by Algis Budrys
“I’d rather not soil myself. A few rusty rifles pulled out of the old armories aren’t worth that much to me.”
Henley’s mouth twitched. He looked at the austere pride on the commander’s face, gathered like a mask of strength and youth on the gray stubbled cheeks, and then he said: “Well, if I ever do find him, I’m empowered to offer him the presidency of the Eighth Republic.” His eyes glittered and fastened like talons on the old commander’s expression.
Custis grunted to himself. He couldn’t say Henley had exactly surprised him.
And the old man was looking down at the tabletop, his old hands suddenly clenched. After a long time, he looked up slowly.
“So you’re not really working for the Seventh Republic. You’ve been sent up here to find a useful figurehead for a new combination of power.”
Henley smiled again, easily, blandly—and looked like a man who has shot his animal and only has to wait for it to die. “I wouldn’t put it that way. Though, naturally, we wouldn’t stand for any one-man dictatorships.”
“Naturally.” One corner of the commander’s lip lifted, and suddenly Custis saw Henley wasn’t so sure. Custis saw him tense, as though a dying tiger had suddenly lashed out a paw. The commander’s eyes were narrowed. “I’m through talking to you for the moment,” he said, and Custis wondered how much of his weakness had been carefully laid on. “You’ll wait outside. I want to talk to Custis.” He motioned to the two waiting riflemen. “Take him out—put him in another hut and keep your eyes on him.”
And Custis was left alone in the hut with the old commander.
The commander looked up at him. “That’s your own car out there?”
Custis nodded.
“So you’re just under contract to the Seventh Republic—you’ve got no particular loyalty to the government.”
Custis shrugged. “Right now, there’s no tellin’ who I’m hired out to.” He was willing to wait the commander out and see what he was driving at.
“You did a good job of handling things, this morning. What are you—about twenty-nine, thirty?”
“Twenty-six.”
“So you were born four years after Berendtsen was killed. What do you know about him? What have you heard?”
“Usual stuff. After the plague, everything was a mess. Berendtsen put an army together, took over the territory, made the survivors obey one law, and strengthened things out that way.”
The commander nodded to himself—an old man’s nod, passing judgment on the far past. “You left out a lot of people between the plague and Berendtsen. And you’ll never imagine how bad it was. But that’ll do. Do you know why he did it?”
“Why’s anybody set up a government? He wanted to be boss, I guess. Then somebody decided he was too big, and cut him down. Then the people cut the somebody down. But I figure Berendtsen’s dead, for sure.”
“Do you?” the commander’s eyes were steady on Custis.
Custis tightened his jaw. “Yeah.”
“Do I look like Berendtsen?” the commander asked softly.
“No.”
* * *
“But hand-drawn portraits thirty years old don’t really mean anything, do they, Custis?”
“Well, no.” Joe felt himself getting edgy. “But you’re not Berendtsen,” he growled belligerently. “I’m sure Berendtsen’s dead.”
The old commander sighed. “Of course. Tell me about Chicago,” he said, going off in a new direction. “Has it changed much? Have they cleaned it up? Or are they simply abandoning the buildings that’re really falling down?”
“Sometimes. But they try and fix ’em up, sometimes.”
“Only sometimes.” The commander shook his head regretfully. “I had hoped that by this time, no matter what kind of men were in charge…”
“When’s the last time you were there?”
“I was never there. But I’ve seen a city or two.” The commander smiled at Custis. “Tell me about this car of yours. I used to be quite fond of mechanized equipment, once.” Now he was an old man again, dreaming back into the past, only half-seeing Custis. “We took a whole city once, with almost no infantry support at all. That’s a hard thing to do, even with tanks, and all I had was armored cars. Just twenty of them, and the heaviest weapons they mounted were light automatic cannon in demiturrets. No tracks—I remember they shot our tires flat almost at once, and we went bumping through the streets. Just armored scout cars, really, but we used them like tanks, and we took the city. Not a very large city.” He looked down at his hands. “Not very large, no. But still, I don’t believe that had ever been done before.”
“Never did any street fighting,” Custis said. “Don’t know a thing about it.”
“What do you know, then?”
“Open country work. Only thing a car’s good for.”
“One car, yes.”
“Hell, mister, there ain’t five cars runnin’ in the Republic, and they ain’t got any range. Only reason I’m still goin’ is mine don’t need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin’ grounds, it was. My dad, he’d taught me about runnin’ cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Seven years.”
“And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?”
“Mister, there’s three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car.”
The commander looked at him from head to foot. “I see.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And now you’ve practically handed it to me.”
“Not by a long shot, I ain’t. My crew’s still inside, and it’s kind of an open question whether you’re ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody.”
The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not as open as all that.”
“Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement.”
“You’re here. Your crew’s down the mountain.”
“My crew’s just as good without me, Mister.”
