The lady of that bouse hadn’t yet come home.
He found several candles on the workbench and slipped a couple into his pocket, then looked about for matches. There were none. There was also a refreshing lack of masculine clothing, shoes, manuals, and coffins in the shop. Owen peered into the bedroom, the shower, the kitchen, and into the stiff room at the rear, but all were untenanted. He unlocked the escape route door and ran back to the front. The road was still free of wardens, and he wondered if the two women had run off to get a posse or merely hold a conference at City Hall.
Paoli’s door was still shut.
Owen lifted the latch without a betraying sound. The door was slowly inched open. He waited a spell, listened carefully, and then put his head around the door’s edge. There were no lights in the love nest, but there was a very pronounced and familiar sound from the vicinity of the bedroom. There was no need to remove his shoes’ for stealth. Owen went in quietly and stood at the corner of the room divider, marveling at the sight. The blonde was sprawled on the bed as naked as he had left her, making night music. Her lusty snoring would have drowned out any noises he made coming in—it was a healthy, ripsawing after-the-binge snoring. She would thank him in the morning.
“Baby doll, you could audition for Alexander’s ragtime band and win. Don Ameche would love you!”
Owen went to the bench to retrieve his matches and cigars, then left the house as quietly as he had entered. The night music went on without stop.
Owen stopped on the walk to scan the road and the distances. It appeared that the whole town went to bed at sundown.
“I would make a hell of a good cat burglar—the town is mine for the taking.”
The house next to Paoli’s had no occupant. It did have the usual think-and-do machine, the usual workbench, and all the common furniture now covered with thick dust,, but the total absence of shoes and clothing and tools and candles said*that it was empty of living woman and cadaverous workman alike. Owen thought the place would be an excellent base of operations; it offered not only a place to spend the night, but a place of refuge as well. He need only replace the door to give him privacy and fend off the snooping wardens.
He unlocked the rear door and then went out front to scout for a likely replacement.
And ran headlong into the same frustration as before. Doors failed to match frames, being either a quarter-or a half-inch too wide or too narrow to fit.
Owen Hall expressed his opinion of the carpenters who’d done the work, using choice words and phrases known to good old Indiana boys who were extremely vexed. When taxed, Owen could swear like a trooper, and he liked to think that he knew more slang whang than any other man his age. He’d give a pretty penny to know who was responsible for this mess, whether it be workman or woman, and then he’d be willing to give another penny for the opportunity to criticize that culprit to his or her face.
Six useless, shoddy doors were piled on the lawn before the vacant house he’d chosen as a place of refuge; six nearby dwellings hung open to the world. There were no zombies about to tote the damned things home for him, so Owen simply piled the doors onto the roadway and let that marvelous invention carry them away. Perhaps they’d ride round and round the town all night long to surprise the early risers in the morning.
And now there were ten doorless dwellings to confuse the ladies when they returned. That ought to shake up the posse and give them food for thought.
Owen felt so frustrated, so angry that he had a long stiff drink. And then another.
The bottle’s contents were running perilously low and he’d have to do something about that when he moved into the empty snuggery. Real soon now. Paoli had said that the power was always on so the think-and-do machine should serve his bidding. It had damned well better.
He shook a screwdriver at the row houses. “One more time! One more cotton-picking door, and if it doesn’t fit, to hell and blazes with it. I’ll give the town back to the Indians—they’re entitled.” He’d sleep in the empty lodgings without the luxury of a door if it came to that, and be damned to the nosy woman who dared peek inside.
Summer darkness was overtaking him. The screws in the hinge holes were difficult to see and he had to feel for the slots with his fingers before inserting the screwdriver. It was tedious work. The door came slowly. It was now too dark to see the color of the thing, but he didn’t really care—all he wanted was a decent door to give him privacy for the night.
The last screw came free and he lifted the panel out of the frame.
“Hey—dummy!”
Owen said, “Oh, God ”
“What are you doing with my door?”
Owen cried, “Firewood,” and broke into a run.
The aroused resident thundered after him.
He ran away from the woman, away from the same huge and drunken harridan who had so meanly launched him into the strange new world at sunrise. The behemoth with the sour mash tonsils. The road was rolling in the wrong direction but he wasn’t going that way anyhow. Owen raced off in the opposite direction, toward the southwest and Paoli, toward all the empty doorways and all the escape hatches he had arranged.
“Stop, runt. Drop that door!”
Owen ran the harder with the door tucked under his arm. The ogre lumbered after him in full bellow.
“Stop the dummy! Somebody stop him. Thief!”
There was a sudden answering cry in the distant darkness ahead and Owen thought that the posse had returned; even now there might be a mob galloping up the road at top lung, intent on his capture. They might even string him up if door thievery was as serious a crime as horse theft.
The behemoth cried, “Come here, dummy! Stop!”
A voice in the darkness ahead answered, “Ho! What is the trouble?”
“The dam has broke,” Owen yelled out. “Take to the hills!”
