumerable
dams blocked the rivers. The rivers stopped and overflowed. The creeks
swelled into rivers.
Congressional Committees investigated, the Supreme Court tested the dams
against the Constitution, ethnologists and archeologists hastily checked
for Indian relics; and the dams, infused with youthful vigor, matured.
Beginning with Norris, which backed up the Clinch and Powell Rivers to
inundate 25,000 acres and displace 3,000 families, the dams expanded
mighty aquatic muscles. The Tennessee, the Little Tennessee, the
Nolichucky, the Holston, the French Broad, the Watauga, the Hiwassee,
the Little Pigeon--all the rivers spread their waters into lengthy,
ragged lakes, changing the map of Tennessee more than any natural
cataclysm, such as the great earthquake of 1811, had ever done. The
Lakes provided jobs, electric power, flood control, soil conservation, a
fisherman's paradise, milder winters, cooler summers, and they covered
all the really good farming land in the eastern part of the state.
Catriona loaded the revolver. It was an obsolete .357 Magnum with a
6-1/2 inch barrel, and the cartridge cases of the metal-piercing bullets
had a greenish sheen. "Now, put it in the holstah, and be ca'eful,"
Catriona said.
Stonecypher wore the holster, a leather silhouette studded with two
spring clips opening forward, on a belt and secured to his leg by a
thong. Gingerly, he took the revolver and slipped it under the clips.
"I've kept outa duels all my life," he said, "but, so long as it's for
you, I don't much mind."
"Ah'll mind if he kills you. You do like I tell you, and you can beat
him. Why, mah best act in the How-To Cahnival was How to Win a Duel.
Cou'se, they didn't know ah was really drawin' befoah the buzzah
sounded. Why, ah used to set two plates ten yahds apaht, draw two
revolvahs, and shoot both plates, all in foah-tenths of a second!"
Stonecypher grinned. "Sorry I missed that carnival first time it came
through here. I coulda seen you in that costume they poured on you,
three years earlier."
"Nevah mind the veiled compliments. Now, try it!"
Stonecypher faced the target, a sheet of plastiboard roughly sawed to
the shape of a man, and backed by a heap of earth removed from the new,
as yet dry, pond in which they stood. Catriona pressed a small buzzer
concealed in her palm. Stonecypher's big hand closed on the revolver
butt, pushing the weapon up and forward. The sound of the shot rattled
away over the mountain top.
"That's good!" Catriona cried, consulting the sonic timer. "One and
two-tenths seconds from buzzah to shot!"
"But I missed," Stonecypher protested. "Look bad on tevee."
"You'll hit him. Watch the recoil next time."
Stonecypher drew and fired a second wild shot. He snorted, "Confound
Westerns, anyhow!"
"Weste'ns?"
"Sure. That's where this duelin' started. Used to, almost ever' movie or
tevee was called a Western. Sort of a fantasy, because they were just
slightly based on real history. They generally showed a feller in a
flowered shirt, ridin' a Tennessee Walking Horse, and shootin' a gun.
Ever'body in these Westerns had a gun, and they all shot at each other.
"The youngin's were hep on 'em, so they all wore toy guns, and a whole
generation grew up on Westerns. When they got big, they carried real
guns. I've heard my great-uncle tell about it, how before the Government
built duel-pens and passed laws, you couldn't hardly cross the Lakes
without runnin' into a bunch of fools on water skis shootin' at each
other."
"You leave the histo'y books alone foah awhile," Catriona commanded,
"and practice. The tenants and ah'll tend to the wo'k. Try it loaded and
empty. Hook this little buzzah to the timeah, and practice. Ah've got to
go see the chickens."
"'Bye, teacher." Stonecypher dropped the buzzer in his pocket and
watched her vanish into the grove. He fired the remaining shots, nicking
the target once. With the revolver holstered, he followed the path to
the summer pasture.
* * * * *
Belly-deep in red clover, twenty-four cows, twenty-four calves, and
twenty-four yearlings grazed or played in the shady field. Stonecypher
cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, "Smart-calves!
