"Well," Stu said, "the surplus deer will just starve."
"No they won't. Not all of them, not even most of them. Not up here, anyway. I can't speak for what might happen in East Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won't be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you'll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road."
Stu worked this over in his mind. Finally he said, "Aren't you exaggerating?"
"Not on purpose. There may be a factor or factors I haven't taken into consideration, but I honestly don't think so. And we could take my hypothesis about the effect of the complete or almost complete subtraction of the dog population on the deer population and apply it to the relationships between other species. Cats breeding without check. What does that mean? Well, I said rats were down on the Ecological Exchange but making a comeback. If there are enough cats, that may change. A world without rats sounds good at first, but I wonder."
"What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?"
"There are two possibilities," Bateman said. "At least two that I see now. The first is that the babies may not be immune."
"You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?"
"Yes, or possibly in utero. Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left."
"That's crazy," Stu said.
"So's the mumps," Glen Bateman said dryly.
"But if the mothers of the babies that are... are in utero ... if the mothers are immune - "
"Yes, in some cases immunities can be passed on from mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But not in all cases. You just can't bank on it. I think the future of babies now in utero is very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead."
"What's the other possibility?"
"That we may finish the job of destroying our species ourselves," Bateman said calmly. "I actually think that's very possible. Not right away, because we're all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal; and eventually we'll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we're very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I'll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on. It could be done, and very easily. This isn't the aftermath of a nuclear war, with everything laid to waste. All the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along - the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings - and start it up again. It's all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted."
Stu sipped his beer. "Think so?"