Striding out the door toward McPeek was a huge figure of a man, muscles bulging all over and threatening to force the seams of his homespun trousers, shirt and jacket He had a surly, frustrated look on his face. His eyes were small, close-set, dogmatic. That was it, also, thought McPeek as Crawford approached. Dogmatism and a splintered, atomic, circumscribed and personal chauvinism. That was another reason why McPeek didn’t fit; another reason why he was an outlaw.
“You must be McPeek,” Crawford boomed. The voice fit the body, not the face.
“Pleased to meet you,” McPeek said automatically.
“Well, I’m not pleased to meet you. Come on inside quick before some of the neighbors see you.”
“Are they that close?” McPeek demanded, surprised.
“No, but they might be snooping. That’s all we’d need, them catching one of your kind around here. Come inside, will you?”
At first McPeek thought they were going to lead him into the shabby house, but Crawford changed his mind and headed for the workshop. McPeek got one quick glimpse of the Crawford farm before he went inside. Most of the acreage was in weed. A few scrawny, ill-fed chickens were hopping about. A lean-to for the six or seven head of Crawford catde had been slapped together on one wall of the rickety house, but McPeek thought better quarters would have to be provided for them by winter, which was not a long way off.
The workshop was different, as McPeek expected it would be. At one end of the cavernous 1-shaped room McPeek saw the keel of a boat. It was far bigger than the dinghy he had stolen to flee across the East River from the New Rochelle vigilantes. It would be a cabin cruiser if Crawford could build an engine or find one—and then somehow get the gasoline to run it. Since the Crawford farm was a good two miles from the river, the boat—if and when completed—would have to be disassembled and carried down to the water piece by piece.
There was an unfinished tractor with all the latest Home Workshop do-dads.
There was the frame of an unfinished wagon, the wheel-spokes beautifully turned on the Crawford lathe.
There were parts of furniture, window frames (without glass), two ornate doors (minus hardware) which might be used in the Crawford house someday, picture frames, lamp bases (although McPeek had not seen a generator on the Crawford property,) a decorative pot-rack, window boxes and other things McPeek couldn’t name. Stacks of Home Workshop plans and blueprints were piled on a table in one comer of the place.
“Sit down,” Crawford said.
None of the furniture was finished, so McPeek sat on the floor in front of the unfinished boat.
“We found out about you from my cousin in New Rochelle,” explained Crawford.
“I usually get my business that way. Word of mouth.” It was the polite thing to say.
Crawford smiled. It was not a friendly smile. “Word of mouth, huh? We were snooping, McPeek. Plain snooping.”
“That’s none of my business.”
“All right, this is. While you’re here, you’ll act like one of the family; can’t have it any other way. If we get any visitors, which I doubt, you’re my cousin from New Rochelle. Got it?”
“Yes,” said McPeek.
“And let’s get a few things straight. I don’t like your kind. I never have and I never will. It’s a shame, the kind of riff-raff an honest farmer has to associate with these days.”
“You’re right,” McPeek said, “let’s get a few things straight. I wouldn’t be here unless you needed me. You know I can do the work because I come with family recommendations. But you’re probably busy hatching schemes for what you’re going to do after the work is finished. Just forget it.”
“I ain’t hatching no—”
“Well, if you are, forget it. You’re afraid IH talk. My kind doesn’t; we survive on word of mouth good faith. But there are certain precautions which, naturally, I have to take.”
“Such as?” asked Crawford belligerently.
“I’ve left the location of your farm, and your name, with my union. If I’m not back in Manhattan, safe, after a stipulated period of time, they’ll make the knowledge public.”
“They wouldn’t!”
“Well, just see that nothing happens to me, that’s all. You wouldn’t want it known I’ve been working here. Sometimes you farmers figure the best way around something like that is to kill a man like me after he’s finished. My union holds the information which says you won’t”
“That’s blackmail.”
“I like it better than murder. Incidentally, we haven’t discussed payment for my work.”
“I got homespun the old lady does.”
“Thank you, no. I’m not adverse to money; there are still some places you can spend it.”
“We threw all our money away a long time ago.”
“Jewelry, then?”
“We got some rings and things.”
“Good. I’ll take a look at them later. Right now I’d like to clean up and things if you don’t mind.”
“Got no privy,” Crawford said. “I’m sorry about that Been meaning to build one, but what with the boat and this furniture and all, I ain’t had the time. There’s a stream and a slit trench a couple of hundred feet south of the house.”
“That will be all right,” said McPeek. “By the way, do you have a master plan for the work you want done?”
“Haven’t had the chance to draw one up.”
“Well, I’ll go over things with you after I clean up.”
“How’d you like it?” Crawford suddenly asked, taking in the whole huge interior of the workshop with a sweeping motion of his arms.
“Nice,” said McPeek diplomatically. “Of course, nothing is finished yet.”
“Finished? Are you crazy? We’re just getting started, ain’t that right, Gil?”
The younger Crawford nodded.
We only been in it five-six years,” his father went on earnestly. “Another five years, you wouldn’t recognize this place.”
