"000009-some_wil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)[Image] CHAPTER SEVEN: [Image]
This happened in New Jersey a generation later, with Robert Garvin and Merton Hollis both dead in a duel with each other. Robert Garvin left a legacy, and this is what happened to it: Cottrell Slade Garvin was twenty-six, and had been a sex criminal for three years, when his mother called him into her parlor and explained why she could not introduce him to the girl on whom he had been spying. "Cottrell, darling," she said, laying her delicately veined hand on his sun-darkened own, "You understand that my opinion of Barbara is that she is a fine girl; one whom any young man of your class and station would ordinarily be honored to meet, and, in due course of time, betroth. But, surely, you must consider that her family,"--there was the faintest inhalation through the fragile nose--"particularly on the male side, is not one which could be accepted into our own." Her expression was genuinely regretful. "Quite frankly, her father's opinion on the proper conduct of a domicile..." The sniff was more audible. "His actions in accord with that opinion are such that our entire family would be embroiled in endless Affairs of Integrity, and you yourself would be forced to bear the brunt of most of these encounters. In addition, you would have the responsibility of defending the notoriously untenable properties which Mr. Holland pleases to designate as Barbara's dowry. "No, Cottrell, I'm afraid that, much as such a match might appeal to you at first glance, you would find that the responsibilities more than offset the benefits." Her hand patted his as lightly as the touch of a falling autumn leaf. "I'm sorry, Cottrell." A tear sparkled at the corner of each eye, and it was obvious that the discussion had been a great strain to her, for she genuinely loved her son. Cottrell sighed. "All right, mother," he said. There was nothing more he could do, at this time. "But, should circumstances change, you will reconsider, won't you?" he asked. His mother smiled, and nodded as she said, "Of course, Cottrell." But the smile faded a bit. "However, that does seem rather unlikely, doesn't it? Are there no other young ladies?" At his expression, the smile returned, and her voice became reassuring. "But, we'll see. We'll see." "Thank you, mother." At least, he had that much. He rose from his chair and kissed her cheek. "I have to be sure the cows have all been stalled." With a final smile exchanged between them, he left her, hurrying across the yard to the barn. The cows had all been attended to, of course, but he stayed in the barn for a few moments, driving his work-formed fist into a grain sack again and again, sweat breaking out on his forehead and running down his temples and along the sides of his face, while the breath grunted out of his nostrils and he half-articulated curses that were all the more terrible because he did not fully understand at whom or what they were directed. Vaguely sick to his stomach, he gently closed the barn door behind him, and saw from the color of the sunset and the feel of the wind, that it would be a good night. The realization was one that filled him with equal parts of anticipation and guilt. The air temperature was just right, and the dew had left a perfect leavening of dampness in the night. Cot let the false door close quietly behind him, and slipped noiselessly up and across the moist lawn at an angle that brought him out on the clay road precisely at the point where his property ended and Mr. Holland's began. He walked through the darkness with gravel shifting silently under his moccasins, his bandolier bumping gently against his body, with the occasional feel of oily metal against his cheek as the carbine, slung from his shoulder, touched him with its curving magazine. It was a comforting sensation--his father had felt it before him, and his father's father. It had been the mark of free men for all of them. When he had come as close to Mr. Holland's house as he could without disturbing the dog, he left the road and slid into the ditch that ran beside it, cradling his carbine in the crooks of his bent arms, and bellycrawled silently and rapidly until he was as near the house as the ditch would take him. He raised his head behind a clump of weeds he had planted during a spring rainstorm, and, using this as cover, swept the front of the house with his vision. For any of this to be possible without the dog's winding him, the breeze had to be just right. On such nights, it was. The parlor window--perhaps the only surface-level parlor window in this area, he commented to himself--was lighted, and she was in the room. Cot checked the sharp sound of his breath and sank his teeth against his lower lip. He kept his hands carefully away from the metalwork of his carbine, for his palms were sweated. He waited until, finally, she put the light out and went downstairs to bed, then dropped his head and rested it on his folded arms for a moment, his eyes closed and his breath uncontrollably uneven, before he twisted quietly and began to crawl back up the ditch. Tonight, so soon after what his mother had told him, he was shocked but not truly surprised to discover that his vision was badly blurred. He reached the point where it was safe to leave the ditch and stood up quietly. He put one foot on the road and sprang up to the clay surface of the road with an easy contraction of his muscles. He had no warning of a darker shadow among the dappled splotches thrown by the roadside weeds and bushes. Mr. Holland said "Hi, boy," quietly. Cot dropped his shoulder, ready to let the carbine he had just reslung slide down his arm and into his hand. He stood motionless, peering at Mr. Holland, who had stepped up to him. "Mr. Holland!" The old man chuckled. "Weren't expecting me, huh?" Cot took a measure of relief from the man's obvious lack of righteous anger. "Good--uh--good evening, sir," he mumbled. Apparently, he was not going to die immediately, but there was no telling what was going on in his neighbor's mind. "Guess I was right about that patch of weeds springing up kind of sudden." Cot felt the heat rush into his ears, but he said "Weeds, sir?" "Pretty slick. You got the makings of a damn good combat man." Cot was thankful for the darkness as one cause for his flush was replaced by another. The lack of light, however, did not keep his voice from betraying more than it should have. Mr. Holland's implication had been obvious. "My family, sir, prefers not to acknowledge those kin who had sunk below their proper station. You will understand that, under differing circumstances, I might thus consider your remark to be, in the least, not flattering." Mr. Holland chuckled--a sound filled with the accumulated checks to hastiness acquired through a lifetime that was half over when Cot's began. "No insults intended, son. There was a time when a guy like you wouldn't have stopped strutting for a week, after a pat on the back like that." Cot could still feel the heat in his cheeks, and its cause overrode his sharp sense of incongruity at this midnight debate, a completely illogical development of circumstances under which any other two men would long ago have settled the question in a normal civilized manner. "Fortunately, sir," he said, his voice now kept at its normal pitch with some effort, "we no longer live in such times." "You don't maybe." Mr. Holand's voice was somewhat testy. "I sincerely hope not, sir." Mr. Holland made an impatient sound. "Boy, your Uncle Jim was the best goddamned rifleman that ever took out a patrol. Any family that gets snotty notions about being better than him--" He chopped the end of the sentence off with a raw and bitter curse. Cot recoiled from the adjective. "Sir!" "Excuse me," Mr. Holland said sarcastically. "I forgot you're living in refined times. Not too refined for a man to go crawling in ditches to sneak a look at a girl, though. A girl sitting and reading a book!" he added with something like shock. Cot felt the adrenaline-propelled tingle sweep through his bloodstream and knot his muscles. At any moment, Mr. Holland was obviously going to call an Affair of Integrity. Even while he formulated the various points for and against a right to defend himself even if surprised in so palpably immoral an action, his reflexes let the carbine slip to the angle of his shoulder and hang precariously from the sling, which now, despite careful oiling, gave a perverse squeak. Cot set his teeth in annoyance. "I haven't got a gun on you, boy," Mr. Holland said quietly. "There's better ways of protecting your integrity than shooting people." Cot had long ago decided that his neighbor, like all the old people who had been born in the Wild Sixties and grown up through the Dirty Years was, to put it politely, unconventional. But the sheer lack of common sense in going unarmed into a situation where one's Integrity might be molested was more than any unconventionality. But that was neither here nor there. In such a case, the greater responsibility in carrying out the proprieties was obviously his to assume. "Allow me to state the situation clearly, sir," he said, "In order that there might be no misunderstanding." "No misunderstanding, son. Not about the situation, anyway. Hell, when I was your--" "Nevertheless," Cot interposed, determined not to let Mr. Holland trap himself into a genuine social blunder, "The fact remains that I have trespassed on your property for a number of years--" "For the purpose of peeping at Barbara," Mr. Holland finished for him. "Do me a favor, son?" Mr. Holland's voice was slightly touched by an amused annoyance. "Certainly, sir." "Can the--" Mr. Holland caught himself. "I mean, show a little less concern for the social amenities; ease up on this business of doing the right thing, come hell or high water, and just listen. Here. Sit down, and let's talk about a few things." Cot's nerves had edged to the breaking point. He was neither hung nor pardoned. This final gaucherie was too much for him. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, his voice, nerve-driven, harder and harsher than he intended, "but that's out of the question. I suggest that you either do your duty as the head of your family or else acknowledge your unwillingness to do so." "Why?" The question was not as surprising as it might have been, had it come at the beginning of this fantastic scene. But it served to crystallize one point. It was not meant as a defiant insult, Cot realized. It was a genuine and sincere inquiry. And the fact that Mr. Holland was incapable of appreciating the answer was proof that his mother's advice had been correct. Holland was not a gentleman. Quite obviously, there was only one course now open to him, if he did not abandon all hope of Barbara's hand. Incredible as it might seem, it was to answer the question in all seriousness, in an attempt to force some understanding through the long-set and, bluntly, ossified, habits of Holland's thinking. "I should think it would be hardly necessary to remind you that an individual's Integrity is his most prized moral possession. In this particular case, I have violated your daughter's Integrity, and, through blood connection, that of your family, as well." Cot shook his head in the darkness. Explain he might, but his voice was indication enough of his outrage. "What's that?" Holland's own voice was wearing thin. "I beg your pardon, sir?" "Integrity, damn it! Give me a definition." "Integrity, sir? Why, everyone--" Holland cut him off with a frustrated curse. "I should have known better than to ask! You can't even verbalize it, but you'll cut each other down for it. All right, you go ahead, but don't expect me to help you make a damned fool of yourself." He sighed. "Go on home, son. Maybe, in about twenty years or so, you'll get up guts enough to come and knock on the door like a man, if you want to see Barbara." Through the occlusion of his almost overwhelming rage, Cot realized that he could not, now, say anything further which might offend Holland. "I'm certain that if I were to do so, Miss Barbara would not receive me," he finally managed to say in an even voice, gratified at his ability to do so. "No, she probably wouldn't," Holland said bitterly. "She's too goddamned well brought up, thanks to those bloody aunts of hers!" Before Cot could react to this, Holland spat on the ground, and, turning his back like a coward, strode off down the road. Cot stood atone in the night, his hands clutching his bandolier, grinding the looped cartridges together. Then he turned on his heel and loped home. He left his carbine on the family arms-rack in the front parlor, and padded about the surface floor in his moccasins, resetting the alarms, occasionally interrupting himself to tense his arms or clamp his jaw as he thought of what had happened. The incredible complexity of the problem overwhelmed him, presenting no clear face which he could attack and rationalize logically. Primarily, of course, the fault was his. He had committed a premeditated breach of Integrity. It was in its various ramifications that the question lost its clarity. He had spied on Barbara Holland and done it repeatedly. Her father had