Whiteley hurled the gun at them; it stopped in mid-air and fell to the floor.
‘Better go back to your room,’ came Farthingdale’s voice. Whiteley started to run … then the chair leg pulled itself out of his hands, and dropped in front of his feet. He sprawled headlong.
A tremendous force caught him, buffeted him, lifted him, over the eager, upturned faces. He could see their teeth gleam like eyes. Then he was coming down helplessly among them.
The Towers of San Ampa
The hero was back from Venus and his rabbit shooting. The last two hundred miles of the twenty million mile return journey were the worst. The train from Los Angeles arrived at San Ampa five hours late. And then Clay Marshall had to walk the last two miles to the Town; the old atomic bus running between San Ampa and the Town had discontinued since Clay was last home, five years ago. The bus station had been taken over by the People’s Police.
It was raining. Clay squelched along in mud, the big pack on his back standing up like a cliff-face down which water cascaded onto his head. He was thirty-two, but long years of under nourishment and his recent illness made him look older. His long face was lined, his hair clung moss-like to his skull. Inside the skull was only one clear thought: I’ve got to get home – and see Cath.
The Town had once been San Ampa, long before the adjoining valve works had come along and unsurped the name. As the works grew and grew, the Town deteriorated. When Clay plodded into it, a river of mud ran down the main street; several buildings had collapsed from untended age; the belfry on the church sagged dangerously. It looked like a medieval Japanese village, instead of an American town in nineteen ninety-nine.
Clay knocked at his father’s door and went in. He shucked off some of his wet things, coughing almost automatically, and padded into the living room. As he had expected, his father, Old Marshall, Mayor of the Town, lay on the sofa in his stockinged feet, just letting time pass.
‘Clay, boy! Well, if the government haven’t sent you back to us all in one piece, Heaven be praised!’ he exclaimed, getting up, hobbling forward, and embracing his son. ‘Throw that floor rug round your shoulders, and come and sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing on Venus. I’ll put the oven on for a bit of heat. Your Mother and me wasn’t expecting you home for a few months yet.’
‘I should have sent you a cable from LA to warn you I was coming,’ Clay said, ‘but I figured it would cost a half month’s pay.’
‘Sure would have – only they cut the cabling services a couple of years back,’ Old Marshall said. ‘It released over a million girls to go to armaments. Well, what you been doing?’
‘Well, father,’ Clay said cautiously, looking at his boots, ‘I never completed my six years’ Venusian tour because – I guess I’ll have to tell you some time – I’ve been … ill.’
The old man sat down, massaging his bad hand with his good one.
‘Not … you’ve not got Venusian TB?’ he asked.
‘I had just a touch of it,’ Clay said guardedly. ‘I wasn’t too bad, father – the doctors said they caught it in time, or it would have been a whole lot worse. They gave me proper treatment and everything.’
‘That’s bad, my boy.’ As he looked at Clay, Old’s eye caught the battered old clockwork alarm clock on the shelf. ‘Just a minute, it’s time for a news bulletin. You must tell me more in a minute. Must just catch the news. That’s very bad about you …’
He switched on a TV set by the side of the sofa, fidgeting while it warmed. The picture that formed was small and faint.
‘Tube blew last spring. Unfortunately, we are not insured,’ Marshall said, twiddling. A voice responded, emanating cheer, the oleomargarined voice of a station announcer.
‘… According to Moscow,’ it said, ‘where Soviet architects have just announced the completion of their two kilometre high skyscraper on Red Square. This is now the highest building in the world. A spokesman in New York said today that he doubted whether the building was safe or even habitable. Western architects agree that this in no way proves that Soviet construction methods are in any way superior to ours. In fact, at a special meeting in Washington this afternoon – and this will be welcome news to all our listeners – it has been decided to build a mile and a half high building. This will be considerably higher than the Russian structure; work on the foundations should be started before the New Century.
‘In the third round of the Mechanised Sports – ’
‘Good for us!’ Marshall declared, cutting the announcer off. ‘Can’t let these Russians get ahead of us – America would never live it down. They’re terrible braggers, you know.’
