Earth Abides

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 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, all 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 him, 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 the footing 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 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.

Chapter 2

As Ish had expected, they did nothing. Weeks passed. There was no heaving and grunting of men as they carried the refrigerator up the hill, no click and crunch of spades preparing a garden plot. Ish worried occasionally, but in general life drifted along, and even he could not be much concerned. With his old student’s habit of observing even when he did not participate, he often wondered just what might be happening.

Was it really, as he sometimes imagined, that all the individuals were still suffering under a kind of shock as the result of the sudden destruction of their old society? His studies in anthropology supplied him with examples—the head-hunters and the plains Indians, who had lost the will to readjust and even the will to live, after their traditional way of life had rudely been made impossible. If they could no longer go head-hunting or ride out to steal horses and take scalps, they had no desire for anything else either. Or, with a mild climate and food-supplies easy to obtain, was there now simply no stimulus to change? He could recollect possible examples of this kind also—some of the South Sea islanders, or those tropical peoples who lived chiefly on bananas. Or was it something else?

Fortunately, he had enough background of philosophy and history to keep his perspective. He was actually, he realized, struggling to solve a problem which had baffled philosophers from the time when they had first become conscious of problems at all. He was facing the basic question of the dynamics of society. What made a society change? He, as a student, was more fortunate than Koheleth or Plato or Malthus or Toynbee. He saw a society reduced in size until it had attained the simplicity of a laboratory experiment. Yet, whenever he had arrived at this stage of argument, another thought cut across and disturbed the simplicity. He began to feel himself less scientific but more human, to think more nearly as Em thought. This society along San Lupo Drive was not really, a philosopher’s neat microcosm, a small dip out of the general ocean of humanity. No—it was a group of individuals. It was Ezra and Em and the boys—yes, and Joey! Change the individuals, and the whole situation changed. Change even one individual! In the place of Em, if we had—well, say, Dotty Lamour? Or, instead of George, one of those high-powered minds that he remembered from his University years—Professor Sauer, perhaps! Again the situation would change.

Or would it? Possibly not, for in the test the physical environment might be stronger, and might force the aberrant individuals into its mould.

But in one detail Ish thought that Em was wrong. She did not need to fear that he was worrying too much about the situation and would end up with ulcers or a neurosis. Instead, his observation of what was happening kept him interested in life. At first, just after the Great Disaster, he had devoted himself to observing the changes in the world as the result of the disappearance of man. After twenty-one years, however, the world had fairly well adjusted itself, and further changes were too slow to call for day-to-day or even month-to-month observation. Now, however, the problem of society—its adjustment and reconstitution—had moved to the fore, and become his chief interest.

Then at this point in the recurrent course of his thinking he always had to correct himself again. He could not, and should not, be merely the observer and student. Plato and the others—each of them could merely watch and comment, even cynically, if he so felt. Through his writings he might influence future generations, but he himself was in no appreciable way responsible for the growth and development of the society in which he lived. Only now and then had the scholar also become the ruler—Marcus Aurelius, Thomas More, Woodrow Wilson. To be sure, Ish realized that he himself was not a ruler exactly, but he was the man of ideas, the thinker, in a community of only a few individuals. Necessarily the others turned to him in their rare times of trouble, and if any real emergency should arise, he would almost certainly have to assume leadership.

The thought had already in the course of the years sent him to the City Library after books about scholars who had also become rulers. Their fates were not comforting. Marcus Aurelius had worn himself out, body and soul, in bloody and fruitless campaigns on the Danube frontier. Thomas More had gone to the scaffold, and afterwards, ironically, he had been canonized as a martyr of the Church. The biographers often called Wilson a martyr also, although no Church of Peace had made him St. Woodrow. No, the scholar in power had not prospered notably. Yet he, Ish, in a community which even yet numbered only thirty-six people, was so placed that he probably could wield more influence in the shaping of its future than an emperor or a chancellor or a president in the Old Times.

Heavy rains in the week after New Years had slowed the falling of the water level in the reservoir. Then, a little earlier than usual, came the mid-winter dry spell.

Like the blood of some leviathan oozing from a hundred thousand pinpricks, the life-giving water flowed away through open faucets and leaking joints and broken pipes.

And now, where the still-standing gauge showed that the depth had recently been twenty feet, only a thin skin of water covered the bottom of the reservoir.

When Ish woke up that morning, he realized that it was a fine sunny day, and that he had slept well and was rested. Em was gone from the bed, and he heard the familiar little sounds from downstairs which meant that breakfast would soon be ready. He lay still for a few minutes, thoroughly enjoying himself, coming back more slowly than usual to full consciousness. He felt it a very fortunate circumstance to be able to lie in bed a little while longer if you wished, not merely on Sunday morning, but on any morning. There was no sharp looking at clocks, in the life that they lived now, and no need for him or for anyone else, to catch the 7:53 train. He was living a life of greater freedom than anyone could possibly have lived in the Old Times. Perhaps, with his special temperament he was even living more happily now than he could have lived then.

When he felt ready, he got up and shaved. There was no hot water, but he did not care about that particularly. As a matter of fact, nobody would have minded if he had not shaved at all, but he liked the sense of cleanliness and stimulation that the shave gave him.

He dressed—a new sport shirt and a pair of blue jeans. He stuck his feet into some comfortable slippers, went slopping down stairs, and steered toward the kitchen.

As he came to the door, he heard Em say, rather more sharply than she was used to speak, “Josey child, why don’t you turn that faucet farther, so you can really get some water?”

“But, Mommie, it is turned on, as hard as I can turn it.”

Ish, coming into the kitchen, saw that Josey was holding the tea-kettle in the sink under the faucet, and that only a trickle of water was running.

“Morning!” he said. “I guess I’ll have to get George to come over and fix up that plumbing a little bit. Josey, why don’t you run out into the garden, and get some water from one of the outside faucets?”

Josey trotted off agreeably, and when she was gone, Ish took the opportunity to kiss Em, and to tell her what he was planning for the day. Josey was gone for a little while, and then came back with the kettle full.

“The water out there ran faster for a little while, and then it just died out to a trickle, too,” she said, setting the kettle on the gasoline stove.

“That’s a nuisance!” said Em. “We’ll need more water for washing the dishes.”

Ish recognized the tone of voice. This was one of the times when a crisis was laid directly at the feet of the menfolk to do something about.

Breakfast was served on the dining-room table, and the table looked just about the way it might have looked in the Old Times. Ish sat at one end, and Em at the other. They had only four children at home now. Robert, who was sixteen, and almost fully grown up, according to the standards of The Tribe, sat on one side. Beside him was Walt, who was twelve, and very big and active for his age. And on the other side, close to the kitchen door, sat Joey and Josey, part of whose work was to help with breakfast, by aiding with the cooking and setting of the table, and running in and out to wait on table and helping to wash the dishes afterwards.

As he sat down, Ish could not help thinking how little this particular scene differed from what it might have been in the Old Times. To be sure, he would never have expected then to be the father of so many children. But, granting the numbers, the family group was just what it might have been at any time in almost any society—father, mother, and children, tightly grouped to form the basic social unit, so basic in fact that it might be considered biological rather than social. After all, he thought, the family was the toughest of all human institutions. It had preceded civilization, and so it naturally survived afterwards.

There was grapefruit-juice, out of cans, of course. Ish had long since begun to doubt seriously whether after all this time there was anything valuable in the way of vitamins left in canned juices. Even the taste had gone flat. But they continued drinking it, because it felt good on the stomach, even though there might not be any vitamins, and at worst it probably was doing them no harm. There were no eggs, because there had been no hens since the Great Disaster. There was no bacon, either, because canned or, glassed bacon was hard to find now and there were no pigs in this vicinity, as far as they had ever discovered. But they had beef-ribs, braised and well browned, which were a fairly good substitute for bacon, even to Ish’s taste. The children, of course, liked nothing better. In fact, they made the principal part of their breakfast on the beef-ribs because they had grown up being largely meat-eaters and expecting or wanting little else. Ish and Em, on the contrary, had always been used to having toast or cereal, and now that the rats and weevils had ruined all flour and packaged cereals, they had hominy, from cans, cooked up so as to be something like a breakfast-food. They ate it with canned milk and to sweeten it there was white corn-syrup, because lately they had been unable to find any sugar that rats and weather had spared. The grownups also had coffee. Ish used milk and corn-syrup in his; Em had always preferred hers black and unsweetened anyway. The vacuum-packed coffee, like the grapefruit juice, had lost much of its flavor.

They had settled gradually upon this menu as their standard one for breakfast. Except perhaps for lack of vitamins, it seemed to offer a fairly well balanced meal, and to supply vitamins they had fresh fruit whenever they could find any, though now that blight and insects and rabbits had ruined the orchards, there was little fruit to be had, except for wild strawberries and blackberries, a few wormy apples, and some sour plums from trees gone wild. On the whole, however, Ish found it a satisfying breakfast.

After he had finished, Ish slumped into an easy-chair in the living room, picked a cigarette from the humidifier, and lighted it. But the cigarette was not very satisfactory. They were no longer able to find vacuum-packed ones, and the ordinary ones had dried out almost completely in the packages now, no matter how well sealed. You had to keep them in the humidifier a while to get them decently smokable, and then the trouble was that you were likely to get them even too damp. That was what was wrong with this one. And then also, he could not quite enjoy the cigarette because his conscience was bothering him. From the kitchen he could hear uncertain sounds from Em and the twins, and he gathered that they were still having trouble getting water.

“Might as well go over,” he thought, “and see George, and get him to clean out that pipe or whatever it is.” He got up and went out.

On the way to George’s, however, he stopped at Jean’s house to pick up Ezra—not that Ezra could fix anything, or that he needed Ezra for any negotiation with George, but just because he always liked to see Ezra. He knocked, and Jean came to the door.

“Ez is not here now,” she said. “He’s over at Molly’s this week.” Ish had the funny feeling that he often had when facing the actual practice of bigamy. He did not exactly see how Jean and Molly kept on such good terms, and even helped each other out in all the little emergencies of housekeeping. It was merely another triumph of Ezra’s at getting along with human beings and making them get along with each other. Ish turned to go, and then he recollected, and looked back.

“Oh, Jean,” he said. “Say, is your water running all right this morning?”

“Why, no,” said Jean. “No, it isn’t. There’s just a little trickle coming out.”

She closed the door, and Ish went down the porch steps and headed for Molly’s house. He felt a sudden little chill of apprehension.

He picked up Ezra at Molly’s, and discovered that she at least had no difficulty with water. That, however, might be the result of her house being several feet lower than Jean’s so that the water might not yet have run out of the pipes.

They went over to George’s house, which stood neat and trim inside its freshly painted white picket-fence. Maurine showed them into the living-room, and told them to sit down while she went to get George, who was puttering around somewhere as usual. Ish sat down in one of the big velourcovered overstuffed chairs. Then, as always, he looked around the living-room with a sense of amazement, mingled with an almost perverted pleasure. The living-room in George and Maurine’s house looked exactly the way the living-room of any prosperous carpenter would have looked back in the years before the Great Disaster. There were bridge-lamps with pink shades, and tassels hanging from them. There was a very expensive electric clock, and a magnificent console radio-phonograph, which had four different bands of reception. There was also a television set. On both tables were scarves carefully crumpled up to give an elegant look to things, and on one table were neat piles of several popular magazines.

The bridge-lamps did not work, because there was no electricity, and the hands of the electric clock always stood at 12:17. The magazines were at least twenty-one years old. There were no programs on the air for the radio to pick up, even if there had been any electric current by which the radio and the phonograph could run.

Yet all these things were the symbols of prosperity. George had been a carpenter in the Old Times. Maurine had then been married to a man who must have been about the social and financial equal of George. Such people always wanted to have fine bridge-lamps and electric clocks and radios and all the rest, and now that it was possible to have all these things, they had merely gone out and got them and put them into the house. Their not working was secondary. In the evening Maurine merely brought in a kerosene lamp, and stood it on the table and they got their light from it instead of from the bridge-lamps, and they had a wind-up phonograph for actual use. It was ridiculous, and also a little pitiful. Yet, when Ish considered the matter, he always remembered Em’s first reaction to it.

“Well,” she had said, “don’t you remember in the Old Times people would have a piano, maybe a grand piano, in the living-room, even though nobody could play it? And they had a set of those books—what did they call them?—the Harvard Classics, though they never read them. And maybe they had a fireplace that never even had a chimney attached to it. All those things were just to show off that you could afford them. They were proof that you had arrived. So I don’t see much difference now if George and Maurine want to have their bridge-lamps, even if they can’t get any light from them.”

They heard George coming in from the back, and then his bulky form filled the doorway. He held a pipe-wrench in one hand, and was wearing his usual costume of carpenter’s overalls, rather dirty and well stained with paint smears. He could have used new overalls every day, but apparently he felt more comfortable in ones that were well broken in.

“Hi, George,” said Ezra, who usually managed to say the first word.

“G’morning, George,” said Ish.

George seemed to chew his tongue for a moment, as if really considering what the situation demanded. Then he said: “Morning, Ish…. Morning, Ezra.”

“Say, George,” said Ish. “No water over at Jean’s or at our place this morning. How about here?” There was a pause.

“None here, neither,” said George.

“Well,” said Ish, “what do you make of it?”

George hesitated, working his mouth and lips, as if he were chewing the end of an imaginary cigar. Ish felt a sense of irritation at George’s lumpishness. Yet he reflected, controlling himself, that George was a solid person and a very good one to have around.

“Well,” he repeated, “what do you make of it, George?”

George made a motion as if to put the imaginary cigar into one comer of his mouth, and then he replied. “Well, if she’s off over there too, I guess there’s no use looking any more for some block in my pipes around here, way I was. I guess she’s broke or clogged up somewheres on the main pipe that comes to all these houses.”

Ish caught a sidelong glance from Ezra, and a ghost of a smile on his face as much as to say that after all any of them might have figured that out and that George’s pronouncement was not exactly the word of a mental giant.

“I guess you must be right, George,” Ish said. “But what are we going to do about it?”

George shifted the imaginary cigar again, and then spoke: “Well, I dunno.”

Like Em, George obviously considered this to be out of his province. Give him a dripping faucet or a plugged toilet, and he would be happy taking care of it for you. But he was no mechanic, and certainly no engineer. So, as it always happened, Ish had to fake the lead.

“Where did all this water come from anyway?” he asked on the impulse.

The others both were silent. It was curious. Here they had been for twenty-one years merely using water that continued to flow, and yet they had never given any real consideration to where the water came from. It had been a gift from the past, as free as air, like the cans of beans and bottles of catsup that could be had just by walking into a store and taking them from the shelves. Ish indeed had vaguely thought about the matter sometimes, and wondered how long the water would continue to run, and even considered vaguely what they should do to develop another supply. But he had never got round to doing anything. Water which had already run for many years might well continue to run for many years more, and so there was no pressure for action. In all those years there had never been one single day, until this one, when there had been any immediate reason why he should say to himself. “Today I must do something about the water-supply.”

So now Ish glanced from George to Ezra, and had no response to his question. George merely stood, shifting weight from one foot to the other. Ezra had a little twinkle in his eyes, to indicate that this was not his department. Ezra knew people. When he had clerked in that liquor-store he must have been good at jollying his customers along and making tie-in sales. But when it came to handling ideas and things, Ish was better than Ezra. Ish saw that he would have to answer his own question.

“This water must come from the old city water-system, somewhere,” he said. “Must have come, I mean. The old pipes are still there. I think the best thing for us to do would be to go up to the reservoir and see whether there is any water in that.”

“O.K.,” said Ezra, agreeable as ever. “Maybe, though, we should see what the boys think about it.”

“No,” said Ish. “They won’t know anything about it. If it was a question of hunting or fishing, we could ask the boys. But the boys wouldn’t know anything about this.”

They went out and began calling the dogs, and getting ready to harness up the teams to the wagons. The reservoir was not more than a mile away, but ever since he had been mauled by the mountain-lion, Ish was not good at long walks, and George was beginning to suffer from the stiffness of old age in his legs. Getting the dogs together and making everything ready always took some time. At moments like these, Ish regretted that horse-taming had come to be a lost art. There were no wild horses left in the immediate vicinity, but he was sure that they could find plenty of them farther east in the open plains country of the San Joaquin Valley. But the trouble really was that all three men had been city-people who were used to driving automobiles; not one of them really knew anything about horse-keeping or horse-managing, and so they had never made the effort to keep horses. Actually, the dogs were in many ways more convenient because they demanded little care, and fed on the less choice cuts of the many cattle which could be killed easily in the surrounding country. But to have horses, you would have had to see that they were kept on good pasture, and protected from wolves and lions. So on the whole, now that automobiles were difficult to keep running, the dog-teams were probably the simplest answer to their modest requirements for transportation, and George was very happy to make the little wagons and keep them in repair. It had taken Ish years to get over the feeling, when he was driving in one of the wagons behind four dogs, that he was acting in some kind of ridiculous pageant, and made a ludicrous spectacle. But, of course, no one else felt the same, and he had gradually come to accept the situation. After all, people had thought it natural to have dogs pull sleds. Why not wagons?

They left the dog-teams at the foot of the final slope, and climbed up along the old path, breaking their way through thick blackberry bushes. They stood at the edge of the reservoir, and looked across its empty expanse. There was a little skim of water in two or three low spots, but the outlet-pipe stood up into the air. They took a long look, and it was Ezra who spoke at last:

“That’s that!”

They discussed the possibilities a little, but without much interest or conviction. They were already half way through the rainy season, so that there was little possibility that rainfall would put water into the reservoir again. They went down the path, picked up the dog-teams, and started home.

As they neared the houses, the dogs began to bark, and the house-dogs barked back at them. Everyone had time to assemble at Ish’s house to hear the news. When they had heard it, the older people looked so glum that the children caught the infection, and one little fellow, who was probably too young to understand anything actually, began to cry. In the babble of conversation it soon became evident that no one was much worried about actual thirst, but that the women were greatly concerned that the toilets would no longer work. They did not mind this one day, but it was the thought that they would never work again! It seemed that all life had taken a step backward.

Only Maurine accepted the situation philosophically. “I growed up my first eighteen years on the old farm in South Dakota,” she said. “I run out to the outhouse, all kinds of weather, and I never seen a flusher except maybe when we was in town on Saturdays. That was one of the things I liked best when pappy piled us into the old Chevy and we went to California. But I always felt it wouldn’t last, and I’d end up, a-runnin’ out in all weathers, way I began. Rushers was nice. But it’s all over now, and I say, ‘Thank the good Lord the weather ain’t so cold here as in South Dakota.’”

The older men were more concerned with the problem of drinking-water. At first, like the confirmed city-dwellers that they had been, they thought in terms of finding where supplies of bottled water had been left in the stores and warehouses. But soon they saw that even in the approaching dry season, there could be no real lack of water. In spite of the long rainless summer, the area was not a desert, and the little streams in the gullies, though no one had ever paid much attention to them, must actually be supplying the water for all the cattle and the other animals which wandered in the region.

Just at this point, a distinction between the older generation and the younger began to show itself. Ish, in spite of having been a geographer, could not have told off-hand where there was a single spring or dependable stream in the neighborhood, although he could still locate positions by names of streets and intersections. The youngsters, on the other hand, could quickly tell him where there was a stream of running water at this season of the year, or where there would be pools of water, or where there were springs. They could not locate these places by reference to streets, but they could tell in general where they were, and could go to them without hesitation. Ish suddenly found himself being instructed by his own son Walt, who assured him that at this season of year there would be running water in a little gully which Ish had scarcely ever noticed because it flowed through under San Lupo Drive by means of a storm drain.

Before long, the original consternation changed to a kind of warm excitement. Some of the youngsters were sent off with the dog-teams and some five-gallon cans to bring back water from the nearest spring. The older ones began to dig holes vigorously, and to set up outhouses.

The enthusiasm lasted for several hours, and resulted in a noticeable amount of work. Steady pick-and-shovel labor, however, was something to which no one was accustomed, and by noon there was widespread complaint about blisters and weariness. When they separated for lunch, Ish suddenly became aware that no one was coming back for work. It was amazing how many important matters seemed to be planned for that afternoon—such as going fishing, and wiping out an ugly-acting bull who might prove dangerous, and shooting a mess of quail for dinner. Besides, by now the enthusiastic youngsters had brought in a supply of water which was plentiful for all immediate needs of drinking and cooking. The difference between having a small water-supply and no water at all was tremendous, psychologically. A five-gallon can sitting in the kitchen-sink took away all sense of strain.

After lunch Ish again relaxed with a cigarette. He was not going to go out and dig by himself. As the story-books told things, this would have been setting a noble example. Practically, it would make him look ridiculous.

Little Joey came, and stood nervously for a moment on his left foot with his right leg bent at the knee, and then reversed. “What’s the matter, Joey?” said Ish.

“Don’t we want to go out and work some more?”

“No, Joey. Not this afternoon.”

Joey continued balancing, letting his gaze wander around the room and then come back to his father.

“Go along, Joey,” said Ish gently. “Everything’s fine! We’ll have the lesson at the regular time.”

Joey went off, but Ish was touched, even if a little humiliated, by the wordless sympathy which his youngest son was offering. Joey scarcely could understand the larger issues, but his quick mind had sensed that his father was unhappy, even though there had been no argument between him and the others. Yes, Joey was the one!

Since that idea had first come to Ish on New Years Day, he had been pressing the lessons, and Joey had been absorbing them eagerly. There was even danger that he might turn out to be a learned pedant. He showed little ability at leadership among the other children, and sometimes Ish had begun to doubt.

This small incident just now, for instance! It might show intelligence and thought for the future, and it might show a tendency to escape from contacts with those of his own age, who were better at games than he, and to seek security in the presence of his father, by whom he felt himself appreciated. Ish hoped that the other children did not feel how strongly Joey had become his favorite. It was not right for a father to play favorites, but this situation had arisen suddenly and involuntarily, that New Years Day.

“Oh,” he thought, “don’t worry about it!” And suddenly he felt as if he were explaining it all to Em. “There on New Years Day, I was suddenly sure that Joey was the Chosen One. Now of course it’s all blurred. Maybe this is only the feeling a father gets for a small son. Later we may squabble, just the way I do with Walt now. Yet, I hope! The other boys were never like this—bright, I mean, lightning-quick at lessons. I don’t know. I wish I knew. I’ll keep on trying.”

Then, as he lit another cigarette, he was suddenly angry. He himself had not been so very bright! He had missed the opportunity. During the years he had been saying, “Something is going to happen!” It had not happened, and they had smiled at him for a gloomy and not-to-be-regarded prophet. Now this morning it had happened! It had been a shock! He could remember the scared faces when he and Ezra and George had first come back with the news. Then was the time to have made his I-told-you-so speech. He should have rubbed it in. He should have painted the future with disaster. That might have got something done.

As it was—perhaps he himself had been a little scared at the moment—everyone had made as light as possible of the matter, searched for the easiest makeshifts, and thus dulled the edge of what might have been made to seem a disaster. The Tribe had really taken the matter in its stride. Or—the identity of the word popped an old comparison into his mind—it had rolled off, “like water off a duck’s back!” Four or five hours later, and everybody had apparently settled again into the old happy-go-lucky life!

“Apparently,” yes! But after all, some sense of shock and uncertainty must still be lingering. Some had gone fishing and some had gone quail-shooting, and already he had heard two reports of a shot-gun. But all of these must certainly feel a slight sense of irresponsibility, even of guilt, at having left the more important work. They would come in tired at evening, and then the reaction might go the other way. He would get everybody together for a meeting then. If the iron would not still be red-hot, it might at least have rewarmed a little.

Then he himself incongruously crunched out his second after-lunch cigarette, and settled back to rest, comfortable and unharassed by worry, in the big chair. “This is comfortable,” he thought, “This is…”

In those days they will look toward the sea, and cry out suddenly, “A ship, a ship!… Yes, a ship certainly!… Do you not see the plume of the drifting smoke?… Yes, it is making for our harbor!” Then they will be merry with one another and say gaily: “Why were we despondent?…. It stood to reason that civilization could not be destroyed everywhere!… Of course, I always said…. In Australia, or South Africa, one of those isolated places—or one of the islands.” But there will be no ship, and only a wisp of cloud on the horizon.

Or one will wake from his nap in the afternoon, and took upward quickly. “Surely!… I knew it must come!… That was the motor of a plane…. I could not be mistaken.” But it will be only the locust in the bush, and there will be no plane.

Or one will rig batteries to a radio-set, and sit with earphones, fingering the dials. “Yes?” he will say sharply. “Be quiet there, all of you!… Surely, surely!… Just at 920!… Someone talking. I heard distinctly, sounded Spanish…. There again!… Now it’s faded!” But there will be no words on the air, only the tricks of the far-off thunderstorms.

“Yes, this is comfortable,” thought Ish, resting in the big chair…. And then suddenly he started! From the street came the noise of two loud reports, and he knew at once that they could be nothing but the backfiring of a large truck! Then, so quickly that he did not seem to take time at all, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, and there was the truck in the middle of the street. It was a fine large truck painted bright red with blue trim, and in large white letters on its side he saw: U.S. GOVT. A man got out of the truck, and though he had been driving it, he was now (quite understandably) wearing a cut-away coat and a high silk hat. The man said nothing, but Ish of course knew that this was the Governor of California. Ish felt himself filled suddenly with an inexpressible happiness. For again there was security and constituted authority and the strength of the many, instead of only the few in the midst of surrounding darkness, and now he, Ish, was no longer a weak and neglected child wandering alone in the vast unfriendly world….

In that bewilderment of happiness too great to be home, he awoke. The insides of his hands were moist, and his heart pounded. As he looked around the familiar room, the happiness faded out like a dying light, and in its place succeeded a woe, equally unutterable.

After another moment the woe too faded out as his conscious controls took over. That intense happiness of the dream, so overwhelming that it had awakened him—he knew now that it had sprung again from that often-repeated dream—“wish fulfillment,” they used to say. How many times throughout these twenty-one years had he dreamed it in some form or other! Not during the first year or two indeed—his sense of loneliness and insecurity had seemed to grow cumulatively with the years, piling up faster than the birth of new children could counteract it.

Yes, today the symbolism had been very plain. It varied, though usually it was plain enough. He felt a little surprised that it so often took the form of the return of the United States Government. In the Old Times he had never considered himself a flag-waving patriot, and he had not thought often about such things as the benefits of citizenship. But no more, indeed, did a person think of the air he breathed, until it was taken away. A sense of the vastness and solidity of the United States of America must have affected the sub-conscious feelings of its citizens, he reflected, much more than most of them had imagined.

By now he had brought his mind back to his actual world. He stirred in the chair. By the position of the sun he judged that he had slept an hour. Again he heard the distant report of the shot-gun from the quail-hunters. He smiled wanly, associating it with the back-firing truck. Anyway—now he would set about getting the others together for the meeting which he had planned for that evening.

Water supplies remained scanty throughout the day, but at least no one suffered from thirst. That evening the older ones, including Robert and Richard who were only sixteen, gathered at Ish’s house at his invitation. Ish found no one very much disturbed. It would be a good idea (this seemed to be the general opinion) to try digging a well near one of the houses, rather than to move to some houses nearer a natural water supply. Yes, they probably would have to watch sanitation carefully under the new arrangements and see that the children were instructed in such matters.

There was no presiding officer. Occasionally someone deferred to Ish to settle a point, but this deference, he realized, might be because he held a faintly recognized natural leadership of intellect or even for no better reason than that he was the host. There was no secretary taking a record of what happened. But then, there were no motions made and no votes taken. As always, it was more a social than a parliamentary gathering. Ish listened to the conversation back and forth.

“Come to think of it, though—how’s anybody know we’d get water in that well?”

“Can’t be a well till you do get water.”

“Well, that hole-in-the-ground then?”

“You got something there!”

“Maybe this would do better…. Run a pipe over to some click or spring, and hitch it onto our old pipes.”

“How about it, George? That sound O.K.?”

“…Why, sure… I guess so… Yeah… I guess I could connect up some pipes.”

“Trouble would be, though, when everybody wants water at once.”

“Have to build a dam—earth-dam would be all right—so’s to have a little bitty head behind your water.”

“Guess we could do that?”

“…Sure… Be some work, though.”