He swerved and darted into the nearest open doorway. The stolen door was set on edge crossways in the opening, a temporary barrier intended to gain him time.
Owen sped to his escape hatch at the rear and leaped through it into the concealing jungle. He was just closing that hatch when the pursuing woman crashed through his frail barrier at the front and sent up an outraged howl. The barrier, at knee level, tripped her. Door and dinosaur fell together in a jumble of thrashing arms and legs, angry bellows, demolished hinges, and shattered wood. The floor shook. It sounded like a rehearsal for doomsday. The furious woman seized the poor remains of her door and wrestled with it, only belatedly realizing that the pulp in her hands was not the wanted man. She hurled the debris aside and climbed to her feet.
“I have the runt now!”
Owen sidled away from the exit, feeling along the ground for the sets of pipes to guide him. He eased along the wall to the next unlocked door and slipped it open.
A candle was being lit in the kitchen. Bellowings of rage were easily heard in the kitchen through the thin separating walls of adjoining apartments.
Owen hastily backed out.
His slow progress along the rear wall continued as another set of pipes signaled yet another dwelling. There was no moon to aid him and he was quickly thankful that the citizens of the town had indoor plumbing rather than backyard privies. This was a poor time to stumble onto a privy in the dark or to fall into the hole where an outhouse had once stood in odorous glory.
Another door opened beneath his fingers.
The house was unlit and lacked the smells and sounds of a tenant. He moved silently through the musty rooms. The cot at the rear was empty of man and the kitchen table was bare of all but dust; the larger bed was uninhabited and the workbench had been swept clean of tools, clothing, and manuals. He was in the vacant house next to Paoli, but now he had no door to hang for his own privacy. It had been a mistake to remove this one, but, what the hell, there was no point in crying over spilled milk and splintered doors. The thing would make firewood for somebody.
Owen stared around the interior, seeing dim and nearly formle
ss shapes in the darkness. The opaque room divider before the bed would serve nicely. He hauled the divider to the front of the house, stood it on end and fitted it over the doorframe. It made a splendid barrier. The divider was larger in all dimensions than the missing door and covered the opening with several inches to spare. If he had hammer and nails he could have nailed the barricade in place—there was so much commotion just up the street that the noise of his hammering wouldn’t be heard. He pulled two straight chairs and propped them against the barricade to keep it tightly sealed.
A solitary candle burned on his workbench.
Owen Hall very carefully visualized the packsack he’d worn on his weekend fishing trips back there in Indiana. He had supposed that the pack was as familiar as the back of his hand, but now he discovered that he’d taken it for granted. A high order of concentration was called for. The pack had been fashioned of canvas, with padded canvas shoulder straps, a single chest strap, and heavy duty stitching all around. The stitching was important—it wouldn’t do for the victuals to fall out the first time he gave rough treatment. There had been two voluminous pockets in the pack, with each held closed by a tie-down. Now, then—had there been any hardware on the packsack? Owen zeroed in on the mental picture. Yes, there was hardware: two small brass buckles for fastening the straps after they were adjusted for length. It was funny how he’d used the packsack all those years but had to stop and think of the details now.
He activated the machine and pressed his forehead to the bar. The operating theater lit and delivered.
The pack was identical to the one he’d owned back yonder, even to the stains it had accumulated during long use. Owen examined the stitching carefully and exulted. What fine workmanship! What artistic expression! Why, if he had one of these machines at home he could go into production for all the sports in Indiana, he could sign a supply contract with Sears Roebuck. (But he’d have to remember to omit the stains, of course. The proud new owners of his packs would want to add their own coffee spills and bacon drippings.) Owen was so pleased that he returned to the machine and made a duplicate.
His subconscious reproduced the identical stains.
The matter of supplies was cause for some thought. A traveler could be out on the prairie for a week or more before chancing across a friendly town, but it there were no cattle or buffalo available, a traveler could get hungry. In Hartford City, Juanita’s Grocery had provided most of the items he’d taken along on fishing trips, but that small store didn’t stock everything necessary for survival, and an occasional trip into Indianapolis was called for. Food for survival. Fishermen and cowboys ate lots of beans and peaches and cornpone, of course, but Owen wanted more than that sparse diet. Cheese, soup, dried fruit, dried peas—maybe even some green beans. He thought he should stock up on pemmican, hard tack, and bullybeef, as well as staples like coffee, salt, and maybe a pinch of sugar. Yes, and butter if he could possibly manage, it. With practice he might be able to produce a better spread than the sick axle grease another man had manufactured that morning.
No spinach. Definitely no spinach.
He mustn’t forget the essentials like a coffeepot, frying pan, and a couple of can openers. Making quality food neatly tucked away inside cans and jars would be a mite tricky, but he had clear memories of the goods filling the shelves of Juanita’s Grocery and that was a definite advantage—that and the skill he’d exhibited earlier in making fine bourbon from memory. He was an artisan.
Owen bellied up to the machine and started work.