‘We ran up against some of them on Venus,’ Clay said. ‘They don’t seem such bad fellers. They got drunk like the rest of us.’
‘They may be okay individually,’ Old Marshall admitted in a low voice, ‘but you don’t want to go saying things like that round here, or you’ll find yourself in trouble. The People’s Police can run a man in for dangerous chatter.’
Silence fell between them. It seemed funny that after five years neither of them should have anything to say. He wanted to ask his father about Cath, but wariness prevented him. All the drab years on Venus, he had thought of Cath, and the way they had planned to marry when he saved enough money to buy himself out of the poverty of the Town. Now that he was back, he realised she would be like a stranger to him.
‘Has mother still got her job?’ Clay asked at last.
‘Yes, down on Parson’s farm. She’ll be in soon. She’ll be glad to see you,’ Old said. ‘It’ll be a surprise …’
Clay stood looking out of the dirty window. The rain was tapering off with evening. Distantly, beyond the sagging roofs of the Town, he could see the towers of San Ampa, where lights already burned. It was a walled city. More, it was a feudal society. It existed merely for valves. Modern civilisation – or the technological sparring match between the Powers which was still called civilisation – demanded valves, not only on Earth, but on the struggling outposts of the other planets: myriad valves for air pumps, hydrazine pumps, water pumps, valves for this and valves for that … if you lived anywhere near San Ampa, you could not but think that valves were the key to civilisation.
‘I have saved my eight hundred dollars, father,’ Clay said suddenly.
‘You did? You managed it?’ Old Marshall exclaimed. He stood up. For the first time, real pleasure filled his voice. He patted Clay’s shoulder with his one sound hand; the other had been crushed in a reaper when he was a boy.
‘When you told me you’d had VTB, I thought you’d have had to waste your savings on sanatoria and the like. I was wondering how we was going to keep you. There’s only farming doing in the Town now, and precious little of that – and you don’t know any farming. But you’ll be okay if you’ve got the money. You can get into San Ampa now.’
‘I managed to pinch and scrape, and I’ve just got the eight hundred,’ Clay said proudly. without revealing how desperate the pinching and scraping had been.
‘Well, that’s fine, son! I always hoped to see you buy your way into San Ampa. You’ll be set for life there. And they say their valves are twice as good as anything the Russians can do.’
They looked into each other’s eyes until Clay turned away. Somehow he couldn’t face his old man any longer; it was terrible to find him so shrunken in body and mind. At the moment you first find your father is only an old bore, you really begin to hate yourself.
Sure, Clay could now buy his way into San Ampa. That was what they had planned, all the while he was on Venus. For eight hundred dollars, you could purchase basic training in the valve plant. From then on, you hadn’t a worry. The firm cared for you; it housed, clothed and fed you. It was more than a firm – it was a society. It doctored you, it married you, it delivered your babies. In time, it buried you.
When small firms were amalgamating with big, during the hard times of the sixties, the ‘social amenities for workers’ movement was already well
under way. Then the rivalry with the Russians had begun in real earnest; as the internal economy of the country was cut to the bone, the only way of securing a decent livelihood was by joining one of the big combines. The competition to do so was becoming tougher all the time. Nowadays, you had to pay through the nose to get a job.
Suke, Clay’s mother, arrived tired from her labours at Parson’s farm, but threw her arms enthusiastically round her son. She had not aged as much as her husband; outdoor work kept her young.
‘It’s grand to see you again, Clay!’ she exclaimed. ‘If we’d known you were coming, we could have got in some food. Still, there’s big potatoes; I can bake them up, and I’ve a pat of butter and some cheese to serve them with – a bit of surplus over and above what the government demand from the farm. For this special occasion, we must have ourselves a spread. How did you eat on Venus?’
He could not remember his mother ever talking of much but food. Her whole life was dedicated to scraping together enough to eat for the next meal. Clay walked about talking to her, as she busied herself at the oven. Old Marshall, dangling the broken hand that had barred him from a job at San Ampa, laid the table and listened, padding round spiritlessly in his socks.