As the conversation wandered on almost complacently, Ish found himself gradually becoming more disturbed. To him it seemed as if this day had seen a retrograde and perhaps irretrievable step. Suddenly he found himself on his feet, and he was really making a speech to the ten people who were there before him.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “We shouldn’t have let this creep up on us. Any time in the last six months we should have been able to see that the water in the reservoir was failing, but we never even went to look at it. And here we are, caught suddenly, and shoved back so that we’ll perhaps never be able to catch up with things again. We’ve made too many mistakes. We ought to be teaching the children to read and write. (No one has ever supported me strongly enough in that.) We ought to send an expedition to find out what’s happening other places. It’s not safe not to know what may be happening just over the hill. We should have more domestic animals—some hens, anyway. We ought to be growing food…”

Then, when he was really in full career, someone started clapping, and he stopped for applause, feeling pleased. But everyone was laughing good-naturedly, and again he realized that the applause was ironic.

Through the noise of the hand-clapping he heard one of the boys saying:

“Good old dad! He’s said it again!”

And another replied:

“Time for George and the refrigerator!”

Ish joined in the laughter. He was not angry this time, but he was crestfallen at having unconsciously repeated himself and even more at having again failed to make his point. Then Ezra was speaking—good old Ezra who was always quick to cover up anyone’s embarrassment!

“Yes, that’s the old speech, but maybe there’s a new point there. How about that business of sending out an expedition?”

To Ish’s surprise a vigorous discussion arose, and in its course he was struck again by the unpredictable quality of people, particularly in a group. He had thrown out the new idea without any special forethought; it had sprung spontaneously from the events of the day—the surprise which had come upon them because they had not taken the pains to explore around the reservoir. He would have considered it the least important of his suggestions, but this was the one that caught the group-imagination. Suddenly everyone was in favor of it, and Ish joined the crowd in vigorous support. It was better, he felt, to do something-anything to break the lethargy.

Soon he felt himself becoming more enthusiastic. His original idea of an “expedition” had merely been that they should explore the country for a hundred miles or so roundabout, but he found that the others had understood him to envisage something much more. Soon, his imagination kindling, he went along with them. In a few minutes everyone was talking of a transcontinental expedition. “Lewis-and-Clark in reverse!” thought Ish to himself, but he said nothing, knowing that few of those present would know anything about Lewis and Clark.

The talk ran on vigorously:

“Too long for walking!”

“Or dog-teams either!”

“Horses would do better, if we had some!”

“There’re sure to be some over in the big valley.”

“Take a long time to catch and break them.”

As he listened, still another thought crossed Ish’s mind. His old dream, the one which had come again that afternoon! How did they really know that the Government of the United States had actually failed? Even if it had, it might have been reconstituted. It would be small and weak, of course, and might not yet have been able to re-establish touch with the West Coast. By their own effort they might make the contact.

Another curious feature was that nearly everyone wanted to go! It was the best evidence you could want as to the way in which people generally—males, at least—were born with itchy feet, always ready to go somewhere else and see new things. The question became one of elimination. Ish was ruled out, scarcely being able to put up a good protest, because of his disability where the mountain-lion had clawed him, far back in the Year of the Lions. George was too old. Ezra, in spite of his vigorous arguments, was disqualified as being the worst shot of them all and generally the least fitted to take care of himself in the open. As for the “boys,” everyone except themselves agreed that they should not leave their wives and young families. In the end the decision was for Robert and Richard, youngsters, but well able to take care of themselves. Their mothers, Em and Molly, looked doubtful, but the enthusiasm of the meeting overrode their objections. Robert and Richard were delighted.

The more ticklish questions were really as to the route and the means of transportation. In the last few years no one had used an automobile, and several once-fine cars stood forlorn and ruinous along San Lupo Drive on hopelessly flat tires; the children used them for playhouses. The trouble of keeping automobiles going was more work than pleasure, and the roads in all directions had become so clogged with fallen trees and the bricks of chimneys brought down by the earthquake that there would have been little practical advantage to trying to travel about the city by car, even if you had a workable one. On top of all that, the younger men had never known the fun of driving a car under good conditions, and so had no interest. Finally, where would you go if you had a car? You had no friends to visit in the other part of town, and no movies to go to. To bring cans and bottles home from the grocery stores the dog-teams did well enough, and they also served for fishing-expeditions to the bay-shore.

Still, the older ones agreed, it might be possible to get an automobile running again, and to drive it for a considerable distance, even on rotten tires, if you kept the speed down below, say, twenty-five miles an hour. And that was really traveling, compared with a dog-team! Fast enough too to take you to New York in a month easily—provided the roads were passable!

That was the other difficult point—the route! Ish was suddenly at home, bringing into play his old knowledge of geography. Everything to the east, across the Sierra Nevada, would be completely blocked by fallen trees and landslides, and the roads to the north would probably be the same. The best chance would certainly be through the more open country toward the south, actually the route by winch Ish had gone to New York once long before. The desert roads might still be almost as good as ever. The Colorado River bridges might still be standing or might have fallen. The only way to find out would be to go and see.

His excitement rising, the old road-maps standing out more clearly in his mind, Ish planned the route eastward. Beyond the Colorado the mountains should not be too difficult, and there were no big rivers for a long way—until you came to the Rio Grande at Albuquerque. Beyond there, if you could just get through the Sandia Mountains, you had open plateau country, and farther east there would be more and more choice of roads. (You could still find gasoline in drums; that would be no great problem.) Once on the plains, you should be able to get to the Missouri or the Mississippi, and even across those largest rivers; the high steel bridges should still be in good condition, to judge by the Bay Bridge.

“What an adventure!” he burst out. “I’d give anything to be able to go! You must look everywhere for people—not just one or two, but communities. You must see how other groups are going at solving their problems and getting started again.”

Beyond the Mississippi (he resumed planning the route) it would be hard to say. That was natural forest country, and the roads might be badly blocked. On the other hand, fires might have kept the growth down, at least across the old prairie country in Illinois. All they could do would be to go and find out, if they even got that far, and to make decisions then.

By now the candles were getting well burned down. The clock, pointed to ten o’clock, although that was only an approximation. (Ish checked time once in a while by watching the shadow at noon, and the big clock in his living-room was considered standard for the community.) But it certainly was a late hour for people who had no electric lights, and so had gradually got around to making more and more use of sunlight.

Suddenly the others were all on their feet and taking leave. When they had gone, Ish and Em sent Robert to bed, and then started to straighten, up the living-room.

Ish felt a nostalgic touch. Things had changed so much and yet sometimes seemed to have changed not at all! This might have been away back in the Old Times, and he instead of Robert might have been the youngster just sent upstairs. He instead of Robert might be the one peeping down through the stairway (as Robert probably was), seeing his father and mother moving about, emptying cigarette trays, shoving cushions back into place, and generally putting the room to rights so that it would not look too devastating when they came down in the morning. It furnished a kind of comfortable little domestic interim which rounded off the evening and let your nerves settle down from the buzz of conversation.

When they had finished, they sat on the davenport for a last cigarette. Ish’s mind could not help snapping back to the everung’s discussion. Even though things had not turned out as he had at first planned, still he felt that he had carried a main point.

“Communications,” he said. “Communications—maybe that’s the big thing! Take it anywhere in history. When a nation or a community got isolated all by itself, it went conservative and then retrograded. It got to acting just the way George and Maurine are over there, gathering in all the things out of the past, and freezing just at that point. That sort of thing, maybe, happened to Egypt and China. But then when there’s contact with some other civilization, everything loosens up again, and gets going. That’s the way it will be with us.”

She did not say anything, but he knew from the very fact of her silence, that she did not altogether agree.

“What is it, darling?” he asked.

“Well, you see, I was thinking maybe it wasn’t so good for the Indians when they got into communication with the white people, was it? Or how about all my people on the coast of Africa when they got into contact with the slavers?”

“Yes, but maybe that’s just my point. How would we like it if some slavers came over the hill some fine morning, and we had never known they were anywhere around before? Wouldn’t it have been better if the Indians could have sent some scouts over to Europe, and been ready for white men who came with horses and guns?”

He was pleased that he had countered so cleverly. After all, her argument had merely been for letting things slide and for living in ignorance. That kind of philosophy could never win in the long run. But all she said was: “Yes, perhaps, perhaps.”

“Do you remember?” he went on. “I was saying this a long time ago. We’ve got to live more creatively, not just as scavengers. Why, I was saying this way back even at the time our first baby was going to be born!”

“Yes, I remember. You’ve said it a great many times! And still some way or other, it seems to be easier just to go on opening cans.”

“But the end will come some time, and it shouldn’t come suddenly the way this stopping of the water has today.”

Chapter 3

When he awoke that next morning, Em was gone from the bed. He lay still, relaxed, calmly happy. Then his mind seemed to turn over suddenly and take hold—and there it was, starting to make plans, thinking.

After a minute, a slight sense of irritation came over him. “You think too much!” he said to himself.

Why did not his mind, like other people’s minds, allow him to rest and be happy without any planning ahead into the future, whether of the next twenty-four hours or of the next sixty seconds? No, something took over with a rush and a whir, and even though his body lay still, his mind turned over and started, and there it was running on, like an idling engine. Engine? Well, naturally, today he would think of engines!

But the quiet happiness between sleep and waking had definitely left him, and pure contentment was gone. With a resentful push of his arm he threw back the blankets.

This morning was bright and sunny. Though the air was cool, he went out to the little balcony, and stood there, looking off toward the west. During all these years the trees had everywhere grown taller, but he could still see the mountaintop and much of the Bay with its two great bridges.

The bridges! Yes, the bridges! To him they still were the most poignant reminders of the great past. The children, indeed, as he had often observed, scarcely thought of bridges as anything different from hills or trees; they were just something that was there. But to him, Ish, the bridges stood testifying daily to the power and the glory that had been civilization. So, he thought, some tribesman—Burgund or Saxon—might once have looked at a strong-built, not yet decayed, Roman gateway or triumphal arch. But, no, that analogy did not hold. The tribesman was sure and content in his own ancient folkways; he was first of the new, confident master of his own world. He, Ish, was more like the last of the old, a surviving Roman—senator or philosopher—spared by barbarian swords and left to brood over an empty and ruinous city, anxious and uncertain, knowing that never again would he meet his friends at the baths or know the deep security that came to a man when he saw a cohort of the Twelfth march down the street. But no, he was not just like the Roman either.

“History repeats itself,” he thought, “but always with variations.”

Yes—he had a chance to think a great deal about history! Its repetitions were not those of a stolid child going over and over the multiplication table. History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.

As he stood on the little balcony in his pajamas, he felt a light breeze cool on his face. He sniffed it in more deeply, and again it brought to him the realization that even the smell of things had changed. In the Old Times you were not conscious of any characteristic smell to a city, and yet there must have been a complex mingling of smoke and gasoline-fumes and cooking and garbage and even of people. But now there was only a fresh tang to the air, such as he had once associated with country fields and mountain meadows.

But the bridges! His glance came back to them, as if to a light in the darkness. The Golden Gate Bridge he had not visited in many years. Such a journey would mean a very long walk, or even a long pull for a dog-team; it would mean camping out overnight. But he still knew well what the Bay Bridge was like, and even from where he stood he could see it clearly.

He remembered what it had once been—six crowded lanes of swiftly moving cars, the trucks and buses and electric trains rumbling on the lower level. There was, he knew, only one car on the Bridge now—that little empty coup parked neatly at the curb near this end of the West Bay span. The yellowed certificate of registration had been, when he had last noticed, still fastened to the steering-column—John S. Robertson (or, he could not surely remember, it might have been James T.) of some number on one of the numbered streets in Oakland. Now the tires were flat, and the once-bright green paint had weatherd to moss-gray.

On the surface, to the eye, they had changed. The towers that hid their tops in the summer clouds, the mile-long dipping cables, the interlocked massive beams of steel—no longer they cast back the morning sun with a bright sheen of silvergray. Over them now rested softly the neutral pall of rust, red-brown color of desolation. Only, at the tops of the towers, and along the cables at good spots for perching, the quiet monotone was capped and spotted with the dead-white smears of the droppings of birds.

Yes, through the years the sea-birds had perched there, the gulls and pelicans and cormorants. And on the piers the rats scurried, and fought, and bred and nested, and lived as only rats can—squeaking and fighting, and breeding and nesting, and at low tide feeding on mussels and crabs.

The broad roadway, unused, showed few signs of change—only roughness and a few cracks here and there. Where blown dust had settled into cracks and corners, a little grass was growing, and a few hardy weeds, not many.

Within its deeper structure also, the bridge was still intact and unchanged. The superficial rust had done no more than wipe out a small fraction of the safety-factor. At the eastern approach, where salt water during time of storms splashed against the long-unpainted steel supports, corrosion had been eaten somewhat deeper. An engineer, if there had been one, would have shaken his head, and ordered the replacement of some members before allowing traffic to resume.

But that was all. In the enduring structure of the bridge, long-dead civilization still defied the attacks of all the powers of air and sea.

Ish roused himself from his trance-like contemplation, and went in to shave. The clean touch of the steel was at once soothing and stimulating. Cheerfully now, happy with the expectation of purposive action, he found himself thinking of the things to be done that day. He would have to see that they started in again with work on the outhouses and the well. He would make more plans about the expedition into the far interior. (President Jefferson giving instructions to Lewis and Clark!) He would have to see what could be done about making a car work once more. Perhaps, he thought happily, this would be the day on which they would take the road again, not only in a car literally, but also figuratively—the road toward the rebirth of civilization.

He finished shaving, but the moment seemed golden. So he lathered again, and started over his face once more…. This community now, these thirty-some people who held the seed of the future—they were fair enough individuals, not brilliant by a long way, but sound. The original adults had been better in spite of their shortcomings than you would have expected to get if you had merely reached down into the great bin of humanity in the old United States and taken the first that came by chance. He ran over them again rapidly in his mind, and ended upon himself. How did he stack up among the others?

Yes, he could remember years ago, in this same house, he had even sat down and listed his qualifications for the new life. Such things, for instance, as having had his appendix out. Well, having no appendix was still an advantage, although actually, no one had been bothered with that kind of trouble. But he had listed other things which now, he realized, had ceased to be advantageous. He had listed, for instance, his quality of being able to get along without other people. That was no longer a virtue. Perhaps, it was even a vice. But he himself had changed also in those years. If he listed his qualities now, they would not be exactly the same ones. He had read widely, and learned much. Even of more importance, he had lived with Em, and had become the father of a family. He had matured, as a man should. He had a stronger will, he realized, than George or Ezra. If the test came, they would yield to him. He, alone, could think into the future.

He disassembled the razor, and threw the blade into the medicine closet, where there were already a lot of blades lying around. He never bothered to use a blade more than once, because there were so many thousands of them available that there seemed no need of economy. And yet this problem of what to do with the old razor-blades was still curiously present. He remembered jokes about that, from long ago. Funny how a little thing remained the same after so many big things had changed irrevocably!

After breakfast Ish went over to talk with Ezra. They sat on the steps of the porch. Before long, more people came along, and a little group formed, as always happened when anybody seemed to be having an interesting conversation. there was talk back and forth, and a good deal of easygoing fun-making, with a little horse-play among the younger people. Everybody seemed to agree, in general, that they ought to get to work again, but nobody was in a special huffy to begin. The delay chafed Ish, especially when George in his slow way began again to bring up the old question of the gas-refrigerator.

At last, however, Ezra and the three younger men with an accompanying rag-tag of little boys and girls moved off to begin work. As soon as they had really started, a kind of enthusiasm fell upon them. Everyone, even Ezra, suddenly began to run, trying to see who would be the first one there to start digging. Ish could see Evie running with the rest—although she could not know what was happening—her blond hair streaming wildly behind her. Who got there first, he could not tell, but in a moment dirt started to fly in all directions. He did not know whether to be amused or perturbed. Everyone seemed to be turning serious work into a kind of play, as if unable to distinguish between work and play. That might sound fine, but you could not accomplish much, he thought, without settling down to labor. As it was, the playful enthusiasm would wear out in half an hour, and the dirt would move more slowly; then, children first, older ones soon afterward, everyone would probably drift off to something else.

When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats, or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay—that was not work, though often the breath came hard and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or tended the fire at the entrance to the rock-shelter—that was not work either.

So also, when they sang and danced and made love, that was not play. By the singing and dancing the spirits of forest and water might be placated—a serious matter, though still one might enjoy the song and the dance. And as for the making of love, by that—and by the favor of the gods—the tribe was maintained.

So in the first years work and play mingled always, and there were not even the words for one against the other.

But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm-clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

Only Ish and George were left standing there by Ezra’s porch-steps. Ish knew that George was getting ready to say something. Funny, Ish thought, you wouldn’t think anyone could pause until he had said something; George paused before he said anything.

“Well,” said George, and then he paused again. “Well…. I guess I better go get some planks… so I can wall in the sides… after she gets deeper.”

“Fine!” said Ish. George at least, Ish knew, would get the work done. He had carried the habit of work over so strongly from the Old Times that he perhaps could never really play.

George went off after his planks, and Ish went to find Dick and Bob, who had been collecting and harnessing the dogteams.

He found the two boys in front of his own house. Three dog-teams were ready. A rifle-barrel was sticking out from one wagon.

Ish considered for a moment. Was there anything else he should take along?

He felt a lack.

“Oh, say, Bob,” he said, “run in, please, and get my hammer”.

“Aah, why do you want that?”

“Oh, well, nothing in particular, I guess. It might come in handy for breaking a lock.”

“You can always use a brick,” said Bob, but he went.

Ish used the momentary delay to pick up the rifle and check that the magazine was full. This was pure routine, but Ish himself was the one who insisted on it. There was only a very small chance of meeting a rambunctious bull or a she-bear with cubs, but you took the rifle along for insurance. Ish, at times when he woke up in the night, still remembered very vividly the occasion when the dogs had trailed him.

Bob came back, and at once handed the hammer to his father. As Ish gripped the handle, he felt a strange little sense of security. The familiar weight of the dangling four-pound head brought him comfort. It was the same old hammer that he had picked up long ago, just before the rattlesnake bit him. The handle had been weathered and cracked then, and it still was. He had often thought of choosing a new handle in some hardware store and fitting it to the head. As a matter of fact he could just as well have picked out a whole new tool. Actually, however, he had very little use for the hammer. By tradition he took it along every New Years Day when he cut the numerals into the rock, but that was about its only practical value, and even for that purpose a lighter one might have been better.

So now he stuck the hammer into the wagon by his feet, and felt comfortable. “All ready?” he called to Dick and Bob, and just then, something caught his eye.

A small boy was standing, half-hidden in the bushes, looking out at the wagons. Ish recognized the slight figure. “Oh, Joey!” he called on impulse. “Want to go along?”

Joey stepped out from the bushes, but hung back.

“I have to help digging the well,” he said.

“Oh, never mind, they’ll get the well dug without you or” [he added to himself] “they more likely won’t get it either with or without you.”

Joey took no more urging. Obviously this was what he really been hoping. He ran to Ish’s wagon, and climbed snugly at his father’s feet where he could just find room. He held the hammer in his lap.

Then the dogs were off with a furious rush and an outburst of barking, as they always liked to start out. The two other teams followed, with the excited boys yelling and their dogs barking too. The dogs around the houses barked back. It made a fair imitation of a riot. As always, hunched in the little wagon behind six dogs, Ish felt ridiculous, as if he were acting in some silly pageant.

Once the dogs had started, they stopped wasting breath barking, and settled to a slower pace. Ish collected thoughts, and went over his plans.

He made his first stop at what had once been a station. The door was open. Inside the little office, though it was walled in glass, the sunlight filtered through in subdued yellow. Twenty-one years of fly-specks and blown dust had coated the windows thickly.

He saw the old telephone directory hanging from its book beside the long-dead telephone. As he took the book and opened it, bits of brittle yellowed paper broke off from the pages and went fluttering to the floor. He found the address of what had once been the local agency for jeeps. Yes, with the roads in the condition they were, a jeep would be the thing.

Half an hour later, when they came to the proper streetcorner, Ish looked through the dirty display-window, and his heart jumped with boyish excitement at seeing a jeep actually standing there.

The boys tied up the teams, and the dogs, well-trained, lay down in orderly fashion without snarling the tram. Dick tried the door; it was locked.

“Here,” said Ish, “take the hammer, and smash the lock.”

“Oh, here’s a brick!” said Dick, and then went running off down the street toward the remains of a chimney that had fallen in the earthquake. Bob went with him.

Ish had a feeling of irritation. What was wrong with those boys? At best a brick was not as good as the hammer for smashing a door in. He ought to know; he had smashed a lot of them.

He stepped three strides across the sidewalk, and swinging with the hammer on the rhythm of his last stride, he sent the door crashing inwards. That would show them! After all, there had been sense in bringing the hammer!

The jeep that was standing there in the display-room had four flat tires, and showed a thick layer of dust, but under the dust the red paint was shiny. The speedometer showed a total of nine miles. Ish shook his head.

“No,” he said, “this one’s too new. I mean, she was too new! One that was better broken in will be easier for us.”

In the garage behind the display-room, there were several others. All their tires were flat, extremely flat. One had its hood up and various of its parts were scattered around. It must have been in for a repair-job. Ish passed that one by.

There seemed little to choose between the others. The speedometer of one of them stood at six thousand, and Ish decided to try that one.

The boys looked at him expectantly, and Ish felt that he was putting himself to the test.

“Now remember,” he said defensively, “I don’t know whether I can get this thing going or not. I don’t know whether anyone could—after twenty years and more! I’m not even a mechanic, you know! I was just one of those ordinary fellows who had driven a car quite a lot and could change a tire, or tighten a fan-belt, maybe. Don’t expect too much…. Well, first, we might try to see if we can move her.”

Ish made sure that the brake was off and the gears in neutral.

“All right,” he said. “The tires are flat, and the grease is stiff in the wheel-bearings, and for all I know maybe the bearings themselves have gone flat from standing twenty years the same way. But come on and get behind her, and we’ll shove. This floor is level anyway…. All right, now. All together—shove!” The car lurched suddenly forward!

The boys were yelping with pleasure and excitement, and their noise set the dogs to barking. You would have thought it was all over, whereas all that had been proved was that the wheels still would turn.

Next Ish put the gear into high, and they shoved again. This was a different story. The car did not budge.

The question was now whether the engine and gears were merely stiff from disuse or whether they were actually rusted tight somewhere.

Looking under the hood, Ish saw that the engine was well smeared with grease, as engines usually were. There was little sign of external rust, but that might show nothing about what had happened inside.

The boys looked at him expectantly, and he thought of expedients. He could try the other car. He could have the boys bring the dog-teams in and hitch them to the car. Then he had another idea.

The jeep which had been in the process of being repaired was only some ten feet behind the one they had chosen to try. If they could shove that one forward out of gear, they might send it against the rear of the other with enough momentum to make something give. Also they might smash something, but that was no matter!

They brought this jeep within two feet of the other, and rested. Then, altogether, they shoved again.

There was a satisfactory bang of metal on metal. Going to look, they found that the first jeep had moved three inches. After that, they could move it with hard pushing, even when it was in gear. Ish began to feel triumphant.

“You see,” he said, “once you get something moving it’s easier to keep moving!” (Then he wondered whether that principle applied to groups of people, as well as to engines.)

The battery of course was dead, but Ish had faced that problem before. First, however, he gave the boys instructions to drain all oil out of the car and replace it with oil from sealed cans, using the lightest oil available.

Leaving them at work, he went off with a dog-team. In half an hour he was back with a battery. He connected it, and turned the key in the ignition switch, watching the needle on the ammeter. Nothing happened. Perhaps the wiring was gone somewhere.

But he tapped the ammeter, and the long unused needle suddenly disengaged and went jiggling over to Discharge. There was life! He felt around for the starter-button.

“Well, boys,” he said, “here’s a real test…. Yes, I guess this is the acid test, seeing that that’s what we have in the battery!” But the boys grinned blankly, never having heard the expression, and Ish found himself a little disturbed that he had been able to make a pun at such a climax. He pressed the starter-button. There was a long grunt.

Then slowly the engine turned!

After the first turn it moved more easily, and then more easily still. So far, so good!

The gasoline-tank was empty, like most of them these days. Probably their caps were not air-tight, or else the gasoline seeped through the carburetor—Ish did not know.

They found gasoline in a drum, and poured five gallons into the tank. Ish put in fresh spark-plugs. He primed the carburetor, feeling a little proud that he knew enough to do so. He got into the seat, set the choke, snapped the ignition on again, and tramped on the starter-button.

The engine grunted, turned over, turned faster, and then suddenly roared into life.

The boys were shouting. Ish sat triumphantly, nursing the throttle with his foot. He felt a sense of pride in the old achievements of civilization—in all the honest design and honest work of engineers and machinists which had gone into fashioning this engine, fit to work after twenty-some years of idleness.

The engine, however, died suddenly when the gas in the carburetor was exhausted. They primed and ran it again, and still again, and finally the ancient pump brought up gas from the tank, and the engine ran continuously. The problem now—and perhaps the worst of all—was tires.

In the same display-room there was one of the usual tireracks well raised above the floor. But the tires had been standing upright for so long that they had sagged a little under their own weight, and the rubber, where it had rested against the rack, was badly indented. Such tires, even though they might last for a few miles, held obviously little possibility for a long run. By searching carefully, they finally found some tires which had been resting on their sides, and these seemed to be in better condition, although the rubber was hard and full of little cracks, and gave an impression of being dead.

They found a jack, and raised the first wheel from the ground. Even to get the wheel off was a struggle, for the nuts had begun to rust to the threads.

Bob and Dick were unaccustomed to the use of tools, and little Joey kept getting in the way with his eagerness, and was more hindrance than help. Even in the Old Times Ish had never dismounted a tire except once or twice in an emergency, and he had forgotten the tricks, if he had ever known them.

They spent a long time sweating the first tire off the rim. Bob barked a knuckle, and Dick tore a finger-nail half off. Getting the “new” tire onto the rim was even more of a struggle, both because of their clumsiness and because of the tire’s own aged stiffness. At last, tired and thoroughly irritated with one another and with the whole job, they finished getting this one tire onto the rim.

Just as they were pausing, triumphant but tired, Ish heard Joey calling to him from across the garage.

“What is it, Joey?” he answered, a little petulantly.

“Come here, Daddy.”

“Oh, Joey, I’m tired,” he said, but he went, and the two other boys trailed with him. Joey was pointing at the spare wheel of one of the jeeps.

“Look, Daddy,” he said, “why couldn’t you use that one?”

All Ish could do was to burst out laughing.

“Well, boys,” he said to Dick and Bob, “that’s the time we made fools of ourselves!”

The tire on the spare wheel had been suspended in the air all these years, and it was already on a wheel. They had not needed to shift any tires. All they had needed to do was to take this and the other spares, pump them up, and put them on their own jeep. They had done a lot of work for no purpose because they had just barged along and not used their heads.

Then Ish, suddenly recognizing his own stupidity, strangely gained a new pleasure. Joey was the one who had seen! But by now it was time for lunch.

They had brought along only their spoons and always essential can-openers.

Now they went off to the nearest grocery store.

Like all the others it was a scene of devastation and litter and ruin. A mess! It was depressing to Ish, even horrible, in spite of the many times he had seen its like. The boys, however, thought nothing of it, never having seen a grocery store in any other state. Rats and mice had chewed into all the cartons, and the floor was deep with the remnants of cardboard and paper, mixed with rodent droppings. Even the toilet paper had been chewed, probably for nesting.

But the rodents could do nothing with glass or tin, and so the bottles and cans were undisturbed. They even looked startlingly neat, at first glance, in contrast with the mess elsewhere. When you looked closer, they were not really neat. Droppings were scattered even on these shelves, and many labels had been chewed, probably because of the paste beneath the paper. Also the colors had faded, so that the once bright red tomatoes on the labels were a sickly yellow, and the rosy-cheeked peaches had almost disappeared.

The labels, however, were still readable. At least, Ish and Joey could read them, and the others, though they got stuck on many hard words like apricots and asparagus, could at least tell what was inside by looking at the pictures. They selected what they wanted.

The boys were quite ready to sit down in the liner and eat. Ish, however, wanted to get outside. So they went and sat on the curb in the sun.

