He opened the hatch to the huge storage rooms. And gaped in amazement. Piled high to the ceiling were hundreds of drums of food; fruits, vegetables, preserved meats, juices, everything imaginable. Sacks of grain, wheat and rice. Flour. Nuts, dried raisins and apricots. All left, all forgotten.
“Good God,” he murmured. “They left everything.”
The yuks were getting the works. They were getting everything. The Company had given up and gone off. It was no longer interested; it was tired. It did not care any more. Once, it had guarded these things carefully. Men had counted each can, each package, each ounce of food. Countless forms and records had been made out for the bookkeepers. Armed guards had patrolled the periphery of the grounds. Wire had been strung up, complex burglar alarms and bells.
The Company had protected its land and property with jealous cunning. Through centuries its craft and power had grown, breeding and multiplying. But now it no longer cared. It had gone off, turned everything over to someone else. Someone to come, who was not tired. Who was not exhausted.
The Company had been failing. For a long time it had been going downhill, secretly, quietly. Deep in its heart it was losing, dying. And in this last great fatigue, this final moment when the last threads of energy ran out of the withering Stations, those few men who stayed behind, who remained after the others had left, were rich. They had everything; men for centuries had dreamed of owning what these three now had. It was all theirs. The land, the buildings, the stores, the records—this whole Station belonged to them.
They had inherited it, the work of previous generations of workers, men behind desks, men in the mines, in factories. The work and the wealth from the work. The three who remained owned this, this heap that was the total remains of the Company Station. They had not built it, or done much to help produce it; but it was theirs all the same. They were the only ones left to have it, in the dim short days that remained before the new owners arrived. Before it became a part of that new world, that world which just a little while before had not even been entered on the Company’s list of potential competitors.
Verne gazed at the food, and he thought of the other buildings, the stores and property abandoned to them, left behind. He could hardly believe it. The Company had worked so long to acquire all this; could it really leave it behind for others to find? For strangers to take?
But meanwhile, it was a stroke of luck for the three of them.
After they had eaten all they could, after they had slept in all the beds, bathed in all the tubs, listened to all the radios, taken out of boxes and crates anything they desired, they would disappear, too, like the others. After a little while there would be nothing left of them, either. They would join the others.
But right now there was at least a week ahead of them. Later, the yuks would come with crowbars and hammers and open up the doors and windows. Maybe they would tear down the buildings. Maybe they would make them even bigger, or change them so that no one would recognize them. They might do many things.
But right now he was not thinking of this. He was thinking of the week ahead.
Presently he heard the sound of footsteps. Carl and Barbara came into the kitchen, carrying a hammer. They stopped short when they saw all the food.
“I guess that answers that question.” Barbara went into the store room; they heard her moving cans and drams around. “What do you think of these for dinner?” She came out, loaded down with canned chicken, canned peas, cranberry sauce, and a rum pudding.
“There’s milk in the refrigerator,” Verne said. “And frozen vegetables and meat. Tons of it.”
“Put the cans back!” Carl exclaimed, looking into the first refrigerator compartment. “Forget them. Look at all this frozen stuff! Let’s have that, instead.”
“What a break,” Barbara murmured. “It’s strange. I’ve worked for the Company two years and I’ve never seen food like this. They must have held it back.”
Carl rummaged through the drawers under the great sink. “Look!” He held up two long flashlights, snapping them on. They worked perfectly. “What do you say?”
“Let’s take a look around outside before we eat,” Barbara said. “Let’s make sure there’s no one else here.”
“Come on!” Carl handed Verne one of the flashlights. “We’ll go and explore. We can eat afterwards.”
Verne accepted the flashlight silently.
“I’ll go along with Barbara one way, and you go the other. We’ll make a complete circuit of the property and meet back here.”
“What a waste of time,” Verne murmured.
“We ought to know for sure. There might be somebody left. Some old workman, some old Swede, working away in a deserted building.”
“Okay.” Verne wandered toward the door.
“Shout if you find anything,” Carl said.
Verne made his way along the gravel path, flashing his light listlessly from side to side. The light caught a tree, then a row of shrubs, then finally a great granite building, one of the administration buildings. The windows were nailed over. The door was chained. In the fog it seemed forlorn and dismal.
He went on. Now he was coming to abandoned piles of machinery. Massive columns reared up into the fog and were lost. In the darkness it seemed as if they had been thrown there in no particular order, left behind, emptied out of some vast, cosmic bag. Or perhaps they were the beginnings of some new, never finished structures that had been given up, left to rust and corrode in the mists.
But more, these columns seemed like the ruins of some very ancient city. Verne stood at the foot of one of the towers, gazing up. Perhaps it had supported the corner of some Coliseum, or a long-forgotten Parthenon. Would tourists come later to look? Would the new owners stand and stare and wonder what his world had been like, what the people who had left these hulks might have been?
His people. His world. Verne moved on. These ruins were his ruins. The remains of the Company. He came to the fence that marked the edge of the property. Beyond, even with the flashlight, he could see nothing but rolling fog and darkness. Was there anything out there? What would come from the fog and darkness? Would it be good?
