“We must see more of each other,” Bluthgeld said, somberly nodding. “We must talk.”
IX
When Stuart McConchie returned to the East Bay from his trip to the peninsula south of San Francisco he found that someone—no doubt a group of veterans living under the pier—had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head, a heap worthless to him or to anyone else. He stood by it, pondering. Well, it had been a costly trip. And he had arrived too late anyhow; the farmer, at a penny apiece, had already disposed of the electronic parts of his Soviet missile.
Mr. Hardy would supply another horse, no doubt, but he had been fond of Edward Prince of Wales. And it was wrong to kill a horse for food because they were so vitally needed for other purposes; they were the mainstay of transportation, now that most of the wood had been consumed by the wood-burning car and by people in cellars using it in the winter to keep warm, and horses were needed in the job of reconstruction—they were the main source of power, in the absence of electricity. The stupidity of killing Edward maddened him; it was, he thought, like barbarism, the thing they all feared. It was anarchy, and right in the middle of the city; right in downtown Oakland, in broad day. It was what he would expect the Red Chinese to do.
Now, on foot, he walked slowly toward San Pablo Avenue. The sun had begun to sink into the lavish, extensive sunset which they had become accustomed to seeing in the years since the Emergency. He scarcely noticed it. Maybe I ought to go into some other business, he said to himself. Small animal traps—it’s a living, but there’s no advancement possible in it. I mean, where can you rise to in a business like that?
The loss of his horse had depressed him; he gazed down at the broken, grass-infested sidewalk as he picked his way along, past the rubble which once had been factories. From a burrow in a vacant lot something with eager eyes noted his passing; something, he surmised gloomily, that ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin.
This, he thought, explains why Hoppy might legitimately have imagined he was seeing the afterlife. These ruins, the smoky, flickering pallor of the sky … the eager eyes still following him as the creature calculated whether it could safely attack him. Bending, he picked up a sharp hunk of concrete and chucked it at the burrow—a dense layer of organic and inorganic material packed tightly, glued in place by some sort of white slime. The creature had emulsified some of the debris lying around, had reformed it into a usable paste. Must be a brilliant animal, he thought. But he did not care. The world could do without the brilliant and deranged life forms exposed to the light of day in the past years.
I’ve evolved, too, he said, turning one last time to face the creature, in case it might scuttle after him from behind. My wits are much clearer than they formerly were; I’m a match for you any time, so give up.
Evidently the creature agreed; it did not even come forth from its burrow.
I’m evolved, he thought, but sentimental. For he genuinely missed the horse. Damn those criminal veterans, he said to himself. They probably swarmed all over Edward the moment we pushed off in the raft. I wish I could get out of town; I wish I could emigrate to the open country where there’s none of this brutal cruelty and hoodlumism. That’s what that psychiatrist did, after the Emergency. Stockstill got right out of the East Bay; I saw him go. He was smart. He did not try to return to his old rut, he did not merely pick up where he left off, as I did.
I mean, he thought, I’m no better off now than I was before the goddam Emergency; I sold TV sets then and now I sell electronic vermin traps. What is the difference? One’s as bad as the other. I’m going downhill, in fact.
To cheer himself he got out one of his remaining special deluxe Gold Label Andrew Gill cigarettes and lit up.
A whole day wasted, he realized, on this wild goose chase to the far side of the Bay. In two hours it would be dark and he would be going to sleep, down in the cat pelt-lined basement room which Mr. Hardy rented him for a dollar in silver a month. Of course, he could light his fat lamp; he could burn it for a little while, read a book or part of a book—most of his library consisted of merely sections of books, the remaining portions having been destroyed or lost. Or he could visit old Mr. and Mrs. Hardy and sit in on the evening transmission from the satellite.
After all, he had personally radioed a request to Dangerfield just the other day, from the transmitter out on the mudflats in West Richmond. He had asked for “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” an old-fashioned favorite which he remembered from his childhood. It was not known if Dangerfield had that tune on his miles of tapes, however, so perhaps he was waiting in vain.
As he walked along he sang to himself,
Oh I heard the news:
There’s good rockin’ tonight.
Oh I heard the news!
There’s good rockin’ tonight!
Tonight I’ll be a mighty fine man,
I’ll hold my baby as tight as I can
It brought tears to his eyes to remember one of the old songs, from the world the way it was. All gone now, he said to himself. Bluthgelded out of existence, as they say … and what do we have instead, a rat that can play the noseflute, and not even that because the rat got run over.
