"Earth Abides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart George Rippey)

Chapter 1

After the ceremony at the rock was over and the numerals 2 and 1 stood out sharply and freshly cut on the smooth surface, the people started back toward the houses. Most of the children scuttled ahead, calling back and forth, eager with ideas about the bonfire which traditionally ended the New Year celebration.

Ish walked beside Em, but they talked little. As always at the date-carving Ish felt himself thinking deeper thoughts than usual and wondering what would happen in the course of the year. He heard the children shouting out:

“Go to the old house that fell down; you can pull off lots of dry wood there…. I think I can find a can of gasoline…. I know where there is toilet paper; it burns fine.”

The older people, as was the custom, gathered at Ish and Em’s house, and sat around for a little conversation. Since it was a time for festivity, Ish opened some port, and they all drank toasts, even George, who ordinarily did not drink. They agreed again, as they had at the rock, that the Year 21 had been a good year and that the prospects for the coming one were good also.

Yet in the midst of the general self-congratulation, Ish himself felt a renewed sense of dissatisfaction.

“Why,” he thought, feeling the words flow through his mind, as if he were arguing aloud, “why should I be the one who in times like this always has to start thinking ahead? Why am I the one that has to think, or’try to think, five years or ten years, or twenty years into the future? I may not even be alive then! The people who come after me—they will have to solve their own problems.”

Yet he knew, as he thought again, that this last was not altogether true either. The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.

In any case, he could not help wondering what would happen to The Tribe in the years that were ahead. It worried him. After the Great Disaster, he had thought that the people, if any survived at all, would soon be able to get some things running again and proceed gradually toward re-establishing more and more of civilization. He had even dreamed of a time when electric lights might go on again. But nothing like that had happened, and the community was still dependent upon the leavings of the past.

Now he looked around, as he had often looked before, at the ones who were with him. They were, so to speak, the bricks out of which a new civilization must be fashioned. There was Ezra, for instance. Ish felt himself growing warm with the mere pleasure of friendship as he looked at that thin ruddy face and pleasant smile, even though the smile showed the bad teeth. Ezra had genius perhaps, but it was the genius of living on easy and friendly terms with people, and not the creative drive that leads toward new civilizations. No, not Ezra.

And there beside Ezra was George, good old George—heavy and shambling, powerful still, though his hair had turned wholly gray. George was a good man, too, in his fashion. He was a first-class carpenter, and had learned to do plumbing and painting and the other odd jobs around the house. He was a very useful man, and had preserved many basic skills. Yet Ish always knew that George was essentially stupid; he had probably never read a book in his life. No, not George.

Next to George, was Evie, the half-witted one. Molly kept her well groomed, and Evie, blond and slender, was good-looking, if you could forget the vacantness of her face. She sat there glancing right and left at whoever was talking. She even gave an illusion of alertness, but Ish knew that she was understanding little, perhaps nothing, of what was being said. She was no foundation-stone for the future. Certainly, not Evie.

Then came Molly, Ezra’s older wife. Molly was not a stupid person, but she had had little education and could certainly not be called intellectual. Besides, like the other women, she had expended her energy at bearing and rearing children, and now five of hers were still alive. That was enough contribution to ask of anyone. No, not Molly.

Beyond Molly, the next person was Em. When Ish looked at Em, so many feelings boiled up within him that he knew any judgment he might try to make of her would be of no value. She, alone, had made the first decision to have a child. She had kept her courage and confidence during the Terrible Year. She it was to whom they all turned in time of trouble. Some strong power lodged within her, to affirm and never to deny. Without her they might all have been as nothing. Yet, her power lay deep in the springs of action; in a particular situation, though she might inspire courage and confidence in others, she herself seldom supplied an idea. Ish knew that he would always turn to her and that she was greater than he, but he also knew that she would not be of help in planning toward the future. No—though it seemed disloyalty to say so—not even Em!