They did not bother with a fire, but ate a cold lunch out of the cans, each to his choice, from a selection of baked beans, sardines, salmon, liver loaf, corned beef, olives, peanuts, and asparagus. Such a meal, Ish knew, ran high in proteins and fats and low in carbohydrates, but there were few carbohydrates that had been canned or bottled, and the few that you could find, like hominy and macaroni, called for heating. For drink, they had tomato juice. They ate a desert of canned nectarines and pineapple.

When they had finished, they wiped off the spoons and can-openers and put them back into their pockets. The halfempty cans they merely left lying. There was so much litter in the street already that something more did not matter.

The boys, Ish was glad to notice, were in a hurry to get back to work at the car. They had apparently begun to feel a little of the intoxication that was likely to come from a mastery over power. He himself was a little tired, and a new idea was shaping in his mind.

“Say, boys,” he said, “Bob and Dick, I mean. Do you think you can go back and shift those wheels by yourselves?”

“Sure,” said Dick, but he looked puzzled.

“What I mean is—well, Joey is too little to be much use, and I’m tired. It’s only four blocks to the City Library from here. Joey can go with me. Want to, Joey?”

Joey was already on his feet with the excitement of the idea. The other boys were happy to get back to the tires.

As they walked toward the Library, Joey ran ahead in his eagerness. It was ridiculous, thought Ish, that he had never taken Joey there before. But all this matter of Joey’s reading and intellectual interests had developed very rapidly.

Because of his policy of saving the great University Library as a reserve, Ish had been using this library for his own purposes for many years, and had long since forced the lock on the main entrance. Now he pushed the heavy door open, and entered proudly with his youngest son.

They stood in the main reading-room, and then wandered, through the stacks. Joey said nothing, but Ish could see his eyes drink the titles in as he passed. They came out from the stacks again, and stood in the main lobby by the entrance looking back. Then Ish had to break the silence.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

“Is it all the books in the world?”

“Oh, no! Just a few of them.”

“Can I read them?”

“Yes, you can read any you want to. Always bring them back, and put them in place again, so they won’t get lost and scattered.”

“What’s in the books?”

“Oh, something of pretty near everything. If you read them all, you would know a lot.”

“I’ll read them all!”

Ish felt a sudden warning shadow fall on the happiness of his mind.

“Oh, no, Joey! You couldn’t possibly read them all, and you wouldn’t want to. There are dull ones and stupid ones and silly ones, and even bad ones. But I’ll help you pick out the good ones. Now, though, we’d better go.”

He was actually glad to get Joey away. The stimulation of seeing so many books so suddenly seemed almost more than was good for the frail little boy. Ish was glad that he had not taken him to the University Library. In due time now he could take him there.

As they walked toward the garage, Joey did not run ahead. This time he kept close to his father; he was thinking. Finally he spoke:

“Daddy, what is the name of those things that are on the ceilings of our rooms—like shiny white balls? You said once they used to make light.”

“Oh, those are called ‘electric lights.’”

“If I read the books, could I make them make light again?”

Ish felt a sudden intoxication of pleasure, and immediately after it a sense of fear. This must not go too fast!

“Well, Joey, I don’t know,” he said, trying to speak with unconcern. “Maybe you could, maybe not. Things like that take time, and a lot of people working together. You’ve got to go slow.”

Then they walked without speaking. Ish was proud and triumphant that Joey had absorbed so much of his own feeling, and yet he was fearful. Joey was moving even too fast. The intellect should not run ahead of the rest of the personality. Joey needed physical strength and emotional solidity. Still, he was going far!

Ish came out of his thoughts to the sound of retching, and saw that Joey was vomiting upon a pile of rubble.

“That lunch!” thought Ish guiltily. “I let him eat too much mixture. He’s done this before.” Then he realized that the excitement had probably been more a factor than the lunch.

When Joey felt better, and they finally got back to the garage, they found that the boys had finished the work of shifting tires and pumping them up. Ish felt his old curiosity about the car and the expedition rising up again.

He got into the car, and once more started the engine. He nursed it lovingly, and then raced it a little to let it grow warm. Well, the engine was running and the tires were holding, at least temporarily. But there were a lot of questions about clutch and transmission and steering-gear and brakes, besides all those mysterious but vital things which lurked somewhere in the make-up of automobiles and of which he scarcely even knew the names. They had filled the radiator, but the water-circulation might well be clogged somewhere, and even that was enough to render a car of no value. But here we are again worrying about the future!

“All right!” he said. “Let’s go!”

The engine was muttering contentedly. He threw the clutch out, and worked the stiff transmission into low gear. He let the clutch in, and the car lurched forward heavily, as if its bearings were almost too stiff to be started again, as if their fine steel balls like the rubber tires, had flattened from long standing in one position. Yet the car moved, and he felt it respond to the stiff steering gear. He pressed upon the brake, and the car came to a stop, having moved only six feet. Yet it had moved, and (of equal importance) it had stopped.

He had a sudden feeling of more than pleasure, reaching to, the height of exaltation. It was not all a dream! If in one day work a man and three boys could get a jeep to running again, what could not a whole community accomplish in the course of a few years?

The boys unloosed the dogs from one of the wagons to home by themselves. They hitched the wagon behind one the others. Then Dick drove one team, and Bob the other. Ish, with Joey beside him, started out bravely.

Fallen buildings had left heaps of debris in the street, blowing winds had drifted leaves and dust upon the bricks and the winter rains had washed the whole into semblances natural banks and hillocks. Grass was growing thickly; on o little mound there was even a fair stand of bushes. Ish stiffly hither and thither, finding a way along the clogged streets. He was nearing home when he sharply over a brick and heard a bang as the left rear tire out. He ended the day driving home on one flat tire, badly, but taking it slowly and making the last grade successfully, a little ahead of the dog-teams. In spite of this final mishap, he felt that he had done well.

He let the jeep roll to a stop in front of the house, leaned back in triumphant relief. At least he had got it home.

Then he pressed the horn-button, and after these years of silence it responded wonderfully—TOOT-A-TOOT-TOOT!

He expected children, and older people too, to come hurrying from all directions at the unaccustomed sound, but there was no one. Only a sudden barking of dogs sprang up from everywhere. Then the team-dogs joined in the chorus, as they now came up the hill, and the boys joined him. Ish felt a sudden emptiness of fear inside him. Once before, long ago, he had come into a strangely empty town, and blown the horn of his car, and now it was easy enough to think that something might have happened when your whole universe consisted of only some thirty more or less defenseless people. But that was only for a moment.

Then he saw Mary, her baby on her arm, come unconcernedly out of the house down the street, and wave to him. “They’ve all gone bull-dodging!” she called.

The boys were suddenly excited to join the sport. They loosed the dogs from the carts, and were off, not even asking permission of Ish. Even Joey, now wholly recovered from his illness, rushed off with the others. Ish felt suddenly left alone and neglected, his triumph at restoring transportation gone suddenly sour in his mouth. Only Mary came to look at the jeep. She stared with big enough eyes, but was as untalkative as the baby, who also stared.

Ish got out of the jeep, and stretched. His long legs were cramped from its close quarters, and his bad loin ached from even this small amount of bumping.

“Well,” he said with a little pride in his voice, “what do you think of it, Mary?” Mary was his own daughter, but she was not much like either of her parents, and her stolidity often bothered him.

“Good!” she said with a Choctaw-like imperturbability.

Ish felt that there was not much to follow up along that line. “Where’s the bull-dodging?” he asked.

“Down by the big oak tree.”

Just then they heard the loud sound of yelling, and Ish knew that someone had made a good maneuver at dodging.

“Well, I guess I might as well go down and see the national sport,” he said, though he knew the irony would be wasted.

“Yes,” said Mary, and began to stroll back with her baby toward her own house.

Ish went off on the path down the hill, across lots, through what had once been someone’s backyard. “National sport!” he was still thinking to himself bitterly, although he realized that the bitterness might be partly because his own triumphant entry had been spoiled. He heard another shout from ahead which indicated that again someone put himself within a few inches of the bull’s horns.

Bull-dodging was dangerous, too, although actually no one had ever been killed or even badly hurt. Ish rather disapproved of the whole business, but he did not feel that he was in a position to set himself firmly against it. The boys needed some way to get rid of their energy, and perhaps they even needed something dangerous. By and large, life was perhaps too quiet and too safe these days. Possibly—the image of Mary came to his mind again—too safe and unadventurous life tended to produce stolid people. These days children never had to be warned against crossing the street because of automobiles, and there were dozens of other daily hazards of the old civilization such as the common cold, not to mention atomic bombs, which nobody ever needed to consider. You had the ordinary run of sprains, cuts, and bruises, what you expected among people living largely in the open, and handling tools like hatchets and knives. Once, too, Molly had burned her hands badly, and there had been a near-drowning when a three-year-old had slipped from the pier at fishing.

Now he came into the edge of the little open space on the side of the hill, fairly level, close to the flat rock where the numerals of the years were incised. It had once been a park. The bull was being played in the center of the grassy spot. It was not a lawn such as you expected in a park. The grass was a foot tall at this time of year, and would have been taller if it had not been eaten down by cattle and elk.

Harry, Molly’s fifteen-year-old, was playing the bull, and Ish’s own Walt was backing him up—what they called “playing halfback”—a bit of jargon surviving from the Old Times. Although Ish did not consider himself an expert, his first glance was enough to let him know that this particular bull was not very dangerous. He must have been of almost pure Hereford blood, and still had the red coat with the white face and front markings. Nevertheless he showed the cumulative effects of ancestors who for twenty-one years had lived as, range cattle, knowing no man-supplied shelter or food and surviving as best they could. The legs were longer; the barrel of the body, slimmer; the horns, bigger. At the moment, there was a pause in the game as the already tiring bull stood uncertain, and Harry was taunting him to charge.

At the edge of the glade among the trees on the uphill side, the spectators were sitting—almost everybody from the community in fact, including Jeanie with her baby. Among the trees they would have no trouble getting out of the road of the bull, if by any chance he should suddenly decide to leave the open ground. There were several dogs to be loosed in an emergency, and Jack sat with a rifle across his knees.

The bull suddenly came to life, and charged ponderously uphill with enough power to have wiped out twenty boys. But Harry dodged neady, and the bull came to a halting stop, uncertain and confused.

A little girl (she was Jean’s Betty) sprang suddenly from the group, and cried out that she wanted to take over. She was a wild, dashing little figure, her skirts tucked up high around her thighs, her long sun-tanned legs flashing back and forth in the sunshine. Harry yielded place to his half-sister. The bull was tired now, and fit for a girl to take over. Betty, aided by Walt, managed to provoke a few charges which were of no difficulty to dodge. And then, suddenly, a little boy cried out loudly, “I’m going in!”

It was Joey. Ish frowned, but he knew that he would not have to exert himself to forbid it. Joey was only nine, and it was strictly against the rules for anyone so young to try bulldodging, even as halfback. The older boys enforced this discipline quickly enough. They were kindly, but firm.

“Aah, Joey,” said Bob from his age of sixteen, “you’re not big enough yet. You’ve got to wait a couple of years, anyway.”

“Yeah?” said Joey. “I’m as good as Walt is, anyway.”

The way he said it, suggested to Ish that Joey might have been doing a little practice on his own, sneaking off to find some easy-looking bull and playing it for a while, perhaps with the aid of Josey, his devoted twin sister. Ish felt a quick coldness pass through him at the thought of any danger to Joey—to Joey, particularly.

After a few more half-hearted protests, however, Joey had to subside.

By this time the bull, fat from the good grazing, was thoroughly tired and winded. He stood, only pawing the grass a little, while the wildly cavorting Betty swarmed around him, and even turned a handspring. But the sport was obviously, over, and the spectators began to drift off. The older boys called to Betty and Walter. Suddenly the bull, much to his relief, doubtless, was merely left standing alone in the center of the grassy spot.

Back at the houses, Ish went to look at the well, to see how much work had been done during the day. He found that it had been sunk only a foot or so. Shovels and picks were left scattered about. All too obviously, the easygoing nature of the community and the special attraction of bull-dodging had prevented much labor being performed. Ish looked at the shallow hole a little grimly.

Yet during the day enough water had been carted in from a spring to provide plenty for all practical purposes. At dinner the veal roast was extremely good, and the only thing lacking to make a really excellent meal for Ish was that his Napa Gamay had soured a little in the bottle, after standing for better than a quarter-century, if the vintage-date on the label could be trusted.

Chapter 4

He planned that the boys should leave on the fourth day. That was another difference between the Old Times and these now. Then it was all so complicated that anything important had to be worked out a long time ahead; now you just decided on something, and did it. Besides, the season of the year was favorable, and he feared that delay would only permit the enthusiasm for the expedition to seep away.

Throughout the intervening days he kept the boys busy. He practiced them at driving. He took them to the garage again, and picked up some spare parts, such as a fuel-pump and a coil. To the best of his ability he showed them how to change parts, and they practiced a little.

“Or,” he said, “you might find it easier, if you have trouble, to stop in at some garage and get another one running, just as we did here. That might be easier than to try patching this one.”

But most of all Ish enjoyed the planning of the route. In the service stations he found road-maps, yellow and faded. He studied them eagerly, bringing into play his old knowledge of the land, trying to imagine how flood and windstorm and treegrowth would have affected the roads at different points.

“Head south first, for Los Angeles,” he concluded finally. “That was a big center of population in the Old Times. There are probably some people left, maybe a community.”

On the map he let his glance run southward toward Los Angeles, following the old familiar red lines of the routes.

“Try 99 first,” he said. “You can probably get through. If it’s blocked in the mountains turn back toward Bakersfield and work across to 466, and try it over Tehachapi Pass….”

He paused, and in the pause he suddenly felt his throat tight, and his eyes brimming. Nostalgia filled him. The names, it must have been, that did it! Burbank, Hollywood, Pasadena—once they had been living towns. He had known them. Now coyotes hunted jack-rabbits through their drought-stricken parks and back-lots. Yet all the names still stood out black and plain on the maps.

He swallowed and winked, for he saw the two boys looking at him.

“O.K.,” he said briskly. “From Los Angeles, or from Barstow, if you can’t make Los Angeles, take 66 east. That was the way I went. Across the desert, things should be easy. But watch your water. If the Colorado River bridge is there, well and good. If not, swing north and try the road across Boulder Dam. The dam will be there still, certainly.”

On the maps he showed them how to figure out alternate routes, if they found themselves blocked anywhere. But with the jeep he thought that they could usually get through with no more than the occasional cutting back of a fallen tree, or an hour’s work with pick and shovel to make a track across a landslide. After all, even in twenty-one years, the great highways would not be entirely blocked.

“You may have some trouble in Arizona,” he went on. “After you get to the mountains, but then….”

“What’s Arry—? What is it?—Arry-zone-a?”

Bob was asking, and it was a fair enough question. But Ish found himself stumped to answer it. What Arizona once had been—even that was a hard one. Had it been a certain amount of territory, or had it been essentially a corporate entity, an abstraction. Even so, how could he explain in a few words what a “state” had been? Much less, how could he explain what Arizona now was?

“Oh,” he said finally, “Arizona—that was just a name for that part over there beyond the river.” Then he had an inspiration, “See, on the map it’s this part inside the yellow line.”

“Yes,” said Bob, “I suppose they had a fence around it?”

“Well, I doubt whether they had.”

“That’s right. They wouldn’t have needed a fence where the river was.”

(Let it pass, thought Ish. He thinks Arizona is like an old fenced-in backyard, only bigger.)

After that, however, he stopped referring to states, and mentioned cities. The boys knew what a city was, that is, it was a lot of littered streets and weather-beaten buildings. Of course, since they themselves lived in a city, they could easily imagine another city and another community like their own.

He routed them through Denver, Omaha, and Chicago, wanting to see what would have happened in the great cities. By that time it would be spring. Beyond that, he told them to try for Washington and New York, by the route that seemed the most passable.

“The Pennsylvania Turnpike may still be the best way to get across the mountains. It will be hard to block a four-lane highway like that, and even the tunnels should still be open.”

For the return route he left them to their own choice; by that time they would know more about conditions than he did. He suggested, however, that they swing far to the south, since on account of the cold winters there would probably have been a drift of population toward the Gulf Coast.

They drove the jeep every day, and thus, by the process of elimination through blow-outs, they got tires which seemed likely to stand up under some wear.

On the fourth day they left, the back of the jeep jammed with an extra battery, tires, and other equipment; the boys themselves, half-wild with the excitement of the prospect; their mothers, close to tears at the thought of so long a separation; Ish himself, nervous with the desire to go along.

The boundaries, like the fences, drew lines that were hard and uncompromising. They too were man-made, abstractions dominating reality. Where you crossed by the highway, on a line, the road-surface changed. It was smooth in Delaware, but when you went into Maryland, you felt a change in vibration, and all at once the tires hummed differently. “State line,” the sign read. “Entering Nebraska. Speed limit 60 M. P. H.” So even right and wrong altered with the sharp snap of a discontinuity, and you stepped harder on the throttle.

At the national boundary the flags showed different colors, though the same breeze blew them. You stopped for customs and immigration, and were suddenly a stranger, unfamiliar. “Look,” you said, “that policeman has a different uniform!” You got new money, and even for picture post-cards the stamps had to have another face on them. “Better drive extra carefully,” you said. “Wouldn’t be good to get arrested over here.” That was a funny business! You stepped across a line you couldn’t see, and then you were one of those queer people—a foreigner!

But boundaries fade even faster than fences. Imaginary lines need no rust to efface them. Then there will be no quick shifts, and adjustments, and perhaps it will be easier on the mind. They will say as in the beginning: “About where oaks start to get thin, and the pines take over.” They will say: “Over across there—can’t tell exactly—in the foothills where it gets drier and you start seeing sage-brush”.

After the boys had left, there seemed to be a settling down into another one of those calm and happy periods which had led them to name one certain time the Good Year. Day after day things drifted, week after week. The rains held on late—hard showers, quickly clearing afterwards, with fine blue weather, so that the far-off towers of the Golden Gate Bridge stood out clean-etched and still majestic against the the western sky.

In the mornings, Ish usually managed to herd enough of them together to get some work done on the well. Their first shaft hit bed rock before water, for on the slope of the hill the soil was thin. But they managed to take the second shaft down, until they struck a good flow. They walled the well in with planking, and covered it, and rigged a hand-pump. By this time, they had all become accustomed to using the outhouses, and the thought of the labor involved to make the toilets work again by means of pipes and tanks and hand-pumping seemed more than was worthwhile. And so they put it off.

The fishing was good now. Everyone wanted to go fishing, and other matters seemed to take second place.

In the evenings, they often gathered together, and sang songs to the accompaniment of Ish’s accordion. He sometimes suggested that they should try singing parts. When they did, old George carried a good resonant bass, and the others caught on to the idea, but no one seemed very much interested in this sophistication.

No, Ish decided again as he had decided long before, they were not a very musical group. Years before, he had tried bringing home records of symphonies and playing them on the wind-up phonograph. Such rendition of course was not very good; even so, you could follow the themes. But he never got the children interested. At some melodic passage they might leave off their own playing or wood-carving and look up, listening with pleasure for a moment. As soon, however, as the development became a little complicated, the children went back to their own play. Well, what could you expect of merely a few average people and their descendants? (No, a little better than average, he insisted—but possibly not in musical appreciation.) In the Old Times one American in a hundred might have had a deep or real appreciation of Beethoven, and those few were probably just among those more sophisticated and intense people who, like the more highly bred dogs, had apparently been less able to survive the shock of the Great Disaster.

As an experiment, he also tried jazz records. At the loud blare of the saxophones, the children again left off their own enterprises, but again the interest had been momentary. Le jazz hot! It too, with all its involuted rhythms, had been a sophistication; it appealed, not to a simple and primitive mind, but to one that was highly developed and specialized, at least along that particular line. You might as well expect the children to appreciate Picasso or Joyce.

In fact—and this was something that encouraged him—the younger generation showed little interest in listening to the phonograph at all; they preferred to do their own singing. He took this as a good sign: that they would rather participate than listen, rather be actors than audiences.

They failed, however, to take the next step and compose tunes and words of their own. Ish himself occasionally tried making up a verse with topical references, but either he had no knack for it or else his efforts met with unconscious resistance as being a violation of tradition.

So they sang in unison against the background of the standardized chords and bumping bass of the accordion. The simpler tunes, he observed, they liked the best. The words seemed to make little difference. They sang “Carry me back to old Virginny” although they had no idea what “Virginny” was or who was asking to be carried back. They sang “Hallelujah, I’m a bum!” without caring what a bum was. They sang plaintively of Barbara Allen although none of them had even known of unrequited love.

Often, in those weeks, Ish thought of the two boys in the jeep. Perhaps the children would call for “Home on the Range,” and as his left hand shifted to the G-buttons, he would have a sudden thought, and a pang with it. Just now Bob and Dick might be somewhere far out in the old range country.

Playing mechanically, he would wonder. Were the deer and the antelope playing there now? Or was it cattle? Or had the buffalo come back?

More often, however, thoughts of the boys came to him in the dark hours of the night when some dream, caused by his very anxiety, brought him out of sleep in sudden terror to lie nervously considering possibilities.

How could he ever have let them try it? He thought of all the dangers of flood and storm. And the car! You could never trust young fellows with a car, and even though there was no danger from traffic, they might run off the road. There would be many bad places. The boys would take chances.

There would be mountain-lions and bears and bad-tempered bulls. Bulls were worst of all, because they never seemed to have lost a certain contempt for men, sprung perhaps from age-old familiarity.

No—more likely, the car would break down. Then they would be marooned, hundreds or even thousands of miles away!

But what raised the worst shivers in Ish at such moments in the night was the thought of men! What people might the boys encounter? What strange communities—warped and perverted by curious circumstances, unrestrained by any flywheel of tradition! There might be communities with universal and death-dealing hostility to the stranger. Outlandish religious rites might have developed—human sacrifice, cannibalism! Perhaps, like Odysseus himself, the two youngsters would encounter lotus-eaters and sirens and unspeakable Laestrygonians.

This community of their own; here on the hillside, might be stodgy and dull and uncreative, but it had at least preserved the human decencies. That was no guarantee that other communities had done the same.

But in the morning light, all these bug-a-boos of the darkness lost their reality. Then he thought of the two boys as enjoying themselves, stimulated by new scenes, perhaps by new people. Even if the car should break down and they were unable to start another one, still they could walk back over the same road they had driven. There would be no lack of food. Twenty miles a day, at least a hundred a week—even if they had to walk a thousand miles, they should be home before fall. Actually, if they kept a car running, they should be home a great deal sooner. When he thought of it, he could scarcely contain himself for excitement at the thought of all the news they would bring.

So the weeks passed, and the rains were over. The grass on the hills lost its fresh greenness, and then seeded and turned brown. In the mornings the low summer clouds hung so close that the towers of the bridges sometimes reached up into them.

Chapter 5

As time passed, Ish stopped thinking, and dreaming, so much about the two boys. Their being gone so long seemed to show that they had traveled far. It was barely time to expect their return from a transcontinental journey, and certainly not time to begin worrying over their failure to return. Other thoughts, and worries, occupied his mind.

He had reorganized the school, and was back at what he felt to be his essential work of teaching the young ones to read and write and work a little arithmetic, and thus to maintain for The Tribe some hold on the basic skills of civilization. But the young ones, ungratefully, fidgeted on their chairs, and looked restlessly toward the windows, and he knew that they wanted to be outside, running on the hillside, and playing at bulldodging, fishing. He tried various lures, attempting the techniques which in the old days he remembered had been called “progressive education.”

Wood-carving! Curiously to Ish, wood-carving had become the chief means of artistic expression. Obviously this was a heritage from old George. Perhaps, stupid as he was, George had unconsciously managed to pass along to the children his love of wood-working. Ish himself had no interest in it, and no knack.

No matter what it had come from! Could he, Ish, as a teacher, make use of this hobby to stimulate an intellectual interest?

So he began to teach them geometry, and to show them how with compass and ruler they could lay out designs on the surface of the wood.

The bait took, and soon with great enthusiasm everyone talked of circles and triangles and hexagons, and had laid out a geometrical design, and was eagerly carving. Ish himself became interested. He felt the fascination of the work as the mellow sugar-pine block—aged for almost a quarter century—began to peel off from his knife-edge.

But even before the first geometrical designs were executed, the children were losing interest. To draw your knife along the edge of a steel square and thus get a straight line that was easy and uninteresting. To follow the outline of a circle—that was difficult enough, but was mechanical and dull. And the designs when finished, even Ish had to admit, looked like bad imitations of old-time machine-work.

The children reverted to free-running handwork, often improvising as they went. It was more fun to do, and in the end it looked better also.

Best of them all at carving was Walt, although he could never read, except in a halting stammer. But when it came to doing a frieze of cattle on the smooth surface of a plank, Walt carved with sure touch. He did not have to measure things out ahead, or to use the tricks of geometry. If his row of three cows did not quite fill up the space, he merely carved a calf at the end of the line to take up what was left. And yet, when he finished, it all looked as if he had planned it from the beginning. He could work in low relief, or in three-quarters, or even sometimes in the full round. The children admired his work, and him, tremendously.

So, Ish realized, he had failed in what had seemed his shrewdly planned attempt at using a hobby to stimulate an intellectual interest, and again he was left with little Joey. Joey had no talent at wood-carving, but of them all, only he had kindled at those eternal truths of line and angle which had survived even the Great Disaster. Once Ish found him cutting different-shaped triangles from pieces of paper and then recutting the ends from each triangle and placing them together to form a straight line.

“Does it always work?” Ish asked.

“Yes, always. You said it always would.”

“Why do you do it then?”

Joey could not explain why he did it, but Ish shared enough of the workings of his son’s mind to be sure that Joey must be really paying a kind of homage to universal and unchangeable truth. He was as much as saying to the powers of chance and change: “Here, make this one come out different, if you can!” And when those dark powers could not prevail, it was again a triumph for intellect.

So Ish was left with little Joey—spiritually, and sometimes also physically. For, when the other children ran out of school whooping loudly, Joey often made a point of not going, but of sitting with some biggish-looking book, and even seeming a little superior in his attitude.

Physically, the other boys were stalwart young giants, and Joey lagged at all sports and outdoor adventures. His head seemed big for his body, though that might be, Ish realized, because you thought of it as containing an undue amount of knowledge. His eyes also were big for his head, and exceptionally quick and alert. Alone among the children, he suffered from sick spells, with an upset stomach. Ish wondered whether these attacks were truly physical or sprang from some emotional disturbance, but since there was no chance of sending Joey to either a doctor or a psychiatrist, the actuality would never be known. In any case, Joey remained underweight, and often came home exhausted after playing with the other boys. “It’s not good!” said Ish to Em.

“No,” said Em, “but still, you like him interested in books and geometry. That’s merely the other side of his not being as strong as the others.”

“Yes, I suppose so. He has to find his satisfaction somewhere. But still I wish he would get to be stronger.”

“You wouldn’t really have him different, would you?”

And, as she went away about some other matter, Ish thought that again she had been right.

“No,” he thought, “we have plenty of galumphing young huskies. Still I wish he were stronger. Yet, even if he is something of a weakling, and even a freak and a pedant, we must have one person like that, to carry on intellectually.”

And so, of all his children, his heart went out to Joey. He saw in Joey the hope of the future, and he talked often with him, and taught him many things.

Thus the school dragged along through those weeks while they waited for Dick and Bob to return. Even Ish could hardly use a more optimistic word than “dragged.” Altogether there were eleven children whom he taught, or tried to teach, that summer.

He held school in the living-room, and the eleven children came there from all the houses. The session lasted only from nine to twelve, with a long recess. Ish realized that he must ride them with a light rein.

He taught them arithmetic, now that he had failed in his attempt to sugar-coat the pill of geometry. He tried to make practical applications of arithmetic, and found it surprisingly difficult. “If A builds 30 feet of fence…” the old book read. But nobody built any fences now, and he found himself having to start by explaining why people once had built them—a much more complicated matter to explain than you would think, until you tried it. He thought of emulating the progressive school again by setting up a shop where the pupils could buy and sell and keep accounts. But this was not practical, for there were no more store-keepers now. He would have had to start with a whole exposition of ancient economics.