Smart-calves to school!"
The entire herd turned sorrowful eyes on him. Seven of the calves and
four of the yearlings trotted to the gate, which Stonecypher held open,
and jostled out of the pasture. As the calves began to lie down under
the trees, a white heifer-calf nuzzled Stonecypher's hand and bawled,
"Paaapy gyoing a fyightt?"
"Yeah, he's goin' to fight," Stonecypher answered. "Your pappy's gone to
the bullring. He suggested it, and made the choice himself. He's got
real courage. You oughta all be proud of him."
The calves bawled their pride. Including those remaining in the pasture,
they presented a colorful variety of spots, specks, splotches, browns,
reds, blacks, and even occasional blue and greenish tinges. Stonecypher
sat facing them from a stump. He said, "I'm sorta late for the lesson,
today, so we'll get on with it. Some of this will be repetition for you
yearlings, but it won't hurt. If you get too bored, there's corn and
cottonseed meal in the trough, only be quiet about it.
"Now. To look at you all, nobody would think you're the same breed of
cattle; but you, and your mammys, and Moe are the only Atohmy cattle on
Earth. It's usually hard to say exactly when a breed started; but you
all started a long, long time ago, on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo,
New Mexico, when they exploded the first Atomic Bomb."
At mention of Atomic Bomb, who had succeeded the Bogger Man as a means
of frightening children, one of the younger calves bawled. Her polled,
brindled mother ran in ungainly fashion to the fence and mooed with
great carrying power.
"All right!" Stonecypher yelled. The cow closed her big mouth, but
stayed by the gate. "Can't go by what you hear the tenants tell their
kids," Stonecypher cautioned the calf. "Atomic Bomb is as dead as the
tank and the battleship.
"Now, like I was sayin', the scientists put Atomic Bomb on a hundred
foot tower and blowed him up. There was a flash of fire, and an awful
racket, and the blast raised up a lot of dirt and dust from the ground.
All this dust achurnin' around in the cloud bumped into little bits of
metal and stuff that was highly radioactive. That means, the basic atoms
of matter had been thrown out of kilter, sorta deranged. The protons and
electrons in an atom oughta be about equal for it to be stable, but
these were shootin' off electrons, or beta particles, and givin' off
something like powerful x-rays, called gamma rays, and things like that.
"Anyhow, this radiation affected all the sand and bits of rock and dirt
in that bomb cloud. This radiation is dangerous. Some of it will go
right through several inches of lead. Enough'll kill you. Your ancestors
were ten miles or so from where Atomic Bomb went off.
"They were just plain Whiteface cattle. They weren't supposed to be
there, but I reckon none of the scientists bothered to warn 'em. The
dust started settlin' all over your ancestors. In about a week, there
were sores and blisters on their backs. The red hair dropped off. When
it grew back, it was gray.
"The scientists got real excited when they heard about it, 'cause they
wanted to see how horrible they could make Atomic Bomb. So, they shipped
fifty-nine cattle up to Oak Ridge. That was a Government town, a hundred
miles southwest of here, where they made some of the stuff to put in
Atomic Bomb. The University of Tennessee was runnin' an experimental
farm there. They had donkeys, and pigs, and chickens, and other animals
that they exposed to radioactivity. Then they killed 'em and cut 'em up
to see what had happened. I know it's gruesome, but that's how it was.
"The awful fact is, the scientists slaughtered more than half that
original Atohmy herd for experiments. Some of the rest,
they--uh--married. Wanted to see if the calves had two heads, or
something; if radioactivity had speeded up the mutation rate.
"Back then, they didn't understand much about mutation. Some claimed a
little radioactivity would cause it, some said a whole lot, and some
said it wouldn't hurt a bit."
"Whaa mootyaaonn?" asked the calf which was not yet assured of the
extinction of Atomic Bomb.
