Chapter 1

June 24, 2095 A.D.

Randolph Emerson Pritchett III, chairman and CEO of Pritchett Insemination Services (more popularly known as PIS by the general public) sat at his huge mahogany desk frowning. That wasn’t a good thing, as both of us knew.

“Us” consisted of Charity Bremmerton and me, and we weren’t used to Mr. Pritchett frowning at us. We were two of the PIS team leaders and our record was pristine.

“There’s been some kind of mistake,” said Pritchett. His voice was low and brought to mind gravel tumbling in a compost barrel.

We waited. I glanced at Charity, who looked as calm as I hoped I looked. She was a statuesque brunette with a truly mammoth bosom. As odd as it might seem, considering what we did for a living, I had never gotten to sample those breasts. I’d seen them a hundred times, but never under circumstances where I was the one getting to benefit from them. I also knew that she had great legs that went all the way to the floor, and supported an ass to die for. She was as beautiful as I was handsome. But that was just part of our job.

We knew Mr. Pritchett well enough to know he’d get around to the point of this meeting sooner or later. We were beginning to suspect he’d also go on one of his famous (within PIS) lecturing tangents. He didn’t disappoint.

“Pritchett Services has been in operation for three generations,” he droned. “We’ve been serving the needs of the breeding public since two thousand and forty-three, only ten years after the collapse took place, and in all that time our record of service to the public has been unmarred. We have brought about the successful insemination of tens of thousands of girls and women, helping to pull the Free World from the dark age when oil stopped and the world social order collapsed.”

Calling it a dark age wasn’t overdoing things. It had been very, very bad, and the memory of that lived on. It took ten years after the collapse for folks to develop the hope that the human race might just make it. But the nuke attacks and some kind of disease nobody knew anything about at the time, kept the birth rate so low that things still hung in the balance.

Every compound had been affected. There were thousands scattered all over The Free World, once called the United States. Nobody knew who had renamed it The Free World. Nobody really cared. What we did care about were all the problems the populace faced, such as getting something to eat, keeping someone else from taking whatever you had, and just staying alive. It was understandable that a debilitatingly low birth rate wasn’t noticed for almost ten years.

Almost everyone alive lived in a compound, for it was only a well-defended compound that could provide safety, both for the farmers who worked the land outside the compound during the day, and for everyone else who gathered inside at night. It was a feudal system, of sorts, but it brought basic social stability back to the populace.

There were those, of course, who chafed for freedom. Almost all of them were men and they called themselves the free scavengers. Most compounds had their own scavengers, but they rarely went far from the safety of the compound. The free scavengers were the ones who took the risks, mining the abandoned cities, risking the lingering radiation to salvage things that society either no longer had the technology to manufacture, or the workings of which were no longer understood. The free scavengers were the entrepreneurs of the land. They were among the smartest, toughest and, admittedly, craziest of the species.

The free scavengers also worked on a circuit basis, more or less. Each had his own fiercely protected claim at some location he hoped was a complete secret. He’d gather together enough to make a trip and then visit the compounds he felt were safe to trade with, getting food and sometimes sex in exchanged for his technological offerings.

It was, in fact, a free scavenger named Randolph Emerson Pritchett who made the initial discovery that brought about what might arguably be claimed to have saved the human race.

Pritchett had been a doctor, back in the old days, and had just gotten set up in a high altitude, rustic campground at Yellowstone for a two week camping and fishing trip when the world had fallen apart. He camped the old fashioned way, in a tent. He felt the ground move and heard it groan, but when no lasting earthquake resulted, he kept fishing. When he finally came out of the woods, he found out the smoke he’d been smelling the last day or so came from the still-smoking ashes of Cody, miles to the east. Cody was much too small to waste a nuke on, but greed and fear had destroyed it anyway.

Most park guests had learned what was going on much sooner and had fled back to what they thought would be the safety of their homes. Pritchett found, when he came out of the bush, that he was one of roughly forty people still in the park. They watched the destruction of the nation on TV until all broadcasts stopped, at which time they decided to take their chances there, in the park, where at least there was game to hunt. The initial scavenging they did was during the sweet spot, before gun stores and most homes were cleaned out. A couple of runs were made with cars that still had gas in them, and the loot brought back. They made it through the first winter, lost two of their number to marauders the following summer, fought off attacks in the fall and used the weather to protect them another winter.

The following spring, the nexus of the free scavengers, at least in that area of the country, was born.

Five years later, in July of 2038, Pritchett found a binocular microscope in what had, at one time, been the firearms and tool marks section of the Utah State Crime lab. The building had collapsed and he had to do some significant excavation to find anything of value. The microscope was a great find because it was an older one that still had a mirror to focus light on a slide.

He didn’t trade the device, though, because on his route as a free scavenger he also practiced a little medicine from time to time and the microscope was invaluable for that. He used it in June, the next year, in fact, to look at a semen sample from the leader of the Willow Run compound, which was on his route. The man was unhappy that none of his women had produced a child yet.

Non motile sperm cells had been seen. It was blamed on radiation at that time. Other samples were checked and also found worthless. In a panic, all of the Willow Run men were required to provide samples. It was the first evidence discovered that more than ninety percent of the males had no motile sperm at all. Of the rest, only two had sperm that were viable for breeding. Only two men in the entire compound could father a child.