There was another old favorite, the tune about the man who had the knife; he tried to recall how it had gone. Something about the shark having teeth or pretty teeth. It was too vague; he could not recollect it. His mother had played a record of it for him; a man, with a gravelly voice, had sung it and it was beautiful.
I’ll bet the rat couldn’t play that, he said to himself. Not in a million years. I mean, that’s practically sacred music. Out of our past, our sacred past that no brilliant animal and no funny person can share. The past belongs only to us genuine human beings. I wish (the idea stirred him) that I could do like Hoppy used to do; I wish I could go into a trance, but not see ahead like he did—I want to go back.
If Hoppy’s alive now, can he do that? Has he tried it? I wonder where he is, that preview; that’s what he was, a preview. The first phoce. I’ll bet he did escape with his life. He probably went over to the Chinese when they made that landing up north.
I’d go back, he decided, to that first time I met Jim Fergesson, when I was looking for a job and it was still tough for a Negro to find a job in which he met the public. That was the thing about Fergesson; he didn’t have any prejudice. I remember that day; I had a job selling aluminum pans door to door and then I got the job with the Britannica people but that was also door to door. My god, Stuart realized; my first genuine job was with Jim Fergesson, because you can’t count that door to door stuff.
While he was thinking about Jim Fergesson—who was now dead and gone all these years since the bomb fell— he arrived on San Pablo Avenue with its little shops open here and there, little shacks which sold everything from coat hangers to hay. One of them, not far off, was HARDY’S HOMEOSTATIC VERMIN TRAPS, and he headed in that direction.
As he entered, Mr. Hardy glanced up from his assembly table in the rear; he worked under the white light of an arc lamp, and all around him lay heaps of electronic parts which he had scavenged from every corner of Northern California. Many had come from the ruins out in Livermore; Mr. Hardy had connections with State officials and they had permitted him to dig there in the restricted deposits.
In former times Dean Hardy had been an engineer for an AM radio station in downtown Oakland; he was a slender, quiet-spoken, elderly man who wore a green sweater and a necktie even now—and a tie was unique, in these times. His hair was gray and curly, and he reminded Stuart of a beardless Santa Claus: he had a droll, dour expression and a roguish sense of humor. Physically, he was small; he weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds. But he had a near-violent temper and Stuart respected him. Hardy was nearly sixty, and in many respects he had become a father-figure to Stuart. Stuart’s actual father, dead since the ’70s, had been an insurance underwriter, also a quiet man who wore a tie and sweater, but he had not ha
d Hardy’s ferocity, his outbursts; or if he had, Stuart had never witnessed them or had repressed the memory of them.
And, too, Dean Hardy resembled Jim Fergesson.
That more than any other factor had drawn Stuart to him, three years ago. He was conscious of it; he did not deny it or want to deny it. He missed Jim Fergesson and he was drawn to anyone who resembled him.
To Mr. Hardy he said, “They ate my horse.” He seated himself on a chair at the front of the shop.
At once Ella Hardy, his employer’s wife, appeared from the living quarters in the rear; she had been fixing dinner. “You left him?”
“Yes,” he admitted. She, a formidable woman, glared at him with accusing indignation. “I thought he was safe out on the City of Oakland public ferry pier; there’s an official there who—”
“It happens all the time,” Hardy said wearily. “The bastards. It must have been those war vets who hole up down there. Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds. What about the car? You had to leave it, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Stuart said.
Mrs. Hardy said caustically, “Edward was worth eighty five silver U.S. dollars. That’s a week’s profit gone.”
“I’ll pay it back,” Stuart said, rigidly.
“Forget it,” Hardy said. “We have more horses at our store out in Orinda. What about the parts from the rocket?”
“No luck,” Stuart said. “All gone when I got there. Except for this.” He held up a handful of transistors. “The farmer didn’t notice these; I picked them up for nothing. I don’t know if they’re any good, though.” Carrying them over to the assembly table he laid them down. “Not much for an all-day trip.” He felt more glum than ever.
Without a word, Ella Hardy returned to the kitchen; the curtain closed after her.
“You want to have some dinner with us?” Hardy said, shutting off his light and removing his glasses.