Then he tried valiantly to present to them some of the wonders of pure number. For himself, indeed, he was successful, and the more he tried to tell it to the children the more he himself felt the basic quality of mathematics to all that had been civilization. At the same time, he felt more and more, even though he could not express it, all the wonder that lay in the relations of one number to another. “Why is it,” he would think, “that two and two eternally make four—and not, sometimes, five? That has not changed! Even though wild bulls bellow and fight in Union Square!” Thus too, he played games with triangular numbers, showing the way they built up one on top of the other. But except for Joey the children showed no sense of wonder, and Ish saw their sidelong looks toward the windows when he tried to impress them with it all.

He attempted geography also. This, his own subject, he should at least be well qualified to teach. The boys enjoyed drawing maps of the near-by country. But neither boys nor girls were interested in the geography of the world as a whole. Who could blame them? Perhaps when Dick and Bob came back in the jeep, there might be more interest. But just now the children’s horizon was limited to the few miles round about. What to them was the shape of Europe with all of its peninsulas? What to them, the islands of the sea?

He made a somewhat better case for history, although what he taught was more anthropology than history. He told them of all the growth of man, that struggling creature, who had gradually learned this, learned that, learned to develop himself here, and restrain himself there, and through infinite error and trouble and foolishness and cruelty, at last had achieved so spectacularly before the end came upon him. They were mildly interested.

Yet most of his time he spent at teaching them to read and write, because reading he felt was the key to everything else and writing was its counterpart. But only Joey took naturally to reading, and romped ahead. He knew the meanings of words, and grasped even the meaning of books.

Civ-vil-eye-za-shun! That is what Uncle Ish talked about. There are lots of quail by the stream today. Two-and-six? I know that! Why should I say it to him? Two-and-nine? That is hard. It is more than my fingers. It is the same as “a lot.” Uncle George is more fun than Uncle Ish. He can show you how to carve. My daddy is more fun still. He says funny things. But Uncle Ish keeps the hammer. It is there now on the mantel. Joey makes up stories about the hammer, I think. You can’t be sure. I would like to pinch Betty now, but Uncle Ish would not like it. Uncle Ish knows most of anybody. Sometimes I am afraid. If I could tell him what seven and nine is, maybe we would have civ-vil-eye-za-shun, and I could see the pictures that act like people. Daddy used to see them. It would be fun. Eight-and-eight. Joey knows right off. Joey is no good at finding quail nests. Soon we can go now.

In spite of recurrent discouragement, Ish still kept trying, and he always fastened quickly on any opportunity that the children themselves seemed to offer him.

One afternoon the older boys had gone on a longer expedition than usual, and the next morning they brought with them to school some native walnuts. They had not seen such nuts before, and were curious. Ish quickly decided to crack some of the nuts, and thus perhaps give a little lesson in biology. It would be taking advantage of the children’s own curiosity, and would be following up something that they themselves had initiated.

He sent Walt outside for two stones to use in cracking the hard shells. Walt returned with two half bricks—bricks and stones not being distinguished in his vocabulary.

Ish ignored that detail, but he found that trying to break the hard shells with a brick was more likely to result in a smashed finger than a smashed nut. He cast around for something better to use, and his eyes fell upon his hammer. It was standing, as usual, on the mantelpiece.

“Go get the hammer for me, Chris!” he said, pointing, to the little boy who was nearest it.

Usually Chris was only too glad to spring up from his seat, and do something active. But now a strange thing occurred. Chris glanced this way and that, at Walt and at Weston, who were next to him. He looked embarrassed, or alarmed.

“Go get the hammer, Chris!” Ish repeated, thinking that possibly Chris had been day-dreaming, and had merely heard his name without noting the words that went before.

“I—I don’t want to!” said Chris, hesitantly. Chris was eight years old, and not given to being a cry-baby, and yet Ish could see that Chris was, for some reason, close to tears. He dropped the matter with Chris. “Bring me the hammer, one of you others,” he said. Weston looked at Walt, and Barbara and Betty, the sisters, looked at each other too. Those four were the oldest. All four of them looked back and forth, and did not make a move to rise. Naturally, the little ones did nothing. But Ish could see all the children glancing furtively at each other.

Although Ish was wholly puzzled, he saw no reason to make an issue of the matter, and he was just about to get the hammer himself when something else strange began to happen.

Joey rose. He walked over toward the mantelpiece. All the children’s eyes followed him. The room, Ish realized, was deathly quiet. Joey stood at the mantelpiece. He reached out his hand, and took the hammer. There was a strange little cry from one of the smaller girls. In the hush that followed, Joey walked back from the mantelpiece, and gave the hammer to Ish. Joey went back to where he had been sitting.

The room was still, and the children were looking at Joey. Joey sat down, and Ish broke the silence by pounding on a nut with the hammer. At that noise the tension, whatever it was, seemed to break.

Only after it had come to noon and he had dismissed school did Ish have time to think the matter over and come, with a start, to the conclusion that it had been a case of pure superstition. The hammer—all the children associated it vaguely with something strange and mystical in the far past! It was used on state occasions; it stood on the mantelpiece by itself. Generally speaking, no one touched it except Ish. Even Bob, Ish now remembered, had handled it with reluctance on that occasion when they had started out with the dog-teams. The children had come to think it an implement of power, dangerous for any of them to touch. He could see how such an idea might have begun half seriously as a game and in a few years have come to be taken seriously. And as for Joey, again he realized that Joey was the one who stood out from the crowd. Perhaps Joey had not rationally figured out that Ish’s hammer was only like any other hammer. Perhaps, he had merely let his superstition work at a higher level, and assumed that he had something in common with his father, such as was shown by his reading, so that he, as the High Priest’s child, the Son of the Blessing, might touch the relics which would blast the others. Possibly even, he might be capable of it, Joey had helped build up the superstition in the others in order to build up his own importance. It could not be much work, Ish decided, to overcome this superstition.

Yet that same afternoon he began to have doubts. On the sidewalk in front of the house some children were playing. As they played, they were jumping from one block of the sidewalk to another and crying out that old rhyme:

Ish had heard children singing it often in the Old Times. It meant nothing then, just a little childish rhyme. Children, as they got older, had always learned that such things were merely childish. But now, he thought, what would there be to teach the children that such things were mere superstition? Here was a society with almost no stored-up tradition, and apparently a society that was not going to develop its traditions greatly by reading.

He sat in his easy-chair in the living-room, and heard the children, outside, playing and shouting their rhyme. As the smoke of his cigarette curled up, he remembered more and more disturbing evidences of superstition. Ezra carried his pocket-piece, the old Victorian penny, and doubtless the children looked on that much as they looked on the hammer. Molly was a confirmed rapper on wood; Ish was disturbed when, now that he considered, he remembered the children also rapping on wood. Would they ever learn that that was just the thing that someone did to make himself feel more comfortable, although it had no real meaning?

Yes, he reluctantly concluded, this matter of the children’s beliefs was extremely serious. In the Old Times the beliefs held by the children of any family or small group of families might be momentous enough, but still those children on growing up would come into contact with other beliefs and make adjustments. Besides, there had been a great, even overwhelming, mass of tradition—the tradition of Christianity, or of Western civilization, or of Indo-European folkways, or of Anglo-American culture. Call it what you wished, it was still so tremendous that you might say it was omnipotent, for good or bad absorbing the individual.

But now their little community had lost much of the tradition. Part of it had been lost because no seven survivors (Evie did not count) could preserve and transmit all of it. Part had been lost because for so long a time there had been no big children to pass on the tradition to the small ones. The oldest of the younger generation had been taught games by their parents, not by older comrades. The community should therefore be plastic to an unprecedented degree. This was an opportunity, but also a responsibility—and a danger.

It would be a danger—and he shuddered at the thought—if any evil force, such as a demagogue, should begin to work.

To be sure, he recollected wryly, he had not found the children particularly plastic as regards learning to read! Yet that might be only that a stronger force—the whole environment—was already working against his efforts.

But take now again this matter of superstition. Perhaps this all had grown up because, as it happened, there was no one in The Tribe who was creatively religious. Perhaps there was some kind of vacuum in the childish mind, and it had to be filled up with supernatural beliefs. Perhaps all this represented some kind of subconscious straining toward an explanation of the basis of life itself.

Years ago they had organized those church services, and then discontinued them as meaningless. That discontinuance might have been a mistake.

Now, more certainly even than before, he knew that he had the opportunity to be the founder of a religion for a whole people. What he told the children in school, they would probably believe. He could insure their memory of it by mere insistence and iteration. He could tell them that the Lord God created the world in six days, and found it good. They would believe. He could tell them a local Indian legend that the world was the work of Old Man Coyote. They would believe.

Yet what could he really tell them in honesty? He might tell them any one of half a dozen theories of cosmogony which he remembered from his old studies. Probably they would believe these too, although their complications did not make for quite as good a story as one of those others.

Actually, no matter what he said, it might easily be twisted and made into some kind of religion. Again, as years before, he revolted from the idea, for he treasured the honesty of his own skepticism.

“It’s better,” he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, “to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him.”

He lighted another cigarette, and settled back into the chair again… Yet this matter of the vacuum! It worried him. Unless it could be positively filled, his own descendants at the third or fourth generation might be practicing primitive rites of incantation, trembling in terror of witchcraft, and experimenting with ritualistic cannibalism. They might believe in voodoo, in shamanism, in taboo…!

He started, almost guiltily. Yes, already there were beliefs in The Tribe which approached the intensity of taboo, and he himself was inadvertently their chief author.

There was the matter of Evie, for instance. He and Em and Ezra had talked it over long ago. They wanted no half-witted children of Evie’s—to be a care and drag. So they had made her, at least for the boys, a kind of untouchable. Evie, with her blond hair and startled blue eyes, was perhaps the best-looking girl of them all. But Ish was sure that none of the boys had even seriously considered her. Probably they had no specific idea that anything would happen to them if they did, but such action was merely outside their scope of imagination. The prohibition was stronger than law. Such a one you could only call taboo.

Again, there was all the allied matter of fidelity. Always fearing the disruption of quarrels arising from jealousy, the older men had not so much taught marital fidelity as assumed it. Young people had been married at the earliest possible moment. Ezra’s bigamy, having always been present, was not questioned. Although Ish did not doubt the utility of this practice for their particular situation, still its acceptance as a matter of faith rather than of reason seemed to come close to taboo. The first violation—and there would surely be one—might bring a tremendous shock.

A third possible example of taboo, though a minor matter perhaps, was the turning of the University Library into a sacrosanct building. Once, when the oldest boys were youngsters, Ish had gone with them on a long walk which had taken them to the campus. While he was napping, two of them had worked loose a board which, long before, he had nailed across the broken window; they had gone into the stacks, and started throwing books onto the floor. Horror-stricken with a sense of the violation of that great treasure house, Ish had followed them. He had been ashamed of himself later, but at the moment he had been outraged beyond reason and had beaten the boys. The very unreasoning quality of his rage and horror must have impressed them much more than the beating. They had certainly passed this impression on to the younger children. The Library had been safe, and Ish had been pleased. But this might also be called an example of taboo, and now he wondered.

There was a fourth one too, of course—but this brought him back to where he had started. He got out of the chair and went to the mantelpiece.

The hammer was there, as he himself had replaced it. He had not asked any child to take it back, not even Joey. He had preferred not to raise the issue again.

There it stood, balanced on its four-pound head of dull, rust-pitted steel. The hammer had been with him a long time. He had found it just before the rattlesnake had struck him, and so it might be called his oldest friend. It had been with him longer than Em or Ezra.

He looked at it curiously, considering it carefully and selfconsciously. The handle was actually in bad shape. It had weathered from lying so long in the open, and even before the hammer had been left to lie, the handle had apparently been banged accidentally against a rock and cracked a little. What was the wood? He really did not know. Ash or hickory, he supposed. Hickory, most likely.

The simplest thing, he concluded impetuously, would be to get rid of the hammer. He could throw it into the Bay. No, he reconsidered, that would be merely treating the symptom, not the disease. With the hammer removed, the children’s tendency to superstition would still remain, and would merely fix upon something else, and perhaps take some more sinister form.

He thought of destroying the hammer, as a symbolical lesson to the children that it had no strength in itself. But he remembered that he did not actually have the power to destroy it. The handle he could burn easily, but the steel head was next to indestructible by any means at his disposal. Even if he found a carboy of acid and dissolved the steel in it, to go to so much trouble would make the children think that the hammer must really have possessed some deep-seated power.

So he looked at the hammer with new interest, as something which was coming to have a life and power of its own. Yes, it had the qualities which went toward the making of a good symbol—permanence, entity, strength. Its phallic suggestion was obvious. Curiously, as he thought now, he had never named it, though men were likely to give names to weapons, which also were symbols of power—Madelon and Brown Bess and Killdeer and Excalibur. Hammers had been signs of godhead before this; Thor had carried a hammer, probably other gods too. Among kings there had been that old Frankish one who drove back the Saracens—Martel, they had called him, Charles of the Hammer! Ish of the Hammer!

Thus, for one reason or another, when the children reassembled in school the next morning, Ish said nothing about superstition. It would be better, he told himself, to bide his time a little, to observe more closely for a day or two, or a week. Most of all, he wished to learn more about Joey.

As the result of this observation, over a period of some weeks, Ish came to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that Joey had many of the qualities of a first-class brat. He had passed his tenth birthday during the summer. His precocity was sometimes painful; he was, in the old phrase, “too big for his britches.” In age, he was half way between Walt and Weston, who were twelve, and Chris, who was eight. But Joey’s precocity put him naturally into the company of the two older boys, and he and the younger one had nothing in common. This must be hard on Joey, Ish concluded, because he was always overreaching to attain the physical power of boys two years older and naturally stronger as well. Josey, his own twin, he neglected also, for he was at a stage when boys had no interest in girls, and Josey, besides, was not nearly so bright as he.

There was thus, Ish saw, always a kind of strain about what Joey was doing or trying to do. Again and again Ish thought of that little incident in which the other children had been afraid to pick up the hammer, but had acquiesced in Joey’s doing something that they themselves did not dare to do. Obviously, in their minds, there was some kind of power inherent in Joey. Ish thought far back to the times of his studies, and he remembered the wide-spread belief that certain members of a tribe had a special power within them. Mana, the anthropologists had called it. Perhaps the children believed that Joey had mana; possibly Joey himself believed it.

Yet, though Ish recognized Joey’s limitations and disabilities and bad qualities, still he kept his thought centered more on Joey than on any of the others. Joey held the hope for the future. Only by the power of intelligence, Ish believed firmly, had mankind ever risen to civilization, and only by further exercise of that same power, would mankind ever rise again. And Joey possessed intelligence. Possibly also he possessed that other power. Mana might be a fallacy of simple minds, but even the most civilized peoples had realized that certain individuals carried within them some strange power that went for leadership. Had anyone ever explained why certain men became leaders, and others, though they seemed better qualified, did not?

How much of all this did Joey realize? Many times Ish asked himself the question, but he could not as yet answer it. Yet more and more, as the summer progressed, he felt that in Joey lay the hope of the future.

All mysticism aside! All idea of mana discounted! Still, only Joey could keep the light burning through this dark time.

Only he could store up and transmit the great tradition of mankind!

But mere acquisition of knowledge was not all in which Joey excelled. Even though he was only ten, he was beginning to branch out for himself, to experiment, to discover things on his own. Indeed, that was the way he had really taught himself to read in the beginning. To be sure, all this development was still at a childish level.

There was that matter of the jig-saw puzzles, for instance. The children had developed a sudden craze for the puzzles, and had set about rifling some of the stores. Ish had watched them at their play, and at first Joey had not been as good as the others. He seemed to lack some basic spatial sense. Sometimes he tried to join pieces which obviously did not fit, and the others indignantly told him so. Joey had been irked at his inferiority, and for a while had withdrawn from the game.

Then Joey had suddenly got a new idea of how to go about it. He collected himself a number of pieces bearing the same shade of yellow, and thus was able to put them together more rapidly and make better progress than the other children.

When he proudly displayed what he had done, the others were impressed. But even after he had explained his system, they did not want to adopt it.

“What’s the use anyway!” Weston had argued. “We might be able to do it faster your way, but it wouldn’t be any more fun, and nobody cares how soon we get this finished.”

Betty had agreed. “Yes, it’s no fun just going through all the work, picking up the yellow pieces and the blue pieces and the red pieces, and putting them in different places!”

Joey, Ish noticed, could not put up a good argument for his method, and yet Ish could understand his motives. In the first place, granted there was no need to finish the puzzle in a hurry, still to work efficiently was just as natural and as pleasant for Joey as not to crawl when he could walk. Besides, he had the competitive spirit, the old-time drive, so characteristic of Americans, for getting to the front. Lacking a native gift for distinguishing shapes, really as much a physical endowment as having strong muscles, he had seen the way to take the lead by intellectual means. He had “used his head,” as they once had liked to say.

Though the “discovery” was at all remarkable only because made by so young a child, still Ish was pleased to note that it was the discovery of one phase of classification, that basic tool of man’s progress. Logic rested upon classification; language, too—by its nouns and verbs grouping things and actions into neat workable compartments. Only by his discovery of classification had man been able to impose some workable degree of order upon the infinite apparent disorder of the natural world.

Ish saw Joey’s experimental mind also at work with language. To him language was not merely a practical matter, an unconscious implement used to express wants and feelings. Language to him was also a wonderful plaything. He had, for instance, a sense of puns and of rhymes, although none of the other children showed much interest in such things. He liked riddles.

One day Ish heard him asking a riddle of the other children. “I made this one up myself,” Joey was saying proudly. “Why are a man, a bull, a fish, and a snake all alike?”

The other children were not much interested.

“Because they all eat things,” Betty suggested languidly.

“That’s too simple,” said Joey. “Everything eats things. Birds eat things too.”

They made one or two other suggestions, and then there came up a suggestion to run off and do something else. Joey saw that he was in immediate danger of losing his audience; to prevent complete anticlimax, he had to come out with his own answer. “Why, they’re all alike because not one of them can fly!”

At the moment Ish was not impressed with the riddle, but as he thought about it afterwards, he felt that it was a highly developed and curious kind of ten-year-old mind which could evolve the idea of negative likeness. And into Ish’s mind popped suddenly an old definition: “Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.” Of course, like every other definition of genius, that one could be shot to pieces also, because it obviously included the madman, as well as the genius. Yet there might be something in it, too; the great thinkers of the world must necessarily have made their reputations by sensing what was not there and looking for it and discovering it, but the first requisite for making the discovery, unless it depended upon mere luck, was the realization that something unseen was there to be discovered, something lacking in the picture.

This was Joey’s summer for experiment apparently, and one day he came home reeling strangely and with a strong smell of liquor on his breath. The story came out that he, along with Walt and Weston, had visited one of the liquorstores in the nearest business district. This was a problem that Ish had often considered. He had once even gone into one of the stores and started opening and emptying the bottles. After an hour’s work, however, he had found that he had made too little progress; the project was obviously impossible, and the children must take their chances with an unlimited liquor supply. And yet, when he thought about it, the situation for his children was not so different from that which he himself had experienced. In those days his father had always had a shelf holding a bottle or two of whiskey and brandy and sherry, and there would have been nothing to stop Ish from carrying on a clandestine experiment of his own. He had not, and so also his own children and grandchildren apparently were not greatly attracted by the unlimited stores available to them. In fact, drunkenness had never been a problem in the community at all. Perhaps the simpler life they were leading took away the need for such stimulation, or perhaps the mere fact that alcohol, like air, was free to everyone, removed the lure of difficulty which had previously surrounded it.

As for Joey, Ish was pleased to see that the little fellow had still been sufficiently clever to drink only a small amount—not enough to make him really sick or even to make him pass out. He had obviously again been showing off before the older boys, and had again succeeded in impressing them; they had come home in worse shape than he.

Nevertheless Joey was definitely tipsy, and made no objection to being put immediately to bed. Ish took the opportunity to sit at the bedside, and to deliver a lecture on the dangers of too much and too reckless experimentation, particularly if it was designed chiefly to show off before others. He looked down at the small face in the bed, with its big eyes. There was intelligence in the eyes, and he knew that in spite of being tipsy, Joey was comprehending. There was also sympathy in the eyes, as if they were again saying to Ish, “We understand together. We both know things. We are not like these others.”

In a sudden flood of affection for his youngest son, Ish reached down and took one of the little hands in his own. He saw an answering look of affection come into the big eyes, and suddenly Ish knew that behind all the boyish bumptiousness, Joey was really a timid, sensitive child, just as he himself had once been. In fact, Joey’s brashness was only the expression of timidity gone too far the other way.

“Joey, boy,” he said impulsively, “why do you keep straining so hard? Weston and Walt—they’re two years older than you are. Why don’t you go easier? In ten years—twenty years—you’ll be away ahead of anything they can do.”

He saw the boy smile slightly, happily. But Ish knew that the happiness was merely that a new-found sympathy with his father, not at an impression that the words might have made. Any child, even a precocious one like Joey, lived in the present; to talk of ten years away was merely, for a child, to talk of centuries.

Ish looked at the little face again, and he saw the eyes roll slightly outward with drunkenness and sleepiness, and there was incongruity in the two. Yet Ish felt this love for his son welling up more strongly than ever within him. “This one, this one,” he thought, “is the Child of the Blessing! This one will carry on!”

He saw the eyes lose focus, and the eyelids drop shut, and so he spoke no more, but he sat there by the bed, holding the hand in his own. Then, perhaps because sleep is so like death, a horrible fear swept in upon him. “Hostages to fortune!” he thought. When a man loved greatly, he laid himself open. He himself had good luck. He had loved greatly with Em, and now, again perhaps, with Joey. With Em he had the luck—but then one could never even think of Em in terms of death. She was the stronger. With Joey it was different. Holding the hand, he could feel the faint throb of the pulse in the wrist, and it seemed very close to the surface. A mere scratch would be enough. What were the chances for a little boy, not strong of body, driven on always by too powerful a mind?

Yet, this might be the one who could shape the whole future. He had only to grow in stature and in mind, to gain wisdom with the years, and to live.

Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard. Heart-beat flutters, knife flashes, horse stumbles, cancer grows, more subtle foes invade….

Then they sit around the fire at the cave-mouth, and say, “What shall we do? Now that he is no longer here to lead us!” Or, while the great bell tolls, they gather in the courtyard, and say, “It should not have happened so. Who is there now to give us counsel?” Or they meet at the street-corner, and say sadly, “Why did it have to be this way? Now there is no one to take his place.”

Through all of history it runs as a plaint. “If the young king had not fallen ill…. If the prince had lived…. If the general had not so recklessly exposed himself…. If the president had not overworked….”

Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.

Once more the fogs thinned out, and then came the first hot days. “I have seen it again,” Ish thought to himself. “The great pageant of the year! Now is the time of dryness and death. Now the god lies dying. Soon the rains will come, and then the hills will be green. At last one morning I shall look out westward, here from the porch, and I shall see the sun setting far to the south. Then we shall all go together, and I shall carve the number into the rock. What shall we call this Year, I wonder!”

By now also it was time to be expecting Dick and Bob to return from their expedition in the jeep. Ish still worried and felt guilty sometimes at having allowed the boys to go, but now they had been gone so long that he was somewhat accustomed to the idea and did not feel the strain so much as he had earlier. And at the same time he had another worry and sense of guilt that tended to counteract this one.

The children! Their superstition and their ideas about religion! He had said to himself that all this would be easy to counteract; he had said that he would do something that next day. Yet all summer he had been flinching.

Was it actually that he did not want to do anything? Did he really want the children to think of Joey as the possessor of some special power? Deep within himself, did he want the children to think of him, Ish, as a god? Not every day or every year could a man have reason to play with the intoxicating idea that he was becoming a god. Oh, well—say, at least a demi-god, a being of some degree of special power!

Ever since the incident of the hammer, he had been studying curiously the children’s attitude toward him. It was changeable and uncertain. Sometimes, he sensed that feeling of awe which he had seen on that day of the incident with the hammer. He, like Joey, but even more so, had mana within him. He could perform strange feats. He knew the meanings of the puzzling words. He knew the curious ways of numbers. He knew, by some strange power, what the world was like, away beyond the horizon, out through the Golden Gate, that there were islands far in the ocean beyond the little rock-tips of the Farallones, that they sometimes saw standing up above the horizon on clear days.

The children, he came to realize, were not only children, but they were also unsophisticated and inexperienced as children in the Old Times had rarely been. None of them had ever seen more than a few dozen people. Though their lives, he believed, had been happy, they had been happy with the simplicity of a few satisfying experiences, repeated again and again. They had not suffered the continual shock of change which had so affected children in the old days, both for good and for bad, making them nervous on the one hand, and yet alert on the other.

Children so unsophisticated might easily come to feel a certain dread of him, to regard him as a being with powers different from their own, not altogether earthly. At times he sensed this feeling and even saw definite evidences of it.

Yet at other times, indeed generally, he was merely their own father or grandfather, or Uncle Ish, a person they had known all their lives, with whom they had romped on the floor when they were little. They had no more respect for such a person than children ever had. In fact the bigger ones already showed the adolescent feeling that the older man was blundering and quite obtuse. Perhaps they stood in some awe, but still they played tricks on him.

Once, not a week after the incident of the hammer, they had set a tack for him in his chair, though that was one of the oldest of all tricks to play on a teacher. And again, after they had left the room with much suppressed giggling, Ish discovered that someone had worked that other old trick of pinning a strip of cloth to his rear, so that it hung down like a white tail behind.

Ish accepted such tricks in good spirit, and did not attempt to find out which one of the children had done them or to inflict any punishment. In some ways the tricks pleased him, for they showed him that children considered him one of themselves. But the tricks also chagrined him a little. His ego was not above being pleased with the belief that he was a folk-hero or demi-god. Was this a way to treat a demi-god, by putting tacks on his chair or pinning a tail on him, behind? Yet, as he thought farther, he realized that the two attitudes were not incompatible or altogether unprecedented.

That is a strange thing—to be a god! They bring the fat ox with the gilded horns, and at your altar they strike him down with the pole-ax. You are proud of the sacrifice. But then they take head and horns and tail and hide, and in the hide they wrap the entrails. All this noisomeness they burn before your altar, and then go to feast themselves on the fat haunches! You see the deceit, and you are angry with a god’s anger. You gather the thunderbolts, and your black clouds assemble. But, no, you think then, “They are my people!” This year they are fat and proud and insolent—but who would wish his people to be mean and meeching? Next year, if there is pestilence, they will really burn the ox—nay, many oxen! So you pass it off, with only a little thunder, scarcely noticed in the pleasant confusion of the feasting. “I am not stupid,” you say to The Son, “but there are times when a god should seem stupid!” Then you wonder if you should have shared with him any secret of godship, but rather have looked for a convenient mountain to pile upon him. He is altogether too handy with a sickle these days….

Even you terrible ones who call for human sacrifice, you too must wink! Ah, it is magnificently horrible! The shrieks of his wife and the moans of the victim and the flailing axes of the killers! There he lies, covered with blood, his tongue hanging out, a picture of loathsome death! Yet soon, in the confusion of the dance, he rises suddenly and dances with the others and the red mulberry juice mingles with his sweat and disappears. Then you, the terrible one, must be a wise god and remember only the horror of the seeming death, though every child in the village knows you are tricked….

“No, there is no need to grovel and rub the face in the dirt. Merely bow the head, as you enter, ever so slightly.”

Yet in the end, though he half feared the test, Ish could not resist an experiment. Perhaps the incident of the hammer had really meant nothing. He was curious.

He picked the time carefully—late one morning, when it was only a few minutes before dismissal. He was preparing himself a retreat, if things got too embarrassing. There was no difficulty, since he was the teacher, in bringing a discussion around to the point where he could put the question casually enough.

“How was it… do you think, that all these things…” he gestured widely with his hands, “how was it that the world happened to be made?”

The answer came quickly. Weston was the spokesman, although apparently any of the children could have answered: “Why, the Americans made everything.”

Ish caught his breath. Yet, immediately, he saw how the idea had arisen. After all, if a child asked who made the houses or the streets or the canned food, any of the older ones would have said naturally that the Americans did. He followed up with another question.

“And the Americans—what about them?”

“Oh, the Americans were the old people.”

This time Ish found it a little harder to adjust quickly. In “the old people” he sensed not merely a reference to time, but also something close to superstition. “The old people”—that had once meant fairies, people of the Other-world. That might be its meaning now again. Here was something he should work to counteract.

“I was…” He began simply. Then he paused and corrected himself, seeing no reason to use the past tense.

“I am an American.”