They were out there. The new owners who would soon be coming to claim their new possessions.
Verne turned away. He walked slowly back toward the commissary, flashing his light aimlessly over the ruins and towers. The commissary was silent; the others had not finished their tour.
He went inside and sat down to wait. After a long time he heard them clattering up the stairs, talking and laughing together.
“What did you find?” Carl said. “Anyone?”
“No.”
“Nothing, either,” Barbara said. “Let’s eat. And then we can get my stuff uncrated. So I can go to bed.”
“Sure.” Verne got to his feet. “Let’s start.”
“I’m really hungry!” Carl said. “Really hungry.”
5
VERNE WOKE UP. He was lying in bed, feeling the sunlight shining on him. If he opened his eyes it would blind him. He turned the other way and the red haze became black. He yawned. The covers were twisted around him. He opened one eye a little to see the clock.
The clock wasn’t there. He was facing a bare wall, the paint peeling, stained and cracking with dirt and age. For a moment he felt startled. He sat quickly up. Across the room Carl was still asleep. His blond head was hidden under the covers; only his hand and arm, hanging over the side of the bed, were visible. Verne reached around on the floor and found his glasses. He fitted them into place and got slowly out of bed.
It was only eight o’clock. He went over and sat by his clothes, heaped across an unused bed, rubbing his hands together and yawning. The day was warm and bright. Out the window he could see the trees and carefully arranged shrubs that grew in front of the men’s dorm. A long way off a blue bird was hopping among some weeds, growing up beside a heap of rusting slag. Presently he picked up his clothing and began to dress.
Eight o’c
lock was too early! He had wakened from years of habit; but there was no need, any longer. There was nothing to get to, nothing to begin. It was all behind him, in the past. He let go of his shirt, dropping it. Why was he up? What for? There was nothing to do.
He padded back to his bed and slid into it, pulling the blankets up over him. Carl stirred a little in his sleep. Verne watched him. How long he was! His feet and head stuck out at both ends of the bed. He smiled.
Gazing at the youth sprawled out on the bed, snoring faintly, Verne thought again of Teddy. The smile faded. That night he had come into the apartment; he had found her there, lying on his bed, passed out. Messy and asleep.
He let his mind wander back to the scene.
Her shoes had been kicked off. Her skirt was up around her waist, showing her thin, white legs. She had rolled her stockings down; they were wrinkled and sagging.
Verne went back and bolted the door to the hall. He returned to the bedroom. She had turned over, so that her face was away from him. He could still hear her dull breathing. What had the manager thought? Had he known she was drunk? Maybe he thought she was sick.
Why had she come to his place?
He sat down on the edge of the bed. It was hard to connect her with Don Field. Don was so square, so out of the course of things. He plodded along between one meaningless activity and another, hunting down a certain old Genet record of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, reading a forgotten science-fiction serial in an old Air Wonder Stories magazine, patronizing some hum-drum cafe because it was off the beaten path and served some peculiar sauce. Everything he did was cultish, set aside.
But this girl looked as if she flowed in the main stream of things. Perhaps she had just picked up Don for a passing moment. It was hard to tell. He had never heard Don mention her before.
Watching, waiting for her to wake up, Verne lit a cigarette.
In the life of Verne Tildon there had been much trouble. That is true of most small men. A little man is aware of things a large man can ignore. Like colors beyond the end of the spectrum, invisible to the ordinary eye, certain things were major realities to Verne that another man would not even have noticed.
He had grown up in Washington, D.C. Most of his early life had been spent in the bleak snow-covered streets and vacant lots of the little town of Jackson Heights, just outside of the city proper. In the winter he and his brother went sledding. When they had to stay indoors they played duets on the piano together. He remembered nothing about the piano, later in life. Finally he had switched to the oboe, which he played in the high school orchestra.
Later he gave up that, too. Playing in the high school orchestra made him look silly. He was practicing in the afternoon when he could have been walking uptown with the other kids, and on some days he had to wear the gaudy red and gold uniform of the school that made him look like a ticket taker in a theater. After school he was very much alone. When he had finished practicing he ran up to the music store and listened to records.
At that age he talked with a slight stutter, in a nervous, excited way. It made him shy with people.
His brother graduated from college and left the family home. They got letters from him once in a while. Verne read a lot, and for a while he thought he would go on to college, too. But at nineteen, when he finished high school, his father convinced him that it would not be too bad a thing if he earned a little money working for a while. The family had carried the burden for too long; some help was needed. He got a job in the bookkeeping end of a big department store, typing up monthly statements and emptying the waste baskets.
At nineteen, a boy who still stuttered and who occasionally blew a few notes on his oboe, he met a girl his own age who was enough interested in books and music so that there seemed to be something between them, for a time. She was blonde and tall, with hair like corn silk. Her people came from the Middle West. She had blue eyes and a soft, thoughtful voice. The two of them walked and read and went to Sunday concerts. And considered their lives together.