become aware of the fact. Tonight, rather than issue a direct challenge, Holland had lain in wait for him. Then, having informed Cot that he was aware of his actions, Holland had not only not done the gentlemanly thing, but had actually ridiculed his expectation of it. The man had insulted Cot and his family, and had derided his own daughter. He had referred to his sisters-in-law in a manner which, if made public, would have called for a bandolier-flogging at the hands of the male members of the female line. But the fact nevertheless remained that whether Mr. Holland was a gentleman or Holland was not, Cot had been guilty of a serious offense. And, in Cot's mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was as disastrous and disgusting as a public horror. And, since Holland had refused to solve the problem for him in the manner in which anyone else would unhesitatingly have done so, Cot was left with this to gnaw at his brain and send him into sudden short-lived bursts of anger intermingled with longer, quieter, and deadlier spells of remorseful shame. Finally, when he had patrolled the entire surface floor, Cot walked noiselessly down to the living quarters, completely uncertain of the degree of his guilt, and, therefore, of his shame and disgrace, knowing that he would not sleep no matter how long he lay on his bed--and he fought down that part of his mind which recalled the image of Barbara Holland. Fought--but lost. The remembered picture was as strong as the others beside which he placed it, beginning with the first one from five years ago, when, at the age of twenty- one, he had passed her window on his return from Graduate training. And, though he saw her almost every day at the post office or store, these special images were not obscured by the cold and proper aloofness with which she surrounded herself when she was not--he winced--alone. Again, there was the entire problem of Barbara's father. The man had been raised in the wild immorality and casual circumstances of the Dirty Years. Obviously, he could see nothing wrong with what Cot had been doing. He had sense enough not to tell anyone else about it, thank the good Lord--but, in some blundering attempt to "get you two kids together," or whatever he might call it, what would he tell Barbara? Dawn came, and Cot welcomed the night's end. As head of the family since his father's death in an affair of Integrity two years before--he had, of course, been the Party at Grievance--it was Cot's duty to plan each day's activities insofar as they were to vary from the normal farm routine. Today, with all the spring work done and summer chores still so light as to be insignificant, he was at a loss, but he was grateful for this opportunity to lose himself in a problem with which he had been trained to cope. But after an hour of attempting to think, he was forced to fall back on what, in retrospect, must have been a device his father had put to similar use. If there was nothing else, there was always Drill. Out of consideration for his grandmother's age, he waited until 7:58 before he touched the alarm stud, but not even the heavy slam of shutters being convulsively hurled into their places in the armor plate of the exterior walls, the sudden screech of the generators as the radar antennas came out of their half-sleep into madly whirling life, or the clatter as the household children fired test bursts from their machineguns were enough to quench the fire in his mind. The drill ran until 10:00. By then, it was obvious that the household defenses were doing everything they had been designed to, and that the members of the household knew their parts perfectly. Even his grandmother's legendary skill with her rangefinder had not grown dull--though there was a distinct possibility that she had memorized the range of every likely target in the area. But that, if true, was not an evasion of her duties but, instead, a valuable accomplishment. "Very good," he said over the household intercommunications system. "All members of the household are now free to return to their normal duties, with the exception of the children, who will report to me for their schooling." His mother, whose battle station was at the radarscope a few feet away from his fire control board, smiled with approval as she returned the switches to AutoSurvey. She put her hand gently on his forearm as he rose from behind the board. "I'm glad, Cottrell. Very glad," she said with her smile. He did not understand what she meant, at first, and looked at her blankly. "I was afraid you might neglect your duties, as so many of our neighbors are doing," she explained by continuing. "But I should not have doubted you, even to that degree." Her low voice was strongly underlaid with her pride in him. "Your fiber is stronger than that. Why, I was even afraid that your disappointment after our little talk yesterday might distract you. But I was wrong, and you'll never know how thrilled I am to see it." He bent to kiss her quickly, so that she would not see his eyes, and hurried up to the parlor, where the children had already assembled and taken their weapons out of the arms-rack. By mid-afternoon, the younger children had been excused, and only his two oldest brothers were out on the practice terrain with him. "Stay down!" Cot shouted at Alister. "You'll never live to Graduate if you won't learn to flatten out at the crest of a rise!" He flung his carbine up to his cheek and snapped a branch beside his brother's rump to prove the point. "Now, you," he whirled on Geoffrey. "How'd I estimate my windage? Quick!" "Grass," Geoffrey said laconically. "Wrong! You haven't been over that ground in two weeks. You've no accurate idea of how much wind will disturb that grass into its present pattern." "Asked me how you did it," Geoffrey pointed out. "All right," Cot snapped. "Score one for you. Now, how would you do it?" "Feel. Watch me." Geoffrey's lighter weapon cracked with a noise uncannily like that of the branch, which now split at a point two inches below where Cot's heavy slug had broken it off. "Have an instinct for it, do you?" Cot was perversely glad to find an outlet for his annoyance. "Do it again." Geoffrey shrugged. He fired twice. The branch splintered, and there was a shout from Alister. Cot spun and glared at Geoffrey. "Put it next to his hand," Geoffrey explained. "Guess he got some dirt in his face, too." Cot looked at the point where the grass was undulating wildly as Alister tried to roll away under its cover. He found time to note his brother's clumsiness before he said, "You couldn't have seen his hand--or anything except the top of his rump, for that matter." Geoffrey's seventeen-year-old face was secretly amused. "I just figured, if I was Alice, where would I keep my hands? Simple." Cot could feel the challenge to his pre-eminence as the family's fighting man gathering thickly about him. "Very good," he said bitingly. "You have an instinct for combat. Now, suppose that had been a defective cartridge--bad enough to tumble the bullet to the right and kill your brother. What then?" "I hand-loaded those cases myself. Think I'm fool enough to trust that ham-handed would-be gunsmith at the store?" Geoffrey was impregnable. Cot felt his temper beginning to escape the clutch of his strained will. "If you're so good, why don't you go off and join the Militia?" Geoffrey took the insult without an expression on his face. "Think I'll stick around," he said calmly. "You're going to need help--if old man Holland ever catches you on those moonlight strolls of yours." Cot could feel the sudden rush of blood pushing at the backs of his eyes. "What did you say?" The words drove out of his throat with low deadliness. "You heard me." Geoffrey turned away, put a bullet to either side of the thrashing Mister, and one above and below. Mister's training broke completely, and he sprang out of the grass and began to run, shouts choking his throat. "A rabbit," Geoffrey spat contemptuously. "Just pure rabbit. Me, I've got Uncle Jim's blood, but that Alice, he's strictly Mother." He fired again and snapped the heel off Alister's shoe. As Alister stumbled to the ground, Cot's open palm smashed against the side of Geoffrey's face. Geoffrey took two sideward steps and stopped, his eyes wide with shock. The rifle hung limply from his hands. He had several years to grow before he would raise it instinctively. "You'll never mention that relative's name again!" Cot said thickly. "Not to me, and not to anyone else. What's more, you'll consider it a breach of Integrity if anyone speaks of him in your presence. Is that understood? And as for your fantasies about myself and Mr. Holland, if you mention that again, you'll learn that there is such a thing as a breach of Integrity between brothers!" But he knew that anything he might say now was as much of an admission as a shouted confession. He could feel the night's sickness seeping through his system again, turning his muscles into limp rags and sending the blood pounding through his ears. Geoffrey narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled into a half-sneer. "For a guy that hates armies and soldiers, you sure think you can act like a Senior Sergeant," he said bitterly. He turned around and began to stride away, then stopped and looked back. "And I'd drop you before you got the lead out of your pants," he added. Geoffrey knows, echoed through his mind. Geoffrey knows, and Mr. Holland found me out. How many others? Like a sickening refrain, the thoughts tumbled over and over in his skull as he swung down the road with rapid and clumsy strides. The usual coordination of all the muscles in his lithe body had been destroyed by the added shock of what he had learned on the practice terrain. He pictured Geoffrey, watching from a window and snickering as he crawled down the ditch. He seemed to hear Mr. Holland's dry chuckle. Over the last three years, how many others of his neighbors had seen him? As he thought of it, it seemed incredible that pure chance had not ensured that the entire countryside was aware of his disgraceful actions. But he could not run from it. It was not the way a man faced situations. The thing to do was to go to the club and watch the faces of the men as they looked at him. As they greeted him, there would be a little hidden demon of scorn in their eyes to be looked for. The carbine's butt slapped his thigh as he climbed the club steps. He could not be sure he had found it. As he looked down at the newly refilled mug of rum, he understood this with considerable clarity. He could not deny that a strange sort of perverse desire to see what was not really there might have put an imagined edge on the twinkle in Winter's eyes, the undercurrent of mirth that always accented Olsen's voice. If Lundy Hollis sneered a bit more than usual, it probably meant nothing more than that the man had discovered some new quality in himself that made him better than his fellows. But probably, probably, and nothing certain. Neither affirmation nor denial. Cot's hand closed around the mug, and he scalded his throat with the drink. The remembered visions of Barbara were attaining a greater precision with every swallow. "Hello, boy." Oh, my God! he thought. He'd forgotten that Holland was a member of the club. But, of course, he was, though Cot couldn't understand how the old man managed to be kept in. He watched Mr. Holland slip into the seat opposite his, and wondered how many chuckles had accompanied the man's retelling of last night's events. "How do you do, sir," he managed to say, remembering to maintain the necessary civilities. "Don't mind if I work on my liquor at the same table with you, do you?" Cot shook his head. "It's my pleasure, sir." The chuckle came that Cot had been waiting for. "Say, boy, even with a few slugs in you, you don't forget to tack on those fancy parts of speech, do you?" Mr. Holland chuckled again. "Guess I got a little mad at you last night," he went on. "Sorry about that. Everybody's got a right to live the way they want to." Cot stared silently into his mug. The clarity that had begun to emerge from the rum was unaccountably gone, as though the very touch of Holland's presence was enough to plunge him headlong back into the mental chaos that had strangled his thinking through the night and most of the day. He was no longer sure that Mr. Holland had not kept the story to himself; he was no longer sure that Geoffrey had done more than make a shrewd guess ...He was no longer sure. "Look, boy..." [Image] And the realization came that, for the first time since he had known him, Mr. Holland was as much unsure of his ground as he. He looked up, and saw the slow light of uncertainty in the man's glance. "Yes, sir?" "Boy--I don't know. I tried to talk to you last night, but I guess we were both kind of steamed up. Think you'll feel more like listening tonight? Particularly if I'm careful about picking my words?" "Certainly, sir." That, at least, was common courtesy. "Well, look--I was a friend of your Uncle Jim's." Cot bristled. "Sir, I--" He stopped. In a sense, he was obligated to Mr. Holland. If he didn't say it now, it would have to be said later. "Sorry, sir. Please go on." Mr. Holland nodded. "We campaigned