Free Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence

defeated.
    'It is our duty,' General MacAllister said, 'to restore this country to what it was.'
    He actually believed it could happen, that the mines would reopen, the factories would be rebuilt, and industry would start again. Planning committees were formed. New contingency plans were drawn up and submitted to Central Government in the Berkshire bunker, and their own bunker extended outward. Bill was transferred from stores to manual labour. Along with Grant and Elmer, supervised by an American army colonel by the name of Jeff Allison, and dressed in white protective suits, he helped to clear the surrounding land of its sterile surface of dust. The prefabricated field units were put into use, bolted to metal girders, and the whole area roofed over with sheets of transparent corrugated plastic to form a vast glass-house. They grew fresh vegetables and cereal crops and Erica Kowlanski went to work in the food-processing laboratory.
    The first batch of cloned root vegetables were harvested eight weeks later, and army personnel with government requisition orders scoured the surrounding countryside for any animals which might have survived. Half a dozen sheep, a few dozen chickens and three goats, were brought to the bunker from a settlement in the Cotswold hills, legalized theft which formed the basis of a breeding flock. Egg yolk was cloned. But the fertilized chicken embryos all showed signs of mutation, and new grass in the outside fields seared brown in the sun. They lacked the means for successfully breeding and raising livestock and women, who had not rated very high on the government's list of priority survivors, suddenly assumed a significance.
    Apart from a few elderly wives and growing daughters, there were only thirty-two women in the whole bunker who were capable of conceiving and giving birth to children, and Erica Kowlanski was one of them. Bill never really knew why she sought him out. It had nothing to do with love and little to do with affection. She admitted, quite freely, that she had never wanted marriage or children, that she found the idea abhorrent. But now she saw it as a necessary duty and she was not the kind of woman to turn her back. Bill understood. She was not offering to be a wife to him in the way Veronica had been. She had simply chosen him to father her child. And one year later, after a long and difficult labour, Erica gave birth to a baby girl.
    She was forty-one years old and Bill was almost fifty. And even if it was her duty, Erica swore she would never go through it again. She was a woman devoid of all maternal instincts and maybe that was why she had chosen Bill for a mate. She had sensed perhaps that he would make up for her inadequacy, that he had fathered before and would love the child enough for both of them.
    Under the white hot lights of the hospital ward Bill took his daughter in his arms. She did not remind him of William or Catherine. She reminded him of Sarah, Bognor Regis polytechnic, and a marriage gone wrong. Marriage to Erica was wrong too, but he could not regret this child. She would make up for the children he had lost and he could not love her more.
    In the next bed to Erica, Jeff Allison's wife cradled her second Anglo-American son. Wayne Jeffrey, like his brother Dwight, had been conceived out of love, not duty. Next time, Mrs Allison vowed, she too would have a girl. But Bill smiled down at his own little daughter and knew he would never have another. The small face puckered to cry and Erica handed him the feeding bottle.
    'What will you call her?' Mrs Allison asked. 'Ophelia,' said Bill. 'And let her not walk i' the sun.'
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    Ophelia assumed she would never walk in the sun. For her it was a dim yellow disc seen through the plastic roof of the cultivation area, an m-type star ninety-three million miles distant. It shone on the great solar panels on the hilltop above her and indirectly provided her with warmth and light, charging the battery cells that worked the