The Last Supper: And Other Stories by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

million dollars.
    For the next twenty weeks, Mr. Baxter was absorbed in the building of the shelter. He built it on the grounds of his lake-front estate, which covered three hundred acres, and gave him all the privacy he required. Mr. Somerville, himself designed it, and they employed the three brightest young engineers in the plant to expedite its construction.
    But about the bright young engineers, Mr. Baxter often felt as he did about the various managers of his plant. They were all right, but it wasn’t their plant; and while these bright young engineers were all right, it wasn’t their shelter they were building. Mr. Baxter stopped going to the country club and spent long hours compiling lists of things a large family would need for several years in a shelter. He was amazed at the endless number of things required to continue the Baxter family in the style to which it was accustomed—and he was also amazed at his wife’s attitude.
    â€œIf you think I’m going to spend five years down in that hole and do my own housework, Henry,” she said firmly, “you’ve got another thought coming.”
    â€œIt’s not a hole,” Mr. Baxter said coldly. “It’s every bit as good as the one Ike has under the White House, but you can’t go adding rooms to it.”
    â€œYes I can,” countered Mrs. Baxter. “Either you install servants’ quarters, or leave me out.”
    â€œFor a quarter of a million dollars?”
    â€œWhat?” Mrs. Baxter looked at her husband as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Henry, just what is this shelter costing us?”
    â€œAbout three million dollars without the servants’ quarters.”
    â€œI think you’ve gone out of your mind,” she whispered—which came as a surprise, for it was the first time he had ever known Clarise to be concerned about money.
    â€œYou won’t think so when those H bombs begin to drop.”
    But what Mrs. Baxter thought when her husband cancelled their European trip and even intimated that until the bombs began to fall, there would be no more trips for them, does not bear printing. For two weeks, she did not speak to him, but it is questionable whether he realized that, so deeply was he involved with the shelter. He sat up a whole night with the grocery list. He read five brochures on vitamin pills before he ordered the twenty thousand that he felt would be necessary, and he regretted a hundred times that he had not trained one of his sons to be a physician. He pored over seed catalogues in order to select the germs that would once again make the earth fruitful. He called in experts on livestock and experts on horticulture, and he read the pages of his favorite magazine, U. S. News and World Report , more carefully than ever before seeking for inside information as to the imminence of war; for now, as the shelter neared completion, he felt that he was involved in a desperate race with time, and it made him sick at heart to think that they might start throwing the H bombs before he was ready.
    Strangely enough, his hatred of communism, which had at one time been outstanding, even for an Ohio millionaire, began to cool. The Russians had provided what was now the prime motive in his life, and at times he felt rather warmly toward them. He was becoming more and more religious, and he began to believe that in his dream, he had met God face to face. Even that long sought after dinner at the White House, which Harvey Ramson had promised to arrange, paled into insignificance against this.
    Meanwhile, his beautiful meadows on the bluff overlooking the lake had been turned into a construction site. Great steam shovels bit deeper and deeper into the ground. Wooden forms rose in the gaping hole, and an endless stream of concrete poured down to provide security for the, Baxter family. Tractors lumbered back and forth and steel girders swung on booms. The temporary slack in