The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. “You’ll admit you’ve come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work.”
Custis shrugged. “Car needed shopwork. Chicago’s the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That’s the straight up and down of it. And it’s one more reason why gettin’ the car’d be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You’re so fond of cars, where’s yours? Wore out, right? So now you’re walkin’.”
“Horses.”
“Horses!”
The commander smiled crookedly. “All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn’t it, Custis?”
“Depends on the spot I’m in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful.”
The commander nodded again. “I’d say so. All right, Custis, I’ll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men’ll stay close to you. Other than that, you’re free to look around as much as you want to. I don’t imagine you’ll ever be leading any expeditions up here—not if Henley’s plans work out. Or even if they don’t.”
He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn’t found out what the old commander was driving at.
Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis’s nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car’s ration cans.
Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander’s riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling hi
s rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes.
A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the men who were in position around the battlewagon. Custis watched them for a while, then ignored them as well as he could.
So Henley was working for a group that wanted to set up the next government. It wasn’t particularly surprising that the Seventh Republic was financing its own death. Every government was at least half made up of men from the one before. They played musical chairs with the titles—one government’s tax collector was the next government’s chief of police—and whoever wasn’t happy with the graft was bound to be figuring some way to improve it the next time the positions moved around.
It looked a helI of a lot like, however the pie was cut, Custis wasn’t going to get paid. The Seventh wouldn’t pay him if he didn’t come back with Berendtsen, and if he did find him the Eighth wouldn’t hold to the last government’s contract.
Custis twitched his mouth. Anyhow, the car was running as well as you could expect. If he got out of here, Kansas City might have a job for him. He’d heard rumors things were happening down there. It wasn’t familiar territory, and there were always rumors that things were better somewhere else, but he might try it. Or he might even head east, if the highways over the mountains were still any good at all. That could be a real touchy business all around, with God knew what going on behind the Appalachians, and maybe an organization that had plenty of cars of its own, and no use for half-bandit plains people. Going there wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. As a matter of fact, he knew, inside, that he’d never leave the northern plains, no matter how he reasoned. It was too risky, heading for some place where they were past needing battlewagons.
He wondered how the boys in the car were making out. He hadn’t heard any firing from over there, and he didn’t expect to. But it was a lousy business, sitting cooped up in there, not knowing anything, and looking out at the men on the rocks as time went by.
When you came right down to it, this was a lousy kind of life, waiting for the day you ran into a trap under the sod and the last thing you ever did was try to climb out through the turret while the people who’d dug the hole waited outside with their knives. Or wondering, every time you went into one of the abandoned old towns on the far prairie, where supposedly nobody lived, if somebody there hadn’t found some gasoline in a sealed drum and was waiting to set you on fire.
But what the hell else could a man do? Live in the damned cities, breaking your back in somebody’s jackleg factory, eating nothing that couldn’t be raised or scavenged right on the spot—and not much of that—living in some hole somewhere that had twelve flights of stairs before you got to it? Freezing in the winter and maybe getting your throat cut for your coat in some back alley?
Custis shivered suddenly. To hell with this. He was thinking in circles. When a man did that, he licked himself before he got started.
Custis slid off his rock, stretched out on the ground, and went to sleep thinking of Berendtsen.
CHAPTER FOUR
This is what happened to Theodore Berendtsen when he was young, having grown up in the shadow of a heap of rubble with a weathering sign on top of it. That was all he had in the way of a portrait of his father. And this is what he did with it.
Ted Berendtsen opened the hatch and shouted down over the growl of the PT boat’s engines. “Narrows, Jack.”
Holland nodded, typed the final sentence of his report with two bobbing fingers, and got up. “What’s the latest from Matt?”
“Nothing new. I just checked with Ryder, on radio watch.”
Holland scrambled up on deck, stretching his stiff muscles. “Man, next time Matt sends out a mission, somebody else can go. I’ve had PT’s.”
Ted nodded sourly. “I’ve had Philadelphia, too,” he growled in conscious imitation of Jack’s voice. For the hundredth time, he caught the faint smile on Jack’s lips, and resolved, for the hundredth time, to stop his adolescent hero-worship. Or at least to tone it down. “Brotherly love. Wow!”
He flushed. Boyish excitability was no improvement.
Holland grunted and ran his eyes over the bright machine-gunned scars in the deck plywood. He shook his head. “That’s a tough nut down there.”
Ted nodded solemn agreement, instantly stabbed himself with the realization of solemnity, flushed again, and finally shrugged his mental shoulders and, for the hundredth time, gave up on the whole problem of being sixteen. Instead, he watched the shoreline slip by, but soon found himself unable to resist Manhattan’s lure. The skyscraper city bulked out the horizon in front of him, windows flashing in the sun.
He knew Holland was watching the look on his face, and he cursed himself for being conscious of it just because Holland had gotten him his first man- size rifle and taught him how to use it.