Beyond Em, lolling on the floor, were Ralph and Jack and Roger, the three who were still called boys, even though they themselves were married and had children. Ralph was Molly’s son who was married to Ish’s daughter, Mary; Jack and Roger were Ish’s own sons. But as he looked at them now, Ish felt very far from them, even though his connection by family was as close as could well be. Though he was only some twenty years older, still he seemed separated from them by centuries. They had not known the Old Times, and so they could not look forward much and think how things might again be in the future. No, probably not the boys either.

Ish’s eyes had moved around the circle, and he was looking now at Jean, Ezra’s younger wife. She had borne ten children, and seven of them were still alive. She had a mind of her own, as her refusal to join in the church-services had shown. Still, she was not a person of new ideas. No, not Jean.

As for Maurine, George’s wife, she had not even bothered to come to the gathering, but had gone directly from the rock to her own house, where she would already be engaged at sweeping or dusting or some other of her perpetual and beloved tasks of housewifery. Of all persons, certainly not Maurine.

Three other adults also were not present. They were Mary, Martha, and young Jeanie, who were married to the three boys. Mary had always seemed to Ish the most stolid of all his children, and now with her own children coming so fast, she grew a little more bovine, yearly. Martha and Jeanie also were mothers, and motherhood was absorbing them. No, none of these.

Present and absent, twelve adults! He still had difficulty in realizing that there was no vast reservoir of humanity from which to draw.

Half a dozen children were interspersed among the adults or circled around restlessly on the outside of the circle. Instead of going to help with the bonfire, these few had kept with the adults—half-bored, and yet apparently thinking that such a large gathering of their elders was important and should be watched. Ish let his attention shift to them, speculatively. Sometimes they listened to what the older people were saying, and sometimes they merely poked each other or scuffled. Yet, in them, careless as they seemed, rested the hope. The older people could probably slide along on the present arrangements as long as they lived, but the children might have to adapt. Could any of them supply the spark?

And now, as he began to focus on the children, Ish saw that one of them was not scuffling with any other, but was sitting there, steadily listening to what the older ones were saying, his big eyes glancing back and forth with a bright glow of intelligence and interest. This was Joey.

No sooner had Ish’s eyes focused for a moment upon Joey, than Joey’s alertly wandering glance noticed the attention his father was giving him. He squirmed with delight, and his face broke into the all-embracing grin of a nine-year-old. Upon the impulse of the moment, Ish winked slyly at his youngest son. Joey’s grin could scarcely have become any broader than it was, but in some way it seemed to spread. Ish caught the flutter of an eyelid in return. Then, not to embarrass Joey, Ish turned his glance elsewhere.

There was a slow argument going on among George and Ezra and the boys. Ish had heard it all before, and was not enough interested to participate or even to listen to all of it.

“One of them things don’t weigh more’n four hundred pounds anyway, I think,” George was saying.

“Yes, maybe,” Jack replied. “But just the same, that’s a lot to lug up here.”

“Aw, that’s not so much!” said Ralph, who was heavy-set and powerful, and liked to show off his strength.

And so, thought Ish, the argument would go on, as he had heard it often before, about whether it was possible to get a gas-refrigerator somewhere, and set it up, and supply it with still charged tanks of pressurized gas, and so have ice again. Yet, in the end, nothing would be done, not because the project was impossible or even inordinately difficult, but merely because everybody was fairly well contented with things as they were, and in a region of notably cool summers there was no great drive which led anyone to want to have ice. Yet, in a vague way, the old argument disturbed him.

He let his gaze shift back to Joey. Joey was small, even for his age. Ish enjoyed watching the little boy’s face, the quick way in which his eyes shifted from one speaker to another, never missing a point. In fact, Ish could see that Joey often picked up the point of a sentence, even before the speaker arrived at the end of it, especially with a slow speaker, like old George. This must be, Ish reflected, a tremendous day for Joey. A year had actually been named after him, the Year When Joey Read. No other child had ever had any such honor as that. Perhaps it was even such a distinction as to be bad for him. Yet, the idea had come spontaneously from the other children, a tribute to sheer intellect.

The languid argument was still going on. George was talking now:

“No, there shouldn’t be no great trick to connecting up the pipes.”