with Berendtsen together, sure. That doesn't sit too well with some people around here. But it's true, and there's lots of people who remember it, so there's nothing wrong with my saying it." Something that was half reflex twisted Cot's mouth at the mention of the AU, but he kept silent. "How else was Ted going to get a central government started among a bunch of forted-up farmers and lone-wolf nomads? Beat 'em individually at checkers? We needed a government--and fast, before we ran out of cartridges for the guns and went back to spears and arrows." "They didn't have to do it the way they did it," Cot said bitterly. Mr. Holland sighed. "Devil they didn't. And, besides, how do you know exactly how it was done? Were you there?" "My mother and father were. My mother remembers very well," Cot shot back. "Yeah," Mr. Holland said dryly. "Your father was there. And your mother was always good at remembering. Does she remember how your father came to be here in the first place?" Cot frowned for a moment at the obscure reference to his father. "She remembers. She also remembers my uncle's leading the group that wiped out her family." Holland smiled cryptically. "Funny, the way things change in people's memories," he murmured. He went on more loudly. "The way I heard it, her folks were from Pennsylvania. What were they doing, holding down Jersey land?" He leaned forward. "Look, son, it wasn't anybody's land. Her folks could have kept it, if they hadn't been too scared to believe us when we told them all we wanted was for them to join the Republic. And anyway, none of that kept her from marrying Bob." Cot took a deep breath. "My father, sir, never fought under Berendtsen. His Integrity did not permit him to take other people's orders, or do their butchery." "Ahuh," Mr. Holland said. "Your father got to be awful good with that carbine. He had to," he added in a lower voice. "And I guess he had to rationalize it somehow. "Your father built up this household defense system," he said more clearly. "I guess he figured that an armored bunker was the thing to protect his property the same way his carbine protected him. "Which wasn't a bad idea. Berendtsen unified this country, but he didn't exactly clean it up. That was more than they gave him time for." Holland stopped and drained his mug. He put it down and wiped his mouth. "But, boy, don't you think those days are kind of over? Don't you think it's time we came out of those hedgehog houses, and out of this hedgehog Integrity business?" Mr. Holland put his palms on the table and held Cot's eyes with his own. "Don't you think it's time we finished the unifying job, and got us a community where a boy can walk up to his neighbor's house in broad daylight, knock on the door, and say hello to a girl if he wants to?" Cot had been listening with his emotions so tangled that none of them could have been unraveled and classified. But now, Holland's last words reached him, and once again, the thought of what had happened the previous night was laid bare, and all his disgust for himself with it. "I'm sorry, sir," he said stiffly. "But I'm afraid we have differing views on the subject. A man's home is his defense, and his Integrity and that of his family are what keep that defense strong and inviolate. Perhaps other parts of the Republic are not founded on that principle, as I've heard lately, but here the code by which we live is one which evolved for the fulfillment of those vital requisites to freedom. If we abandon them, we go back to the Dirty Years. "And I am afraid, sir," he finished with a remembrance of the outrage he had felt the previous night, "that despite your questionable efforts, I shall still marry your daughter honorably, or not at all." Holland shook his head and smiled to himself, and Cot realized how foolish that last sentence had sounded. Nevertheless, while he could not help his impulses, he was perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong. Holland stood up. "All right, boy. You stick to your system. Only--it doesn't seem to work too well for you, does it?" And, once again, Mr. Holland turned around and walked away, leaving Cot with nothing to say or do, and with no foundation for assurance. It was as though Cot grappled with a vague nightmare; a dark and terrible shape that presented no straightforward facet to be attacked, but which put out tentacles and pseudopods until he was completely enmeshed in it--only to fade away and leave him with his clawing arms hooked around nothing. It was worse than any anger or insult could have been. His footsteps were unsteady as he crossed the club floor. The rum he had drunk, combined with a sleepless night, had settled into a weight at the base of his skull. He was about to open the door when Charles Kittredge laid a hand on his arm. Cot turned. "How do you do, Cottrell," Kittredge said. Cot nodded. Charles was his neighbor on the side away from Mr. Holland. "How do you do." "You look a little tired," Charles remarked. "I am, Charles." He grinned back in answer to his neighbor's smile. "Shouldn't wonder--holding a drill at 0800." Cot shrugged. "Have to keep the defenses in shape, you know." Kittredge laughed. "Why, for God's sake? Or were you just rehearsing for the Fourth?" Cot frowned. "Why--no, of course not. I've heard you holding Drill, often enough." His neighbor nodded. "Sure--whenever one of the kids has a birthday. But you don't really mean you were holding a genuine dead-serious affair?" Cot was having trouble maintaining his concentration. He squinted and shook his head slightly. "What's the matter with that?" Kittredge's voice and manner became more serious. "Oh, now look, Cot, there's been nothing to defend against in fifteen years. Matter of fact, I'm thinking of dismounting my artillery and selling it to the Militia. They're offering a fair price" Cot looked at him uncomprehendingly. "You can't be serious?" Kittredge returned the look. "Sure." "But you can't. They'd stay out of machinegun range and shell you to fragments with mortars and fieldpieces. They'd knock out your machinegun turrets, come in closer under rifle cover, and lob grenades into your living quarters." Kittredge laughed. He slapped his thigh while his shoulders shook. "Who the devil is 'they,'" he gasped. "Berendtsen?" Cot felt the first touch of anger as it penetrated the deadening blanket that had wrapped itself around his thoughts. Kittredge gave one final chuckle. "Come off it, will you, Cot? As a matter of fact, while I wasn't going to mention it, all that banging going on at your place this morning practically ruined one of my cows. Ran head-on into a fence. It's not the first time it's happened, either. The only reason I've never said anything is because your own livestock probably has just as bad a time of it. "Look, Cot, we can't afford to unnerve our livestock and poison our land. It was all right as long as it was the only way we could operate at all, but the most hostile thing that's been seen around here in years is a chicken hawk." The touch of anger had become a genuine feeling. Cot could feel it settling into the pit of his stomach and vibrating at his fingertips. "So, you're asking me to stop holding Drill, is that it?" Kittredge heard the faint beginning of a rasp in Cot's voice, and frowned. "Not altogether, Cot. Not if you don't want to. But I wish you'd save it for celebrations." "The weapons of my household aren't firecrackers." The words were carried as though at the flicking end of a whip. "Oh, come on, Cot!" For almost twenty-four hours, Cot had been encountering situations for which his experience held no solutions. He was baffled, frustrated, and angry. The carbine was off his shoulder and in his hands with the speed and smoothness of motion that his father had drilled into him until it was beyond impedance by exhaustion or alcohol. With the gun in his hands, he suddenly realized just how angry he was. "Charles Kittredge, I charge you with attempt to breach the Integrity of my household. Load and fire." The formula, too, was as ingrained in Cot as was his whole way of life. Chuck Kittredge knew it as well as he did. He blanched. "You gone crazy?" It was a new voice, from slightly beyond and beside Charles. Cot's surprised glance flickered over and saw Kittredge's younger brother, Michael. "Do you stand with him?" Cot rapped out. "Aw, now, look, Cot..." Charles Kittredge began. "You're not serious about this?' "Stand or turn your back." "Cot! All I said was--" "Am I to understand that you are attempting to explain yourself?" Michael Kittredge moved forward. "What's the matter with you, Garvin? You living in the Dirty Years or something?" The knot of fury twisted itself tighter in Cot's stomach. "That will be far enough. I asked you once: Do you stand with him?" "No, he doesn't!" Charles Kittredge said violently. "And I don't stand either. What kind of a fool things going on in your head, anyway? People just don't pull challenges like that at the drop of a hat anymore!" "That's for each man to decide for himself," Cot answered. "Do you turn your back, then?" An ugly red flush flamed at Kittredge's cheek. bones. "Damned if I will." His mouth clamped into an etched white line. "All right, then, Cot, what goes through that door first, you or me?" "Nobody will go anywhere. You'll stand or turn where you are." "Right here in the club? You are crazy!" "You chose the place, not I. Load and fire." Kittredge put his hand on his rifle sling. "On the count, then," he said hopelessly. Cot re-slung his carbine. "One," he said. "Two." He and Kittredge picked up the count together. "Three," in unison. "Four." "Fi--" Cot had not bothered to count five aloud. The carbine fell into his hooked and waiting hands, and jumped once. Kittredge, interrupted in the middle of his last word, collapsed to the club floor. Cot looked down at him, and then back to Michael, who was standing where he had been looking at Cot's face. "Do you stand with him?" Cot repeated the formula once more. Michael shook his head dumbly. "Then turn." [Image] Michael nodded. "I'll turn. Sure, I'll be a coward." There was a peculiar quality to his voice. Cot had seen men turn before, but never as though by free choice. Except for Holland, of course, the thought came. Cot looked at the width of Michael's back, and reslung his carbine. "All right, Michael. Take your dead home to your household." He stood where he was while Michael hoisted his bother's body over his shoulder. According to the formula, he should have publicly called the boy a coward. But he did not, and his next words betrayed his reason. "He was a good friend of mine, Michael. I'm sorry he forced me to do it." As he walked home, past Mr. Holland's house, Cot did not turn his head to see if there were lights in any of the windows. He had kept his family's Integrity unbreached. He had forced another man to turn. But he did not himself know whether he hoped Barbara would understand that, in a sense, he had done it to redeem himself for her. Two days later, at dinnertime Geoffrey and Alister came in five minutes late. Geoffrey's face was wide and numb with shock, and Alister's was glowing with a rampant inner joy. It was only when Geoffrey turned that Cot saw his left sleeve soaked in blood. "Geoffrey!" Cot's mother pushed her chair back and ran to him. She pulled a medkit off its wall bracket and began cutting the sleeve away. "What happened?" Cot asked. "I got my man today," Geoffrey said, his voice as numb as his features. "He rightfully belongs to Al, here, though" A grin broke through the numbness, and a babble of words came out as the shock of the wound passed into hysteria "That crazy Michael Kittredge climbed a tree up at the edge of the practice terrain. Had a 'scopemounted T-4 and six extra clips. Must have figured on an all-out war. First thing I knew, it felt like somebody hit my shoulder with a baseball bat, and I was down, with the slugs plowing the ground in circles around me. I tried to do something with my rifle, but no go. Kittredge must have had crosseyes or something--couldn't hit the side of a cliff with a howitzer, after the first shot damn fool stunt, 'scope-mounting an automatic somebody should have taught him better--and there I was, passing out from the recoil every time I squeezed off. You never saw such a blind man's shooting match in your life! "Then out of this gully he'd been imitating an elephant wallowing through, up pops Al! Slaps the old blunderbuss to his shoulder like the man on a skeet- shoot trophy, and starts blasting away at Kittredge's tree like there was nothing up there but pigeons! Tell you, the sight of that came nearer killing me than Kittredge's best out of twenty-five. "Well, the jerk might have been crazy, but he wasn't up to ignoring a clipload of soft-nose. He swings that lunatic T-4 of his for A1, and this gives me a chance to steady up and put a lucky shot through a leaf he happened to be in back of at the time. He's still out there." Cot felt his teeth go into his lower lip. Michael Kittredge! "He shot you from ambush?" "He wasn't carrying any banners!" "But that's disgraceful! Cot's mother exclaimed. She finished wrapping the gauze over the patch bandage on Geoffrey's bicep. Cot looked at