“Damn, it’s big,” he said.
Jack nodded. “Big, all right. Wonder how much more of it’s joined up since we left?”
“Not the West Side, that’s for sure.”
“Those boys aren’t ever likely to budge,” Holland said.
Ted nodded. Too solemnly, again.
Matt Garvin put the report down and sighed. Then he looked past Ted at Jack Holland with the quick sharpness of a man who knows that the other will understand him perfectly. “People in Philadelphia aren’t any different, are they?”
Jack smiled thinly, and Ted felt envy, as he always did whenever Jack and old Matt communicated in these sentences and short gestures that represented paragraphs of the past. He ruthlessly stifled a sigh of his own. When he and Jack had boarded the PT boat, a month before, he had vaguely hoped that something—some uncertain ordeal by fire or inconcise overwhelming experience—would give him that intangible which he recognized in Holland as manhood. He had hoped, as the PT growled slowly down the Jersey coast, that some sort of antagonist would put out from the shore or rise from the sea, and that, at the conclusion of the harrowing struggle, he would find himself spontaneously lean of cheek and jaw, carelessly poised of body, with automatically short and forceful sentences on his lips. But nothing had changed.
“What do you think?” Matt asked him.
The question caught him unaware. He realized he must have looked ridiculous with his absent gaze snapping precipitously back to Matt Garvin.
“About Philadelphia?” he said hastily. “I think we’ll have a hard time with them, Matt.”
Garvin nodded. “Which would mean you think we’re bound to run into those people sometime, right?”
“Ahuh.” He caught the smile on Jack’s lips again, and cursed inwardly. “Yes, I do,” he amended. Damn, damn, damn!
“Any special reason why you think so?”
Ted shrugged uncomfortably. He thought about his father less than he should have, probably. He only vaguely remembered the big man—bigger than lifesize, doubtless, in a child’s eyes—who had been so friendly. If he had seen his death, perhaps, he would have that missing thing to fill out his inadequacy—a cause, passed down, to be upheld and to which he could dedicate himself. But he had not seen his father die. Of it all, he remembered only his mother’s grief, still vaguely terrifying whenever too closely thought of.
He stood hopeless before Matt Garvin, with only reasoning to justify him. “I don’t know exactly, Matt,” he stumbled. “But they’re down there with Pennsylvania and New Jersey in their laps whenever they need them. They’re going to be crowding up this way in another twenty-five, thirty years. All we’ve got’s Long Island, and it’s not going to be enough to feed us by them. We’re stuck out here on this island. They could pinch us off easy.” He stopped, not knowing whether he’d said enough or too much.
Garvin nodded again. “Sounds reasonable. But this report doesn’t show any organization down there. How about that?”
&
nbsp; Ted glanced quickly at Jack. If Holland hadn’t covered that in his report, it could only have been because he shared Ted’s opinion that the true situation was self-evident. The thought occurred to him that Garvin was testing his reasoning.
He felt even more unsure of himself now.
“Well,” he said finally, “I can’t think of anything about Philadelphia that would make people down there much different from us. I don’t see how they could have missed setting up some kind of organization. Maybe it works a little different from ours, because of some local factor, but it’s bound to be basically the same.” He stopped uncertainly. “I’m not making myself clear, am I?” he asked.
“It’s all right so far, Ted. Go on,” Garvin said, betraying no impatience.
“Well, it seems to me,” Ted went on, some of his inward clumsiness evaporating, “that you’d have a tough time spotting our kind of organization if you just took a boat into the harbor, like we did in Philly. Chances are, you wouldn’t run across our radio frequency. If you landed on the West Side, you’d run into the small outfits in the warehouses. Even if you happened to pick the organized territory—I don’t know; if somebody came chugging up the river, I wouldn’t be much likely to trust him, no matter what he tried to say. It’s the same old story. You can’t join up with anybody, anymore, unless it’s on your own terms. There’s been too much of our hard work and fighting done to keep our organization going. It doesn’t really matter whether they’ve had to do the same for themselves. Each of us is in the right, as far as we’re separately concerned. And it’d be a lot nicer, for us, if we were the ones who came out running things, because that’s the only way we could be sure all that work of ours hadn’t been for nothing.”
He stopped, thinking he’d finished, but as he did, another thought came to him.
“It’d be different, if there were a lot of things to negotiate about. Then there’d be room to talk in. I guess, maybe, if we keep organizing, we’ll work our way up to that point. But right now, it’s a pretty clear-cut thing, one way or the other. Nobody’s any better off than anybody else—if somebody was, we’d of heard from them by now. Looking at it from our viewpoint, then, it’s a lot better for our organization if we do all the deciding on who joins up with us. So, if somebody from outside comes nosing around, the best thing to do is just discourage him.” He broke off long enough to grin crookedly. “They sure discouraged us down at Philly.