“But, George,” this voice was Ezra’s with its quicker tempo and faint tone of Yorkshire still noticeable after all these years, “has gas-pressure kept up in those tanks of compressed gas? I should think, p’raps, after all this time……”

Ezra’s voice trailed off that moment at a sudden rumpus between two of the children. Weston, Ezra’s own twelve-year-old son, was engaged in a punching contest with Betty, his half-sister.

“Stop it, Weston,” Ezra snapped out. “Stop it, I say, or I’ll warm your pants for you!”

The threat did not carry conviction, and as far as Ish could remember, he had never seen the easygoing Ezra punish a child. Nevertheless, at the paternal order the scuffle subsided with no more than the conventional protest from Weston, “Aw, Betty started it!”

“Yes, but what do you want ice for anyway, George?” This was Ralph speaking. It was a natural and never-failing phase of the argument. The boys, who had never known what it was to have ice, had no urge to make them go to the work of obtaining it.

Ish was thinking to himself that George had been asked that question a great many times in the course of this argument before. He really should have had his answer ready, but George was not a quick thinker and was not a man to be hurried. He shifted his tongue in his mouth, shaping words before he actually set out to reply, and in the pause Ish again watched Joey. The little boy’s glance moved quickly from the hesitant George to Ezra and to Jack, as if to see how those others were taking the pause; then Joey’s eyes sought his father’s again. All at once there was a quick comradeship and sense of understanding in the glance. Joey seemed to be saying that either his father or he would find an answer quickly and not hesitate as George was doing.

Then something exploded inside Ish’s brain. He did not hear the words that at last began to unroll slowly from George’s mouth.

“Joey!” Ish was thinking-and the name seemed to reverberate all through his consciousness. “Joey! He is the one!”

“Thou knowest not,” Koheleth wrote in his wisdom, “how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child.” And though the centuries have passed since Koheleth looked upon all things and found them fickle as wind, yet still we know little of what goes to the making of a man—least surely of all, why usually there issue forth only those who see what is, and why rarely, now and then, there comes forth among them the chosen one, Child of the Blessing, who sees not what is, but sees what is not, and seeing thus what is not, imagines also what may be. Yet without this rare one all men are as beasts.

First in the dark depths and the flooding, those unlike halves must meet that carry within them each the perfect half of genius. But that is not all! Also the child must be born to the world in fitting time and place, fulfilling its need. But even that is not all. Also the child must live, in a world where death walks daily.

When each year children are born in millions, now and then the infinitesimal chance will happen, and there will be greatness and vision. But how will it be, if the people are broken and scattered, and the children only a few?

Then, almost without knowing what had happened, Ish found himself on his feet. He was talking. In fact, he was making a speech. “Look here,” he was saying, “we’ve got to do something about all this. We’ve waited long enough!”

As he stood there, he was only in his own living-room, and he was talking only to the few people who were there. He knew that they were only a few, and yet it seemed to him not so much as if he were talking just to these few in this little room, but rather that he was in some great amphitheater and talking to a whole nation or to all the people of the world.

“This has got to stop!” he said. “We mustn’t go on living forever just in this happy way, scavenging among all the supplies that the Old Times left here for us, not creating or doing anything for ourselves. These things will an give out some day-if not in our years, in our children’s, or grandchildren’s. What will happen then? What will they do when they won’t know how to produce more things? Food, they can get, I suppose-there will still be cattle and rabbits. But what about all the more complicated things we enjoy? What, even, about building fires after the matches have all been used, or spoiled?”

He paused, and looked around again. They all seemed pleased, and seemed to be agreeing with him. Joey’s face was transcendent with excitement.

“That refrigerator you were talking about just now, a of you!” Ish went on. “That’s an example. We talk about it, but we never do anything. We’re like that story-that old king in the old story-the one who sat enchanted and everything moved around hun, but he could never make any move to break the spell. I used to think we were just suffering from the shock of the Great Disaster. Perhaps that was it, in those first days. When people have their whole world go to pieces around them, they can’t expect to make a fresh start immediately. But that was twenty-one years ago, and many of us have even been born since that time.”