‘We had quite a bit of meat on Venus,’ he said. ‘Neo-rabbit meat, of course … Nothing else but!’
He told them of all the clever things man had been doing on Venus, but not of how he had suffered. Venus had been hell for him; Clay’s had been the humblest, wretchedest of jobs – neorabbit exterminating in Venus’s desolate, mountainous outback.
In the technological race between the two great powers, Venus had soon been reached. That had been in the late sixties. The neorabbit trouble had come soon after.
‘There was an example of scientific ingenuity,’ Clay said, without admiration in his voice. ‘Several batches of rabbits were mutated in different ways, and set in outdoor runs to see which batch was best adapted to exist in the hard conditions of Venus. Batch One was so well adapted it got out of the run in the night and beat it. With no natural enemies about, they were multiplying over the face of the planet in no time. You just can’t stop rabbits.’
‘But the Venusian military bases were required to be self-supporting,’ Old Marshall objected, recalling something he had heard in a newscast. ‘If the rabbits – these neorabbits – were wanted for meat supplies, surely this multiplication was just what was needed?’
‘They were meant to be kept under control,’ Clay said. ‘If they were a success, sheep were to be introduced next. But the neorabbits were eating up all the grass the sheep needed. And they had enough sense not to stay near us. In ten years, they were a menace. Within twenty, they nearly caused the evacuation of the planet – but of course while the Russians hung on to their bases, we hung on. Nobody on Earth was told how bad things were.
‘The strain of fox they introduced did a lot to cope with the problem, till the foxes grew fat and lazy on an easy diet. So next step was, the authorities spread a disease called myxomatosis, which the British had used to cope with their rabbit problems, earlier on in the century. The neorabbits died by the thousand, blind and sick. That didn’t leave anything for the foxes to eat. When the foxes were starving, they came down in packs like wolves, and killed the sheep. That brought another crisis.
‘Later, the surviving neorabbits bred immune to myxomatosis, and increased with new rapidity. So Venusian TB – VTB – was developed to cope with both rabbits and foxes. The virus was so successful, it mutated. Men started going down with it too. Emergency hospitals were packed. Nothing daunted, our scientists found a serum to beat the virus; it’s efficient with most people – at least it prevented a wholesale plague.’
‘It all sounds terrible!’ Suke said, pulling the baked potatoes deftly from the oven.
‘The rabbits survive even VTB,’ Clay said. ‘So I was on the mountain patrols, shooting them down. Sometimes I’d get two hundred a day. They were all eaten – after being irradiated.’
‘Talk no more about meat,’ Old Marshall growled, ‘or we’ll not enjoy our spuds. Still, it does go to show how we’ve got enough ingenuity to get over any problem. It’s a wonderful age, no doubt …’
Over the humble meal, as they talked in desultory fashion, Clay told his mother how he had saved enough money to buy his entry to San Ampa.
‘I’m glad, Clay; I didn’t dare ask,’ Suke said. ‘It means you’ll be able to live in comfort, as far as anyone does. Outside the combines, on the land, in the old towns, things are bad. worse than when you went away. I know we’ve got to keep up with the Soviets, of course we have, but meanwhile your father and I haven’t enough money to buy him the new boots he needs. Not that any new boots are available if we had the dough. Still, it’ll be better when you’re provided for, Clay – and now you’ll be able to marry Cath.’
‘If she’ll still have me,’ Clay said embarrassedly; he did not like to think others were taking his proposed marriage to Cath for granted.
‘Of course she’ll have you,’ Suke said warmly. ‘What sensible girl wouldn’t, with a chance to live inside San Ampa and have a fairly full stomach all her days?’
‘Maybe,’ Clay said. He did not say he wanted Cath to see more than a meal ticket in him. Love was out of fashion these days; there was a cold war on, and the watchword was Expediency. All the same … Clay was still thinking of Cath when she came in after the meal.