Alister, who was standing beside Geoffrey, his face still shining. "Is that what happened, Alister?" he asked. Alister nodded. "Sure, that's what happened!" Geoffrey said indignantly. "Think this's a mosquito bite?" "You know what this means, don't you?" Cot asked gravely. Geoffrey began a shrug and winced. "Fool kid with a bug." Cot shook his head. "The Kittredges may be lax in their training, but Michael knew better. In a sense, that was a declaration of war. If Michael was out there, the rest of his household may not have known about it, but when they find out they'll be forced to support his action." "So it's a declaration of war," Alister suddenly said, his tones a conscious imitation of Geoffrey's. "What have we been drilling for?" Geoffrey's eyes opened wide, and the secretive laughter returned to his expression as he looked at his younger brother. "Not to start a war--or get involved in one," Cot said. "Their gunnery will be sloppier than ours, but their armor plate's just as thick." "What do you want to do, Cottrell?" his mother asked. Her delicate face was anxious, and her hands seemed to have poised for the express purpose of underscoring the question. "We've got to stop this thing before it snowballs," Geoffrey said. "I didn't get it before, but Cot's right." Cot nodded. "We'll have to call everybody in to a meeting. I don't know what can be done about the Kittredges. Maybe we'll all be able to think of something." He beat the side of his fist lightly against his thigh. "I don't know. It's never been done before. But the Kittredges aren't the AU. We can't handle the problem by simply dropping our shutters and fighting as independent units. The whole community would finish in firing on each other. We've got to have concerted action. Perhaps, if the community lines up as a solid block against them, we'll be able to forestall the Kittredges." "Unite the community!" His mother's eyes were wide. "Do you think you can do it?" Cot sighed. "I don't know, mother. I couldn't guess." He turned back to Alister. "We're going up to the club. It's the only natural meeting place we've got. I think you'd better break out the car. The Kittredges might have more snipers among them." He picked his carbine up from the arms rack, and started to follow the busily efficient Alister down to the garage. "I'll go with you," Geoffrey said. "Only takes one arm to work the turret guns." Cot looked at him indecisively. Finally, he said, "All right. There's no telling what the Kittredges might be up to along the road." He turned back to his mother. "I think it might be advisable to put the household on action stations." She nodded, and he went down into the garage. The road was open, and glaring white in the sunlight of early afternoon. The armored car's tires jounced over the latitudinal ruts that freight trucks had worn into the road, and one part of him was worried about the effect on Geoffrey, battened down in the turret. He looked up through the overhead slits and saw the twin muzzles of the 35mm cannon tracking steadily counterclockwise. Where did it begin, what started it? he thought with most of his mind. The chain of recent events was clear. From the moment that Mr. Holland had discovered him, that night four days ago, event had followed event as plainly and as inevitably as though it had been planned in advance. If he had not been upset by his meeting with Mr. Holland, he would not have called Drill the following morning. If he had never seen Barbara at her window at all, there would have been nothing for Geoffrey to taunt him with, and no fear of exposure to drive him to the club. If he had not been drinking, Mr. Holland's references to Uncle James would not have cut so deeply. Had there been no Drill, there would have been no quarrel with Charles Kittredge, and even if there had been Drill, Charles's remarks would not have been so objectionable had there been no smoldering resentment from his talk with Mr. Holland. For, it was true, he had been angry. Had he not been, Charles and Michael would not be dead, and he and his brothers would not now be in the car, trying to stop an upheaval of violence that would involve the entire community. But his anger had not been his responsibility. A breach of Integrity remained a breach of Integrity, no matter what the subjective state of the Party at Grievance. But where did it really begin? If his mother had ever introduced him to Barbara, would any of this have happened? He rejected that possibility. His mother had been acting in accordance with the code that his father and the other free men who had settled in this area had evolved. And the code was a good code. It had kept the farmlands free and in peace, with no man wearing another's collar--until Michael Kittredge broke the code. And so, while he thought, he turned the car off the road and stopped in front of the club. The porch of the club was already crowded with men. As he climbed out of the car's hatch, he saw that all the families of the community, with the exception of the Kittredges, were represented. Olsen, Hollis, Winter, Jordan, Park, Jones, Cadell, Rome, Lynn, Williams, Bridges--all of them. Even Mr. Holland stood near the center of the porch, his lined face graver than Cot had ever seen it. He walked toward them. The news had spread rapidly. He remembered that a lot of households had radios now. He'd never seen any use for one, before. Probably, he ought to get one. As long as the families were uniting, a fast communications channel was a good idea. "That's far enough, Garvin!" He stopped and stared up at the men on the porch. Lundy Hollis had lifted his rifle Cot frowned. One or two other guns in the crowd were being raised in his direction. "I don't understand this'" he said. Hollis sneered, and snorted. He looked past Cot at the car. "If anyone in the buggy tries anything, we've got a present for them." The men on the porch drew off to two sides. Two men were crouched in the club's doorway. One held a steady antitank rocket launcher on his shoulder, and the other, having fed a rocket into the chamber, stood ready to slap the top of his head and give the signal to fire. "I'll ask once more--" "Looks like you've united the community, boy," Mr. Holland said. "Against you." Cot felt the familiar surge of anger ripple up through his body. "Against me! What for?" There was a scattered chorus of harsh laughs. "What about Chuck Kittredge?" Hollis asked. "Charles Kittredge! That was an Affair of Integrity!" "Yeah? Whose--yours or his?" Hollis asked. "Seems like the day of Integrity has sort of come and gone, son," Mr. Holland said gently. "Yeah, and what about Michael Kittredge?" someone shouted from the back of the crowd. "Was that an Affair of Integrity, too?" "What about those two brothers of yours shooting the kid out of a tree?" someone else demanded. "Geoffrey's in the car with a wounded arm right now!" Cot shouted. "And Mike Kittredge's dead." There was a babble of voices. The burst of sound struck Cot's ears, and he felt himself crouch, fists balled, as the knot of fury within him exploded in reply. "All right," he shouted. "All right! I came up here to ask you to stop the Kittredges with me. I see they got to you first. All right! Then we'll take them on alone, and the devil can have all of you!" Somehow, in the storm of answers that came from the porch, Mr. Holland's quiet voice came through. "No good, boy. See, when I said 'against you,' I meant it. It's not a case of them not helping you--it means they're going to start shelling your place in two hours, whether you're in it or not." "No." The word was torn out of him, and even he had to analyze its expression. It was not a command, nor a request, nor a statement of fact or wonder. It was simply a word, and he knew, better than anyone else who heard it, how ineffectual it was. "So you'd better get your family out of there, son." The other men on the porch had fallen silent, all of them watching Cot except for the two men with the rocket launcher, who ignored everything but the armored car. Mr. Holland came off the porch and walked toward him. He put his hand on his shoulder. "Let's be getting back, son. Lots of room at my place for your family." Cot looked up at the men on the porch again. They were completely silent, all staring back at him as though he were some strange form of man that they had never seen before. He shuddered. "All right." Mr. Holland climbed through the hatch, and Cot followed him, slamming it shut behind him and settling into the drivers' saddle. He gunned the idling engine, locked his left rear wheels, and spun the car around. With the motor at full gun, the dust billowing, the armored car growled back down the road. "I heard most of it, Cot," Geoffrey's tight and bitter voice came over the intercom. "Let's get back to the house in a hurry. We can dump a ton of fray on that porch before those birds know what's hitting them." Cot shook his head until he remembered that Geoffrey couldn't see him. "They'll be gone, Jeff. Scattered out to their houses, getting ready." "Well, let's hit the houses, then," Alister said from behind the machinegun on the car's turtledeck. "Wouldn't stand a chance, son," Mr. Holland said. "He's right. They've got us cold," Cot agreed. What had happened to the code? His father had lived by it. All the people in the community had lived by it. He himself had lived by it--he caught himself. Had tried to live by it, and failed. Cot stood in the yard in front of Mr. Holland's house. It had taken an hour and a half of the time Hollis had given him, to get back to his house and move his family and a few belongings to Mr. Holland's house. There had been a strange, uncomfortable reunion between Mr. Holland and his grandmother. He had kissed his mother just now, and raised his hand as she turned back at the doorway. "I'll be all right, mother," he said. "There are a few things I'd like to attend to." "All right, son. Don't be long." He nodded, though she was already inside. Geoffrey and Alister had gone in before her, taking care of their grandmother and the younger children. Cot smiled crookedly. Alister would be all right. He hoped Geoffrey wasn't too old to adapt. Mr. Holland came out. "I'd like to thank you for taking us in," Cot said to him. Mr. Holland's face clouded. "I owe it to you, boy. I keep thinking this wouldn't be happening if I hadn't chivvied you along." Cot shook his head. "No--one way or the other, it would have happened. That's rather easy to see, now." "You coming inside, Cot? I'd like to introduce you to my daughter." Cot looked at the sun. No, not enough time. "I'll be back, Mr. Holland. Got a few loose ends to tie up." Holland looked over the low, barely visible roof of Cot's house. A small dustcloud was approaching it from the other side. He nodded. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, you'd better hurry up. Don't have more than about twenty minutes." Cot nodded. "I'll see you." He dropped the carbine into his hand and loped across the yard, not having to worry about the dog now, cutting through the scrub underbrush until he was just below the crest of a rise that overlooked his house. He flattened himself in the high grass and inched forward, until his head and shoulders were over the crest, but still hidden in the grass. He'd been right. There were three men just climbing out of a light guncarrier. Well, that's what our grandparents were, he thought. Looters. He slipped the safety. And our parents had a code. And, now his brothers had a community. But I've been living a way all my life, and I guess I've got integrity. He fired, and one of the men slapped his stomach and fell. The other two dove apart, their own rifles in their hands. Cot laughed and threw dirt into their faces with a pair of shots. One of them bucked his shoulders upward involuntarily, as the dirt flew into his eyes. Cot fired again, and the shoulders slumped. Thanks for a trick, Jeff. The other man fired back--using half a clip to cut the grass a foot to Cot's right. Cot dropped back below the crest, rolled, and came up again, ten feet from where he had been. Down by the house, the remaining man moved. Cot put a bullet an inch above his head. He had about ten minutes. Well, if he kept the man pinned down, the first salvo would do as thorough a job as any carbine shot. The man moved again--a little desperately this time--and Cot tugged at his jacket with a snap shot. Five minutes, and the man moved again. He was shouting something. Cot turned his ear forward to kill the hum of the breeze, but couldn't make out the words. He pinned the man down again. When he had a minute of life left, the man tried to run for it. He sprang up suddenly, running away from the weapons carrier, and Cot missed him for that reason. When the man cut back, he shot him through the leg. Damn! Jeff would have done better than that! The man was crawling for the carrier. Over at the Kittredges, the first muzzle-flashes flared, and the thud of guns rolled over the hills. Cot put a bullet through the crawling man's head. He'd been right. The Kittredges' gunnery was poor. The first salvo landed a hundred yards over--on the crest of the ridge where he was standing with his rifle in his hand. [Image]