“There are lots of things we should do. We should get some more domestic animals, not just dogs. We ought to be growing more of our own food now, not just raiding the old grocery stores still. We ought to be teaching the children to read and write more. (No one has ever supported me strongly enough in that.) We can’t go on scavenging like this forever—we must go forward.”

He paused, searching for words by which to point out to them the old truism that unless we go forward we inevitably go back, but suddenly they all applauded loudly, as if he had finished. He thought that he had really swayed them by a sudden flood of eloquence, but then he realized, as he looked around, that the applause was largely in good-natured irony.

“That’s the fine old speech again, Dad,” Roger remarked. Ish glared at him angrily for a moment; having really been the leader of The Tribe for twenty-one years, he did not like to have himself put down thus as merely an old codger with some funny ideas. But then Ezra laughed good-naturedly, and everybody joined in the laughter, and the tension fell off.

“Well, what are we going to do about it then?” Ish asked. “I may have made the same speech before, but even if I have, it’s true, nevertheless.”

He paused expectantly. Then Jack, who was Ish’s oldest son, unlimbered himself from where he was lolling on the floor, and got to his feet. Jack was taller and much more powerful than his father now; he was, himself, a father.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” he said, “but I’ve got to go.”

“What’s the matter? What is it?” Ish snapped back to him, a little irritated.

“Well, nothing so very much, but there’s something I have to do this afternoon.”

“Won’t it wait?”

Jack was already moving toward the door.

“I suppose it might wait,” he said, as he put his hand on the door knob.

“But I think I’d better be going anyway.”

There was silence for a moment, except for the sounds of the door opening, and shutting, as Jack went out. Ish felt himself suddenly angry, and he knew that his face was flushed.

“Go on talking, Ish,” Ish heard the voice, and knew through his anger that it was Ezra’s. “We would like to hear just what you think we ought to do; you have the ideas.” Yes, it was Ezra’s voice, and Ezra as usual was saying something quickly to cover up the difficulty and make people feel better. He was even flattering Ish.

Nevertheless, at the voice, Ish relaxed. Why should he be angry with Jack for acting independently? He should, rather, be happy. Jack was a grown man now, no longer a little boy and merely a son. The flush faded from Ish’s face, but still he felt a profound sense of trouble within him, and he was led on to talk more. If the incident could do nothing else, at least it could supply him with a text.

“This business with Jack right here now, that’s something I want to talk about, too. We’ve drifted along all these years not doing anything about producing our own food and getting civilization back into some kind of running-order, as regards all the material things. That’s one matter, and an important one, but it isn’t the only one. Civilization wasn’t just only gadgets and how to make them and run them. It was all sorts of social organization too—all sorts of rules, and laws, and ways of life, among people and groups of people. The family—that’s all we have left of a that organization! That’s natural, I suppose. But the family can’t be enough when there get to be more people. When a little child does something we don’t like, the father and mother correct it, and bring it into line. But when one of the children grows up, that’s all over. We haven’t any laws—we aren’t a democracy, or a monarchy, or a dictatorship, or anything. If someone—Jack, for instance—wants to walk out on what seems to be a kind of important meeting, nobody can stop him. Even if we take a vote here and decide to do something, even then, there’s no means of enforcement—oh, a little public opinion, perhaps, but that’s all.”

He had trailed off to a lame ending, rather than coming to a conclusion. He had been speaking more from the emotional drive that Jack’s move had aroused in him. He was not a trained orator, and had certainly no practice.

Yet, as he looked around, he saw that the speech had apparently made a very good impression. Ezra was the one who spoke first.

“Yes, you bet!” he said. “Don’t you remember all of those wonderful times we used to have back in those days. Golly, what wouldn’t I give just now to be over there with George’s big radio and turn it right on and hear Charlie McCarthy again! Don’t you remember the way that little guy would talk, making fun of the other guy, whatever his name was, you know, and here that other one was just the same as him all the time.”

Ezra took out the big Victorian penny that had served him for a pocket-piece during all these years. He tossed it back and forth from one hand to the other in sheer stimulation at the thought of hearing Charlie McCarthy again.