When he spoke, though they were the simplest of words, he had a curious feeling of pride come over him, as if flags were flying and bands playing. It had been a great thing, in those Old Times, to be an American. You had been deeply conscious of being one of a great nation. It was no mere matter of pride, but also there went with it a profound sense of confidence and security in life, and a comradeship of millions. Yet now he had hesitated to speak in the present tense.

In the silence of his pause he saw the children looking at him, and then suddenly he sensed that his explanation had missed fire. He had merely been trying to explain that there was nothing supernatural in those old people who had been the Americans. He had tried merely to say, “Look at me, I’m Ish, father of some of you, granddad of one. I’ve rolled on the floor with you. You’ve mussed my hair. Yes, I’m only Ish. And now when I say, ‘I’m an American,’ I mean that there is nothing supernatural about Americans. They were only people too.”

This was what he had thought they would understand, but it had gone the other way round. When he had said, “I am an American,” they had nodded inwardly, interpreting, “Yes, naturally, you are an American. You have many strange knowledges which we simple ones do not have. You teach us reading and writing. You tell tales about the world being round. You talk about numbers. You carry the hammer. Yes, it is plain that people like you made all the world, and you are merely one who lingers over from the Old Times. You are one of the Old People. Yes, naturally you are an American!”

As he looked about, almost wildly at this new thought, the silence was deep, and he saw Joey smiling at him. It was a knowing smile, as if Joey was saying, “We two have something in common. I am like one of the Old People who has been left over. I can read; I understand those things. Without being hurt, I carry the hammer.”

Ish was glad that he had the foresight to ask his question just before noon. There was nothing he could muster now, either for question or reply. “School dismissed,” he said. “School dismissed!”

Chapter 6

One late afternoon Ish was talking with Joey, or actually they were continuing Joey’s education by means of playschool. Ish had collected some money, and was teaching Joey a little about history and the old economics. Joey liked the bright jingly nickels with the figure of the strange humped animal. As a young child would have done even in the Old Times, he preferred the nickels to the uninteresting bills with their picture of a bearded man who looked something like Uncle George. Ish was trying to find ways to explain.

Just as he thought he had put the point across, he heard a strange and yet old and familiar sound. He lifted his head and waited tensely, mouth open to listen. It came again, much closer—the toot-a-toot-toot of a horn!

“Hey, Em!” he yelled. “They’re back!” He jumped up, letting the bills scatter from his hand to the floor.

He and Em and the children all came rushing out, and there was a universal running and yapping of dogs, just as the jeep came down the road. It was dirty and travel-worn and banged-about, but it had got through. Ish had still a moment of tension. Then the boys jumped out, yelling loudly, obviously alive and well. A sudden sense of profound relief let him know how much he had really been worrying about them.

The boys stood there, surrounded by a little mob of yelling children. Ish held back, almost diffident. Then his eyes caught another movement. There must be someone else in the jeep. Yes, now the person was starting to get out. Ish had a sharp sensation of alarm, of resentment, at the intruder.

First, as the head was thrust out from the low door, Ish saw a bald crown and a brown beard, which would have been handsome if it had not been stained with tobacco and dirty-looking, and scraggly around the edges where it had been haggled with scissors. The man stepped out, and slowly straightened up.

Ish, almost in panic, appraised him. A big fellow—tall and large-framed and heavy! He was powerful, and yet there had been little vigor in his movement as he straightened up. Yes, powerful, but with some inner trouble, and too heavy! The pudgy fat of the thick-featured face had squeezed in upon the eyes, narrowing them.

“Pig-eyes!” thought Ish, still in resentment.

The children were milling around, and the man stood in their midst, just as he had stepped down from the car. He looked up, and saw Ish, and their glances met. The man’s little fat-encroached eyes were bright blue. He smiled at Ish.

Ish smiled back, though he raised the corners of his mouth only by conscious effort. “Should have smiled first,” he was thinking. “He put me at my ease. I should have done it with him. He’s powerful, even though his fat looks soft and unhealthy.”

Ish broke up the situation by striding forward to grasp Bob’s hand. But even as he did so, the newcomer was still in his mind—“About my age,” he was thinking. Now Bob was making the introduction.

“This is our friend Charlie!” he said simply, and he slapped Charlie on the back.

“Glad to see you!” Ish managed to say, but even the old meaningless words did not slide out naturally. He looked straight at the narrow blue eyes, and in the tenseness of his look there was perhaps a conscious defiance. No, those others were not pig-eyes. Boar’s eyes! Strength and ferocity behind the baby-blue. As they shook hands, Ish felt his own grasp the weaker. The other could have squeezed and hurt him if he had wished.

Now Bob had taken Charlie away, to introduce him to the others. Ish felt his resentment growing, not decreasing. “Careful!” he thought.

But he had imagined the return as a reunion with no discordant elements.

And here was Charlie!

Handsome, no doubt—in a way! A good companion—so the actions of the boys seemed to testify! But—yes—Charlie was dirty. That thought gave a background of rationality to the unreasoning dislike. Charlie was dirty, and from inner reaction Ish felt himself going on to think that Charlie must be in some way dirty inside, through and through, as well as outside.

Dirt—the ever-present dirt of the earth—that was something which bothered Ish no more than it bothered anyone else these days. But the impression of dirt that Ish gained from Charlie was something different. Perhaps, he analyzed quickly, it was the clothes. Charlie was wearing what had in late years become a rarity, a business suit. He was even wearing the vest, because the afternoon was cold with low-drifting clouds. But the suit seemed greasy, and you would have said that it was egg-spotted, if there had been possibility of a man’s having had eggs to eat recently.

They all went trooping up to the house suddenly, Ish with them, not leading. The living-room was jammed. The two boys, and Charlie, held the center. The children looked marveling at the boys, as explorers returned from a far expedition, and they eyed Charlie with as much wonder, because they were unused to seeing any stranger. It was one of the biggest occasions that anyone could well imagine. Ish thought to himself it was a time to open champagne, if he had any ice. Then he wondered why the idea seemed ironic.

“Did you make it?” everyone was asking at once. “How far did you get? What about that big city—what’s its name?”

Yet in the midst of all the excitement, Ish felt himself sliding sidelong looks at the greasy beard and spotted vest, and gradually resenting Charlie more than ever.

“Watch your step,” he thought to himself. “You’re just being the provincial, resenting the intrusion of anyone else who may have different manners and ideas. You keep saying that the community needs the stimulation of new thoughts, and yet when someone else comes in, you start resenting him, and rationalizing to yourself, because you say, ‘He’s dirty on the outside, and so must have something dirty about him on the inside.’ Relax—this is a great day!” Nevertheless, all thought of its being a great day went sour inside him.

“No,” Bob was saying, “we never got to New York. We got to that other big city—Chicago. But past there the roads kept getting worse and worse—trees grown up, trees fallen around everywhere, lots of washouts, bridges gone. So we had to shift one way or the other, looking for…”

Someone cut in with another question before Bob could even finish his answer. There were half a dozen questions, each one canceling out the one before. In the hubbub, Ish caught Ezra’s eye. In that glance he seemed momentarily to sense danger, and he knew that Ezra too was watching Charlie.

Ish felt himself both reassured and justified. Ezra knew people, Ezra liked people. If Ezra was so quickly perturbed at Charlie, there must be something about which to be wary. Ish trusted Ezra in such a case much better than he trusted himself.

“Come on,” he thought again. “You don’t really know at all what Ezra’s thinking. Maybe he’s disturbed because he senses what you’re thinking. And what’s that? Maybe I’m only thrown off because I’m like any small tribesman, and fear the horrible stranger with his new ideas and his new gods to fight against mine.”

He brought himself back to what was being said. “…wear funny clothes,” he heard Dick’s voice saying. “Long white gowns, sort of, I don’t know what you call them, and they have long white sleeves in them. The men and the women both wear them. They threw stones at us. They yelled, ’Unclean, unclean!’ They kept crying, ’We are the people of God!’ They made us keep away.”

Then Em spoke. The rich roll of her voice, deep but feminine, seemed to cut in beneath the high-pitched almost yelping noises of the excited little crowd. Any of the others would have had to pound on the table and shout for attention. For her, the room grew quickly quiet, even though she did not raise her voice and the words were common-place:

“It’s late,” she was saying. “Time for dinner. The boys are hungry….”

Half-witted Evie gave one last little senseless giggle, and then she too was quiet.

Em was saying that everyone should go home now, and come back later. Ish watched Charlie, and saw that Ezra was still watching him too. Charlie’s eyes looked at Em, perhaps a moment too long. His glance shifted to Evie’s blond hair, and took on, it might have been, an appraising look. Then everyone was getting up, starting to go. Dick took Charlie off to dinner at Ezra’s.

After dinner had been got on the table and they were seated, there were a great many questions to ask. Ish let Em do most of the talking with Bob. She had all the mother’s worries to settle. Had they been sick? Found plenty to eat? Slept warm? Discussion of the trip itself was being reserved until the others returned after dinner, and Ish felt also that he should not pump Bob about Charlie. Yet he could not resist the temptation entirely, and Bob showed no reticence.

“Oh,” he said. “Charlie? Sure, we just picked him up about ten days ago, down near Los Angeles. There are quite a few people, I guess, living around Los Angeles. There are some all together, like us, and a few just scattered. Charlie was by himself.”

“Did you ask him to come along, or did he just come with you?”

Ish watched, carefully. He saw that Bob was surprised by the question, but apparently not disturbed.

“Oh, I don’t just remember. I don’t know that I asked him. Maybe Dick did.”

Ish dived into his thoughts again. Perhaps Charlie had reasons for wanting to get from Los Angeles to some other place. No, that was merely slandering a man out of prejudice without trial, and then he heard Bob going on.

“He tells lots of funny stories, Charlie does. He’s a very good guy.” Funny stories, yes, and one could imagine what kind. They were frank enough in all their language, these days; the concept of obscenity, you might say, had disappeared, largely because there was only one word for things in their vocabulary, at least among the younger ones. Obscenity seemed to have died a natural death, possibly as a counterpart to the death of romantic love. But Charlie—he might still be able to tell a dirty story. Although Ish had never been a prude about stories, still he felt his original resentment shifting to a kind of righteous indignation, in spite of his continually telling himself that he really knew nothing about Charlie, except the boys’ opinions that he was a very fine person. Ish felt himself wishing that the water had never gone off, and shocked them into doing something about the future, and thus bringing an outsider in among them.

After dinner, they all built up a big bonfire on the hillside, and gathered about it. There was much singing and skylarking of the youngsters. It was a time of celebration.

There was much excitement, but the boys gradually got their story told…. They had encountered only a few minor washouts and landslides on the highway to Los Angeles, nothing that the jeep could not negotiate in four-wheel drive. The group of religious fanatics, wearing white nightgowns and calling themselves the People of God, lived in Los Angeles. They had focused upon religion, Ish assumed, under the influence of some strong leader who had happened to survive, just as in The Tribe for lack of such a leader, they had developed almost no interest in such things.

Out of Los Angeles, the boys had taken 66 eastward, just as Ish remembered so vividly he had done in the days following the Great Disaster, when he had not been much older than the boys were now. The highway across the desert was easy and open, except for an occasional stretch where sand had blown across. They had gone along with no more trouble than blowouts here and there. The Colorado River bridge they had found shaky, but still passable.

The next community was apparently at one of the old Indian pueblos near Albuquerque. From what he could make out from the boys’ description, Ish concluded that most of the few dozen people at this little community were not very dark in complexion, but that the dominant spirit must be Indian, because their pattern of life was based on growing corn and beans as the Pueblo Indians had done for many hundreds of years. Only some of the older people talked English. This community also had drawn inward upon itself, and looked with suspicion upon the strangers. The people there had horses. They did not drive automobiles, and they rarely went into any town.

From there, the boys had swung north to Denver, and then out eastward across the plains.

“We followed a road,” said Bob. “It’s like 66, only just part of it.” He paused, hesitant. Ish thought for a minute, and then realized that the boy was trying to describe Highway 6. Some of the markers would still be standing along it, and Bob had sensed that they were the same shape as the numerals on 66, although there was only one of them. Ish was embarrassed that his own son was not sure of the numerals.

Highway 6 had led them on through the comer of Colorado, and across the plains of Nebraska.

“Lots of cattle everywhere!” Here Dick was taking up the story. “Cattle everywhere, you always see cattle.”

“Did you ever see the big brown ones with humps on their shoulders?” asked Ish.

“Yes, once we saw a few of them,” said Dick.

“How about the grass? Does any of it grow straight and stiff looking, with a head on the end, and little grains forming. When you went through they should have been still soft and milky, perhaps. When you came back, you might have seen it somewhere standing all golden with the grain hard. We called it wheat.”

“No. We saw nothing like that.”

“And how about corn? You know what that is. They were growing it there by the Rio Grande.”

“No, there is no corn growing wild anywhere.”

Onward still they had gone, finding the roads now blocked more often, since they had come to the wetter country with ranker and faster growth and heavier rains, combined with hard frosts in winter. The highways were splitting up into great chunks and blocks as the frost worked under them, wherever the surface was cracked, grass and weeds, and even bushes and young trees were springing up to block the way. Yet they had crossed what was once Iowa.

“We came to the big river,” said Bob. “it is the biggest of all, but the bridge was good.”

They had come to Chicago, but it was a mere desert of empty streets. It would be an inhospitable place, thought Ish, when the winter winds swept in from Lake Michigan. He was not surprised that people, with the whole continent to choose from, had drifted away from the once great city by the lake, leaving it ghost-like behind.

Leaving Chicago, the boys had lost themselves in the maze of roads in the outskirts, and had ended up (the day was cloudy, and they lost direction) by going south instead of east.

“After that,” said Bob, “we got one of these things out of a store. It points direction—” And he looked at Ish for the word.

“Yes, a compass,” said Ish.

“We hadn’t needed one before, but now we used it and got going east again, until we came to the river we couldn’t cross.”

Ish figured out quickly that it might have been the Wabash. Floods of twenty-two years, or—more likely—just one great flood, had swept away the bridges. After exploring southward and finding no passage, the boys had to go northward to Highway 6 again, which more or less followed a height of land.

The progress eastward had become more and more laborious. Floods, windstorms, and frost had transformed the once open and smooth highways into rough lines of concrete chunks strewn with gravel from washouts, overgrown with vegetation, and crisscrossed with fallen tree-trunks. Sometimes the jeep could push through the bushes or detour the tree-trunks. But often the boys had to make a passageway with ax or shovel, and the constant work wore them down. Also the loneliness began to oppress them.

“There was a cold day with a north wind,” Dick confessed, “and we were afraid. We remembered what you used to tell us about snow, and we thought we might never get home.”

Somewhere, probably near Toledo, they had turned back. At turning back, a kind of panic came upon them. At the same time heavy rains began to fall, and the roads were often flooded. They had the fear that some of the bridges over the larger rivers might be carried away, leaving them cut off from their own people. They had not tried to go south, as Ish had wished, but had back-tracked along their own trail, gradually being reassured by their ability to get back to places that they had seen already. On their return home, therefore, they had learned little that they had not learned on the way east.

Ish did not blame them at all. In fact, he thought that they had acted with great determination and intelligence. He blamed himself, if anyone—for sending the boys toward Chicago and New York, the great cities of the Old Times. He might have done better to have chosen some southern route toward Houston and New Orleans, instead of a route into the inhospitable country of northern winters. And yet, east of Houston at least, floods would have been more severe and growth of vegetation much more rapid than farther north. Because of the climate, Arkansas and Louisiana would have reverted to impassable wilderness much sooner than Iowa and Illinois.

The children were dancing and shouting around the bonfire. Was there a kind of wild primitiveness in the scene, or was that merely his imagining? Perhaps any children would have done the same. Evie, who of course was mentally a child, was dancing with them. Her blond hair streamed spectacularly behind her.

Ish sat, looking on, and thinking. Well, the chief result of the expedition was not the discovery that the country was returning to the wilderness. Anybody would have known that! The important thing was the making of contact with two other communities. That is, if you could call it contact, when the other communities were fighting off all advances from strangers. Was that from mere blind prejudice, or was it from some deep instinct of self-preservation?

Yet, at least, to know that there were people in Los Angeles and near Albuquerque—growing communities—took away a little of that basic feeling of loneliness.

Two little groups of people, discovered on a single trip, going and coming by the same road! At that rate, there should be several dozen in the area of the whole United States. He remembered the Negroes whom he had seen in Arkansas, long ago. In that rich country of easy winters, there was no reason in the world why those three should not have survived and become a nucleus to which others, either black or white, could attach themselves. Yet that community in its ways of life and thought would be vastly different from the one in New Mexico and from either of the two in California. This divergence opened vast questions for the distant future.

But this was no time to be carrying philosophical speculation far into the future. The dancing and shouting of the children around the fire had become even more bacchanalian. In the excitement the older boys, even some of the married ones, were joining the revel. They were playing crack-the-whip, an the more exciting because the one who was thrown off the end of the whip had to dodge the fire. Suddenly Ish felt himself stiffen. Charlie was playing! In the line, linked between Dick and Evie, he was swinging the whip. The children were obviously delighted to have a grown-up, especially this stranger, playing with them.

Ish tried to argue down his resentment. Why not? Why shouldn’t one of the older ones play that way? Me—I’m just as bad as those people in Los Angeles and Albuquerque, not wanting to accept the stranger! Yet I don’t think I’d have minded, if Charlie had been a different kind of person.

But, try as he could, Ish felt himself unable to stifle some deep-seated sense of dislike. He began to revise his estimate of the importance of the boys’ trip. However important the discovery of the other communities could be for the distant future, the immediate problem was Charlie.

By now it was getting late and mothers were gathering their children. But after the celebration was over, most of the older ones went home with Ish and Em, to hear still more from the two boys and from Charlie.

“Sit here,” said Ezra to Charlie, pointing to the big chair in front of the fireplace. It was a place of honor, and comfort too, and Ish thought how characteristic that was of Ezra, to sense the human relationship so quickly. He himself, though he was host, had not thought of it, and so had not been able to make Charlie feel really welcome. And then he wondered, in quick reaction, whether he really wanted to make Charlie feel at home.

It was a chilly evening, and Ezra called for a fire. The boys brought some wood, and before long the sticks were blazing cheerily. The room grew comfortably warm.

They talked, Ezra leading the conversation, as usual. Charlie asked if he might have a drink. Jack brought him a bottle of brandy and a glass. He drank steadily, but with the habitual drinker’s slow absorption. He gave no sign of either excitement or drunkenness.

“I’m still chilly,” said Ezra.

“You’re not getting sick, are you?” said Em.

Ish himself felt a little chill of uneasiness. Sickness was so uncommon with them that any occurrence of it was a matter of note.

“Don’t know,” said Ezra. “If this was the Old Times, I’d think I was getting a cold. Of course, it can’t be that now.”

They piled more wood on the fire, and the room grew so uncomfortable to Ish that he took off his sweater and sat in his shirt sleeves. Then Charlie took off his coat also, and unbuttoned his vest, but did not take it off.

George comfortably settled down into his end of the davenport, and went to sleep. His absence did not make much difference in the conversation. Charlie continued his work on the bottle of brandy, but still it made no difference to him except that from the heat of the fire and from the brandy, his forehead was greasy with perspiration.

Ish could tell now that Ezra was swinging the conversation around, this way and that, to get more information about Charlie’s background. But finesse seemed not to be required, for Charlie talked frankly enough whenever the subject came close to him.

“So after she croaked—” he said. “That was after we’d lived together for quite a few years, ten or twelve, I guess. Well, after my woman died, I didn’t want to stay there no more, not around that place. So, when your boys came along, and I liked them, I picked up and came.”

As Charlie talked, Ish began to feel himself swinging in the other direction again. The boys liked Charlie immensely, and they had been with him for some time already. There was strength in Charlie, and charm also. Perhaps he would be a good man to add to the community. He noticed now that whole beads of sweat were standing out on Charlie’s forehead.

“Charlie,” he said, “you’d better take that vest off and be comfortable.”

Charlie started, but did not say anything.

“I’m sorry,” Ezra said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’d better go home, get to bed.” But he made no move to go.

“Surely you can’t be getting a cold, Ez,” said Em. “There’s never been a cold!”

They persuaded Charlie to move, himself and his brandy bottle, to a place farther from the fire, but he kept his vest on.

Charlie sat there, and the two house-dogs came nuzzling around him. Obviously, even the dogs were interested in the stranger; he must mean a lot of new smells. But they sensed that the stranger had been received. Although at first they were merely neutral, soon they relaxed comfortably under Charlie’s pulling of their ears and scratching of their backs. Their tails wagged.

Ish, always realizing that people were likely to baffle him, felt himself swing back and forth. Now he sensed both power and charm in Charlie, and felt almost warm toward him. And then the very sense of power and charm caused him to react, perhaps with fear for his own position as a dominant force in the community, and he felt Charlie only as a thing of evil.

At last George woke from his nap, stretched his big body and rose, saying that it was time for him to get home to bed. The others made ready to go with him. Ish knew that Ezra would want to say a word to him personally before going, and so he drew Ezra aside into the kitchen.

“You feeling bad?”

“Me? No,” said Ezra. “Never felt better in my life.”

Ezra smiled, and Ish began to see light. “You weren’t chilly?” he asked.

“Never felt less chilly in my life,” said Ezra. “Just wanted to see if we could make Charlie take his vest off. I didn’t think we could. He don’t like to be away from it. Makes me pretty sure about what I think I see anyway. He’s got a vest-pocket he’s deepened himself, enlarged it. He’s got in it one of those little things they used to make for ladies to carry around in their purses—just a small piece of hardware!”

Ish had a sudden sense of relief. Anything as simple and concrete as a pistol—that could be handled! His relief faded as Ezra went on:

“I wish I was sure about him. Sometimes I think there’s something ugly and dirty and mean—clear to the middle of him. Sometimes I think he’ll be my best friend. Always, though, I know he’s one that knows what he wants and generally gets it.”

When they went back to the living-room, George was just leaving.

“This is the best thing that’s happened to us for a long time,” he was saying to Charlie. “We’ve needed another strong man. We hope you stay with us.”

There was a general confirmation chorus from the others, as all of them,

Charlie and Ezra included, went out the door.

Ish was left standing with his thoughts. He had tried to join in the chorus, but his tongue had been suddenly stiff and his mouth dry. All he could think now was: “Something dirty and ugly and mean—clear to the middle of him.”

Chapter 7

After they had gone, Ish thought of something that he had not done during all those years. In fact, after he had decided to do it, he was not sure whether he still could. Yet, when he went into the kitchen, he found that there was a bolt on the back door. He could remember his mother having had it put there because she never trusted ordinary locks. He shot that bolt. Then he went to the front door, and found that there was still a workable night-latch.

In all these years, there had been no need to secure a door. No one in the community was to be feared; no stranger, if there had been one, would have had a chance of getting through the cordon of dogs. But now there was someone, perhaps not to be trusted, and he had made friends with the dogs. Had that patting of the dogs had calculation behind it?

When Ish had gone to bed and shared his apprehensions with Em, he found her not very responsive. Sometimes, he realized, she was too all-accepting for him.

“What’s so remarkable about him carrying a gun?” she said. “You carry one yourself, lots of the time, don’t you?”

“Not concealed! And I’m not afraid to take my vest off, and be away from my weapon.”

“Yes, but maybe you should give him a break for being nervous and uncomfortable, too. You don’t like his looks; maybe he don’t like yours. He’s among strangers—surrounded!”

Ish felt a surge of resentment, almost anger, against Charlie, the intruder.

“Yes,” he said, “but we are on the ground here; this is our place; he comes breaking in; he must adapt himself to us; not we to him.”

“You’re right, darling, I guess. But anyway, let’s don’t talk about it any more now. I’m going to sleep.”

If there was any one thing that Ish had always envied in Em, it was her capacity to go to sleep merely by saying so. As for him, the harder he thought about going to sleep, the longer he was likely to take, and he could never slow down his mind as he wanted to. Now again he felt it settle to work. For suddenly he had a new idea, and a disturbing one. The trouble was, he decided, that he had to think of himself as pitted against Charlie in a personal struggle. If The Tribe had been really drawn together already into some firm organization, if there were some symbolic unity by which they presented an unbroken front, then the mere advent of any stranger, strong though he might be as an individual, would be of little moment. Now it might be too late. The stranger had come already, and he must be met as man to man.

And Charlie would be no mean opponent. Already he had won the loyalty and friendship of Dick and Bob, and doubtless of others of the younger ones. George was obviously impressed. Ezra seemed doubtful. What was this strange charm, backed by strength?

Ish could not sense why anyone felt a liking for Charlie, but the fact was that they did. And the fact might be also that he himself was too narrowly prejudiced against the man, out of a spirit of rivalry, to feel Charlie’s real strength. But of one thing he began to feel certain. There would be some contest between the two of them. Just what form this contest would take, he could not yet know. But since they lacked the solidarity of anything that could be called a state, the contest would be an individual one.

Or at worst, it would be a struggle of factions with two opposing leaders. On whom could be, Ish, depend? He was not really a leader. He had been a leader so far, doubtless, by default—because George had been too stupid and Ezra too easygoing to offer any competition. Oh, intellectual leadership, yes! But in any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under. He thought of the deceptively pretty eyes of baby-blue; yet they had a coldness such as dark eyes could never show.

“Who will follow my banner?” he questioned dramatically. Even Em seemed to be failing him. She had made light of things, almost defended Charlie. All at once Ish felt himself the scared little boy of the Old Times. Of all these people Joey alone was the one who could thoroughly understand, the only one on whom he could always count. And Joey was a little boy, physically frail even for his years. What help could he be against the rush of Charlie’s power? No, not pig-eyes, he thought again. They are a boar’s eyes!

Finally, however, he said to himself, “This is the mere madness of midnight; these are only the wild fantasies that come to a man in the darkness when he cannot sleep.” And he managed, at last, to dismiss the thoughts from his mind, and to sleep.

In the morning things indeed looked better—not altogether rosy, perhaps, but at least not too dark. He ate breakfast in a good enough mood. He was happy to see Bob at the breakfast table again, and by questioning got from him some more details of the trip.

Then, just as he was beginning to feel comfortable, the whole thing broke loose on him when Bob spoke.

“I guess,” he said, “I’ll go over and see Charlie now.”

Ish felt a sudden desire to snap out a bit of fatherly advice, “I wouldn’t see so much of that fellow, if I were you.” But he saw Em’s eyes saying no, and he himself knew that such advice would only make Charlie seem forbidden and more attractive. He still kept wondering what fascination Charlie exercised upon the two boys.

Bob went, and after the morning chores were finished, the other children drifted off too. “What is the fascination?” said Ish to Em.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just the attraction of a stranger, something new. Isn’t that natural?”

“There is trouble ahead!”

“Perhaps,” said Em, and Ish suddenly realized that that was the first time she had admitted the possibility, and then she changed the direction of his thoughts with a second remark, “But be careful that you’re not the one who starts the trouble.”

“What do you mean?” he snapped, angrily, although he did not often get angry at Em. “You mean that this is just a fight for domination?”

“I think that you’d better go over and see what’s happening now,” she said, disregarding his last question.

The advice seemed good in any case, for perhaps he too was curious. He started to follow it, and just as he was opening the front door, he had a feeling of uncertainty. He closed the door behind him, and stood on the front porch wondering. His hands felt strangely empty; he needed something. He felt defenseless, and he considered going back into the house to strap a pistol on. In the vicinity of the houses they never needed to carry firearms any more, because the dogs gave plentiful warning; but he could make an excuse that he was going somewhere farther off. Still, he hesitated, realizing that to carry a pistol would look like aggression—besides, it would be a confession of his own weakness and insecurity. Yet he could not deny his feeling of uncertainty.

He went back into the house, and immediately saw the hammer on the mantelpiece. “So that’s it!” he thought irritably. “You’re as bad as the children. You’re letting the children’s ideas work into you!” Nevertheless he picked up the hammer and took it along. Its weight and solidity gave him comfort. The handle’s firm hardness filled up the emptiness of his right hand.

Over from where the bonfire had been, he heard a sound of people laughing, and he walked that way. He was alone, and then suddenly he felt again the Great Loneliness.

