Soon Dan hypnotized Helen. He then hypnotized or attempted hypnosis on everyone in River Road. He couldn’t hypnotize the Admiral at all. He succeeded in partially hypnotizing Randy, with poor results, including grogginess and a headache. Randy attempted to cooperate but he could not erase everything else from his mind.

The children were excellent subjects. Dan hypnotized them again and again until he had only to speak a few sentences, in the jargon of the hypnotist, snap his fingers, and they would fall into malleable trance. Randy worried about this until Dan explained. “I’ve been training the children to be quick subjects, because in an emergency, they have their own built-in supply of ether.” “And if you’re not around?”

“Helen is studying hypnotism too.” He was thoughtful. “She’s becoming quite expert. You know, Helen could have been a doctor. Helen isn’t happy unless she’s caring for someone. She takes care of me.”

A week later Ben Franklin developed a stomachache which forced him to draw up his right knee when he tried to lie down. The ache was always there and at intervals it became sharp pain enveloping him in waves. Dan decided Ben’s pain was not from eating too many bananas. It was impossible to take a blood count but the boy had a slight fever and Dan knew he had to go into him.

Dan operated on the billiard table in the gameroom, after putting Ben into deep trance. Dan used the steak knives, darning needles, hair curlers, and nylon line, all properly sterilized, and removed an appendix distended and near to bursting.

In five days, Ben was up and active. After that Randy, somewhat in awe, referred to Dan as “our witch doctor.”

In August they used the last of the corn, squeezed the last of the late oranges, the Valencias, and plucked the last overripe but deliciously sweet grapefruit from the trees. In August they ran out of salt, armadillos destroyed the yam crop, and the fish stopped biting. That terribly hot August was the month of disaster.

The end of the corn and exhaustion of the citrus crop had been inevitable. Armadillos in the yams was bad luck, but bearable. But without fish and salt their survival was in doubt.

Randy had carefully rationed salt since he was shocked, in July, to discover how few pounds were left. Salt was a vital commodity, not just white grains you shook on eggs. Dan used saline solutions for half a dozen purposes. The children used salt to brush their teeth. Without salt, the slaughter of the Henry pigs would have been a terrible waste. They planned to tan one hide to cut badly needed moccasins, and without salt this was impossible.

As soon as they were out of salt it seemed that almost everything required salt, most of all the human body. Day after day the porch thermometer stood at ninety-five or over and every day all of them had manual labor to do, and miles to walk. They sweated rivers. They sweated their salt away, and they grew weak, and they grew ill. And all of Fort Repose grew weak and ill for there was no salt anywhere.

In July Randy had gone to Rita Hernandez and she had traded five pounds of salt to him for three large bass, a bushel of Valencias, and four buckshot shells. She had traded not so much for these things, Randy believed, but because he had helped her arrange decent burial for Pete, and provided the pallbearers to carry him to Repose-in-Peace-Park. Since July, he had been unable to trade for salt anywhere. In Marines Park, a pound of salt would be worth five pounds of coffee, if anyone had coffee. You could not even buy salt with corn liquor, potent if only slightly aged.

In August the traders in Marines Park dragged themselves about like zombies, for want of salt. And for the first time in his life Randy felt a weird uneasiness and craving that became almost madness when he rubbed the perspiration from his face and then tasted salt on his fingers. Now he understood the craving of animals for salt, understood why a cougar and a deer would share the same salt lick in the enforced truce of salt starvation.

But even more important than salt was fish, for the fish of the river was their staple, like seal to the Eskimo. It had been so simple, until August. Their bamboo set poles, butts lodged in metal or wooden holders on the ends and sides of their docks, each night usually provided enough fish for the following day. In the morning someone would stroll down to the dock and haul up whatever had hooked itself in the hours of darkness. If the night’s automatic catch was lean, or if extra fish were needed for trading, someone was granted leave from regular chores to fish in the morning, or at dusk when the feeding bass struck savagely. Their poles grew in clumps, they had line aplenty, hooks enough to last for years (fishing had been the pre-Day hobby of Bill McGovern and Sam Hazzard as well as Randy) and every kind of baitworms, crickets, grasshoppers, tadpoles, minnows, shiners-for anyone capable of using a shovel, throw net, or simply his hands.

Randy had more than a hundred plugs and spoons and perhaps half as many flies and bass bugs. He had bought them knowing well that most lures are designed to catch fishermen rather than fish. Still, on occasion the bass would go wild for artificials and in the spring the specks and bream would snap up small flies and tiny spoons. So fish had never been a problem, until they stopped biting.

When they stopped they stopped all at once and all together. Even with his circular shrimp net, wading barefoot in the shallows, Lib beside him hopefully carrying a bucket, Randy could not net a shiner, bream, cat, or even mudfish. Randy considered himself a good fisherman and yet he admitted he didn’t understand why fish bit or why they didn’t. August had never been a good month for black bass, true, but this August was strange. Only during thunderstorms was there a ripple on the river. A molten sun rose, grew white hot, and sank red and molten, and the river was unearthly still and oily, agitated no more than Florence’s aquarium. Even at crack of dawn or final light, no fish jumped or swirled. It was bad. And it was eerie and frightening.

In the third week of August when they were all weak and half-sick Randy spoke his fears to Dan. It was evening. Randy and Lib had just come from the hammock. For an hour they had crouched together under a great oak waiting for the little gray squirrels to feed. They had been utterly quiet and the squirrels had been noisy and Randy had blasted two of them out of the tree with his double twenty, a shameful use of irreplaceable ammunition for very little meat. Yet two squirrels was enough to give meat flavor to a stew that night. What they would have for breakfast, if anything, nobody knew. They found Dan in Randy’s office, with Helen trimming his hair. Randy told them about the two squirrels and then she said, “Dan, I’ve been thinking about the fish. I’ve never seen fishing this bad before. Could anything big and permanent have happened? Could radiation have wiped them out, or anything?”

Dan scratched at his beard and Helen brushed his hand down and said, “Sit still.”

Dan said, “Fish. Let me think about fish. I doubt that anything happened to the fish. If the river had been poisoned by fallout right after The Day the dead fish would have come to the surface. The river would have been blanketed with fish. That didn’t happen then and it hasn’t happened since. No, I doubt that there has been a holocaust of fish.”

“It worries me,” Randy said.

“Salt worries me more. Salt doesn’t grow or breed or spawn. You either have it or you don’t.”

Helen swung the swivel chair. Dan was facing the teak chest. Suddenly he lifted himself out of the chair, flung himself on his knees, opened the chest and began to dig into it. “The diary!” he shouted. “Where’s the diary?”

“It’s there. Why?”

“There’s salt in the diary! Remember when Helen was reading it to me after I was slugged by the highwaymen? There was something about salt in it. Remember, Helen?”