“Yes, you remember too,” he went on. “Why, you used to be able to go down to the picture-house and pay your money and go right in! And you would hear all that music going with the film, and see—oh, maybe—Bob Hope or Dotty Lamour. Yes, those were the days all right! Do you suppose that p’raps if we all got together and worked hard we could find some of those films and rig them up to show them to all the kids? I can just hear them laughing. Maybe we could get a Charlie Chaplin film somewhere!”

Ezra took out a cigarette and a match, and as he scratched the match it broke into a bright flame. Matches never seemed to deteriorate if they were in a fairly dry place. Yet nobody knew how to make matches, and at every sudden spurt of flame there was one match the fewer. Ish had a strange feeling about Ezra, who was thinking of civilization chiefly as the return of motion-pictures, and at the same time was scratching a match. George was the one who spoke next:

“If there was any way of making people help me, just one or two of the boys, I could get that gas-refrigerator fixed up and working in two, three days, maybe.”

George stopped speaking, and Ish supposed that he had finished, for George was never much of a talker. Surprisingly, he went on:

“About those there laws, though, that you was talking about. I don’t know. I was kind of glad that we live in a place where we don’t have no laws. These days, you can do just about the way you want. You can go out and park your car anywhere you want to. Right by a fire-hydrant, maybe, and nobody’s going to give you a ticket, that is, you could park it right by the fire-hydrant if you had a car that would run.”

This was as far in the way of a joke as Ish had ever heard George go, and George responded to his own humor by chuckling quietly. The others all joined in. The standard of humor in The Tribe, Ish realized, had never been very high.

Ish was about to say something more, but Ezra spoke again.

“Come on, now, I propose a toast,” he said. “To law and order!” The older people laughed a little at hearing the old phrase again, but to the younger ones it meant nothing.

They drank the toast, and then everything slipped back quite naturally into merely a social occasion again.

After all, Ish reflected, it was a social occasion, just as well perhaps, not to let business interfere too much. Perhaps the seed he had planted with this rendition of his impassioned little speech would have some effect in the future. Yet, he felt doubts. You used to have the jokes about never fixing the roof until it rained. People were undoubtedly the same now, or worse. They might well wait until something happened that forced them to act; that something would almost certainly be unpleasant—most likely, serious.

Yet he drank the toast with the others, and with half his mind he listened to the talk. With the other half, nevertheless, he still kept to his own thoughts. This had been a good day; yes, on this day he had carved 21 into the smooth surface of the rock, and the Year 22 had begun; on this day, also, partly because the year had been named as it was, he had become more conscious of the possibilities in his youngest son.

He glanced to where Joey was sitting, and caught in return a quick bright glance, full of the small boy’s admiration for his father. Yes, perhaps, there was one at least who could understand fully.

In all that immense and complex system of dams and tunnels, aqueducts and reservoirs, by which water was brought from the mountains to the cities, one particular section of steel pipe in the main aqueduct supplied the fatal flaw. Even at the time of its manufacture certain imperfections had been apparent. It had happened, however, to go past the inspector just at the close of a day, when his senses were dulled and his judgment impaired.

No great harm resulted. The section of pipe was set into place by the workmen, and fiinctioned without difficulty. Shortly before the Great Disaster, a foreman had noticed that this section had developed a slight leak. By the welding of a patch upon it, however, it would be made as good as new, or even stronger than the average.

Then through the years no man passed that way again. A little trickle of water from the faulty section of pipe grew very gradually larger. Even in the dry summers a small patch Of green showed by the dripping pipe; birds and small animals came there to drink. And still rust ate from the outside, and from the inside the corrosive action of the water itself slowly bored outward to meet the rust pits, piercing pinprick after pinprick in the tough skin of steel.

Five years, ten years-now a dozen jets of fine spray played from the surface of the pipe. Now the puddle was a drinking-place for cattle.

In five more years a little stream ran off from beneath, the only summer stream in all that dry foothill region. By now the pipe was beginning to be honey-combed with rust, its actual structure grown weak.