It came upon him with paralyzing force. Once more he was the ant lost from the hill, the bee from the destroyed hive, the motherless child! He paused and stood still, feeling the cold sweat start. No, the United States of America was only a name far in the past! He must act by himself, or with what support he himself could rally. There was no policeman or sheriff, or district attorney or judge, anywhere, to whom he could look.

He was gripping the hammer-handle so hard that his knuckles hurt. “I can’t go back!” he thought. Then he mustered all his courage, and slid one foot forward in front of the other.

Once he was moving again, once action had succeeded thought, he felt better. He saw them now, ahead, as he had expected, at the ashes of the bonfire. Almost all the younger ones were there, and Ezra with them. They stood and sat and lounged around Charlie, and he was telling them things, laughing and joking as he went along. All this was just about what Ish had expected, and only when he had looked more closely did a sudden feeling of coldness seem to begin at his stomach and then flow out until it came clear to the ends of his fingers and toes. His right hand had gripped harder, vise-like, on the hammer-handle.

Close to the center of the group, right beside Charlie, Evie was sitting, the half-witted one, and there was a look on her face that Ish had never seen there before.

Ish was about ten paces from Charlie when he noticed. He halted. Some of the children had seen him, but they were interested in the story, and no one had paid him any attention. He stood there, as if not yet officially present.

He paused. It seemed a long time. But he could feel his heart throbbing, and it did not pound more than a few times.

He felt the coldness ooze away. Now he was ready for action. He was almost happy. The problem had suddenly taken form, and even the worst problem in definite form was better than a fog lurking in corners. You could not combat a mere suggestion of evil.

Still, through the long period of a few more heart-beats, he stood there. The problem had revealed itself and taken shape suddenly. That too was part of their present way of life. In the Old Days a crisis simmered and stewed, and you read the newspapers for weeks and months before the strike broke or the bombs fell. When you were dealing with only a few people, a crisis came quickly.

He looked. Evie was at the center of the group, and usually you could count upon her being somewhere on the outskirts. Usually she paid only furtive attention to what was happening; now she kept her face directed at Charlie’s, seeming to drink his words in, although she certainly did not understand much of what he was saying. There was something more there than the desire to understand his words. They were sitting close together.

Was it for this, Ish thought with bitterness, that they had cared for Evie? Ezra had found her—dirty, groveling, and unkempt, living in filth with merely enough intelligence to open cans to feed herself on whatever they contained, without cooking or preparation. It would have been better, he had often thought, if they had merely put a can of sweet ant-poison within her reach somewhere. As it was, they had cared for her through so many years, and she had certainly been no pleasure to them and probably no pleasure to herself. Their caring for her had been, he thought sometimes, merely a curious lingering of an old standard of humanitarianism.

Now he looked again at the group before him, and in Evie he noticed something that had never been so apparent to him before. That was the trouble of too long familiarity; just as a picture on the wall became something you did not notice at all, so a person whom you knew for many years tended to lose individual characteristics. Evie, he realized now, was a fully developed woman, startlingly blond, in a special way, beautiful. You had to forget, of course, the strangeness of her eyes, and a vacancy in her face. And that was something which he, Ish, could never really do. But to a man like Charlie, such matters were not important. Yes, as Ezra had said, Charlie knew what he wanted, and what he wanted he wanted quickly. Indeed, was there any reason why he should delay?

Ish gripped hard on the hammer-handle. He took comfort from it, but he had become very conscious that it was not a pistol.

A sudden burst of laughter came at something which Charlie was saying. Looking at Evie again, Ish saw that she too was laughing in a high, uncontrolled giggle; as she laughed, Charlie reached across and pinched her in the ribs. She screamed girlishly, high and shrill. Then as Ish drew near, his presence all at once seemed to become official, and everyone turned to look at him. Instantly, Ish realized that they had been waiting for him, that the new situation had disturbed them all, and that they were looking for some suggestion of what to do. He walked forward steadily toward Charlie, still gripping hard with his right hand, but taking care not to clench his left fist, in spite of his rising anger.

As Ish drew near, Charlie—nonchalantly almost—reached out with his right arm, and put it around Evie and drew her close to him. She seemed surprised, but yielded comfortably. Charlie looked at Ish, and Ish knew that this was the crisis of open defiance.

Ish mutely accepted the challenge; he felt calmer now. This was no time to let anger disturb one’s thoughts. Now that there was action, he could think more clearly.

“All of you go somewhere for a while!” he said loudly. There was no need for finesse or excuses; they all knew something was going to happen.

“I want to talk to Charlie here alone for a few minutes. Ezra, you take Evie over to Molly’s. She needs her hair combed.”

There was no argument; everybody left so readily that they must really have been a little frightened. By having Ezra go, Ish was losing his best ally, but to have had him stay would have been a confession of weakness before all of the others, including Charlie.

Then the two of them were left there alone—Ish standing, as he had been when he spoke; Charlie, still sitting. Charlie made no gesture of rising; so Ish too sat down. He would not stand when the other sat so lazily. Charlie was still wearing his vest, although he had no coat on and had unbuttoned the vest so that it hung loosely from him. There were six feet between them as they sat on the ground and looked at each other. Ish saw no reason to beat about the bush.

“All I want to say is that you must quit this with Evie.”

Charlie was equally direct.

“Who says so?”

Ish considered for words. He might say “we” but that was vague. If he could have said “We, the people” that would have been better, but he knew that Charlie would think it ridiculous. He did not want to pause longer, and so he spoke. “I say so.”

Charlie said nothing in return; he sat there. He picked up a few little pebbles from the ground and idly twitched them with his left hand, throwing them here and there. He could not have stated, any more clearly, his disrespect.

At last Charlie spoke. “There’s lots of old wise-cracks you can say when any guy says to you ’I say so.’ You know what they are; so let’s skip them. I’m reasonable, though. Why don’t you tell me just why you want me to lay off Evie? She your girl, maybe?”

Ish spoke quickly.

“This is it,” he said. “It’s simple enough. We’re a pretty good bunch of people here, not mental giants, any of us I guess, but still nobody too downright stupid. We don’t want a lot of little half-witted brats running in on us, the sort of children Evie would have.”

Only when he had stopped speaking, did he realize that by speaking at all in reply to Charlie’s question, he had made a mistake. Like any intellectual, he had been happy to stop commanding and begin arguing, and so he had admitted that his command was non-effective. Now, in spite of himself, he felt in second place, with Charlie the leader.

“Hell!” said Charlie. “What makes you think she’s been around here all this time and not had plenty of chances to have kids with all those boys around, if she was going to have any?”

“The boys never touched Evie,” said Ish. “She was something they grew up with; she was taboo. And besides, all the boys were married off as early as they could be.”

He was still arguing, and was perhaps at the bad end of the argument.

“So you say again!” Charlie’s words had the confident ring of the voice of a man feeling himself in control. “What you really ought to be glad for is that I picked on that one around here, the only one old enough who ain’t married already. What if I’d liked one of the others, and she, me? Then you might have a pretty mess on your hands. You better be glad I was so agreeable.”

Ish thought wildly for something to say. What more could be said? You could not threaten with the police or say that the district attorney might be interested. He had flung the challenge and been met head on.

No, there was nothing more to say. Ish got up, turned on his heel, and walked off. He had a sudden quick memory in his mind of once long before, when he had met a man just after the Great Disaster, and had turned, and walked away with the feeling that he might be shot in the back. Yet, after that first memory, he was not afraid, and it was the more humiliating that he was not. He realized that Charlie would think there was no need of shooting. He, Ish, had come off second-best.

He was in the depths of bitterness as he walked back toward his own house, He had forgotten how deep humiliation would be. The hammer was mere weight now, not a symbol of power. For years things had gone easily, and he had been a leader. But after all he was not so different from the strange youth that he now could hardly remember. The youth who had existed in the old days before the Great Disaster; the one who was afraid to go to dances, the one who was never quite at ease with other people, and had never been a leader. He had changed much, he had outgrown much, but he could not outgrow it all.

Then as he came, deep in bitterness, through the door of the old house, Em was there waiting for him. He laid down the hammer. He took her into his arms, or perhaps she took him into hers, he was not sure. But after that he felt suddenly a new confidence. Sometimes she did not agree with him. They had argued just the night before about Charlie, but in the end he knew that he would renew his confidence from her.

They sat on the davenport, and he poured out the story. He did not wait to hear what she thought, but he felt her sympathy flow out and enfold him. He felt the raw edge of his humiliation healing over. She spoke at last:

“You shouldn’t have done it! You should have had the boys to back you. He might have shot you right there. You’re strong at thinking and knowing things, not in meeting a man like that.”

Then it was she was began to take the next action.

“Go get Ezra and George and the boys,” she said. “No, I’ll send one of the children. No one can move in on us like this, and say what he and we are going to do!”

Yes, Ish realized, he had been wrong. There had been no need to feel again the Great Loneliness. Small and weak though it might be, there was still the strength of The Tribe to rally warmly about him.

George was the first to come, and after him, Ezra. Ish caught the movement as Ezra’s quick eyes shifted from George to Em and back again. “He has something,” Ish thought, “he wants to say to me alone.” But Ezra made no attempt to gain the opportunity. Instead he ended by looking at Em in a half-embarrassed manner.

“Molly’s had to lock Evie up in one of the upstairs rooms,” he said. Ish could tell what a hard matter it was for Ezra, a highly polite and civilized person, to have to speak in public thus about the burst of passion that had suddenly come upon a half-witted girl at a man’s caresses.

“What’s to keep her from jumping out the window anyway?” said Ish.

“Nothing, I guess,” said Ezra.

“I could fix up some bars,” said George, eagerly. “We could put something across the window, all right.”

They all laughed a little in spite of the seriousness. George was always so happy to do a little more carpentry somewhere on the houses. But it was obviously impossible to keep Evie locked up for the rest of her life.

Just then Jack and Roger, Ish’s own sons, came in; after them, Ralph, who was the last of that trio.

At the boys’ coming, there was a little relaxing, and people began to sit down and make themselves comfortable. In a moment, Ish knew they would all expect him to begin to say something and he felt again that this was all happening too rapidly. What he was actually facing was almost like the organization of a new state. And yet, they could not sit down quietly and start out by writing a constitution with a good old-fashioned preamble. No, a particular and troublesome situation faced them, and they must act in the face of it.

He put the question sharply: “What are we going to do about Evie and this Charlie?”

There was a babble of talk, and almost immediately Ish had the chilly feeling that of all the men, only Ezra was solidly with him. The boys, even George, seemed to think that Charlie might bring a new force from the outside to enliven and enrich the life of The Tribe. If he liked Evie, so much the better. They had enough loyalty to Ish to insist that Charlie must apologize for what had happened this morning. But it was evident also, Ish felt, that they all considered him to have acted precipitously—he should have talked with the rest of them before confronting Charlie.

Ish brought up the argument that they could not afford to let Evie start a line of half-witted children. But his words made less impression than he had thought they would. Evie had always been a part of the boys’ life, and the thought that there would be others around of the same kind made little impression upon them. They could not think far enough ahead to conceive that the descendants of Evie would necessarily mingle with the rest of the group and bring the whole level down.

Then curiously enough, George’s slow mind brought forth an even sounder argument. “How do we know,” he said, “that she really is half-witted anyway? Maybe it was just all that trouble she had when she was a little girl when everybody died and left her all alone to take care of herself. That would put anybody crazy. Maybe she’s just as bright as any of us really, and so her children will be all right.”

Though Ish could not imagine Evie’s ever having normal children, still there might be something to the argument, and he saw that it impressed the others, except Ezra. In fact, there was almost a feeling that Charlie was a benefactor to the community, and was going to bring Evie into it again as a normal part. And just then Ish noticed that Ezra was really wanting to say something.

Ezra stood up. That was unusual of him, too, being so formal. And it was also unusual that he seemed to be embarrassed. His florid face was even redder than usual, and he glanced back and forth, particularly at Em, it seemed, in an uncertain manner.

“I’ve got to say something more,” he said. “I talked with that fellow, Charlie, last night after we went home, quite a while. He’d been drinking a lot, you know—talked pretty freely.” He paused, and Ish noticed again his half-embarrassed glance toward Em. “He boasted, kind of, you know.” And now Ezra glanced toward the boys, as if realizing that they, poor half-savages, would not know really what a civilized man was discussing. “He told me quite a bit about himself, which was what I was after.”

Again he paused, and Ish could not remember Ezra ever having been like this before. “Come on, Ezra,” he said. “Tell us. This is just us.”

Suddenly the bonds of Ezra’s reticence broke. “This guy, Charlie!” he burst out. “He’s rotten inside as a ten-day fish. Diseases, Cupid’s diseases, I mean. Hell, he’s got all of them there are!”

Ish saw the news visibly shake George’s big body as if it had been a jolting blow on the chest. He saw the flush spread over Em’s creamy-colored face. To the boys the news was nothing. They did not know what Ezra was talking about.

Ezra would not even try to explain to the boys until Em had left the room, and then he had difficulties because the whole conception of disease was very hazy to the boys.

As Ezra tried his explanation, Ish sat feeling his thoughts run by him fast. This was something for which neither the old life nor the new life held precedent. He knew vaguely that lepers had been restrained by law, and he remembered stories of leper colonies. A typhoid-fever carrier might, he thought, be legally kept from working in a restaurant. But what use was it to remember such precedents anyway? Now there was no law of the land.

“Let the boys go,” he said suddenly to Ezra. “This is for us to talk over and decide on.” The boys, he realized suddenly, were disqualified in two ways—they did not know the dangers of disease to a community, and they did not know the force which any society was privileged to exert in its own defense.

The boys filed out, in spite of their years and inches and paternity, seeming mere children again. “Keep quiet about this,” Ezra told them.

The three older men turned to each other again after the younger ones had gone.

“Let’s get Em back in,” said Ezra. She joined them, and then there were four.

They stood for a minute in silence as if under the actual threat of danger. There was a feeling of death in the air, not of clean death in the open, but of a mean and defiling death.

“Well, what about it?” said Ish, knowing that he must take the lead again.

Once the silence was broken, they discussed the situation fully. They were agreed, first of all, that The Tribe had the right to protect itself and must do so. They would look for no more law or precedent than the primary one of self-defense, which could be applied to a community, as well as to a person.

Granted the right, however, and the necessity, what could be the means? Mere warning, “Do this or else!” they all agreed, would probably be useless and would certainly offer no sure protection. Once the thing was done, the punishment which they could mete out to Charlie would be mere social vengeance, and no avail against the spread of the diseases. They had no means of actually imprisoning Charlie, and the weight of all that responsibility, if they should improvise a jail of bars and locks, would be too much for a small community to enforce indefinitely. The obvious thing was banishment. They could merely take him away from the community and tell him to go on. He could manage to live well enough. If he returned, the penalty would be death.

Death—they stirred uneasily even at the mention of it! Now it had been a long time since there had been either war or execution. That their society might have to inflict such a final penalty, the very thought was strangely disturbing to all their minds.

“But what about it?” Em seemed to voice all their fears. “What if he sneaks back somewhere? After all, there are only a few of us older people, and he makes friends easily with the younger ones. What if he makes friends with some of the boys and they protect him? And he could make friends with some of the girls, too, not necessarily Evie.”

“We might take him a long way down the road,” said Ezra. “We could take him in the jeep and drop him off fifty miles, maybe a hundred miles, away.” And then after a pause, he corrected his own judgment. “Yes, but still, he could get back easy in a month or so—and then… well, I was just thinking, what would keep him from hanging round with a rifle and bushwhacking one of us. Oh, maybe the boys could run him down with the dogs afterwards, but one of us would be good and dead anyway! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being afraid to get within rifle-range of every clump of bushes.”

“You can’t punish a man for something he ain’t done yet,” said George stolidly.

“Why not!” said Em sharply. They all turned quickly toward her, but she was silent.

“Why… you can’t… of course, you can’t.” George was laboriously stating the case. “He’s got to do something, and then there’s… a joo-rie. It says so… the law.”

“What law?”

There was a pause, and then the talk shifted away, as if no one quite had the courage to follow Em.

Ish, feeling that he must be fair, brought up another matter.

“Of course we don’t know he really has any diseases at all. We’ve no doctor to find out. Maybe he had something a long time ago. Maybe he’s just boasting. Some men would!”

“That’s just it!” said Ezra. “Not having a doctor, we don’t know. Yes, he might be just boasting. Do we want to take a chance? If this thing ever gets started…. Besides, I think the guy is sick. He moves slow, like something was wearing on him.”

“They say sulfa pills work,” said Ish, trying still to be fair, to suppress that deep feeling of triumph.

Then, as he looked at George, he was almost appalled at the horror and revulsion that he saw—George, the middle-class citizen, full of superstitions against the “social diseases”; George, the deacon, remembering that text about “the sins of the fathers.” But Em was speaking:

“I asked ‘What law’?” she said. “There are the laws in the old law-books still, I guess. They don’t mean much to us, now that things are different. That old law, like George said—it waited till somebody did something, and then it punished. But the thing was done. Can we take that responsibility now? There are all the children.”

Suddenly there seemed nothing more to say. They all sat silent, each considering possibilities.

“No,” Ish found himself thinking, she does not have a philosophy. She mentions the children and makes it a special case, Yet there is perhaps something deeper even than a philosophy in her. She is the mother; she thinks close to all the basic things of life.

Probably it was not so much a long time that passed as what seemed a long time. Then Ezra spoke.

“While we sit here, even—things happen fast these days! We’d better do something.” And then he added, more as if thinking aloud, “I saw, in those days—yes, I saw lots of good ones die. Yes, a lot of good ones have died. I almost got used to death… no, never quite.”

“Should we take a vote?” asked Ish.

“What on?” said George.

Again there was a pause.

“We can run him out,” said Ezra, “or… the other. We can’t imprison him, and what else is there?”

Then Em faced the issue squarely.

“We can vote Banishment, or we can vote Death.”

There was plenty of paper in the living-room desk. The children enjoyed drawing pictures on it. After a little hunting around, Em located four pencils. Ish tore a sheet of paper into four small ballots, kept one himself, and gave one to each of the others. With four people to vote, there might, of course, be a tie.

Ish took his own slip of paper, and wrote a big B on it, and then paused.

This we do, not hastily; this we do, not in passion; this we do, without hatred.

This is not the battle, when a man strikes fiercely and fear drives him on. This is not the hot quarrel when two strive for place or the love of a woman.

Knot the rope; whet the ax; pour the poison; pile the faggots.

This is the one who killed his fellow unprovoked; this is the one who stole the child away; this is the one who spat upon the image of our God; this is the one who leagued himself with the Devil to be a witch; this is the one who corrupted our youth; this is the one who told the enemy of our secret places.

We are afraid, but we do not talk of fear. We have many deep thoughts and doubts, but we do not speak them. We say, “Justice”; we say, “The Law”; we say, “We, the people”; we say, “The State.”

Still Ish sat with his pencil poised above the B on his slip of paper. He knew, far within the deeper reaches of his thought, that Charlie’s banishment would, in all likelihood, not solve the situation. Charlie would be back; he was a strong and dangerous man, and could exert much influence upon the younger people. “What’s the matter?” Ish was thinking. “Am I still just worrying about the leadership? Am I worrying that Charlie will replace me?” He could not be sure. Yet, at the same time, he knew that The Tribe faced here something real and dangerous and even dreadful, in the long run threatening its very existence. In that final realization he knew that he could write only the one word there, out of love and responsibility for his children and grandchildren. He scratched out the B and wrote the other word. Its five letters stared back vacantly at him, and then for a moment he had a sudden revulsion of feeling. Was this ever right? By writing that word, was he not bringing back into the world all the beginnings of war and tyranny, of the oppression of the individual by the mass, in themselves diseases worse than any which Charlie could carry. And why did it all have to move so fast?

He started to scratch the word out, but stopped again. No, he was torn two ways, but he could not quite scratch it. If Charlie should kill someone, that might make it easier to inflict the final penalty, and yet that was only the old conventional way of thinking. The eye for the eye, and the tooth for the tooth! To execute the murderer never brought back the murdered, and was only vengeance. To be effective, punishment should not be retribution so much as a prevention.

How long had he paused? He suddenly came to the realization that he was sitting there silent, staring at the paper, while the other three were waiting for him. After all, his was only one vote; the others could out-vote him, and so he could have his conscience to himself and still Charlie would only be banished. “Give me your slips,” he said.

They passed them in, and he laid them face up before him on the desk. Four times he looked, and he read: “Death… death… death… death.”

Chapter 8

They shoveled the dirt back into the grave beneath the oak tree. They dragged branches and carried heavy stones to cover it, so that what lay beneath would be safe from burrowing coyotes. After that, they all walked back, the long mile.

They kept close together, as if needing one another’s support. Ish walked among them, swinging his hammer in his tight hand. He had no use for the hammer, but still he had taken it along. Now the downward pull of its weight seemed to keep him firmly on the ground. He had held it in his hand, like a badge of office, when they had gone to find Charlie and, flanked by the boys’ leveled rifles, Ish had said the words and heard Charlie begin to curse obscenely.

Now it would never be the same again. Ish did not like to think of what had happened, and when he did think of it, he felt a little sick, physically. Perhaps, if it had not been for George’s solidity, they could never have gone through with it finally. George, with his practical skill, had knotted the rope and set up the ladder.

No, he would never like to think of it in the future, either. He was sure of that also. This was an end, and this was also a beginning. It was the end of those twenty-one years when they had lived, now he thought, in a kind of idyllic state, as it might have been in some old Garden of Eden. They had known their troubles; they had even known death. But it had been simple, as he looked back toward it. This was an end. Yet, it was also a beginning, and a long road lay ahead. In the past, there had been only a little group of people, scarcely more than an overgrown family. In the future, there would be the State,

Yet there was an irony. The State—it should be a kind of nourishing mother, protecting the individuals in their weakness, permitting a fuller life. And now the first act of the State, its originating function, had been to bring death. Well, who could say? Likely enough, in the dim past reaches of time, the State had always sprung from the need to crystallize power in some troublous time, and primitive power must often have expressed itself in death.

“It was necessary…. It was necessary,” he kept saying to himself. Yes, he could justify the act on the highest of all grounds—the safety and happiness of The Tribe. By the one sharp act, evil and ugly though it seemed, he and the others had prevented—so at least they would hope—all that chain of ugliness and evil which ran on, once started, through the years. Now—so at least they would hope—there would be no endless succession of blind babies, and of trembling, witless old men, and of marriages defiled even in their consummation.

Yet he did not like to think about it. He could justify it rationally. Even though the facts were not wholly proved, the chance had been too great to take.

But he would never be sure how much other motives, secondary and personal, had swayed him. Guiltily he remembered how his heart had leaped when Ezra’s words had given support to his own dislike and fear, and to his apprehension that his leadership was challenged. Well, he would never know. Now, in any case, it was finished. No, he would only say, “It is done.” Too often, he remembered his history, executions had finished nothing, and dead men had risen from their graves, and their souls had marched on. But Charlie had not seemed to have much of a soul.

He walked with the others. They were all silent, except that the three boys were beginning to recover their spirits and chaff back and forth at one another. There was no reason why they should be less concerned than the older men. The boys had not voted originally, but they had concurred. “Yes,” Ish thought, “if anyone is guilty, we are all guilty together, and in time to come no one can raise a word against any other one.”

Along the littered and grass-grown streets, between the rows of half-ruined houses, there was never a longer mile than that one back from the new grave beneath the oak tree to the houses on San Lupo Drive.

When he went into his own house, Ish went to the mantelpiece, and set the hammer there, head down, handle sticking stiffly upward. Yes, it was an old friend, but his thought of the twenty-two years altered a little when he remembered the day when he had first used the hammer. Those years-perhaps they had been lived, as he had thought a little while ago, in a kind of Garden of Eden! Yet, also, they had been the years of anarchy, when there was no strong force to protect the individual against whatever might rise up against him. He remembered that day vividly still—the one when he had first come driving down from the mountains and had stood in the street of the little town of Hutsonville, pausing for a moment, hesitant, looking up and down the street, realizing that he was about to do something illegal and irrevocable and terrible. Then, he still remembered the feeling, he had drawn back deliberately with the hammer and smashed the flimsy door of the little pool-room and gone inside to read the newspaper. Oh, yes—when you had the United States of America around and about you, as all-present as the air you breathed, then you had thought little of it except to complain about income-tax and regulations, and you felt yourself the strong individual. But when it had vanished! How was it the old line had gone?—“His hand shall be against every man’s and every man’s hand against him.” So it had been. Even though he had George and Ezra, they had all acted only from day to day; no battle-tested symbol of unity had bound them. Though things had worked comfortably and pleasantly in all these years, that might only have been good luck.

Now from across the street he heard the sound of a saw, and he realized that George was back at work with his beloved wood. George would not spend much time thinking about what had happened. Neither would Ezra, or the boys. Of them all, only he, Ish, thought much. And now, since he could not help it, he thought back again. Again he wondered, as so often before, what really were springs of action. Did it come from the man inside? Or from the world, the outside? Take all this that had just happened. The water had failed, and then they had sent the boys on their expedition as the result of losing the water, and from the expedition had come Charlie, and from Charlie, who was part of the outside, had come all that had happened afterwards. Yet he could not say, either, that this was all an inevitable succession of happenings from the initial failure of the water. His own mind had worked creatively, throwing out the suggestion for the expedition, seeing imaginatively what might be done. And then again he thought of Joey, that other one who saw what was not there, who looked to the future.

Em came in. She had not been at the oak tree; that was not woman’s work. But she too had written the word upon the ballot. Yet Em, he realized, would not consider too much or worry. She was a person too unified in nature.

She spoke: “Don’t think about it now. Don’t worry about it.”

He took her hand in his, and pressed it against his cheek. For a moment it was cool, and then he felt it warm to the flush of his own skin. Many years it was now since he had first seen her standing in the light of the doorway, and heard her speak, not a challenge or a question, but in quiet affirmation. Twenty-one, twenty-two, years—and now he knew that no matter what happened there would be no question in the final relationship between the two of them. They would have no more children; yet that relationship still was warm. She was ten years older than he. Some might say that she was the mother more than the wife for him. Let it be! As things were, so let them stand.

“I’ll never keep from it!” he said at last. “From worrying, I mean. I suppose I really get pleasure from it. But I have to try to look ahead, peering into the mist. I guess I had picked out the right profession for myself in the Old Times; I’d have made a good research professor. But it’s something of a bad joke, I think, that I was left as one of the survivors. What was needed was only men like George and Ezra; they drift without thinking much, or acting, either. Or else the new times needed men who could act, be leaders, without too much thinking. Men, maybe—well, maybe Charlie was really that kind. Me, I only try. I’m not one like Moses, or Solon—or, or—Lycurgus. Those were the ones who made the laws and founded nations. What has happened—yes, what is going to happen to us all—it would all be different if I were different.”

She pressed her cheek against his for a moment.

“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t want you different.”

Well, that was what a wife should say! It was trite, but it was comforting.

“Besides,” she went on, “how do you know? Even if you were Moses, or—one of those others with the funny names—still you couldn’t control what the world does, all of it, pressing in around us.”

One of the children called, and Em went away. Ish rose, and went to the desk, and from one of the drawers he drew out the little cardboard box which the boys had brought back with them from the tiny community near the Rio Grande. Ish knew what was in it, but because of all that had been happening with such incredible speed he had not yet had the time, or the peace of mind, to examine it.

He opened the little box, and put his fingers down among the cool and smooth kernels. He squeezed some of them in his palm, took a handful out, and looked at them. They were red and black, small, pointed at the ends—not the large flat kernels, yellow or white, that he had expected to see. Yet this was what he should have expected. The large kernels were from a highly developed, perhaps even artificially hybridized, variety of corn. The little black and red ones were more primitive, what the Pueblo Indians had always raised.

He took the box back to his chair. Again he put his hand into it; he picked up more of the black and red kernels, and let them run into the box again through his fingers. He played with them, and as he played, merciful forgetfulness moved in upon him, and there was a new peace in his heart. This also had come from the expedition eastwards. In the corn was life, and the future.

Looking up, he saw Joey—ever the curious one—gazing at him from across the room with interest. He felt himself warm toward Joey, and called to him to come and see. Joey was interested, as always. Ish explained to him about the corn. During the passage of the years their own community had delayed so long in trying to raise corn that in the end he had not been able to find any still living seed. Now there was another chance.