One rainy night, when his family was away at the movies, Verne and the girl went upstairs to his room, and with many giggles and heart-beats, many murmurs and fears and nervous glances out the window, they pulled the shades down and crept into the little wooden bed he had slept in since he was a baby. There, in the room with his postage stamps, his model airplanes and maps, his oboe standing up silently in the corner, all the things from his so recently discarded childhood, Verne and the girl lay huddled together, heart against heart, knee against knee, shaking and holding onto each other.
Outside the rain poured down. Cars slithered past. The room was silent, except for their own sounds. At first the girl was withdrawn, nervous and cold. But then, just as everything seemed to have come to an end, and he was starting to think about getting up again, something strange came over her, something he did not understand. All at once her rigid body relaxed, the coldness fled. He was pulled back, dragged abruptly against a scalding belly that strained and quivered with such violence that only the eventual return of the family and the sudden scramble to dress was sufficiently distracting to save him.
He escaped. His father drove her home; Verne and the girl were silent all the way. After that their relationship gradually fell off.
He continued to work at the bookkeeping office. The idea of the university became dimmer and dimmer. When he was twenty-one he met another girl. This one was tall and dark and quiet. Her treasure was sold dearly; he found himself married, all at once, living in a one-room apartment, watching her string bras and underpants across the bathroom, smelling the starch and iron in the kitchen, and the eternal mechanical presence of pin curls next to him on the pillow.
The marriage lasted only a few months. Sometime between it and the Second World War—he never knew just when—the last memory of college faded from his mind, to be lost and forgotten forever. When the reed broke he put his oboe away in the closet. The stutter had disappeared, and he had grown a small dark mustache. But his hands shook when he lit a cigarette; there was still a too-quick nervous motion about him.
Liquor helped that. Liquor allowed him to laugh at things that normally shut him up tight for days. He found himself beginning to get an edge on men; they were no match for his rapid tongue, his developing razor wit. A hard chilliness was slipping into him, into his speech. It carried him a long way; it was good to have.
When the War came he joined the army. He was too small and light to be much good; but they didn’t like to lose a man whose mind worked so fast He finished out the war teaching others to do the things he couldn’t.
The mustache disappeared, and he learned just how much he could drink before there was no turning back. His hair began to thin. It became soft and wispy. He put on horn-rimmed glasses and discovered French cuffs. The kind of music he had once played on his oboe was almost forgotten. Somehow, in the ratified classical strata, he felt more cut off and alone than usual; he was more separated than before, from the things he wanted. What did he want? He was not sure. He did not intend to let anything stand in his way, but he did not know in which direction that way might be found.
But a man can face the knowledge that he has not found his rut, his depth, his way and people, only so long. Then he stops worrying about it. Verne married again. This girl was plump and competent; she had been secretary to very important people. In her, he saw the drive and direction that he, himself, seemed still to lack. She knew exactly what she wanted: a husband, a home, a kitchen, furniture, clothes. She moved in a tight little circle, as hard and brittle as the red polish on her neatly-trimmed nails.
Whatever there was left in Verne of his memory of books and music, model airplanes and his ticket seller’s bright uniform soon disappeared. With Anne, music and books and ideas were real enough, but they existed only as a means to something else. He found himself listening to things as background music that had, at one time, been intimate parts of his life.
One night he got up from the expensive couch in the gra
ciously furnished living room, turned off the immense television set, and headed for the nearest bar.
Sometime, during the hazy, indistinct days that followed, he was rolled, left to lie in the freezing gutters of Washington in deep winter, and booked at the city jail. They let him go the next day. He wandered around, his hands in his pockets, watching the children sledding in the snow.
With his second marriage over, he gathered up what things were his and set off for New York. The taste that he had had for music had spoiled. He began to sit long hours in dark bars, tapping with a fifty cent piece, watching the people and listening to the sour, bitter music from the little Negro and mixed combos. His knowledge of jazz eventually became of use to him. He got a job with a small station, turning over jazz records in the early hours of morning; after a year or so he had his own program.
He had begun to slide into a kind of existence that seemed to fit. Why? He did not know. He was too small a man to drink as much as he did; there were many mornings when he could scarcely drag himself out of bed. His friends were stooped, preoccupied cultists, occasional natty homosexuals, hard-voiced Lesbians. Smoke and sour sounds, half-dollars and endless commercials. Once he stopped, staring into the mirror, rubbing the yellow, hanging flesh of his neck. The tiny hairs stuck out like pin feathers; his eyes gazed blindly back at him. He was like some runt of a chicken, some plucked and charred creature that had been hung from a hook, drying slowly, corroding through the years. A wrinkled, dried-up runt of a bird…
But then he shaved, washed, put on a clean shirt, drank some orange juice, shined his shoes, and it was all forgotten. He put on his coat and went to work.
Teddy stirred. Verne snapped back, glancing down at her. He put his cigarette out and stood up, stiff and cold. He went over and pulled down the shades and turned on the lamp.