Beneath the pipe the ground had long been soft and muddy, and the tramping of animals had aided the erosion of a little gully. Finally, the erosion was sufficient to start a mudflow in the soft wet soil on which the concrete pier rested, the one which supported the pipe with its heavy load of water. As the pier settled, the weight of the water was thrown upon the weakened pipe. A long rent opened in its rust-riddled steel, and a broad stream of water poured out and gushed down into the gully. This torrent soon undermined thefooting still more, and it shifted again. Once more the pipe tore, and the stream of water issuing from it became like a small river.

Just as Ish had crawled into bed that evening the sharp crack of a rifle shot brought him sitting full upright, tense. Another resounded, and then a fusillade began popping in the night.

He felt the bed shaking gently, as Em laughed quietly beside him. He relaxed. “Same old trick!” he said.

“Fooled you badly this time!”

“I’ve been thinking too much about all the future today, I suppose. Yes, I suppose my nerves are stirred up a little too much today.”

The fusillade was still popping in a good imitation of guerrilla warfare, but he lay down and tried to relax. He knew now what had happened. After everyone had left the bonfire, one of the boys had sneaked back and thrown a few boxes of cartridges into the hot ashes. As soon as the boxes were burned through and things became hot enough, the cartridges had let loose. Like most practical jokes it involved a certain element of risk, but at this time of year the grass was green, and there was no danger of starting a fire. Also, most of the people had been warned in advance or knew what was likely to happen and so would be sure to keep a long way from the hot ashes. Indeed, Ish reconsidered, he himself might have been the particular object of this joke, and everyone else might have known about it.

All right! If so, he was successfully baited. He felt a sense of irritation, but for more serious reasons, he thought, than because he had been fooled. “Well,” he said to Em, “there they go again—more boxes of cartridges popping off uselessly, and no one left in the world who knows how to make cartridges! And here we are in a country overrun with mountain-lions and wild bulls, and cartridges the only way we have of keeping them under control, and for food we don’t know how to kill cattle or rabbits or quail except by shooting them.”

Em seemed to have nothing to say, and in the pause his mind ranged petulantly over the events of the bonfire itself. That fire had been built up largely out of sawed timber brought from a lumber-yard, interspersed with cartons of toilet paper, which burned beautifully because of the holes through the middle. In addition, boxes of matches had been scattered through the fire because they went up with fine flares, and there had also been cans of alcohol and cleaning-fluid to give further zest. Doubtless, if you had had to buy all those materials with money, the bonfire would have cost ten thousand dollars in the Old Times; now, those materials might be considered even more valuable, because they had come to be completely irreplaceable.

“Don’t worry, dearest,” he heard her say now. “It’s time to go to sleep.”

He settled down beside her, his head close against her breast, seeming as always to draw strength and confidence from her.

“I’m not worrying much, I suppose,” he said. “Maybe I really enjoy all this, feeling a little lugubrious about the future, as if we were living dangerously.”

He lay still for a moment more, and she said nothing, and then he went on with his thinking aloud.

“Do you remember I’ve been saying this a long time now, that we have to live more creatively, not just as scavengers? It’s bad for us, I think, even psychologically. Why, I was saying this way back even at the time when Jack was going to be born.”

“Yes, I remember. You’ve said it a great many times, and yet, some way or other, it still seems easier just to keep on opening cans as long as there are plenty of cans in the grocery stores and warehouses.”

“But the end will come some time. Then, what will people do?”

“Well, I suppose, whatever people there are then—they will just have to solve that problem for themselves…. And, dear, I’ve always wished you wouldn’t worry so much about it. Things would be different if you had a lot of people who were like you, that thought about things a long way off. But all you have are usual people like Ezra and George and me. And we don’t think that way. Darwin—wasn’t that his name?—said that we all came from apes or monkeys or something, and I suppose apes and monkeys and things like that never thought much about the future. If we’d come from bees or ants, we might have planned out things ahead, or even if we had been trained like squirrels to store up nuts for the winter.”

“Yes, maybe. But in the Old Times people thought about the future. Look at the way they built up civilization.”