“That’s why I’m here,” McPeek pointed out.
“All right. All right. Be quiet about that, will you? You don’t have to rub it in. If you’re going out to the stream, by the way, Gil will have to go with you. In case any of the neighbors are snooping. Nearest farm’s only a mile and a half down the road. And you never know about those crazy scavengers. Lazy parasites. Won’t do a lick of work for themselves.”
“Let’s go, Gil,” McPeek said. He wished he was back in Manhattan already. Masochistic desire? He doubted it. Hiding from the law was better than this.
The Crawford farm, now five or six years in its present location, produced practically nothing. Crawford himself looked well-fed, but his wife was a scrawny woman who yawned constantly, and the six children, ranging from Mary, who was five, through Thomas, Jonathan, Hilda and die twenty-one year old twins, Gil and Paul, all looked undernourished.
McPeek had come into the kitchen unexpectedly. He watched the children, all but Gil who was still out at the slit trench, sitting apathetically at the table, and heard Crawford and his wife, who were out in the pantry, talking.
“Will you please hurry up?” Crawford said in a loud, agitated whisper. “Git rid of those cans, for gawd’s sake. You can’t have him seeing cans in here; we’re farmers.”
“I’m doing the best I can, Harry.”
Little Mary Crawford looked up at McPeek brightly and said, “Papa says you’re the crook but we’re to treat you nice.”
“Shut up, will you?” teen-aged Hilda warned her younger sister.
“Yesterday I went into Long Island City on my first scavenger hunt and everything,” Mary told McPeek. “That’s nice.”
Hilda: “Shut up!”
“We found canned apergrass…”
“Asparagus,” said Jonathan.
“And apple sauce and meat hash and all. Did you ever go scavenger hunting, Mr. Crook?”
“I’m afraid not,” said McPeek. Hilda looked furious. “Your sister would rather you didn’t talk, young
lady.”
“She made it all up about scavenger hunting,” Hilda said. “We’re farmers; we don’t have to go grubbing around the city, do we?”
“Heck, no,” said Thomas and Jonathan together. But Thomas, who was younger, winked at McPeek. “Are you going to tell us some vigilantes and crooks stories?” he wanted to know. “I never seen a real crook before. What do they do if they find you, put you in jail?”
Thomas must have been reading old books, thought McPeek. There were no prisons now; no organized law-enforcement—only the vigilantes, who banded together when necessary and did the job themselves, then as likely as not might be taking pot shots at one another for snooping. “No,” McPeek said. “They’d probably chase me off Long Island.”
Thomas looked disappointed.
“They sometimes might kill him,” said Jonathan sagely. “Papa told me.”
They might at that, McPeek thought grimly. Vigilantes were very unpredictable. With no specific code of law, there were too many variables, like what a man ate for breakfast and did he have an argument with his wife and how was the work coming in his workshop.
A few moments later, they sat down to a lunch of canned asparagus, canned corned beef hash, canned plums and canned V-8 cocktail. All of it tasted exactly like canned food, but McPeek said nothing.
After lunch, McPeek inspected the farm with Crawford and drew up a tentative master plan. It would be a lot of work. A month, he thought. Maybe six weeks. It wasn’t quite as bad as the New Rochelle job, thought McPeek. He had been there two and a half months.
Hardly looking at it, Crawford approved the master plan and went back to his workshop to putter.
Six weeks later, to the day, McPeek said, “Well, that’s about all I can do.”
“I don’t like it,” Crawford said.
“You don’t like—?”
“No, not your work. I caught a couple of snoopers. Couldn’t identify them. Gil and Paul had orders to shoot on sight, but they got away.”
“I’ll leave here tonight,” McPeek decided. “I’ll travel when it’s dark. If they don’t see me, they can’t prove a thing.”
Just then, the Crawford plane came soaring out of the sky and landed smoothly in the south field. “That sure is better,” Crawford admitted. “There’s so much to do, I don’t have the time. You know how it is.”
“Then you’re satisfied with the work?”
“What I seen of it. I been busy, McPeek; I started another boat, by the way.”
“Another one?”
“Well, it’s a big family I got. If I finished one without the other, there’d be a lot of hard feelings. Also, they had a real bargain on blueprints over to the Home Workshop Center. A man can’t resist a bargain, you ought to know that.”
McPeek nodded, and received two rings and a jeweled bracelet as payment for his work. They’d bring a good price in Manhattan, either in money or bartered goods. Maybe he would take money this time, McPeek thought. It was time he left this part of the country, anyway. And money was still worth something up north in conservative Boston.
“I’ve got some farm now,” Crawford was saying. “Maybe in the spring I’ll even find the time to plant some crops. We should get the first snow soon, though* so I don’t have to worry about planting till next year. There’s a million things I’ve got to do in my workshop.”