Please click here for the next chapter [Image] CHAPTER SEVEN: [Image]
This happened in New Jersey a generation later, with Robert Garvin and Merton Hollis both dead in a duel with each other. Robert Garvin left a legacy, and this is what happened to it: Cottrell Slade Garvin was twenty-six, and had been a sex criminal for three years, when his mother called him into her parlor and explained why she could not introduce him to the girl on whom he had been spying. "Cottrell, darling," she said, laying her delicately veined hand on his sun-darkened own, "You understand that my opinion of Barbara is that she is a fine girl; one whom any young man of your class and station would ordinarily be honored to meet, and, in due course of time, betroth. But, surely, you must consider that her family,"--there was the faintest inhalation through the fragile nose--"particularly on the male side, is not one which could be accepted into our own." Her expression was genuinely regretful. "Quite frankly, her father's opinion on the proper conduct of a domicile..." The sniff was more audible. "His actions in accord with that opinion are such that our entire family would be embroiled in endless Affairs of Integrity, and you yourself would be forced to bear the brunt of most of these encounters. In addition, you would have the responsibility of defending the notoriously untenable properties which Mr. Holland pleases to designate as Barbara's dowry. "No, Cottrell, I'm afraid that, much as such a match might appeal to you at first glance, you would find that the responsibilities more than offset the benefits." Her hand patted his as lightly as the touch of a falling autumn leaf. "I'm sorry, Cottrell." A tear sparkled at the corner of each eye, and it was obvious that the discussion had been a great strain to her, for she genuinely loved her son. Cottrell sighed. "All right, mother," he said. There was nothing more he could do, at this time. "But, should circumstances change, you will reconsider, won't you?" he asked. His mother smiled, and nodded as she said, "Of course, Cottrell." But the smile faded a bit. "However, that does seem rather unlikely, doesn't it? Are there no other young ladies?" At his expression, the smile returned, and her voice became reassuring. "But, we'll see. We'll see." "Thank you, mother." At least, he had that much. He rose from his chair and kissed her cheek. "I have to be sure the cows have all been stalled." With a final smile exchanged between them, he left her, hurrying across the yard to the barn. The cows had all been attended to, of course, but he stayed in the barn for a few moments, driving his work-formed fist into a grain sack again and again, sweat breaking out on his forehead and running down his temples and along the sides of his face, while the breath grunted out of his nostrils and he half-articulated curses that were all the more terrible because he did not fully understand at whom or what they were directed. Vaguely sick to his stomach, he gently closed the barn door behind him, and saw from the color of the sunset and the feel of the wind, that it would be a good night. The realization was one that filled him with equal parts of anticipation and guilt. The air temperature was just right, and the dew had left a perfect leavening of dampness in the night. Cot let the false door close quietly behind him, and slipped noiselessly up and across the moist lawn at an angle that brought him out on the clay road precisely at the point where his property ended and Mr. Holland's began. He walked through the darkness with gravel shifting silently under his moccasins, his bandolier bumping gently against his body, with the occasional feel of oily metal against his cheek as the carbine, slung from his shoulder, touched him with its curving magazine. It was a comforting sensation--his father had felt it before him, and his father's father. It had been the mark of free men for all of them. When he had come as close to Mr. Holland's house as he could without disturbing the dog, he left the road and slid into the ditch that ran beside it, cradling his carbine in the crooks of his bent arms, and bellycrawled silently and rapidly until he was as near the house as the ditch would take him. He raised his head behind a clump of weeds he had planted during a spring rainstorm, and, using this as cover, swept the front of the house with his vision. For any of this to be possible without the dog's winding him, the breeze had to be just right. On such nights, it was. The parlor window--perhaps the only surface-level parlor window in this area, he commented to himself--was lighted, and she was in the room. Cot checked the sharp sound of his breath and sank his teeth against his lower lip. He kept his hands carefully away from the metalwork of his carbine, for his palms were sweated. He waited until, finally, she put the light out and went downstairs to bed, then dropped his head and rested it on his folded arms for a moment, his eyes closed and his breath uncontrollably uneven, before he twisted quietly and began to crawl back up the ditch. Tonight, so soon after what his mother had told him, he was shocked but not truly surprised to discover that his vision was badly blurred. He reached the point where it was safe to leave the ditch and stood up quietly. He put one foot on the road and sprang up to the clay surface of the road with an easy contraction of his muscles. He had no warning of a darker shadow among the dappled splotches thrown by the roadside weeds and bushes. Mr. Holland said "Hi, boy," quietly. Cot dropped his shoulder, ready to let the carbine he had just reslung slide down his arm and into his hand. He stood motionless, peering at Mr. Holland, who had stepped up to him. "Mr. Holland!" The old man chuckled. "Weren't expecting me, huh?" Cot took a measure of relief from the man's obvious lack of righteous anger. "Good--uh--good evening, sir," he mumbled. Apparently, he was not going to die immediately, but there was no telling what was going on in his neighbor's mind. "Guess I was right about that patch of weeds springing up kind of sudden." Cot felt the heat rush into his ears, but he said "Weeds, sir?" "Pretty slick. You got the makings of a damn good combat man." Cot was thankful for the darkness as one cause for his flush was replaced by another. The lack of light, however, did not keep his voice from betraying more than it should have. Mr. Holland's implication had been obvious. "My family, sir, prefers not to acknowledge those kin who had sunk below their proper station. You will understand that, under differing circumstances, I might thus consider your remark to be, in the least, not flattering." Mr. Holland chuckled--a sound filled with the accumulated checks to hastiness acquired through a lifetime that was half over when Cot's began. "No insults intended, son. There was a time when a guy like you wouldn't have stopped strutting for a week, after a pat on the back like that." Cot could still feel the heat in his cheeks, and its cause overrode his sharp sense of incongruity at this midnight debate, a completely illogical development of circumstances under which any other two men would long ago have settled the question in a normal civilized manner. "Fortunately, sir," he said, his voice now kept at its normal pitch with some effort, "we no longer live in such times." "You don't maybe." Mr. Holand's voice was somewhat testy. "I sincerely hope not, sir." Mr. Holland made an impatient sound. "Boy, your Uncle Jim was the best goddamned rifleman that ever took out a patrol. Any family that gets snotty notions about being better than him--" He chopped the end of the sentence off with a raw and bitter curse. Cot recoiled from the adjective. "Sir!" "Excuse me," Mr. Holland said sarcastically. "I forgot you're living in refined times. Not too refined for a man to go crawling in ditches to sneak a look at a girl, though. A girl sitting and reading a book!" he added with something like shock. Cot felt the adrenaline-propelled tingle sweep through his bloodstream and knot his muscles. At any moment, Mr. Holland was obviously going to call an Affair of Integrity. Even while he formulated the various points for and against a right to defend himself even if surprised in so palpably immoral an action, his reflexes let the carbine slip to the angle of his shoulder and hang precariously from the sling, which now, despite careful oiling, gave a perverse squeak. Cot set his teeth in annoyance. "I haven't got a gun on you, boy," Mr. Holland said quietly. "There's better ways of protecting your integrity than shooting people." Cot had long ago decided that his neighbor, like all the old people who had been born in the Wild Sixties and grown up through the Dirty Years was, to put it politely, unconventional. But the sheer lack of common sense in going unarmed into a situation where one's Integrity might be molested was more than any unconventionality. But that was neither here nor there. In such a case, the greater responsibility in carrying out the proprieties was obviously his to assume. "Allow me to state the situation clearly, sir," he said, "In order that there might be no misunderstanding." "No misunderstanding, son. Not about the situation, anyway. Hell, when I was your--" "Nevertheless," Cot interposed, determined not to let Mr. Holland trap himself into a genuine social blunder, "The fact remains that I have trespassed on your property for a number of years--" "For the purpose of peeping at Barbara," Mr. Holland finished for him. "Do me a favor, son?" Mr. Holland's voice was slightly touched by an amused annoyance. "Certainly, sir." "Can the--" Mr. Holland caught himself. "I mean, show a little less concern for the social amenities; ease up on this business of doing the right thing, come hell or high water, and just listen. Here. Sit down, and let's talk about a few things." Cot's nerves had edged to the breaking point. He was neither hung nor pardoned. This final gaucherie was too much for him. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, his voice, nerve-driven, harder and harsher than he intended, "but that's out of the question. I suggest that you either do your duty as the head of your family or else acknowledge your unwillingness to do so." "Why?" The question was not as surprising as it might have been, had it come at the beginning of this fantastic scene. But it served to crystallize one point. It was not meant as a defiant insult, Cot realized. It was a genuine and sincere inquiry. And the fact that Mr. Holland was incapable of appreciating the answer was proof that his mother's advice had been correct. Holland was not a gentleman. Quite obviously, there was only one course now open to him, if he did not abandon all hope of Barbara's hand. Incredible as it might seem, it was to answer the question in all seriousness, in an attempt to force some understanding through the long-set and, bluntly, ossified, habits of Holland's thinking. "I should think it would be hardly necessary to remind you that an individual's Integrity is his most prized moral possession. In this particular case, I have violated your daughter's Integrity, and, through blood connection, that of your family, as well." Cot shook his head in the darkness. Explain he might, but his voice was indication enough of his outrage. "What's that?" Holland's own voice was wearing thin. "I beg your pardon, sir?" "Integrity, damn it! Give me a definition." "Integrity, sir? Why, everyone--" Holland cut him off with a frustrated curse. "I should have known better than to ask! You can't even verbalize it, but you'll cut each other down for it. All right, you go ahead, but don't expect me to help you make a damned fool of yourself." He sighed. "Go on home, son. Maybe, in about twenty years or so, you'll get up guts enough to come and knock on the door like a man, if you want to see Barbara." Through the occlusion of his almost overwhelming rage, Cot realized that he could not, now, say anything further which might offend Holland. "I'm certain that if I were to do so, Miss Barbara would not receive me," he finally managed to say in an even voice, gratified at his ability to do so. "No, she probably wouldn't," Holland said bitterly. "She's too goddamned well brought up, thanks to those bloody aunts of hers!" Before Cot could react to this, Holland spat on the ground, and, turning his back like a coward, strode off down the road. Cot stood atone in the night, his hands clutching his bandolier, grinding the looped cartridges together. Then he turned on his heel and loped home. He left his carbine on the family arms-rack in the front parlor, and padded about the surface floor in his moccasins, resetting the alarms, occasionally interrupting himself to tense his arms or clamp his jaw as he thought of what had happened. The incredible complexity of the problem overwhelmed him, presenting no clear face which he could attack and rationalize logically. Primarily, of course, the fault was his. He had committed a premeditated breach of Integrity. It was in its various ramifications that the question lost its clarity. He had spied on Barbara Holland and done it repeatedly. Her father had become aware of the fact. Tonight, rather