Then, even though it seemed a terrible thing to do, Ish took the little box, and went out into the kitchen with Joey. They lighted a burner in the gasoline stove, and took a frying-pan. Carefully, allowing themselves only two dozen kernels, they poured some corn into the frying-pan, and parched the kernels over the flame.

Even though they thus wasted some of the seeds, Ish felt too Much moved emotionally to resist the temptation, and he justified himself by thinking that the actual demonstration to Joey, immediately, was necessary.

The corn did not parch well, and was barely edible. Neither of them cared for it much. Actually Ish could only remember having eaten parched corn as a sophisticated cocktail-relish, but he explained to Joey that parched corn had been a regular food on the American frontier and that his ancestors must often have depended largely upon it.

The big eyes, bright in the thin little face, showed that Joey appreciated the story.

“I wish,” thought Ish, “that he might grow stronger, and be something firmer to count on. Well, I have wasted two dozen of them, but perhaps in Joey’s mind I have planted a more important seed.”

Wheat and corn—they too, like dog and horse, marched and shared with man, friends and helpers on the long way…

Far in some dry corner of the Old World the little spiked grass sprouted more thickly around the edges of the campsites where the disturbing and enrichment of the soil gave it ground to its liking. So first, perhaps, it adopted man, but soon man adopted it. The more it repaid his care, the more he coddled it. With his fostering it grew taller and stronger, yielding more seed; but also it came to demand the tilled soil and the seedbed free of the competition of the wilder grasses.

The first Year after there were no more plowed fields, the volunteer wheat sprang up on thousands of acres, but soon there was less of it and then still less. Like wolves upon the sheep, the fierce native grasses returned. They formed tough sod; year after year, they grew from the same roots, thriving the better for lack of cultivation.

After a while there was no more wheat, except that far off in the dry lands of Asia and Africa, here and there, the little spiked grass still was growing, as it had grown before an incident called Agriculture…. So also with the maize. From the tropics of America, it too journeyed far with man. Like the sheep it traded its freedom for a fat and pampered life. It could no longer even shed its own seeds, held tight within the tough husk. Even sooner than the wheat, the maize vanished. Only, on the Mexican High lands, in thick clumps the wild teosinte still pushed up tasseled tops against the high sun….

So it will go, unless here and there a few men still linger. For if man cannot prosper without the wheat and the corn, still less can they prosper without man.

Although George and Maurine kept track of the months and the days of the months (or thought they did), all the rest went more by the position of the sun and the state of the vegetation. Ish took pride in being able to estimate the time of the year, and when he compared notes with George’s calendar, he was generally pleased to see that he was not more than a week or so wrong—if indeed he might not be right and George wrong, for Ish had no strong faith in George’s accuracy.

In any case, a week or two made no difference when it came to planting the corn. Obviously the season was too far advanced. The cold weather would arrive before the corn was more than well sprouted. Next year they would try it.

In the next few days, however, Ish spent some time scouting about in the vicinity, trying to locate a good spot for the corn-patch. He took Joey along with him, and the two were soon talking learnedly about exposures, soil, and possibilities for keeping the wild cattle out. Actually, Ish realized, their particular region was about the worst place in the United States for corn-growing. A variety which was adapted to the dry and hot Rio Grande valley might not even mature at all in the chilly and fog-blanketed summers near San Francisco Bay. Moreover, he himself was not a farmer, and had never even had a green thumb for gardening. His knowledge of plants and soils was mostly theoretical, gained from his studies in geography. He remembered how podzols and chernozems were formed and he thought he might even recognize them when he saw them, but that did not make him a farmer. No one else in The Tribe had been one either, although Maurine had grown up on a farm. This accident, so you might call it, that they had no one who was close to the soil, had already been of much importance in determining their communal outlook on life.

One day—more than a week had passed, and the memory of Charlie and the oak tree had faded somewhat—Ish and Joey came back to the house after having located what seemed the most favorable site they had yet seen. Em came out on the porch to meet them, and Ish knew immediately that something had happened. “What’s the matter?” he asked quickly.

“Oh, nothing much,” she said, “I hope anyway. Bob seems to be sick, a little.” Ish stopped dead on the porch, and looked at her.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m no doctor, but I don’t think it’s anything like that. I don’t even see how it could be. Come and take a look at him. He says he’s felt a little bad for the last few days.”

During the years Ish had usually taken the responsibility of doctoring. He had developed some skill at treating cuts and bruises and sprains, and had once set a broken arm. But he had gained practically no experience with disease, because there were only the two that seemed to exist in The Tribe.

“Bob hasn’t just got a case of that sore throat?” he asked. “I can fix that soon enough!”

“No,” she said, as he had known she would—she would not be so obviously worrying about the sore throat. “No,” she repeated, “he hasn’t got a sore throat at all. He just seems laid out, flat.”

“Sulfa will probably do the job anyway,” said Ish, cheerfully. “As long as there are thousands of pills in the drug stores, and still good, we’re lucky! And if sulfa won’t work, I’ll take a chance with penicillin.”

He went upstairs quickly. Bob was lying in bed, lying very still with his face turned away from the light.

“Oh, I’m all right!” he said, irritably. “Mother gets excited!”

Proof enough to the contrary, thought Ish, lay in his taking to bed. A sixteen-year-old did not go to bed, before he was too sick to stand.

Ish looked around and saw Joey, peering curiously at his brother.

“Joey, get out of here!” he snapped.

“I’d like to see. I want to know about being sick!”

“No, you keep your nose out of this. When you get bigger and stronger, I’ll show you, and teach you. But we don’t want you getting sick too. The first thing to learn about sickness is that it may go from one person to another.”

Joey backed out reluctantly, his curiosity stronger than any theoretical fear of being sick. The Tribe had so little experience with disease that the children had no respect for it.

Bob complained of a headache, and a general sense of unlocalized discomfort. He kept very still in bed, obviously prostrated. Ish took his temperature and found it just under 101, not too good or too bad. He prescribed two sulfa pills and a full glass of water. Bob gagged over the pills; he was not used to swallowing such things.

Telling Bob to get some sleep, Ish went out, and closed the door.

“What is it?” Em asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing that sulfa won’t cure, I guess.”

“I don’t like it, though. So soon…”

“Yes. There’s such a thing, however, as coincidence, you remember.”

“I know that. But you’re the one that will be worrying.”

“I’ll give the pills every four hours, overnight at least, before I begin.”

“That’s fine, if it’s so!” she said as a last word, and went off.

And Ish, before even he had got all the way downstairs, knew that her skepticism was justified. After all, why should a man not worry? In the Old Times when you lived with all the protection of doctors and public-health services, even then the mysterious and sudden onset of disease was terrifying. How much more so, now!

Now, just as man lacked the all-embracing power of a nation around him, so also he felt himself bare and exposed and helpless for lack of that age-old tradition of medical skill.

“It’s my fault!” he thought. “All these years of grace! I should have been studying the medical books. I should have made myself into a doctor.”

Yet the study of medicine had never appealed to him, even far back in the Old Times when he had been thinking about a profession. And a man couldn’t be a universal genius! Besides, there had been no pressure, when nearly all the diseases seemed to have died out.

That fact, when he thought of it, sometimes even made the Great Disaster seem beneficent—a magnificent wiping off of the state which allowed man as a species to escape from most of the aches and pains he had been accumulating for so many centuries, and start anew. Originally each little isolated tribe must have developed and maintained its own special infections. If the evidence had been available, the anthropologists would probably have said that the Neanderthal men could be identified as well by their own special parasites as by their own special ways of chipping flint. In archeology, when you found one culture just on top of another one, you assumed that Tribe B had wiped out Tribe A. So doubtless it had. But its weapons had probably been stronger parasites more often than longer spears.

As he thought, he grew more alarmed. Although less than half an hour had passed, he went upstairs, and looked in at Bob. Evening had come, and Bob lay quietly in the half-dark room. Ish did not want to disturb him, and so went downstairs again.

He sat in a big chair and smoked. He would have liked to talk the matter over with someone, but Em did not have the background, and Joey was still too inexperienced. So he thought to himself.

The Tribe—they themselves, that is—had preserved measles and some kind of sore throat. Someone, he himself perhaps, had been the carrier, or else the germs were maintained by some animal with which they were in contact—the dogs, or the cattle, or any one of a hundred smaller ones. But the people in Los Angeles might be free of measles, and have preserved mumps and whooping-cough. And those on the Rio Grande would probably have kept dysentery.

And now Charlie! Even if he had not had those particular diseases of which he boasted, he might well have been a carrier of whatever happened to be prevalent around Los Angeles. That had not been such a fine idea—sending the boys off to explore! Suddenly Ish began to feel an unreasoning fear of any stranger. Give them two-hundred-yards law, that was the idea, and then look at them over the sights of a good rifle!

A fly buzzed in front of his nose, and the overemphatic way he struck at it showed that his nerves were tense. Josey called for him to come in to dinner.

Unlike the human lice, the house-fly—not having irrevocably linked its destiny with man’s—had suffered nothing that approached annihilation. Like the house rat, the house mouse, the human flea, and the cockroach, this other intimate household companion had suffered only a considerable reverse. Where formerly it had buzzed by hundreds and thousands, now it was reduced to its twenties or tens. Nevertheless, it survived.

For, like that lord whom Price Hamlet calls a “water-fly,” the house-fly also was secure in “the possession of dirt,” though for it dirt must mean, not lands and estates, but the word in its dysphemistic sense, as when the Bible of King James declares primly that Ehud struck King Eglon in the belly, “and the dirt came out.” Thus, even though man should be reduced to the vanishing point or disappear altogether, the house-fly was secure as long as the larger animals still lived and continued to leave droppings behind them. The eggs of the fly, thus deposited, soon hatched out, and the larvae found themselves embowered in rich and succulent food on which to feast, as snakes upon rats, woodpeckers upon grubs, and men on the flesh of dead animals.

Still, with man eclipsed, times were hard. No longer did barnyards offer sites as rich as the ancient gift of the Nile, no longer was the countryside studded with beneficently unscreened privies, no longer did innumerable slums offer their choice piles of garbage and filth. Only here and there some few accumulations of nourishing excrement permitted the house-fly to lay numerous eggs and breed up well-fostered larvae and send forth vigorous and busily traveling adults.

A week later the epidemic was in full course. Dick, Bob’s companion on the expedition, had been the next to go down. But now Ezra and five of the children lay stricken. In proportion to its numbers, the community was in the grip of a devastating outbreak of what must be—Ish felt certain—typhoid fever.

Some of the adults had been inoculated in the Old Times, but their immunity must long since have lapsed. All the children were totally unguarded. Even with all the old-time medical skill typhoid had been combatted chiefly by prevention. Once the disease was established, there was no remedy but to let it run its long and sinister course.

Easy enough now, thought Ish, to do some second thinking! Easy enough, he thought bitterly, to know that Charlie, no matter what other diseases he might have had or thought he had, was really carrying the germs from an attack of typhoid fever! Perhaps he had been sick years before; perhaps he had been sick recently, for quite possibly the disease had made the passage in the area where he had lived. They would never know. And now, what did it matter?

What they knew for certain was that Charlie, obviously unclean in personal habits, had eaten with the two boys for more than a week. In addition, the not too carefully constructed outhouses and the flies offered an obvious route of general infection.

They began to boil all drinking-water. They burned the old latrines and filled the old pits. They kept the new ones so well sprayed with DDT that no fly could alight and live. All such precautions were obviously too late. Already every individual must have been exposed to infection. Those who had not yet succumbed must either by good luck possess natural immunity, or else the disease was still lying dormant in them, building up strength through its period of incubation.

Day by day, one or more took to bed. Bob, now in his second week, lay tossing in delirium, a grim indication of the long road all the others must follow before they could grow better. Already those still on their feet were being worn down by the strain of nursing.

They had scarcely time to give any thought to fear, and yet fear lay all around them, daily drawing its circle closer. There had been no deaths as yet, but neither had anyone passed the crisis of the fever. As in earlier years each birth had seemed to force back the circle of darkness, so now with each newly stricken one the darkness moved a step inward, bringing annihilation with it. Even if they did not all die in the epidemic, the loss of any large number might break, it seemed, the communal will to live.

George and Maurine and Molly had taken to prayer, and some of the younger ones had joined with them. They were afraid that God was exacting retribution upon them for the death of Charlie. Ralph was just on the point of taking his family, as yet not stricken, and fleeing off somewhere. Ish dissuaded him, for the moment at least, arguing that any of them might already be infected and that to be taken sick as a small and isolated group would be much more dangerous than to share with the whole community.

“We are close to panic!” thought Ish, and then the next morning he himself awoke—depressed, feverish, and half-prostrated. He forced himself to his feet, made light of Em’s inquiries, and avoided her glances. Bob was very bad, and took most of Em’s time. Ish tended Joey and Josey, who were both in the early stages. Walt, they had sent off to help in one of the other houses.

In the afternoon, leaning over Joey’s bed, Ish felt himself collapsing. With his last effort he managed to get to his own bed, and fall upon it.

Hours later, it seemed, he came to himself. Em was looking down at him. She had managed to undress him and get him into bed.

He looked up at her, feeling small. He gazed as a child might have gazed—above all, fearing that he would see fear. If she was afraid, all was lost!

But in her face he saw no fear.

The dark, wide-set eyes looked calmly at him. Oh, Mother of Nations! And then he slept.

In his days and nights of delirium, he knew little of what happened. Through his fever the great vague dream-shapes moved in and pressed upon him from the dark outside—horrible, inchoate as fog, not to be combated. Then sometimes he called out for someone to bring him his hammer, and he called the name of Joey sometimes, and again (worst of all) the name of Charlie. But also in his terrors he called sometimes on the name of Em, and then it might be that he awoke at the pressure of her hand and looked up. Always he looked for fear, but there was no fear.

Then there was a week when he lay quieter but so prostrated that at times his life seemed to him to be fluttering weakly to take flight and go—and he cared little. Only, when he looked up and saw Em, he felt courage and strength move out from her, and he held his lips hard together, for he thought life itself pressed close behind his lips and that if he opened its mouth it would escape like a butterfly. But as long as he looked up at Em, he knew that he would have strength to hold that little, faintly struggling thing within him.

Only, when she had gone, he said to himself, now that he could think a little, “She will break! Some time she must break! She may not get the fever. We may hope for that good luck! But she cannot carry the burden for all of us.”

Now he realized more of what was happening. There had been deaths, he knew, but not who or how many. He dared not ask.

Once he heard Jeanie come, wailing hysterically at the death of a child, Em said little, but strangely the spirit moved out from her, and Jeanie went away with courage to fight on. George came, unwashed and filth-smeared, a terror-stricken old man—Maurine had suffered a relapse, and their grandchild lay gasping. Em said nothing about God, but again a spirit went out from her, and George walked away with head high, and saying the words, “Yea, though He slay me….” Thus even when the shadows drew in most closely and the little candle seemed flickering and smoky, she knew no despair and sustained them all.

“It is strange,” thought Ish. “She has none of those things on which I used to count so much—not education, not even high intelligence. She supplies no ideas. Yet she has a greatness within her and the final affirmation. Without her, in these last few weeks, we would have despaired and lost hold of life and gone under.” And he felt himself humble beside her.

At last one day he saw her sitting near him, and on her face was such great weariness as he had never seen on a face before. He was appalled. Then suddenly he was happy, for he knew that she would never have sat there and let her weariness show unless the future was safe. Yet it was such a weariness as he scarcely thought could exist. Suddenly he knew that behind such weariness must also lie great grief.

At that moment too he realized that he himself was now on the road to convalescence, probably less weary than she, able to share the load.

He looked at her and smiled, and even in her weariness she smiled back.

“Tell me,” he said gently.

She hesitated, and he was thinking wildly. Walt?—no, Walt was not sick. He brought me a glass of water today. Jack?—no, I am sure that I have heard his voice; he was very strong. Josey would it be? Or Mary? It might be more than one.

“Share it with me,” he said to her. “I am well enough now.” And still he was thinking wildly. It must not be that one. He was not strong, but the weakest often endure illness the best. No, not he!

“Five—up and down the street—five are dead.”

“Which ones?” he said, bracing himself.

“They are all children.”

“What—about ours?” he said, knowing that she was sheltering him still, his fear suddenly dominating. “Yes, five days ago,” she said.

Then he saw her lips start to form the word, and he knew, even before he heard the sounds: “Joey.”

What is the good of anything? (So he thought, and he asked nothing more.) The Chosen One! The rest might have followed; he only could carry the light. The Child of the Promise! Then he closed his eyes, and lay still.

Chapter 9

The weeks of his convalescence dragged along. Very slowly, his physical strength came back to him. Yet, even behind his physical strength, his mental vigor lagged. Looking in a mirror, he saw his hair now showing streaks of gray. “Am I old already?” he thought. “No, not really old!” At least he knew that in some ways he would never be the same. Some fine youthful courage and confidence had faded.

Always he had prided himself on being able to think honestly, to face intellectually whatever must be faced. Now he found his mind swerving off when his thoughts drew near to certain subjects. Well, he was still weak; after a while, he would go ahead once more.

Sometimes (and this frightened him) he found himself refusing to admit the actuality, making plans as if Joey were still there, escaping into the happiness of fantasy. He realized that he had always had something of this tendency. At times it had been an advantage, as when it had enabled him to readjust imaginatively when he had first been left alone. But now he was escaping because the reality seemed too bleak to be faced. Repeatedly a line of poetry, from the wide reading of all those years, came into his head when he tried to breast reality:

No, never again! Joey was gone, and Charlie’s shadow lay over them, and the all-necessary State had arisen, with death in its hands. And everything that he had tried to do so hopefully in that glad morning had failed. He questioned why. Then often in mere despair he fled into fantasy.

When he could think more calmly, the irony of all things impressed him more and more. What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid.

Most of the time he had to be alone. Some of the others still needed care, and what strength remained in Em had to be devoted to them. He would have liked to talk to Ezra, but Ezra too was not yet out of bed. Except for Em and Ezra, now that Joey was gone, there was no one to whom his heart really went out.

One afternoon he awoke from a nap, and saw Em sitting near his bed. With only half-opened eyes, he looked at her. She had not yet noticed that he was awake. She was still weary-looking, but no longer with the terrible weariness that he had seen before. There was grief too, but a calm covered it. There was no despair. As for fear, he no longer even thought of searching for that!

She looked at him, and noticed his opened eyes, and smiled quickly. Suddenly he knew that this was the time when he must face it.

“I must talk with you,” he said, though his voice was scarcely more than a whisper, as if he were still asleep. Then he paused.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I am here…. Go on…. I am here.”

“I must talk with you,” he repeated, still afraid really to begin. He felt himself humble before her, the child who must ask questions of the grown-up, the frightened child trying to drive fear away and renew confidence. Yet, not being really a child, he feared that even she could make no answer that would bring that security.

“I want to ask you some questions,” he went on. “How is it…” he began bravely, and then paused again.

She only smiled at him, realizing his weakness, but she did not tell him to wait till another time.

“This is it!” he said desperately. “Is this the way of it? I know what George is thinking, and the others perhaps too! I heard something, even through my fever. Is it… is it a punishment?”

Then he looked at her, and for the first time in all those terrible weeks he saw in her face something which was fear, or might be. Even I have failed her, he thought in panic. Yet he knew that now he must go on, or else a wall of doubt and dishonesty would arise between them forever.

So he blurted on: “You know what I mean! Is it because we killed Charlie? Did something—did God—strike back at us? An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth! Is this why they all—why Joey?—died? Did—what it was—He—use the disease that Charlie was carrying—so that we should all be sure how it was meant?”

Then, as he paused, he saw that her face was contorted with horror.

“No, no!” she cried. “Not you too! I faced the others so often alone when you were sick! I knew no arguments, but I knew that it could not be so. I could give them no arguments. All I could give them was my courage!”

She paused, as if the sudden vehemence had exhausted her.

“Yes,” she went on, “I felt courage flow out from me like blood! It flowed out to them all, and I grew weaker as it flowed, and I wondered ‘Will there be enough? Will there be enough?’ And you were talking of Charlie through your fever.”

She was silent again, but he could say nothing.

“Oh,” she cried, “do not ask me for more courage! I do not know the arguments. I never went to college. All I know is that we did what we thought best. If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back! Not you too!”

Then she stopped, and he saw that her face was between her hands, so that he could not tell whether or not there was fear in it. But he knew that she was crying.

And again he felt small and very humble before her. (Once more she had not failed him.) But most of all he felt calm and peaceful and reassured. Yes, he should have known. He, among them all, should not have doubted. Reaching out, he took one of her hands.

“Do not be afraid,” he found himself saying, though for him to be saying so to her was ironic. “You are right; you are right! I shall not think such things again. I know the arguments. But when there is death and a man has been very sick, he is weak. Yes, you must remember, I am still—not quite myself.”

Then suddenly she was kissing him through warm tears, and had gone from the room. Again, he knew, she was strong. Again courage could flow outward from her. Oh, Mother of Nations!

He also, as he lay there still weak—he also felt courage again, whether he had drawn it from her store or whether her words had merely caused him to build up his own.

Yes, he thought—and did not flee from the thought—yes, Joey is gone. Joey is dead. He will not be back. He will not—ever again—come running to see what is happening. Yet, there will be a future. Though I am gray-haired now, yet still there is Em—and the others—and I may even be happy. It will be nothing like the future I planned—now that Joey is dead. Still, I shall do what I can.

Again he felt small and humble. He felt all the great forces of the world at work against him, against the only man still alive who could think and plan for the future. He had tried to face them head-on, and they had rolled over him. Yes, they might well have been too much, even if Joey had lived. He must plan more shrewdly now, work more subtly, select smaller and more practical objectives, be the fox and not the lion.

But first he must regain physical strength. Two or three weeks more, it would take him. Even so, well before the end of the year, he would be able to do something.

Immediately he felt his mind turn over and start to work. A good mind! He found himself appraising his own brain, as if it were a trusty instrument or machine—old, but still functioning smoothly.

Yet he was very weak, and before he had done much thinking, he slept again.

Perhaps there were too many people, too many old ways of thinking, too many books. Perhaps the ruts of thinking had grown too deep and the refuse of the past lay too heavy around us, like piles of garbage and old clothes? Why should not the philosopher welcome the wiping-out of it all and a new start and men playing the game with fresh rules? There would be, perhaps, more gain than loss.

During the weeks of the epidemic, the few who remained well had been able to give only hasty burial to those who died.

After the convalescents were again on their feet, George and Maurine and

Molly raised the question of a funeral service.

Ish, and Em with him, would have been glad to let the situation rest as it was. He realized, however, that the others would be happier if a service should be performed. A service might also be of some practical value, to mark a definite end to this period of emergency and fear and death, and signalize a return to a normal and forward-looking life. Although he dreaded the renewal of grief for Joey that such a service might bring him personally, still he felt that after it he could move on toward whatever more modest plans for the future he could finally work out.

So he made the suggestion that the services should be held and that on the day following them all normal activities should be resumed. Although he had not given any special thought to the resumption of school, he found that the others naturally assumed it, and he could only acquiesce.

By common consent Ezra was placed in charge of the services. He chose to hold them very early in the morning.

As in any community where artificial light was inadequate, rising-with-the-sun was a habit, and they did not have to get out of bed much earlier than usual to be standing at the little row of mounds before the light was yet full. The sky was clear, but the western slope of the hills was all in shade. Some tall pine trees standing by the graves did not yet cast shadows.

The season was too late for wild flowers, but the older children, at Ezra’s direction, had cut green pine-boughs and covered the mounds. Although there were only five graves, this loss represented a major catastrophe. In comparison with the small numbers of The Tribe, five deaths were more than a hundred thousand would have been in a city of a million people.

The survivors were all there—babies in their mothers’ arms, little boys or girls holding their fathers’ hands.

Ish stood, feeling the weight of the hammer in his right hand. It dragged him solidly down to the earth. He had started without it, but Josey had reminded him, assuming that he was merely forgetful. The hammer, in the minds of all the younger ones, marked a formal occasion. A few months ago, Ish would not have yielded, and he would have made a point of talking to Josey about superstition. But today he had brought the hammer. Actually, he was forced to admit, he himself was drawing comfort from it. He was humbler now, after all that had happened. If The Tribe needed a symbol of strength and unity, if they were happier with the hammer as a rallying point—who was he to enforce rationalism? Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.

They had now all arranged themselves in an irregular halfcircle, facing the graves, each family grouped together. From his position in the center Ish looked first the one way and then the other. George was wearing a conservative-looking dark-gray suit, the very one probably that he used to wear to funerals when he had been a deacon in the Old Times—or, if not the same one, its twin. Maurine stood beside him in solid black, with a veil. At least while those two lived, the ancient proprieties would survive. But all the others were clothed in the haphazard but comfortable leavings of civilization. The men and boys wore blue jeans and sport shirts, with light wind-breaker jackets over their shirts against the early morning chill. A few of the smaller girls were almost indistinguishable from the boys, except for their longer hair, but the women and most of the girls declared their femininity with skirts, and lent color by means of red or green or blue shawls or scarfs.

Ezra was walking forward to the center, getting ready to begin. The light of the sun behind the hill was brighter gold now; the hush was deeper. Ish felt his throat full. He was moved, even though he felt the ceremony to be meaningless, and talk in the presence of death to be almost an impertinence. Yet also he felt himself close to something very ancient in humanity, perhaps something also very significant for the future. Suddenly he was imagining himself an anthropologist of thousands of years in the future, one who was investigating the life of people just subsequent to the Great Disaster. “Little is known of their culture,” he would write. “From the discovery of certain graves, however, it is known that they practiced inhumation.”

When Ezra began to talk, Ish became a little fearful; there were many things that might be said wrong on the occasion. But as soon as Ezra was well started, Ish knew that he should have had more trust. Ezra had not looked up old funeral services. He did not mouth traditional words. He did not speak of a hope beyond the grave. Of all who stood there, only George and Maurine, and perhaps Molly, would have found comfort in such words. You found it hard to think of such a thing when across the tradition of the past lay the broad black mark of the Great Disaster.

So Ezra, who knew people, talked a little of each of the children. He told some small pleasing story of each of them, something which he remembered and which the others might like to remember.

Last of all, he began to talk of Joey, and Ish felt himself suddenly weak. But Ezra did not talk of any remarkable thing that Joey had done and did not even mention that a year had been named for him. Instead, he began to tell of some little incident of play, as with the others.

As Ezra talked of Joey, Ish saw some of the children begin to cast quick sidelong glances at him. They knew the special bond that had connected Joey and his father. Were they wondering whether he, Ish, would step forward at the last moment? He, the Old One, the American, who knew all that strange knowledge—would he step forward at the last moment, and hold his hammer before him stiffly, and declare that Joey was not gone, that Joey still lived, that Joey would come back to them? Would the earth of that little mound begin to stir?

But Ish noticed only their quick glances, sidelong and furtive. They said nothing. And whatever they thought, he knew that he could work no miracle.

When Ezra finished talking of Joey, he continued speaking more in general. Why did he not stop? Ish felt something wrong. This service should not drag on!

Then abruptly Ezra brought himself to a close, and at the same moment Ish became conscious of another change. All the world was suddenly brighter. The first edge of the sun had risen above the ridge-line!

Ish suddenly did not know whether to be pleased or dismayed. “Well planned!” he thought. “But a stage-trick!” Then, looking around, he saw that the others were happy. He too relaxed, and even though he recognized the theatrical touch, he was comforted.

The return of the sun! That age-old symbol! Ezra had been too honest to promise immortality, but he had chosen his timing, and had the luck of a clear morning. Whether you thought of personal resurrection or merely of the continuance of the race, the symbol was there.

Now the lanes of yellow sunlight stretched out between the long shadows of the tall dark trees.

In this also we are men, that we think of the dead. Once it was not so, and when one of us died, he lay where he lay by the cave-mouth and we ran in and out there, not standing quite upright as we ran. Now we stand upright, and now also we think of the dead.

So, when the comrade lies there, we do not let him lie where he died. And we do not take him by the legs carelessly, and drag him into the forest for the foxes and wood rats to gnaw on. We do not cast him into the river carelessly for the stream to float him away.

No, but rather we lay him where the ground is hollowed out a little and there cover him with leaves and branches. So he shall return to the earth, whence all things came.

Or else we lay him to rest among the tree-branches, and give him to the air. Then, if the black birds come streaming from far to pluck at him, that too is right, for they are the creatures of the air.