In six weeks, McPeek had managed to put the Crawford homestead in order. He had repaired the chimney flu, from which smoke was rising in cheerful lazy tendrils now. He had built a privy near the house, caulked and waterproofed the leaking roof, constructed a barn for the Crawford cattle, made a few major repairs on the weather-plane, constructed plywood windows which would keep out the snow, completed the work on Crawford’s tractor in case the man could find some gasoline and ever got around to farming, and done a dozen or so other things around the place.
Naturally, if all went well, Crawford would be able to brag about the work as his own, provided he got any visitors, which was doubtful. Maybe, after a time, Crawford would talk it into himself and stomp back and forth proudly across his farm, convinced that, with slight help from his family, he had done the work.
McPeek shrugged. He didn’t care. He’d been paid. The system was self-perpetuating now, and men like McPeek were necessary, but outlaws and—what was the word?—pariahs.
It starts with a war, McPeek thought, remembering the union booklet on the subject. Once unions weren’t outlawed organizations, but that was a long time ago. A war in which men leam skilled trades in the service of their country, and women take their places in the factories and on the assembly lines and leam they can use their hands for more than darning socks or cleaning house.
After the war—political isolation. A depression tossed in. People do things for themselves, before the depression because they have leisure time and are proud of their new-found skills, after the depression because they don’t have money to pay for outside work. They begin to distrust outsiders; their homespun work is better. Capital and industry are artificial contrivances to keep a man in debt, anyhow.
Do it yourself, brother.
But with a new generation, the war-leamed skills fade. It isn’t a question of getting the people back to the farms, the union booklet said. Getting them back to the factories has become impossible. You work without pride on an assembly line. You put this bolt here or maybe slam down the drill press like so, but you don’t even get to see the finished product.
A man has got to have pride in his work. Homespun, he does. Of course, the work isn’t always practical. A man gets to dream around his workshop and does the work he likes best and is too busy for unimportant things like—well, like privies. That being the case…
“What did you say, Mr. Crawford?”
“It looks like trouble.”
Little Mary Crawford came running toward them, her eyes brimming with tears. “I didn’t want to tell,” she cried. “I didn’t want to, honest. They made me.”
“Snoopers?” Crawford asked.
“’Noopers, papa!”
“What did you tell them?”
“They made me tell.”
“What, child?”
“We had a crook working here.”
McPeek was already running for his traveling bag, tossing his gear in it. He heard shotgun fire from beyond the enclosure. “That’s Gil and Paul,” Crawford said breathlessly. “They know what it would mean for you to be caught here. Get lost, will you?”
“I’m going,” McPeek said, taking a pistol from his bag before he closed it, and hoping he wouldn’t have to use it.
“If you can get away, them snoopers, can’t prove a thing.”
“Is there a back way out?”
“Over the fence. Hurry up!”
Jonathan sprinted up. “It’s more than snoopers, papa; it’s vigilantes.”
“How do you know that?” Crawford asked.
“On account of there’s ten of ’em. Who ever heard of ten snoopers together?”
McPeek and Crawford were running toward the rear line of the Crawford property. McPeek carrying his bag in one hand and his pistol in the other.
“Once I’m in open country I’ll get away,” he predicted.
“You’re quick, huh?”
“I’ve got to be quick in my business.”
“Here we are now,” Crawford panted. The fence was four feet high, tight-stranded barbed wire.
McPeek fumbled through his bag for a pair of wire cutters. He began to snip the barbed wire with it. “The same thing happened in New Rochelle,” he said. “Vigilantes.”
“You got away?” Crawford’s face was drawn and worried.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
It was growing dark now. McPeek looked up at the sky. A sullen blanket of clouds brooded there, low and laden. It was cold enough to snow. The darkness and the snow would be his best protection. But he was running again. He was always running. His kind was the most necessary single feature of the new slapdash
agrarian society, but was outlawed. Someday men would learn, he thought.
McPeek’s wire-cutter snipped through the last of the barbed wire. “Here,” he, said, giving Crawford a card. “Read it, memorize the address of my union in case any of your relatives ever need any work done, then bum it.”
“Bum it, huh?” Crawford said speculatively.
“You’ve got to, for our protection as well as yours. If you’re found with that card on you, it means you were in contact with one of us, doesn’t it?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then read it—and bum it.”
Crawford nodded. There was a commotion in the direction of the farmhouse. Several figures stumbled across the uncultivated land. A shotgun roared, the muzzle blast a fierce orange blossom against the gathering night.
“Get going!” Crawford pleaded.
McPeek went down on one knee and carefully aimed his pistol at the nearest figure. When McPeek fired, the man screamed, threw his shotgun away, and held his injured forearm. Then McPeek was gone swiftly in the dim twilight.
Crawford looked after him just once. He sure could melt off into the landscape, that guy. When Crawford turned back to look again, McPeek had vanished. He would get away, all right.
Quickly, before the vigilantes could reach him, Crawford read the business card and burned it. The card said:
BURN THIS CARD AFTER YOU READ IT!!
Robert A. McPeek
Manhattan Union 15
Times Square, New York
HANDYMAN
IN HUMAN HANDS
by Algis Budrys
The captain pointed out to his executive, “It’s only one robot.”
Rare Science Fiction Page 3