than issue a direct challenge, Holland had lain in wait for him. Then, having informed Cot that he was aware of his actions, Holland had not only not done the gentlemanly thing, but had actually ridiculed his expectation of it. The man had insulted Cot and his family, and had derided his own daughter. He had referred to his sisters-in-law in a manner which, if made public, would have called for a bandolier-flogging at the hands of the male members of the female line. But the fact nevertheless remained that whether Mr. Holland was a gentleman or Holland was not, Cot had been guilty of a serious offense. And, in Cot's mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was as disastrous and disgusting as a public horror. And, since Holland had refused to solve the problem for him in the manner in which anyone else would unhesitatingly have done so, Cot was left with this to gnaw at his brain and send him into sudden short-lived bursts of anger intermingled with longer, quieter, and deadlier spells of remorseful shame. Finally, when he had patrolled the entire surface floor, Cot walked noiselessly down to the living quarters, completely uncertain of the degree of his guilt, and, therefore, of his shame and disgrace, knowing that he would not sleep no matter how long he lay on his bed--and he fought down that part of his mind which recalled the image of Barbara Holland. Fought--but lost. The remembered picture was as strong as the others beside which he placed it, beginning with the first one from five years ago, when, at the age of twenty- one, he had passed her window on his return from Graduate training. And, though he saw her almost every day at the post office or store, these special images were not obscured by the cold and proper aloofness with which she surrounded herself when she was not--he winced--alone. Again, there was the entire problem of Barbara's father. The man had been raised in the wild immorality and casual circumstances of the Dirty Years. Obviously, he could see nothing wrong with what Cot had been doing. He had sense enough not to tell anyone else about it, thank the good Lord--but, in some blundering attempt to "get you two kids together," or whatever he might call it, what would he tell Barbara? Dawn came, and Cot welcomed the night's end. As head of the family since his father's death in an affair of Integrity two years before--he had, of course, been the Party at Grievance--it was Cot's duty to plan each day's activities insofar as they were to vary from the normal farm routine. Today, with all the spring work done and summer chores still so light as to be insignificant, he was at a loss, but he was grateful for this opportunity to lose himself in a problem with which he had been trained to cope. But after an hour of attempting to think, he was forced to fall back on what, in retrospect, must have been a device his father had put to similar use. If there was nothing else, there was always Drill. Out of consideration for his grandmother's age, he waited until 7:58 before he touched the alarm stud, but not even the heavy slam of shutters being convulsively hurled into their places in the armor plate of the exterior walls, the sudden screech of the generators as the radar antennas came out of their half-sleep into madly whirling life, or the clatter as the household children fired test bursts from their machineguns were enough to quench the fire in his mind. The drill ran until 10:00. By then, it was obvious that the household defenses were doing everything they had been designed to, and that the members of the household knew their parts perfectly. Even his grandmother's legendary skill with her rangefinder had not grown dull--though there was a distinct possibility that she had memorized the range of every likely target in the area. But that, if true, was not an evasion of her duties but, instead, a valuable accomplishment. "Very good," he said over the household intercommunications system. "All members of the household are now free to return to their normal duties, with the exception of the children, who will report to me for their schooling." His mother, whose battle station was at the radarscope a few feet away from his fire control board, smiled with approval as she returned the switches to AutoSurvey. She put her hand gently on his forearm as he rose from behind the board. "I'm glad, Cottrell. Very glad," she said with her smile. He did not understand what she meant, at first, and looked at her blankly. "I was afraid you might neglect your duties, as so many of our neighbors are doing," she explained by continuing. "But I should not have doubted you, even to that degree." Her low voice was strongly underlaid with her pride in him. "Your fiber is stronger than that. Why, I was even afraid that your disappointment after our little talk yesterday might distract you. But I was wrong, and you'll never know how thrilled I am to see it." He bent to kiss her quickly, so that she would not see his eyes, and hurried up to the parlor, where the children had already assembled and taken their weapons out of the arms-rack. By mid-afternoon, the younger children had been excused, and only his two oldest brothers were out on the practice terrain with him. "Stay down!" Cot shouted at Alister. "You'll never live to Graduate if you won't learn to flatten out at the crest of a rise!" He flung his carbine up to his cheek and snapped a branch beside his brother's rump to prove the point. "Now, you," he whirled on Geoffrey. "How'd I estimate my windage? Quick!" "Grass," Geoffrey said laconically. "Wrong! You haven't been over that ground in two weeks. You've no accurate idea of how much wind will disturb that grass into its present pattern." "Asked me how you did it," Geoffrey pointed out. "All right," Cot snapped. "Score one for you. Now, how would you do it?" "Feel. Watch me." Geoffrey's lighter weapon cracked with a noise uncannily like that of the branch, which now split at a point two inches below where Cot's heavy slug had broken it off. "Have an instinct for it, do you?" Cot was perversely glad to find an outlet for his annoyance. "Do it again." Geoffrey shrugged. He fired twice. The branch splintered, and there was a shout from Alister. Cot spun and glared at Geoffrey. "Put it next to his hand," Geoffrey explained. "Guess he got some dirt in his face, too." Cot looked at the point where the grass was undulating wildly as Alister tried to roll away under its cover. He found time to note his brother's clumsiness before he said, "You couldn't have seen his hand--or anything except the top of his rump, for that matter." Geoffrey's seventeen-year-old face was secretly amused. "I just figured, if I was Alice, where would I keep my hands? Simple." Cot could feel the challenge to his pre-eminence as the family's fighting man gathering thickly about him. "Very good," he said bitingly. "You have an instinct for combat. Now, suppose that had been a defective cartridge--bad enough to tumble the bullet to the right and kill your brother. What then?" "I hand-loaded those cases myself. Think I'm fool enough to trust that ham-handed would-be gunsmith at the store?" Geoffrey was impregnable. Cot felt his temper beginning to escape the clutch of his strained will. "If you're so good, why don't you go off and join the Militia?" Geoffrey took the insult without an expression on his face. "Think I'll stick around," he said calmly. "You're going to need help--if old man Holland ever catches you on those moonlight strolls of yours." Cot could feel the sudden rush of blood pushing at the backs of his eyes. "What did you say?" The words drove out of his throat with low deadliness. "You heard me." Geoffrey turned away, put a bullet to either side of the thrashing Mister, and one above and below. Mister's training broke completely, and he sprang out of the grass and began to run, shouts choking his throat. "A rabbit," Geoffrey spat contemptuously. "Just pure rabbit. Me, I've got Uncle Jim's blood, but that Alice, he's strictly Mother." He fired again and snapped the heel off Alister's shoe. As Alister stumbled to the ground, Cot's open palm smashed against the side of Geoffrey's face. Geoffrey took two sideward steps and stopped, his eyes wide with shock. The rifle hung limply from his hands. He had several years to grow before he would raise it instinctively. "You'll never mention that relative's name again!" Cot said thickly. "Not to me, and not to anyone else. What's more, you'll consider it a breach of Integrity if anyone speaks of him in your presence. Is that understood? And as for your fantasies about myself and Mr. Holland, if you mention that again, you'll learn that there is such a thing as a breach of Integrity between brothers!" But he knew that anything he might say now was as much of an admission as a shouted confession. He could feel the night's sickness seeping through his system again, turning his muscles into limp rags and sending the blood pounding through his ears. Geoffrey narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled into a half-sneer. "For a guy that hates armies and soldiers, you sure think you can act like a Senior Sergeant," he said bitterly. He turned around and began to stride away, then stopped and looked back. "And I'd drop you before you got the lead out of your pants," he added. Geoffrey knows, echoed through his mind. Geoffrey knows, and Mr. Holland found me out. How many others? Like a sickening refrain, the thoughts tumbled over and over in his skull as he swung down the road with rapid and clumsy strides. The usual coordination of all the muscles in his lithe body had been destroyed by the added shock of what he had learned on the practice terrain. He pictured Geoffrey, watching from a window and snickering as he crawled down the ditch. He seemed to hear Mr. Holland's dry chuckle. Over the last three years, how many others of his neighbors had seen him? As he thought of it, it seemed incredible that pure chance had not ensured that the entire countryside was aware of his disgraceful actions. But he could not run from it. It was not the way a man faced situations. The thing to do was to go to the club and watch the faces of the men as they looked at him. As they greeted him, there would be a little hidden demon of scorn in their eyes to be looked for. The carbine's butt slapped his thigh as he climbed the club steps. He could not be sure he had found it. As he looked down at the newly refilled mug of rum, he understood this with considerable clarity. He could not deny that a strange sort of perverse desire to see what was not really there might have put an imagined edge on the twinkle in Winter's eyes, the undercurrent of mirth that always accented Olsen's voice. If Lundy Hollis sneered a bit more than usual, it probably meant nothing more than that the man had discovered some new quality in himself that made him better than his fellows. But probably, probably, and nothing certain. Neither affirmation nor denial. Cot's hand closed around the mug, and he scalded his throat with the drink. The remembered visions of Barbara were attaining a greater precision with every swallow. "Hello, boy." Oh, my God! he thought. He'd forgotten that Holland was a member of the club. But, of course, he was, though Cot couldn't understand how the old man managed to be kept in. He watched Mr. Holland slip into the seat opposite his, and wondered how many chuckles had accompanied the man's retelling of last night's events. "How do you do, sir," he managed to say, remembering to maintain the necessary civilities. "Don't mind if I work on my liquor at the same table with you, do you?" Cot shook his head. "It's my pleasure, sir." The chuckle came that Cot had been waiting for. "Say, boy, even with a few slugs in you, you don't forget to tack on those fancy parts of speech, do you?" Mr. Holland chuckled again. "Guess I got a little mad at you last night," he went on. "Sorry about that. Everybody's got a right to live the way they want to." Cot stared silently into his mug. The clarity that had begun to emerge from the rum was unaccountably gone, as though the very touch of Holland's presence was enough to plunge him headlong back into the mental chaos that had strangled his thinking through the night and most of the day. He was no longer sure that Mr. Holland had not kept the story to himself; he was no longer sure that Geoffrey had done more than make a shrewd guess ...He was no longer sure. "Look, boy..." [Image] And the realization came that, for the first time since he had known him, Mr. Holland was as much unsure of his ground as he. He looked up, and saw the slow light of uncertainty in the man's glance. "Yes, sir?" "Boy--I don't know. I tried to talk to you last night, but I guess we were both kind of steamed up. Think you'll feel more like listening tonight? Particularly if I'm careful about picking my words?" "Certainly, sir." That, at least, was common courtesy. "Well, look--I was a friend of your Uncle Jim's." Cot bristled. "Sir, I--" He stopped. In a sense, he was obligated to Mr. Holland. If he didn't say it now, it would have to be said later. "Sorry, sir. Please go on." Mr. Holland nodded. "We campaigned with Berendtsen together, sure. That