“I dunno,” Stuart said. “I feel strange. It upset me to come back and find Edward eaten.” He roamed about the shop. Our relationship, he thought, is different with animals now. It’s much closer; there isn’t the great gap between us and them that there was. “Over on the other side of the Bay I saw something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “A flying animal like a bat but not a bat. More like a weasel, very skinny and long, with a big head. They call them tommies because they’re always gliding up against windows and looking in, like peeping toms.”
Hardy said, “It’s a squirrel. I’ve seen them.” He leaned back in his chair, loosened his necktie. “They evolved from the squirrels in Golden Gate Park.” He yawned. “I once had a scheme for them … they could be useful—in theory, at least—as message carriers. They can glide or fly or whatever they do for amounts up to a mile. But they’re too feral. I gave it up after catching one.” He held up his right hand. “Look at the scar, there on my thumb. That’s from a tom.”
“This man I talked to said they taste good. Like old-time chicken. They sell them at stalls in downtown San Francisco; you see old ladies selling them cooked for a quarter apiece, still hot, very fresh.”
“Don’t try one,” Hardy said. “Many of them are toxic. It has to do with their diet.”
“Hardy,” Stuart said suddenly, “I want to get out of the city and out into the country.”
His employer regarded him.
“It’s too brutal here,” Stuart said.
“It’s brutal everywhere.”
“Not so much if you get away from town, really far away, say fifty to a hundred miles.”
“But then it’s hard to make a living.”
“Do you sell any traps in the country?” Stuart asked.
“No,” Hardy said.
“Why not?”
“Vermin live in towns, where there’s ruins. You know that. Stuart, you’re a wool gatherer. The country is sterile; you’d miss the flow of ideas that you have here in the city. Nothing happens; they just farm and listen to the satellite. Anyhow, you’re apt to run into the old race prejudice against Negroes, out in the country; they’ve reverted to the old patterns.” Once more he put on his glasses, turned his arc light back on and resumed the assembling of the trap before him. “It’s one of the greatest myths that ever existed, the superiority of the country. I know you’d be back here in a week.”
“I’d like to take a line of traps say out around Napa,” Stuart persisted. “Maybe up to the St. Helena Valley. Maybe I could trade them for wine; they grow grapes up there, I understand, like they used to.”
“But it doesn’t taste the same,” Hardy said. “The ground is altered. The wine is—” He gestured. “You’d have to taste it, I can’t tell you, but it’s really awful. Foul.”
They were both silent, then.
“They drink it, though,” Stuart said. “I’ve seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks.”
“Of course, because people will drink anything they can get their hands on now. So do you, so do I.” Mr. Hardy raised his head and regarded Stuart. “You know who has liquor? I mean the genuine thing; you can’t tell if it’s prewar that he’s dug up or new that he’s made.”
“Nobody in the Bay Area.”
Hardy said, “Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert.”
“I don’t believe it.” He sucked in his breath, fully alert, now.
“Oh, he doesn’t produce much of it. I’ve only seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it.” Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. “You would have liked it.”
“How much does he want for it?” He tried to sound casual.
“More than you have to pay.”
“And—it tastes like the real thing? The pre-war?”
Hardy laughed and returned to his trap-assembling. “That’s right.”
I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest … walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy, snow-white hair, imported monocle—I can picture him. He probably drives a Jaguar, converted of course now to wood, but still a great, powerful Mark XVI Saloon.
Seeing the expression on Stuart’s face, Hardy leaned toward him. “I can tell you what else he sells.”
“English brier pipes?”
“Yes, that, too.” Hardy lowered his voice. “Girly photos. In artistic poses—you know.”
“Aw, Christ,” Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. “I don’t believe it.”
“God’s truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They’re worth a fortune, of course. I’ve heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1962 Playboy calendar; that’s supposed to have happened somewhere back East, in Nevada, somewhere like that.” Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space, his vermin trap forgotten.
“Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the service department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed.
Hardy nodded in a resigned way.
“Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere,” Stuart said. “And he came onto a entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions? He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”
“Right,” Hardy said, nodding.
“I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Japan, but they’re no good.”
“I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”
“Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation, and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”
Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where; maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”
“Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”
After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—”
“But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—”
“I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”
Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me.”
Hardy grunted, frowning.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” Stuart said, “but I want to grow. I have to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten yeas ago, and that’s not good enough.”
Scratching his nose, Hardy said, “What did you have in mind?”
“Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”
“Just one potato?”
“I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’re all those freak animals and funny people here in the city.”