"Well, you-all are all mutations. I've told you how life starts from one
cell. This cell has thread-like things in it called chromosomes, and the
chromosomes are made up of things called genes. Mutations, sort of
unexpected changes, can take place in either the chromosomes or the
genes. You see, when this one cell starts dividing, every gene makes a
copy of itself; but, sometimes, the copy is a little different from the
original. Lots of things, like x-rays and ultraviolet rays, heat,
chemicals, disease, can cause this. Radioactivity had caused mutation in
some experiment, so the scientists were anxious to see what happened
with these cattle.
"Genes determine the way an animal develops. Two mutant genes can start
reactions that end up as a man with one leg, or maybe as a bull with the
intelligence of an eight-year-old man. Lots of mutations are recessive.
They may be carried along for generations. But, when two like mutant
genes come together in reproduction, the animal is bound to be something
different, the way you eleven calves are.
"Now. The scientists watched the Atohmy cattle for fifteen or twenty
years, and nothin' much happened. They started sayin' radioactivity
wasn't dangerous, and a man could walk into a place right after Atomic
Bomb went off, and it wouldn't matter. They should be here to see the
mess in Japan today. All the time, though, I think the cattle were
changing. It may have been in little things like the length of hair, or
the shape of an eyeball, or the curve of a horn, so the scientists
couldn't tell without they made exact measurements all the time.
"Then, a bull-calf was born. He had shaggy black hair, and his horns
grew in a spiral like a ram's. Some scientists said, 'I told you so! It
speeded the mutation rate!'
"Others said, 'He's a natural mutation, or else, a throw-back to
prehistoric wild cattle. It happens in every breed. Atomic Bomb had
nothing to do with it.'
"They married the bull, and then they fixed to slaughter 'im to see what
his insides was like. The bull fooled 'em, though. He came down with
contagious pleuro-pneumonia, the first case in years, 'cause it was
supposed to have been wiped out in this country away back in the
Nineteenth Century. They had to cremate the bull for fear the disease
would spread. Ever' one of the calves were normal Whitefaces.
"Finally, the nineteen Atohmy cattle that were left were put up for
sale. My great-grandfather, Cary McPheeter, bought 'em and shipped 'em
here to Bays Mountain. He's the man started this farm where there was
nothin' but rattlesnakes, and trees, and rocks."
"Whyy theyea selll um?" a red roan calf interrupted.
"Well, they sold 'em 'cause Oak Ridge had been condemned. That was
several years after the German Civil War. It was peace time, for a
change, and folks were sick of Atomic Bomb. Anyhow, new, modern plants
for makin' the stuff had been built in secret places a lot easier to
defend. The women were cryin' for more automatic kitchens, so the Bureau
of Interior Hydro-electric Power (that's the name Federal Power, Inc.,
went by then) put another dam across the Clinch River below Norris. Bush
Lake covered up Oak Ridge.
"There wasn't much mutation, except for color, in you Atohmy cattle,
till seven years ago when your pappy, Moe, was born. I remember--"
A hoarse excited voice shouted from a distance. "Thrill party!" it
cried. "Thrill party!"
* * * * *
Stonecypher leaped off the stump, stamped his right foot to restore
circulation, and yelled on the run, "That's all today! Stay under the
trees!"
He loped along the pasture fence and across the makeshift target range.
Two tenants, Teddy and Will, stood on the dirt heap with pitchforks in
their hands. Over Bay Knob, an old Model 14 butterflier hovered on
vibrating wings. Sloppy white letters on the sides of the aircraft
spelled such slang expressions as, "Flash the MAGNETS,"
"SupercOlossalSoniC Flap ship," and "Redheads amble OTHer canop."
An impossible number of middleschool-age boys bulged from the cabin
windows. Methodically, they dumped trash and garbage over the
transmitter station ruins. The butterflier wheeled and flapped over the
pasture. Red clover bent and writhed in the artificial wind from the
ornithopter wings. Cows bawled and ran wild. Calves fell over each
other.
Stonecypher jumped the fence. He wrested the revolver from the holster.
"Clear out, or I'll shoot!" he howled.
[Illustration]