doesn't sit too well with some people around here. But it's true, and there's lots of people who remember it, so there's nothing wrong with my saying it." Something that was half reflex twisted Cot's mouth at the mention of the AU, but he kept silent. "How else was Ted going to get a central government started among a bunch of forted-up farmers and lone-wolf nomads? Beat 'em individually at checkers? We needed a government--and fast, before we ran out of cartridges for the guns and went back to spears and arrows." "They didn't have to do it the way they did it," Cot said bitterly. Mr. Holland sighed. "Devil they didn't. And, besides, how do you know exactly how it was done? Were you there?" "My mother and father were. My mother remembers very well," Cot shot back. "Yeah," Mr. Holland said dryly. "Your father was there. And your mother was always good at remembering. Does she remember how your father came to be here in the first place?" Cot frowned for a moment at the obscure reference to his father. "She remembers. She also remembers my uncle's leading the group that wiped out her family." Holland smiled cryptically. "Funny, the way things change in people's memories," he murmured. He went on more loudly. "The way I heard it, her folks were from Pennsylvania. What were they doing, holding down Jersey land?" He leaned forward. "Look, son, it wasn't anybody's land. Her folks could have kept it, if they hadn't been too scared to believe us when we told them all we wanted was for them to join the Republic. And anyway, none of that kept her from marrying Bob." Cot took a deep breath. "My father, sir, never fought under Berendtsen. His Integrity did not permit him to take other people's orders, or do their butchery." "Ahuh," Mr. Holland said. "Your father got to be awful good with that carbine. He had to," he added in a lower voice. "And I guess he had to rationalize it somehow. "Your father built up this household defense system," he said more clearly. "I guess he figured that an armored bunker was the thing to protect his property the same way his carbine protected him. "Which wasn't a bad idea. Berendtsen unified this country, but he didn't exactly clean it up. That was more than they gave him time for." Holland stopped and drained his mug. He put it down and wiped his mouth. "But, boy, don't you think those days are kind of over? Don't you think it's time we came out of those hedgehog houses, and out of this hedgehog Integrity business?" Mr. Holland put his palms on the table and held Cot's eyes with his own. "Don't you think it's time we finished the unifying job, and got us a community where a boy can walk up to his neighbor's house in broad daylight, knock on the door, and say hello to a girl if he wants to?" Cot had been listening with his emotions so tangled that none of them could have been unraveled and classified. But now, Holland's last words reached him, and once again, the thought of what had happened the previous night was laid bare, and all his disgust for himself with it. "I'm sorry, sir," he said stiffly. "But I'm afraid we have differing views on the subject. A man's home is his defense, and his Integrity and that of his family are what keep that defense strong and inviolate. Perhaps other parts of the Republic are not founded on that principle, as I've heard lately, but here the code by which we live is one which evolved for the fulfillment of those vital requisites to freedom. If we abandon them, we go back to the Dirty Years. "And I am afraid, sir," he finished with a remembrance of the outrage he had felt the previous night, "that despite your questionable efforts, I shall still marry your daughter honorably, or not at all." Holland shook his head and smiled to himself, and Cot realized how foolish that last sentence had sounded. Nevertheless, while he could not help his impulses, he was perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong. Holland stood up. "All right, boy. You stick to your system. Only--it doesn't seem to work too well for you, does it?" And, once again, Mr. Holland turned around and walked away, leaving Cot with nothing to say or do, and with no foundation for assurance. It was as though Cot grappled with a vague nightmare; a dark and terrible shape that presented no straightforward facet to be attacked, but which put out tentacles and pseudopods until he was completely enmeshed in it--only to fade away and leave him with his clawing arms hooked around nothing. It was worse than any anger or insult could have been. His footsteps were unsteady as he crossed the club floor. The rum he had drunk, combined with a sleepless night, had settled into a weight at the base of his skull. He was about to open the door when Charles Kittredge laid a hand on his arm. Cot turned. "How do you do, Cottrell," Kittredge said. Cot nodded. Charles was his neighbor on the side away from Mr. Holland. "How do you do." "You look a little tired," Charles remarked. "I am, Charles." He grinned back in answer to his neighbor's smile. "Shouldn't wonder--holding a drill at 0800." Cot shrugged. "Have to keep the defenses in shape, you know." Kittredge laughed. "Why, for God's sake? Or were you just rehearsing for the Fourth?" Cot frowned. "Why--no, of course not. I've heard you holding Drill, often enough." His neighbor nodded. "Sure--whenever one of the kids has a birthday. But you don't really mean you were holding a genuine dead-serious affair?" Cot was having trouble maintaining his concentration. He squinted and shook his head slightly. "What's the matter with that?" Kittredge's voice and manner became more serious. "Oh, now look, Cot, there's been nothing to defend against in fifteen years. Matter of fact, I'm thinking of dismounting my artillery and selling it to the Militia. They're offering a fair price" Cot looked at him uncomprehendingly. "You can't be serious?" Kittredge returned the look. "Sure." "But you can't. They'd stay out of machinegun range and shell you to fragments with mortars and fieldpieces. They'd knock out your machinegun turrets, come in closer under rifle cover, and lob grenades into your living quarters." Kittredge laughed. He slapped his thigh while his shoulders shook. "Who the devil is 'they,'" he gasped. "Berendtsen?" Cot felt the first touch of anger as it penetrated the deadening blanket that had wrapped itself around his thoughts. Kittredge gave one final chuckle. "Come off it, will you, Cot? As a matter of fact, while I wasn't going to mention it, all that banging going on at your place this morning practically ruined one of my cows. Ran head-on into a fence. It's not the first time it's happened, either. The only reason I've never said anything is because your own livestock probably has just as bad a time of it. "Look, Cot, we can't afford to unnerve our livestock and poison our land. It was all right as long as it was the only way we could operate at all, but the most hostile thing that's been seen around here in years is a chicken hawk." The touch of anger had become a genuine feeling. Cot could feel it settling into the pit of his stomach and vibrating at his fingertips. "So, you're asking me to stop holding Drill, is that it?" Kittredge heard the faint beginning of a rasp in Cot's voice, and frowned. "Not altogether, Cot. Not if you don't want to. But I wish you'd save it for celebrations." "The weapons of my household aren't firecrackers." The words were carried as though at the flicking end of a whip. "Oh, come on, Cot!" For almost twenty-four hours, Cot had been encountering situations for which his experience held no solutions. He was baffled, frustrated, and angry. The carbine was off his shoulder and in his hands with the speed and smoothness of motion that his father had drilled into him until it was beyond impedance by exhaustion or alcohol. With the gun in his hands, he suddenly realized just how angry he was. "Charles Kittredge, I charge you with attempt to breach the Integrity of my household. Load and fire." The formula, too, was as ingrained in Cot as was his whole way of life. Chuck Kittredge knew it as well as he did. He blanched. "You gone crazy?" It was a new voice, from slightly beyond and beside Charles. Cot's surprised glance flickered over and saw Kittredge's younger brother, Michael. "Do you stand with him?" Cot rapped out. "Aw, now, look, Cot..." Charles Kittredge began. "You're not serious about this?' "Stand or turn your back." "Cot! All I said was--" "Am I to understand that you are attempting to explain yourself?" Michael Kittredge moved forward. "What's the matter with you, Garvin? You living in the Dirty Years or something?" The knot of fury twisted itself tighter in Cot's stomach. "That will be far enough. I asked you once: Do you stand with him?" "No, he doesn't!" Charles Kittredge said violently. "And I don't stand either. What kind of a fool things going on in your head, anyway? People just don't pull challenges like that at the drop of a hat anymore!" "That's for each man to decide for himself," Cot answered. "Do you turn your back, then?" An ugly red flush flamed at Kittredge's cheek. bones. "Damned if I will." His mouth clamped into an etched white line. "All right, then, Cot, what goes through that door first, you or me?" "Nobody will go anywhere. You'll stand or turn where you are." "Right here in the club? You are crazy!" "You chose the place, not I. Load and fire." Kittredge put his hand on his rifle sling. "On the count, then," he said hopelessly. Cot re-slung his carbine. "One," he said. "Two." He and Kittredge picked up the count together. "Three," in unison. "Four." "Fi--" Cot had not bothered to count five aloud. The carbine fell into his hooked and waiting hands, and jumped once. Kittredge, interrupted in the middle of his last word, collapsed to the club floor. Cot looked down at him, and then back to Michael, who was standing where he had been looking at Cot's face. "Do you stand with him?" Cot repeated the formula once more. Michael shook his head dumbly. "Then turn." [Image] Michael nodded. "I'll turn. Sure, I'll be a coward." There was a peculiar quality to his voice. Cot had seen men turn before, but never as though by free choice. Except for Holland, of course, the thought came. Cot looked at the width of Michael's back, and reslung his carbine. "All right, Michael. Take your dead home to your household." He stood where he was while Michael hoisted his bother's body over his shoulder. According to the formula, he should have publicly called the boy a coward. But he did not, and his next words betrayed his reason. "He was a good friend of mine, Michael. I'm sorry he forced me to do it." As he walked home, past Mr. Holland's house, Cot did not turn his head to see if there were lights in any of the windows. He had kept his family's Integrity unbreached. He had forced another man to turn. But he did not himself know whether he hoped Barbara would understand that, in a sense, he had done it to redeem himself for her. Two days later, at dinnertime Geoffrey and Alister came in five minutes late. Geoffrey's face was wide and numb with shock, and Alister's was glowing with a rampant inner joy. It was only when Geoffrey turned that Cot saw his left sleeve soaked in blood. "Geoffrey!" Cot's mother pushed her chair back and ran to him. She pulled a medkit off its wall bracket and began cutting the sleeve away. "What happened?" Cot asked. "I got my man today," Geoffrey said, his voice as numb as his features. "He rightfully belongs to Al, here, though" A grin broke through the numbness, and a babble of words came out as the shock of the wound passed into hysteria "That crazy Michael Kittredge climbed a tree up at the edge of the practice terrain. Had a 'scopemounted T-4 and six extra clips. Must have figured on an all-out war. First thing I knew, it felt like somebody hit my shoulder with a baseball bat, and I was down, with the slugs plowing the ground in circles around me. I tried to do something with my rifle, but no go. Kittredge must have had crosseyes or something--couldn't hit the side of a cliff with a howitzer, after the first shot damn fool stunt, 'scope-mounting an automatic somebody should have taught him better--and there I was, passing out from the recoil every time I squeezed off. You never saw such a blind man's shooting match in your life! "Then out of this gully he'd been imitating an elephant wallowing through, up pops Al! Slaps the old blunderbuss to his shoulder like the man on a skeet- shoot trophy, and starts blasting away at Kittredge's tree like there was nothing up there but pigeons! Tell you, the sight of that came nearer killing me than Kittredge's best out of twenty-five. "Well, the jerk might have been crazy, but he wasn't up to ignoring a clipload of soft-nose. He swings that lunatic T-4 of his for A1, and this gives me a chance to steady up and put a lucky shot through a leaf he happened to be in back of at the time. He's still out there." Cot felt his teeth go into his lower lip. Michael Kittredge! "He shot you from ambush?" "He wasn't carrying any banners!" "But that's disgraceful! Cot's mother exclaimed. She finished wrapping the gauze over the patch bandage on Geoffrey's bicep. Cot looked at Alister, who was standing beside Geoffrey, his