“And they had Dotty—what was her name?—and Charlie McCarthy, just like Ezra says.” Then suddenly she went off on another tangent. “And about all this scavenging business that worries you so much! Is it so very different from what people used to do? If you want some copper now, you go down to one of the hardware stores, and find a little copper wire, and take that and hammer it up. In the Old Times, they just went and dug some copper out of a hill somewhere. It maybe was copper ore and not just copper, but still they were scavenging in a way, for it was there all the time. And as far as the food goes, they grew it by using up what was stored in the ground, and changing that into wheat. We just take most of our stuff out of what is stored up somewhere else. I don’t know that there’s too much difference!”

The argument stopped him for a moment. Then he rallied. “No, that’s not just right either,” he said. “At least, they were more creative than we are. They were a going concern. They produced what they used as they went along.”

“I’m not too sure about that,” she said. “It seems to me I can remember reading even in cheap things like the Sunday supplements that we were always just at the point of running out of copper or oil, or were exhausting the soil so we wouldn’t have anything to live on in the future.”

Then from long experience, he knew that she was wanting to go to sleep. He gave her the last word, and said nothing more. But he himself lay awake, his thoughts still running fast. He remembered clear back to times just after the Great Disaster when he had thought of ways in which civilization might again start to go. Then he remembered how he had thought of change itself-how sometime it comes from the inside of a man, reacting outward against the environment, and how sometimes the environment presses in against the man, forcing him to change. Only the unusual man perhaps was strong enough to press outward against the world.

And from thinking of the unusual man, he went naturally to thinking of little Joey, the bright one with the quick eyes, the only one who seemed to follow all the things that Ish had been saying. He tried to guess what Joey would be like when he grew older, and he thought how some day he might be able to talk to Joey. He imagined the words.

“You and I, Joey,” he would say, “we are alike, we understand! Ezra and George and the others, they are good people. They are good solid average people, and the world couldn’t get along without having lots of them, but they have no spark. We have to give the spark!”

Then from thinking of Joey, who was at the top, his mind ran rapidly through the others, ending with Evie, who was at the bottom. Should they have even kept Evie all these years? He wondered. There had been a word—euthanasia, wasn’t it?—for that kind of thing. “Mercy-killing,” they called it sometimes. Yet who was qualified in a group like this to take the responsibility of removing someone like Evie, even though she was probably no source of happiness to herself nor to anyone else? To do anything like that, he realized, they would have to have a power much stronger than the mere authority of an American father over his children, much stronger than that of the group of friends exercising a mild public opinion. Something would happen some time, not necessarily about Evie of course. But something would happen some time, and then they would have to organize and take stronger action.

His imagination stirred him so powerfully that he made a quick movement of his body, as if already he were taking countermeasures against whatever it was that might have happened.

Either Em had not been asleep, or else his sudden movement waked her.

“What is it, dearest?” she said. “You jumped like some little dog that dreams it’s chasing a lion!”

“Something’s going to happen some time!” he said, speaking as if she already knew the course of his thoughts.

“Yes, I know,” she said—and apparently she did know his thoughts. “And we’re going to have to do something. ‘Organize’ I think is the word. We’re going to have to do something about what has happened.”

“You knew what I was thinking?”

“Well, you’ve said the same thing before, you know. You’ve said it very often. Especially around New Years you say it. George talks about the refrigerator, and you talk about something going to happen. Some way or other, nothing has happened yet.”

“Yes, but some time it will. It’s bound to! Some year I’ll be right.”

“All right, dearest. Go on worrying. You’re probably the kind that don’t feel comfortable unless you’ve got something to worry about—and that particular worry, I guess, won’t do you much harm.”

She said nothing more, but she reached over and took him into her arms, and held him close. From the touch of her body, as always, he took comfort, and so he slept.

From the broken pipe of the aqueduct the water had now been gushing out like a small river during a period of several weeks. No more water flowed on into the reservoirs. At the same time, from thousands of leaks which had developed through the course of the years, from the many faucets left running at the time of the Great Disaster, from the major breaks occurring at the time of the earthquake—from all of them, the stored water ran out from the reservoirs, and their levels fell steadily.