“It has nothing to do with you,” said Sawtelle. “With an almost 100% automatic employment and welfare system in Greater Los Angeles little kinks are bound to show up now and then.”
“I'll never work again?”
“That's what,” said Margery, hunching toward the small fire, “has happened to most of us. If you get another chance with them they need never know about this part of your life.”
“They usually only check for an actual conviction record,” said Sawtelle. “You could be given a criminal inclinations aptitude test. You could get caught.” He cut himself a hunk of near-cheese from the piece in his jacket pocket.
“All right,” said Lembeck. “What the hell. Okay.”
Margery smiled at him.
***
An A class housewife in a four-room ranch style house in the Pasadena sector of Greater Los Angeles shot Margery dead on the third food raid Lembeck went on.
Lembeck kept running, a package of turkey wafers under his coat. There was no doubt that Margery was gone. The blaster pistol had lit up the night long enough for him to see her die over his shoulder.
At dawn he was well into the mountains. But where Sawtelle was he had no idea. Margery had been his partner on all his missions and, since Lembeck was still breaking in, Margery had been entrusted with the pattern of campsite shifts.
Day came on and Lembeck opened the package of wafers and ate two, chewing and swallowing fast as he climbed. His stomach made unsettled sounds and he stopped finally and ate a whole handful of the turkey wafers.
The brush was thick and there were clusters of trees up here. Lembeck had trouble breathing and he knew that he must have climbed higher than he had realized. He made it over a rise and found a narrow path leading down into a slight cup-like clearing. This would be a good place to rest.
He sat on a mossy rock and ate another handful of wafers and then the box was empty. Lembeck dropped it between his feet. That was wrong. He decided to hide the empty box.
Off to his right a thick growth of thorny bushes tangled together over a crevice. He went over to stuff the empty wafer carton in there. His hand and arm got scratched as he slid the box in through the thorns. He cocked his wrist to fling the box away. But the box hit against something solid. Lembeck shoved both hands in and forced the bushes aside. He saw a door handle.
“Well, let's see now,” he said. He twisted one arm up to guard his face and head and then pushed through the bushes. He caught the handle and turned it. A door opened in and he fell forward and onto a slanting corridor. His hand still on the handle, he looked at the door. A small plate on it read: “Nuclear Emergency Food Storehouse No. Twenty. Stocked by the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, May, 1991.”
Lembeck left the door open and moved down the corridor. When he hit the end of the incline, lights went on in the room beyond. “It's stayed in working order all these years,” he said.
The room was bigger than the apartment he and Edith had had and it seemed to be surrounded by other rooms. On shelves on two walls there were packages of preserved foods and in the room's center there was something labeled “Safe Water Well.” Another room had smoked meats, the real stuff, and bottles of wine and brandy and whiskey. There were packages and containers of foods Lembeck had only heard of. Besides all that there were shelves of old-fashioned food wafers. And all of the food was still edible. The labels testified that it had been preserved in ways that would make it last until an emergency made its use necessary. There had been no emergency since 1991, not the kind the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce had been thinking about.
In all there were five big rooms, each filled with food and assorted drink, including two still functioning wells. Lembeck laughed as he made glancing inventories of the storehouse. He knew exactly what he would do now. That religious android had been right. When you had a purpose, life was okay.
Lembeck took a look around the main room and then ran up the ramp corridor to the outer door.
He slammed the door shut and ran back inside.
He started to eat.
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Never Fear Page 41