Or else we give him to the bright and hot cleanliness of fire.

Then we go about our life as before, and soon we forget, like the beasts. But this at least we have done, and when we shall no longer do it, then we shall no longer be men.

After the ceremony at the graves was over, they all walked back to the houses through the early sunshine. Ish began to wish that he could be alone. He did not feel it right, however, to leave Em at this time. Before long she must have sensed how he was feeling, and she took the initiative.

“Go on,” she said. “It will be better for you to take a walk, and be by yourself for a while.”

He decided to go. As he had feared, the funeral service had stirred him deeply. Some people sought company in time of grief, but he was one who rather should be alone. He did not worry about Em; she was stronger than he.

He took no lunch with him, because he did not feel hungry. In any case he could always step into a store, and pick out some cans. He did not strap his pistol-belt around him, though it was routine not to go far from the houses without some kind of weapon. At the last moment, however, he hesitated uncertainly, and then took the hammer from the mantelpiece.

The very fact that he took it troubled him a little. Why was it coming to loom so large in his thoughts? It was by no means his oldest possession, because scattered throughout the house were things which he had owned and could remember even from the time of his small boyhood. But still none of them was like the hammer. Perhaps it was because he associated it particularly with his survival in the first days. And yet he did not believe what the children seemed to believe about the hammer.

He walked away from the house, not caring in what direction he wandered, so long as he could be by himself. The hammer dangling from one hand was a nuisance. He began to feel an irritation against it. Was it really coming to be a superstition in his mind too, as it was in the minds of the children?

Well, why did he not simply lay the hammer down, and pick it up on his way home? Or pick it up tomorrow? Yet, he did not lay it down.

He realized that not merely the temporary inconvenience of the hammer was irritating him against it, but rather his feeling that it was coming to be a fixation with him. He made a sudden resolve to be done with it. He would not let his mind be imposed upon. As he had once before imagined himself doing, he would walk down to the Bay, and out on the old wharf, then he would throw the hammer violently, far out into the waves. It would sink through them deep into the soft mud beneath, and that would be the end. He walked on. Then the memory of Joey flooded over him again, and as he walked, he thought no more of the hammer.

After a while he came out of his sorrow, and realized that he was actually walking and carrying the hammer. Then he knew that he was not heading toward the Bay, in spite of his decision. He was walking south, not west.

“It would be a long walk to the Bay, and I am still not strong,” he said to himself. “There is no use walking so far just to get rid of this old hammer. I can throw it into any gully among the bushes, and I shall soon forget where I threw it.”

Then he knew again that his mind was trying to deceive him and that even if he threw the hammer into a gully he would not forget where he had thrown it and would not lose it in that way. He quit his pretense, for he knew that he did not want to be separated from the hammer and that it had come to mean a great deal to him in some strange way. At the same time he realized why he was walking south and where subconsciously his mind was already directing his feet.

He was following the broad street which led toward the University campus. He had not been there for a long time. As he walked, his sorrow was still with him, but in some way now it had ceased to be so overwhelming, as if his decision about the hammer had made some change.

Now, as so often before, he looked around him, and the mere pageant of the years seized his interest, and took his mind away from his grief. This particular section had suffered badly in the earthquake. There was a gully all the way across the old concrete pavement; some crack of the earthquake had made the break; rain and running water had widened and deepened it, and now trees and bushes were standing up from the line of the gully all the way across the wide street. Swinging the hammer to give him momentum, he jumped the four-foot gap from one edge of the pavement to the other, and was pleased that his legs, in spite of his illness, were not too weak.

As he walked along, he saw the houses on both sides of the street, fallen into ruin now, what with the earthquake and the mere passage of time. Vines climbed high upon them. Encroaching trees had thrown porches out of line.

Everywhere he observed the struggle between the native plants which were moving back into the gardens, and the exotics which once had been planted there and carefully tended.

He looked closely at these overgrown gardens, thus to take his mind off worse things. He tried to discover what plants were no longer in existence. He saw no wisteria or camellia or coprosma though they had once been common. But the tall climbing rose-vines were still vigorous. A large and handsome evergreen tree he recognized as a deodar, native to the Himalayas. It was still growing vigorously, but looking beneath it, he found no seedlings. Apparently it could live there, but would not reproduce. On the other hand beneath a eucalyptus tree, a species native to Australia, he found seedlings which had sprouted up through the litter of leaves in which nothing else would grow.

Coming to the campus, he passed first through a grove of Italian stone-pines. Here, everything looked less confused than it had in the gardens along the street, because the pines had spread and formed a canopy beneath which little grass grew. The effect was still park-like.

Near one of the trees he saw a large rattlesnake lying in the sunshine. It seemed torpid, not yet quite revived from the chill of the night. He could easily kill it. He hesitated a moment, but went on.

No—he had once been bitten and still remembered something of that horror. But he held no enmity to the whole tribe of rattlesnakes. In fact, that bite had possibly saved his life. Perhaps, rather than being hostile, he should be grateful, and form a rattlesnake clan around that totem. No, not that either. He would be neutral.

Then he realized that this attitude of his applied to more than just rattlesnakes. He had noticed it in the younger people also. In the times of civilization men had really felt themselves as the masters of creation. Everything had been good or bad in relation to man. So you killed rattlesnakes. But now nature had become so overwhelming that any attempt at its control was merely outside anyone’s circle of thought. You lived as part of it, not as its dominating power. To bother with killing one rattlesnake was foolish, because you had no chance of exterritinating them or even of appreciably changing their number. If one of them came near the houses, you killed it of course, to protect the children. But you did not go crusading against rattlesnakes, any more than you did against mountain-lions.

He passed on, went down an almost overgrown stone stairway, and crossed a wooden bridge. He felt it shaky with rot beneath his feet. It had been an old bridge, he remembered, even when he was a boy. Along the stream the thicket was dense, and he had to push his way through, although underfoot he felt that he was still on an asphalt walk.

He heard a rustle somewhere in the thicket, and for a moment was nervous to be without a weapon. It might be a mountain lion. Wolves or wild dogs also were likely to haunt these thickety stream-courses.

But as he burst through into the open again, he saw only some deer loping off through the trees.

High on his left, now, rose up one of the University buildings. He could not remember what department had been housed there. The shrubbery, which once had been kept neatly trimmed, had now grown up high and shaggy, masking the lower windows.

He went on toward his goal. It was only a little way ahead, now. He burst through another thicket, and saw the great Library building.

He looked. This building also was half masked by the shrubbery. One window was broken, apparently because the branch of a pine tree had grown out across it, and then slapped back and forth in some high wind. That accident had happened since he had last been here, several years back. He kept the University Library as a reserve for the future. He had even taught the children to respect it. Yes, he had even, he was afraid, put a kind of taboo upon it. In fact, not only here but everywhere, he had always tried to impress the children with an almost mystical value of books. Still he kept the symbol of the burning of the books as one of the worst things that men could do.

He circled the Library, here and there having difficulty in breaking his way through bushes. Once he had to crawl over the fallen trunk of a pine tree. The building, as far as he could see, was still in sound condition. He came at last to the window which he had broken many years before, and then boarded up. With the hammer he began to knock off a board. He was careful not to break the board, so that he could replace it. After all, he realized with pleasure, there had been a rational background for his bringing the hammer along with him.

Having knocked off the board, he was able to climb through into the building. Now he recalled the first time that he had gained entrance through the window. He had come when Em had told him she was going to have a baby, and he had been hunting for books on obstetrics. All that had seemed a tremendous problem at the time, and yet it had solved itself without difficulty. Why could he never learn to worry less about problems? Problems not infrequently solved themselves.

He went on through the hall, and found the old door into the stacks. Things were not as clean as they might be. In spite of his precautions, bats had apparently found their way into the building, perhaps through the recently broken window. There was also the litter of some kind of rodent. But the droppings had done no damage to the books. He put out a finger, rubbed the tops of some books, and brought it away dusty. That was natural, and there was not even a very surprising amount of dust.

Yes, they were all still there—well over a million volumes, almost all the accumulated learning of the world still safe within these four wals. He felt a sudden sense of security and safety and hope. He gloated, like a miser.

He went down one flight of the little circular stairway, and headed toward the part of the library, the geography section, which as a graduate student he had known best. He came to the familiar alcoves, and in spite of all the years he felt a sense of having come home. Looking at the shelves, he began to spot books which he had read and studied.

One, in particular, caught his attention, a well-worn volume, rebound in red buckram. He stretched out a hand, took it from the shelf, and blew the dust from its top. Looking at his find, he saw the name Brooks and the title: Climate through the Ages. He remembered the book. Opening it, he saw the card, and noticed that the last borrower of the book—the date only a month before the Great Disaster—had been someone named with the unusual name of Isherwood Williams. Only after a few seconds did he realize that he himself was Isherwood Williams. Nobody had called him by his full name for many years. Now he could actually remember that he had been reading this book during his last semester. It was a good book and interesting, although largely superseded, he curiously found himself remembering, by the later studies of—well, someone with a German name—Zeimer, perhaps.

He laid the hammer down, so as to have both hands for the book. Then he went to where light shone in through a dusty window, and looked curiously through the pages. Actually, this book was not of the slightest value to human progress. Climatic change was not a practical problem. In any case, this book had been superseded. He could just as well throw it away or tear it to pieces, but he did not. He went back, and put it almost reverently into its place.

He walked away, and then suddenly everything was dust and ashes in his mind again. What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about all the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood-pulp and lamp-black, were nothing—without a mind to use them.

Sorrowfully he went away, and he was just starting to climb the circular stairway when he realized that something was missing. He no longer had the hammer. He was suddenly frightened, and returned rapidly to the alcove from which he had taken the book. He had a great feeling of relief when he saw the hammer still resting where he had laid it on the floor when he wanted both hands for the book. He took it up and retraced his steps.

He climbed out through the broken window, and automatically started to replace the board. Then, he stopped. The great feeling of desolation came over him again. Why replace the board? It would make no difference. No one was left who would come here, in the future, to read. He paused, swinging the hammer idly.

At last, slowly, without enthusiasm, he picked up the board, and with the hammer pounded the nails in again. There was no enthusiasm. There was no hope. Yet this was merely part of his life. Just as George would always work at his carpentry, just as Ezra would always be good with people, so he, Ish, would keep some illusion of books, and the future.

After that he went around and sat down to rest on the granite steps at the front of the Library. Everything was overgrown and half ruinous. He thought of an old picture which he remembered. Who was it—Caesar? Hannibal?—someone, sitting in the ruins of Carthage? He pounded idly with his hammer at the edge of one of the granite steps. It was sheer vandalism. He did not ordinarily do such a thing. The edge of the step chipped off. Still, wantonly, he pounded harder. A three-inch flake loosened and fell. The fresh edge of the broken granite looked out roughly at him.

As he sat there still pounding gently with the hammer, he felt himself for the first time remember Joey without merely dissolving into sorrow. How would it have been anyway? Joey might not have been able to do anything. He was only a bright little boy. He could not have changed things. He could not have stood against all the pressing current of this altered world. He would only have struggled and struggled, and in the end he would not have succeeded. He would have been unhappy.

“Joey,” he thought, and he put the thoughts into words. “Joey was too much like me. I always struggle. I can never merely be happy.”

He concentrated on a small chip of granite, and vindictively pounded it into bits.

“Relax, relax!” he again thought in words. “It’s time to relax.”

Thoreau and Gauguin—we remember them. But should we forget the tens of thousands of others? They neither wrote books nor painted pictures, but equally they renounced. And what of those others, the millions who turned their backs on imagination?

You have heard them speak, and seen their eyes… “It was fine there, where we camped on our fishing-trip—sometimes I wished—of course I had to get back for the sales-conference.” … “Do you ever think, George, of a desert island?” … “Just a cabin, in the woods, no telephone.” … “The sand-spit by the lagoon, I like to fancy—but, you know, there’s Maud, and the children.”

What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!

The Chaldeans told that Oannes the fish-god came up from the sea and taught men these new ways. But was he god or demon?

Why do the legends look back toward some golden day of simplicity?

Must we not think then that this great civilization grew up, not by men’s desires, but rather by Forces and Pressures. Step by step, as villages grew larger, men must give up the free wandering life of berry-picking and seed-gathering and tie themselves to the security (and drudgery) of agriculture. Step by step, as villages grew more numerous, men must renounce the excitement of the hunt for the security (and drudgery) of cattle-keeping.

Then at last it was like Frankenstein’s vast monster. They had not willed it, but it ruled them all. And so by a thousand little surreptitious paths they tried to escape.

How then, once overthrown, shall this great civilization, except by renewed Forces and Pressures, ever come again?

And then suddenly he knew that he was old. In years he was only in his forties, but he was the youngest of the older group, and beneath him a long gap opened before you came to the oldest of the younger ones. It was a long gap in Years, and an immensely longer gap in culture and tradition. Never had there been—never could there possibly have been—such another gap between the older and the younger generations.

Sitting there, on the Library steps, pounding the chip of granite into smaller and smaller grains, he began now to have what seemed a little clearer vision of the future. It was all tied up in that same old question. How much did man strike outward to affect all his surroundings and how much did the surroundings press in upon him? Did the Napoleonic age produce Napoleon or did he produce it? So, even if Joey had lived, the welter of circumstances, the circumstances that made Jack and Roger and Ralph, would probably have affected Joey too, and one small boy was not much to set up against all of that. Yes, even if Joey had lived, things would probably have continued to move in the way they already seemed to be moving. Now that Joey was dead, it was certain—certain, that is, as far as anyone could reasonably expect, granting always some unforeseeable accident.

The stars in their courses! (The chip of granite was nothing but powder under the blows of the hammer.) The stars in their courses! No, he did not believe in astrology, and yet the shifting of the stars showed that the solar system too was changing, and that the earth itself was becoming a more or a less habitable place for man. Thus, at some profounder depth of reality, astrology might be right, and the changes in the sky could be taken as symbol of all the grinding wheels of circumstance. The stars in their courses! What was man, little man, to withstand them?

Yes, the future was certain. The Tribe was not going to restore civilization. It did not want civilization. For a while the scavenging would go on—this opening of cans, this expending of cartridges and matches stored up from the past, all this uncreative but happy manner of life. Then at last, sooner or later, there would be more and more people, and the supplies would fail. There would perhaps be no quick catastrophe because many cattle could be had for the taking, and life would go on. So, he thought, and then a new idea came to him with a sudden impact. Even though cattle were left, though there was much food, what would happen when the ammunition for the rifles was exhasted? When the matches were gone? In fact, one might not even have to wait until the ammunition was exhausted. Powder deteriorated with time. Three or four generations, and all who were left might be merely some groveling primitives who had lost civilization and yet, on the other hand, had not learned all those thousand basic skills which enabled savages to live with some degree of stability and comfort! Possibly, indeed—and perhaps this would best—in three or four generations the race would not be able to survive at all, would not be able to make the transition between the scavenging, uncreative life, and some new level of life at which they could remain permanently, or from which they could once more begin a slow advance.

Again he pounded heavily on the edge of the step. Another chunk of the granite fell off. He looked at it gloomily. He had just decided not to worry, and here he was, hard at it again. What could he know about what would be happening three or four generations from now? He got up and started to walk home. He was quieter now.

“Yes,” he thought, again shaping words, “a leopard can’t change its spots, and I’ll always be a worrier, even though I’ve lived with Em for twenty-two years. I look before and after. Relax! Yes, I should relax a little. What I have been trying to do—that has failed. I’ll admit it. Just the same, I’m certain I’ll never stop trying a little. Now, perhaps, if I try for something less, I may in the end attain something more.”

Chapter 10

By the time he had finished the long walk up the hill to the houses, his vague plans had shaped themselves, but he would have to wait until morning to begin.

That night, however, an autumn storm began, and he awoke in the morning to a world of low-lying cloud and steady dropping. He felt surprise, for with all the recent troubles he had failed to realize that time was slipping away. Now, however, when he thought of the matter, he remembered that the sun had been setting well toward the south and that the month, if one could still think in such terms, would be November. The rain interfered with the immediate fulfillment of his plans, but there was plenty of time, and he could mature his ideas with thought.

So completely had his attitudes changed within the last day that the sounds of the assembling children, that morning, came to him as a shock. “Of course!” he thought. “They are expecting to have school again.”

He went downstairs to meet with them. They were all there—all except Joey, and two younger ones. He looked into their faces, as they sat on chairs wriggling, or squatted more comfortably on the floor. They were looking back at him, he imagined, with more alertness than usual. Joey was gone, and they must be wondering how this would affect school. Yet the change, he knew, must be only temporary, and behind this alertness must lurk still that basic lack of interest against which he had already struggled.

He let his glance run over the little group, pausing individually upon each face. They were fine children, not really stupid, but they lacked the flair. No, there was not one! He made his decision, and he felt no pain in it.

“School is dismissed,” he said.

There was a momentary look almost as of consternation in all the faces, and then he saw that they were suddenly pleased, although they were making some effort not to show their pleasure.

“School is dismissed!” he repeated, feeling that he was being dramatic about it in spite of himself. “There will be no more school—ever!”

Again he saw a look of consternation come into the faces, and this time no pleasure showed afterwards. They stirred uneasily in their seats. Some of them got up to go. But they knew that something had happened, something deeper than their minds could grasp.

They went out slowly and quietly. During as much as a minute after they had gone out into the dripping of the rain, there was silence. Then he heard them suddenly shout, and they were children again. School had been a passing incident. Probably they would never think of it again; certainly they would never regret it. For a moment Ish felt a heaviness within him. “Joey, Joey!” he thought. But he had no regret for what he had just done, and he knew that he had made the right decision. “School is dismissed!” he thought. “School dismissed!” And he remembered suddenly that he had sat in this same room many years before, and watched the electric lights fade out.

Three days of rain gave him plenty of time to think things over and mature all his plans. At last a morning dawned with blue sky and a chilly wind from the north. The sun came out, the vegetation dried. Now was the time.

He hunted through the deserted and overgrown gardens. This had never been an area where citrus fruits were grown commercially, but lemons had produced well enough, and here and there someone had nursed a lemon tree in his garden. That wood, he remembered, was suitable. Of course he could have read any number of books, but his approach had changed. He would read no books on this matter. He could do well enough by himself.

Two blocks up the street there had once been a large and showy garden. There he found a lemon tree. It was still living, although nearly crowded out by the growth of two pines. Moreover, it had suffered badly in a frost of some years previous. Never having been pruned after the frost, the tree was only a wreck of itself. Long suckers had shot up from its base after the frost, and some of these again had died.

Avoiding the long thorns, Ish pressed his way into the tangle, found a suitable shoot, and took out his pocket-knife. The shoot at its base was nearly as big as his thumb. The dead lemon wood was almost as hard as bone, but after a while he whittled it through with his knife and pulled it out from the tangle. The shoot was seven feet long, straight for four feet before other branches had begun to interfere and it had grown crooked. At his shaking, it was stiff, but when he leaned against it, it bent and straightened sharply as he released the pressure. It would suffice.

“Yes,” he thought a little bitterly, “it will be good enough for all my needs.”

He carried the lemon-shoot back to the house, and sat on the porch, in the sun, whittling. First he cut off the crooked end of the shoot so that he had four feet of straight wood remaining.

Then he stripped off the dead bark, and began to taper the shoot at both ends. The work was very slow, and he paused frequently to sharpen the knife on a whetstone. The white tough-grained wood seemed to turn the edge after ouly a few strokes.

Walt and Josey had been off playing with the other children, but at lunch-time they came back. “What are you doing?” Josey asked him.

“I’m getting ready to play a game,” Ish answered her. He would not make the mistake, he had decided, of trying to tie this up with anything practical, as he had with the school. Here he would try to harness that love of play which seemed so deep-seated in the human race.

After lunch the children must have carried the word around. In the afternoon George came over.

“Why don’t you come to my place.” George said, “and use a vise and my spoke-shave? You could work a lot faster.”

Ish thanked him, but continued to work with the knife, even though his hand was getting sore. Nevertheless he thought that he would do all this work with the simplest implements.

By the end of the afternoon his hand was beginning to blister where he held the knife, but he judged that the work was done. A four-foot length of the lemon-shoot was now symmetrically tapered toward both ends. He set one end of it against the ground, pressed it to a half circle, and felt it spring back sharply into straightness. Satisfied, he cut notches close to each end, and gladly put the knife away.

The next morning he continued the work. There was plenty of stout string available, and he considered taking some nylon fish line and braiding it into the proper size.

“No,” he thought, “I’ll work from things they can always get for themselves.”

He found the skin of a recently killed calf. From it he cut a long thong of rawhide. The work went slowly, but he had plenty of time. He shaved the hair from the strip, and shaved the strip itself until it was no larger than a small cord. Then he braided three strips together to make a heavy cord, and estimating the proper length, he tied each end into a little loop.

He held the lemon-shoot in one hand and the braided thong in the other, and looked at them. Either by itself amounted to little. Then, bending the shoot, he hooked the loops of the thong into the notches at the ends of the shoot, and the two became one. Since the thong was shorter, the tapered shoot now bent in a clean symmetrical arc. The thong itself cut strait across between the points of the arc. Stick and cord, joined, had suddenly become something new.

He looked at the bow, and knew that creative force had again returned to the world. He could have gone to any sporting-goods store, and picked out a much better bow—a sixfoot toy for archery. But he had not done so. He had made himself a bow from the wood itself carved with the simplest of implements, and a string from the hide of a new-killed calf.

He plucked at the thong. It scarcely twanged, but it gave forth a satisfactory dull throbbing vibration. He considered that his work for the day was finished. He unstrung the bow.

The next day, for an arrow, he cut himself a straight branch of a pine tree. The soft green wood cut easily, and he had shaped the arrow and notched it in half an hour. When he had finished it, he called for the children. Walt and Josey came, and Weston with them. “Let’s see how she works,” Ish said.

He drew the arrow back, and loosed it. Unfeathered, it flew with a wobbly flight, but he had pointed it at a high angle, and it covered fifty feet before it struck, by chance, pointing upward from the ground.

Instantly he knew that he had won success. The three children had never seen anything like this before, and they stood wide-eyed for a moment, then with shouts they broke into a run, and went to retrieve the arrow. Ish shot it for them, again and again.

At last came the inevitable request for which Ish had been waiting.

“Let me try it, Daddy,” said Walt.

Walt’s first shot wobbled a bare twenty feet, but he was pleased. Then Josey tried it, and then Weston.

Before dinner-time, every child in The Tribe was busy at work whittling on a bow of his own.

Everything worked even better than Ish had dared to hope. Within a week the air around the houses seemed to be full of badly shot arrows. Mothers began to worry about lost eyesight, and two children came in crying after having received arrows in various parts of their anatomies. But since the arrows were headless and shot from weak bows, no real harm resulted.

Rules had to be established. “You mustn’t shoot in the direction of anyone. You mustn’t shoot close to the houses.”

Competition developed. Having learned the trick from the older boys who shot from rifles, children began to hold contests against a mark. They experimented with different lengths and types of bows. When Josey complained that Walt always beat her at shooting, Ish subtly made the suggestion that she might try fixing some quail pinions to the butt-end of her arrow. She did so, and beat Walt, and then suddenly all the arrows had quail pinions at one end, and they were flying farther and truer. Even the older boys became interested, and some of them made bows although they were allowed to use rifles. But archery still continued to flourish chiefly among the ones who were too young for rifles.

Ish bided his time. The early rains had sprouted the grass seed, and now the land was green. At evening the sun set behind the hills to the south of the Golden Gate.

Walt and Weston, the twelve-year-olds, were now deep in some kind of boyish plot. They worked hard with bows and arrows, shaping and perfecting them. They were gone long hours during the day.

Then one day toward evening Ish heard the sound of excited boys’ feet running up the steps outside. Walt and Weston burst into the room.

“Look Daddy,” Walt cried, and he held up for Ish the pathetic-looking body of a big rabbit pierced through the side with a headless wooden arrow.

“Look!” Walt cried again. “I hid behind a bush, and waited till he hopped up close to me, and then I shot him right through.”

Ish, as he looked, felt a sympathy and pity for the poor dangling body, even though he knew that it was a symbol of his triumph. Too bad, he thought, that even creation must make use of death also.

“That’s fine!” he said. “That’s fine, Walt! That was a good shot!”

Chapter 11

Day after day still, the sun set in the cloudless sky farther to the south. Now it was very close to its turning. The clear weather still held.

One day, so suddenly that you might almost say just at that particular moment it happened, the children became tired of playing with bows and arrows, and went off on some new enthusiasm. Ish did not worry. He knew that after the ways of children they would come back again, perhaps at the same time of year. The making of bows and the shooting of arrows would not be forgotten. During twenty years, during one hundred years if need were, the bow might remain a children’s plaything. In the end, after the ammunition had failed, it would still be there. It was the greatest weapon that primitive man had ever known and the most difficult to invent. If he had saved that for the future, he had saved much. After the rifles were useless, his great-grandchildren would not have to meet the bear’s rush empty-handed or starve in the midst of the cattle herds. His great-grandchildren would never know civilization, but at least they would not be groveling half-apes, but would walk erect as freemen, bow in hand. Even if they should no longer have metal knives, they could still scrape out bows with sharp stones.

He planned one more experiment, but he was in no hurry. Now that they had bows he could make a bow-drill and teach the children its use. Then after the matches were exhausted, The Tribe would still know how to kindle fire.

Yet, as with the children, his own enthusiasm too grew cool through the passing of the weeks. He thought less upon his own triumph in inventing the bow and tricking the children into enjoying it. He thought rather upon all the disasters of the year. Joey was gone, and that loss could never be redeemed.

Also a kind of fresh innocence had faded from the world when the four of them had written that word upon their ballots. And also a great confidence and trust had gone from himself when he had realized at last that he must give up his dream of re-establishing the ways of civilization.

Now the sun was so near the limit of its southern course that a day or two would bring its turning. Everyone was making ready for the holiday, and the carving of the number in the rock and the naming of the year. This was their great holiday of all, combining as it did, both Christmas and New Years of the Old Times, and yet including along with those two something of their individual own. Like so much else the holidays had suffered strange transitions in the passage of one world to the other. They still observed Thanksgiving Day with a big dinner, but the Fourth of July and all the other patriotic holidays had lapsed. George, who was a traditionalist and had been a good union man, always knocked off whatever he was doing and wore his best clothes when he judged it should be Labor Day. But no one else celebrated it with him. Curiously, or perhaps rather it was natural enough, the old folk-holidays survived better than those established by law. The children still celebrated April Fool’s Day and Halloween with great enthusiasm and with much of the traditional ceremony, although they had to learn such things from their fathers and mothers. Also six weeks after the winter solstice, they talked about Ground-squirrel Day and whether the squirrel could see his shadow, for there were no ground-hogs in this area and they had substituted the ground-squirrel instead. Yet all these were nothing, compared with their own great festival when they cut the number in the rock and named the year.

Now Ish began to hear the children discussing the matter and speculating upon what the name would be. The younger ones were saying that it should be called the Year of the Bow and Arrow. But the slightly older ones, who could remember more vividly the whole year, said that rather it should be called the Year of the Journey. But those who were still older thought of other things also, and often they grew quiet and seemed embarrassed, and Ish knew that they were thinking of Charlie and of all the other deaths. Ish himself thought first of all about Joey, and then of all the changes of attitude which he himself had to make during the year.

Then finally, as they looked out one evening, they saw that the sun set in the same place or perhaps a little to the north from where it had set the night before, and the older ones said, to the great excitement of the children, that tomorrow would be the day.

So again, at the end of the twenty-second year, they gathered at the rock, and Ish with his harnmer and cold-chisel cut 22 into the surface of the rock just below 21. They were all there at the rock, because the day was fair, and warm for winter, and the mothers had brought even the youngest babies. Then after the numeral had been cut, all those who were old enough to talk called out Happy New Year as it had been in the Old Times, and as it was still at this time.

But when Ish asked, following the ritual set in the last years, what should be the name of the year, there came only sudden silence.

At last the one to speak was Ezra, the good helper, who knew the ways of men:

“Too much has happened this year, and whatever name we give the year will have a bad sound to us. People find comfort in numbers, and no bad thoughts. Let us give this year no name, but remember it only as the Year 22.”

Here ends Part II. The second inter-chapter called Quick Years follows, without time-interval.