face still shining. "Is that what happened, Alister?" he asked. Alister nodded. "Sure, that's what happened!" Geoffrey said indignantly. "Think this's a mosquito bite?" "You know what this means, don't you?" Cot asked gravely. Geoffrey began a shrug and winced. "Fool kid with a bug." Cot shook his head. "The Kittredges may be lax in their training, but Michael knew better. In a sense, that was a declaration of war. If Michael was out there, the rest of his household may not have known about it, but when they find out they'll be forced to support his action." "So it's a declaration of war," Alister suddenly said, his tones a conscious imitation of Geoffrey's. "What have we been drilling for?" Geoffrey's eyes opened wide, and the secretive laughter returned to his expression as he looked at his younger brother. "Not to start a war--or get involved in one," Cot said. "Their gunnery will be sloppier than ours, but their armor plate's just as thick." "What do you want to do, Cottrell?" his mother asked. Her delicate face was anxious, and her hands seemed to have poised for the express purpose of underscoring the question. "We've got to stop this thing before it snowballs," Geoffrey said. "I didn't get it before, but Cot's right." Cot nodded. "We'll have to call everybody in to a meeting. I don't know what can be done about the Kittredges. Maybe we'll all be able to think of something." He beat the side of his fist lightly against his thigh. "I don't know. It's never been done before. But the Kittredges aren't the AU. We can't handle the problem by simply dropping our shutters and fighting as independent units. The whole community would finish in firing on each other. We've got to have concerted action. Perhaps, if the community lines up as a solid block against them, we'll be able to forestall the Kittredges." "Unite the community!" His mother's eyes were wide. "Do you think you can do it?" Cot sighed. "I don't know, mother. I couldn't guess." He turned back to Alister. "We're going up to the club. It's the only natural meeting place we've got. I think you'd better break out the car. The Kittredges might have more snipers among them." He picked his carbine up from the arms rack, and started to follow the busily efficient Alister down to the garage. "I'll go with you," Geoffrey said. "Only takes one arm to work the turret guns." Cot looked at him indecisively. Finally, he said, "All right. There's no telling what the Kittredges might be up to along the road." He turned back to his mother. "I think it might be advisable to put the household on action stations." She nodded, and he went down into the garage. The road was open, and glaring white in the sunlight of early afternoon. The armored car's tires jounced over the latitudinal ruts that freight trucks had worn into the road, and one part of him was worried about the effect on Geoffrey, battened down in the turret. He looked up through the overhead slits and saw the twin muzzles of the 35mm cannon tracking steadily counterclockwise. Where did it begin, what started it? he thought with most of his mind. The chain of recent events was clear. From the moment that Mr. Holland had discovered him, that night four days ago, event had followed event as plainly and as inevitably as though it had been planned in advance. If he had not been upset by his meeting with Mr. Holland, he would not have called Drill the following morning. If he had never seen Barbara at her window at all, there would have been nothing for Geoffrey to taunt him with, and no fear of exposure to drive him to the club. If he had not been drinking, Mr. Holland's references to Uncle James would not have cut so deeply. Had there been no Drill, there would have been no quarrel with Charles Kittredge, and even if there had been Drill, Charles's remarks would not have been so objectionable had there been no smoldering resentment from his talk with Mr. Holland. For, it was true, he had been angry. Had he not been, Charles and Michael would not be dead, and he and his brothers would not now be in the car, trying to stop an upheaval of violence that would involve the entire community. But his anger had not been his responsibility. A breach of Integrity remained a breach of Integrity, no matter what the subjective state of the Party at Grievance. But where did it really begin? If his mother had ever introduced him to Barbara, would any of this have happened? He rejected that possibility. His mother had been acting in accordance with the code that his father and the other free men who had settled in this area had evolved. And the code was a good code. It had kept the farmlands free and in peace, with no man wearing another's collar--until Michael Kittredge broke the code. And so, while he thought, he turned the car off the road and stopped in front of the club. The porch of the club was already crowded with men. As he climbed out of the car's hatch, he saw that all the families of the community, with the exception of the Kittredges, were represented. Olsen, Hollis, Winter, Jordan, Park, Jones, Cadell, Rome, Lynn, Williams, Bridges--all of them. Even Mr. Holland stood near the center of the porch, his lined face graver than Cot had ever seen it. He walked toward them. The news had spread rapidly. He remembered that a lot of households had radios now. He'd never seen any use for one, before. Probably, he ought to get one. As long as the families were uniting, a fast communications channel was a good idea. "That's far enough, Garvin!" He stopped and stared up at the men on the porch. Lundy Hollis had lifted his rifle Cot frowned. One or two other guns in the crowd were being raised in his direction. "I don't understand this'" he said. Hollis sneered, and snorted. He looked past Cot at the car. "If anyone in the buggy tries anything, we've got a present for them." The men on the porch drew off to two sides. Two men were crouched in the club's doorway. One held a steady antitank rocket launcher on his shoulder, and the other, having fed a rocket into the chamber, stood ready to slap the top of his head and give the signal to fire. "I'll ask once more--" "Looks like you've united the community, boy," Mr. Holland said. "Against you." Cot felt the familiar surge of anger ripple up through his body. "Against me! What for?" There was a scattered chorus of harsh laughs. "What about Chuck Kittredge?" Hollis asked. "Charles Kittredge! That was an Affair of Integrity!" "Yeah? Whose--yours or his?" Hollis asked. "Seems like the day of Integrity has sort of come and gone, son," Mr. Holland said gently. "Yeah, and what about Michael Kittredge?" someone shouted from the back of the crowd. "Was that an Affair of Integrity, too?" "What about those two brothers of yours shooting the kid out of a tree?" someone else demanded. "Geoffrey's in the car with a wounded arm right now!" Cot shouted. "And Mike Kittredge's dead." There was a babble of voices. The burst of sound struck Cot's ears, and he felt himself crouch, fists balled, as the knot of fury within him exploded in reply. "All right," he shouted. "All right! I came up here to ask you to stop the Kittredges with me. I see they got to you first. All right! Then we'll take them on alone, and the devil can have all of you!" Somehow, in the storm of answers that came from the porch, Mr. Holland's quiet voice came through. "No good, boy. See, when I said 'against you,' I meant it. It's not a case of them not helping you--it means they're going to start shelling your place in two hours, whether you're in it or not." "No." The word was torn out of him, and even he had to analyze its expression. It was not a command, nor a request, nor a statement of fact or wonder. It was simply a word, and he knew, better than anyone else who heard it, how ineffectual it was. "So you'd better get your family out of there, son." The other men on the porch had fallen silent, all of them watching Cot except for the two men with the rocket launcher, who ignored everything but the armored car. Mr. Holland came off the porch and walked toward him. He put his hand on his shoulder. "Let's be getting back, son. Lots of room at my place for your family." Cot looked up at the men on the porch again. They were completely silent, all staring back at him as though he were some strange form of man that they had never seen before. He shuddered. "All right." Mr. Holland climbed through the hatch, and Cot followed him, slamming it shut behind him and settling into the drivers' saddle. He gunned the idling engine, locked his left rear wheels, and spun the car around. With the motor at full gun, the dust billowing, the armored car growled back down the road. "I heard most of it, Cot," Geoffrey's tight and bitter voice came over the intercom. "Let's get back to the house in a hurry. We can dump a ton of fray on that porch before those birds know what's hitting them." Cot shook his head until he remembered that Geoffrey couldn't see him. "They'll be gone, Jeff. Scattered out to their houses, getting ready." "Well, let's hit the houses, then," Alister said from behind the machinegun on the car's turtledeck. "Wouldn't stand a chance, son," Mr. Holland said. "He's right. They've got us cold," Cot agreed. What had happened to the code? His father had lived by it. All the people in the community had lived by it. He himself had lived by it--he caught himself. Had tried to live by it, and failed. Cot stood in the yard in front of Mr. Holland's house. It had taken an hour and a half of the time Hollis had given him, to get back to his house and move his family and a few belongings to Mr. Holland's house. There had been a strange, uncomfortable reunion between Mr. Holland and his grandmother. He had kissed his mother just now, and raised his hand as she turned back at the doorway. "I'll be all right, mother," he said. "There are a few things I'd like to attend to." "All right, son. Don't be long." He nodded, though she was already inside. Geoffrey and Alister had gone in before her, taking care of their grandmother and the younger children. Cot smiled crookedly. Alister would be all right. He hoped Geoffrey wasn't too old to adapt. Mr. Holland came out. "I'd like to thank you for taking us in," Cot said to him. Mr. Holland's face clouded. "I owe it to you, boy. I keep thinking this wouldn't be happening if I hadn't chivvied you along." Cot shook his head. "No--one way or the other, it would have happened. That's rather easy to see, now." "You coming inside, Cot? I'd like to introduce you to my daughter." Cot looked at the sun. No, not enough time. "I'll be back, Mr. Holland. Got a few loose ends to tie up." Holland looked over the low, barely visible roof of Cot's house. A small dustcloud was approaching it from the other side. He nodded. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, you'd better hurry up. Don't have more than about twenty minutes." Cot nodded. "I'll see you." He dropped the carbine into his hand and loped across the yard, not having to worry about the dog now, cutting through the scrub underbrush until he was just below the crest of a rise that overlooked his house. He flattened himself in the high grass and inched forward, until his head and shoulders were over the crest, but still hidden in the grass. He'd been right. There were three men just climbing out of a light guncarrier. Well, that's what our grandparents were, he thought. Looters. He slipped the safety. And our parents had a code. And, now his brothers had a community. But I've been living a way all my life, and I guess I've got integrity. He fired, and one of the men slapped his stomach and fell. The other two dove apart, their own rifles in their hands. Cot laughed and threw dirt into their faces with a pair of shots. One of them bucked his shoulders upward involuntarily, as the dirt flew into his eyes. Cot fired again, and the shoulders slumped. Thanks for a trick, Jeff. The other man fired back--using half a clip to cut the grass a foot to Cot's right. Cot dropped back below the crest, rolled, and came up again, ten feet from where he had been. Down by the house, the remaining man moved. Cot put a bullet an inch above his head. He had about ten minutes. Well, if he kept the man pinned down, the first salvo would do as thorough a job as any carbine shot. The man moved again--a little desperately this time--and Cot tugged at his jacket with a snap shot. Five minutes, and the man moved again. He was shouting something. Cot turned his ear forward to kill the hum of the breeze, but couldn't make out the words. He pinned the man down again. When he had a minute of life left, the man tried to run for it. He sprang up suddenly, running away from the weapons carrier, and Cot missed him for that reason. When the man cut back, he shot him through the leg. Damn! Jeff would have done better than that! The man was crawling for the carrier. Over at the Kittredges, the first muzzle-flashes flared, and the thud of guns rolled over the hills. Cot put a bullet through the crawling man's head. He'd been right. The Kittredges' gunnery was poor. The first salvo landed a hundred yards over--on the crest of the ridge where he was standing with his rifle in his hand. [Image]
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