‘Somebody told me they saw you coming down the street,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t believe till I saw you myself, and here you are!’
They held hands, not kissing with the elder folk present. She had run out of lipstick; she wore woollen stockings and a peasant scarf over her head. ‘She is a peasant,’ thought Clay – ‘just as I am.’ Who was he to complain that she was pale, tired, not as pretty as she had been? The last five years had done him little good either.
Suddenly something like a revolution was swelling in his breast. He hated time, necessity, cold, weariness – everything in life that printed that look on Cath’s face. By the strength of his hatred, he knew he still loved. He burst into angry coughing.
Next day, Clay Marshall tramped up to San Ampa and filed his application for a job.
It was a different world from the Town. Around the square acres of factory, with their high atomic ‘chimneys’ and towers, flower beds had been laid out. Beyond the beds lay the shopping centres, the church, the cinemas, the rows and rows of houses and bungalows where the workers lived, with proper facilities inside them and proper roads between them. Yet it was no utopia. The flower beds bore only weeds, the buildings needed paint, one of the cinemas was closed, the shops offered little but junk.
And the guards were everywhere, plant guards and members of the People’s Police in their neat, black uniforms.
‘There’s a trade recession at present,’ the clerk at the little window told Clay. ‘We’re laying people off. We’ll write you when we want you.’
‘How long’ll that be?’
‘Can’t tell with this present war scare on.’
‘There’s always a war scare on.’
‘I tell you we’ll write you, bud,’ the clerk said, turning away.
Things were bad: they wouldn’t even take his money. There was nothing to do but go back to the Town.
‘Don’t worry, Clay,’ Cath said next day, and the day after, and the day after that. She had taken possession of him, and in his new-found aimlessness, Clay let her have her way. She had a job one day a week on Parson’s farm, where Suke also worked, checking the pullets’ eggs into the deep-freeze containers. A government lorry with an armed guard drove up every Thursday and collected the containers, checking to see that Parson was keeping above the statutory minimum of productivity. Clay wandered down to watch the operation, giving the girl a hand to load the containers after the check-up was carried through.
At last the lorry’s steel doors were secured. They watched it drive off with its load.
‘We might as well be
living in Russia,’ Cath said wearily.
He seized her arm, regarding her with anger.
‘Don’t say a thing like that, even to me,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it ain’t true, and for another, it’s a dangerous thing to say. Conditions aren’t too bad. They could always be worse. Didn’t you hear the news this morning about the new Project Zero on Pluto? Why Cath, your eggs may be going right out out there to feed those boys!’
‘That makes you proud?’ she asked. ‘It just makes me hungry.’
Cath was difficult to understand; maybe it was because her health was low. Clay found her difficult to deal with – she was headstrong, he was unsure of himself. There would be time to sort all that out later, when Clay had got her into San Ampa. The rule there was that if an employee married after he had been taken on the establishment, he was given allowances for wife, forthcoming children, etc. If they were careful, there would be enough over to send out food to their parents occasionally. Everything would be alright, Clay told himself, trying not to think ahead. Two days later, Cath went down with VTB.
They fixed her up on a couch as best they could. Giam Maccara, the horse doctor, came to see her, took a slide of her blood and compared it with a little picture in his big book. Clay and Mora, Cath’s mother, stood apprehensively by the girl’s bedside, waiting.
‘Well,’ Clay said at last. ‘Say something, man.’
‘Sure, it’s Venusian tuberculosis, okay and no mistake,’ the old man said, looking up and screwing his eyes at Cath. ‘Where you pick this up, my girl?’
‘It’s obvious where,’ Clay answered bitterly. ‘She’s got it from me, of course. I’m a carrier. God, I could shoot myself!’
‘No good you to carry on,’ Maccara said. ‘Trouble with this girl, she’s not got enough vitamins in her to make her resist. I tell you nothing has no goodness in today – milk, eggs, meat, vegetable, whatever. With present government policy nothing is put back in the land. Soon we all starve.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 97