He had thought at first that two rucksacks were one too many for his needs, but now he was surprised at how quickly one was filled, and he still hadn’t worked his way through his shopping list. The work continued. When an item of food appeared that seemed faulty, Owen subjected it to a taste test. If it was decent after all, he ate it and manufactured another, but if the taste was as poor as the appearance, he cast it aside and tried to improve the item with better visualization. The discovery was made that many foodstuffs of a truly superior quality came out of the operating theater when his taste buds and saliva flow cooperated with his imagination. The second rucksack was filled and Owen called it a night, after remembering to whip up another supply of cigars and a fifth of bourbon. There was always the possibility of snakebite out there on the prairie.
He wondered if he’d forgotten anything.
Yes—by jingo!—he had. He lacked a sturdy hand ax and a good skinning knife. A frontiersman wasn’t worthy of the name if he didn’t carry an ax and a knife for his survival. Owen made the ax first and pronounced it good after a minute inspection; the ax was as well made and as professionally fashioned as the carpenter’s tools he’d turned out that morning. Owen modestly admitted that he was a master craftsman. The knife came next, but the first sample was a sorry one. Owen paused, carefully visualized a rack of knives seen in a sporting goods store, selected one that he fancied, and put his head to work. The machine delivered a highly satisfactory instrument.
He tucked both knives, the ax, and the bottle of whiskey into the rucksacks, tied everything down, and set the gear at the foot of the bed for the morning. It would be wise to get a few hours* sleep while the posse scoured the town, and then slip away to the woods before daylight. The candle was pinched out.
Owen padded to the front door to reconnoiter.
He pried open a finger-sized slit at one side of the divider and peered out. *
It was an astounding scene.
The posse was there—eight or ten tall women zooming up and down before all the doorless houses like a swarm of bees without a leader. They ran about, gesturing and yelping. The ham-handed harridan was there— the woman who had first made him and then turned against him; she stood on the walk waving her large arms and crying for the blood of the dummy. And some of the missing doors had come home to roost—“some of the doors had ridden all the way around the city and now here they were again, being taken off the road and stacked on a lawn. A warden stood over them with screwdriver in hand.
Owen wished her luck.
He searched for the source of the illumination.
The women weren’t behaving like bees, they were more like flitting fireflies. Owen stared at their torches and fell back in new astonishment. Torches! He hastily closed the makeshift door. The wardens carried hand-held torches just like those people in old movies—the frenzied villagers who had assaulted Frankenstein’s castle. That was the source of the light outside.
He shook his head in dismay. There wasn’t a genius in the town who had the wit to invent electricity (putting himself aside, of course). They had futuristic machines that could reproduce anything a man or woman dreamed of, they had a mechanical road right out of the science-wonder magazines, and somewhere in the town they must have a giant rubber-band factory to power that road, but they lacked the wit to invent flashlights, wires, and light bulbs.
“It’s a rum place,” he said again. “The Indians wouldn’t take it back unless you bribed ’em with scalps.”
There was an authoritative knock at the door.
Owen knew it was time to skedaddle—his sleep and his snuggery were lost. He grabbed up the two rucksacks and headed for the escape hatch. The knock came again, this time more demanding. Owen was through the rear portal and out into the weeds before the divider was pushed aside.
Where was a refuge?
The doll’s house was nearby. Owen crawled over the pipes and set down his twin burdens at the tradesman’s entrance. The door was eased open and he listened for the familiar snoring. Surprise. The tall blonde was no longer sleeping or snoring. She was standing at the front arguing with another woman—a stranger—over the door a kindly carpenter had so recently hung. The stranger was upset and demanding her door back. Paoli was angry at being awakened and equally angry at the suggestion that she was a conspirator to the plot. Her tone and her manner betrayed the state of her head, and Owen guessed that she hadn’t found aspirin for the hangover.
He closed the
hatch silently and backed away. Geez, the whole neighborhood was in an uproar. You’d think that the cops had found a fifth columnist in the act of poisoning the reservoir.
Owen shouldered one of the packsacks and adjusted the straps for a comfortable fit. The other pack would have to be carried in arm as he struck off into the weedy wilderness in search of a hideout. All his thoughtful work in unbolting the hatches was for naught—if the cops had roused Paoli, they’d roused everybody, and if those other ladies were only half as vexed as Paoli, they’d be loathe to offer him supper and solace.
Owen prided himself on the ability to take a hint, however subtle. It was past time to beat a retreat.
Ten
“Blonde or dark, sir?”
says enough
Whether of women, drink,
or snuff.
—Robert Graves
Owen Hall sat on a pipe, swinging his heels and munching a homemade biscuit. The manhunters were getting the smarts.
He had worked his slow way about an eighth of a mile through the tangle of weeds and pipes, first moving straight inland toward the powerhouse at the city’s center and then turning sharply northeast toward downtown but away from the agitated villagers. When he judged that he was safely away from them in the concealing darkness, he rested the packs, dug out a biscuit, and climbed atop a pipe to watch the turmoil. The sky still lacked a moon and that was to his advantage.
Ressurection Days Page 13