by Algis Budrys
He rejected that possibility. His mother had been acting in accordance with the code that his father and the other free men who had settled in this area had evolved. And the code was a good code. It had kept the farmlands free and in peace, with no man wearing another’s collar—until Michael Kittredge broke the code.
And so, while he thought, he turned the car off the road and stopped in front of the club.
The porch of the club was already crowded with men. As he climbed out of the car’s hatch, he saw that all the families of the community, with the exception of the Kittredges, were represented. Olsen, Hollis, Winter, Jordan, Park, Jones, Cadell, Rome, Lynn, Williams, Bridges—all of them. Even Mr. Holland stood near the center of the porch, his lined face graver than Cot had ever seen it.
He walked toward them. The news had spread rapidly. He remembered that a lot of households had radios now. He’d never seen any use for one, before. Probably, he ought to get one. As long as the families were uniting, a fast communications channel was a good idea.
“That’s far enough, Garvin!”
He stopped and stared up at the men on the porch. Lundy Hollis had lifted his rifle.
Cot frowned. One or two other guns in the crowd were being raised in his direction.
“I don’t understand this’” he said.
Hollis sneered, and snorted. He looked past Cot at the car. “If anyone in the buggy tries anything, we’ve got a present for them.”
The men on the porch drew off to two sides. Two men were crouched in the club’s doorway. One held a steady antitank rocket launcher on his shoulder, and the other, having fed a rocket into the chamber, stood ready to slap the top of his head and give the signal to fire.
“I’ll ask once more—”
“Looks like you’ve united the community, boy,” Mr. Holland said. “Against you.”
Cot felt the familiar surge of anger ripple up through his body. “Against me! What for?”
There was a scattered chorus of harsh laughs.
“What about Chuck Kittredge?” Hollis asked.
“Charles Kittredge! That was an Affair of Integrity!”
“Yeah? Whose—yours or his?” Hollis asked.
“Seems like the day of Integrity has sort of come and gone, son,” Mr. Holland said gently.
“Yeah, and what about Michael Kittredge?” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. “Was that an Affair of Integrity, too?”
“What about those two brothers of yours shooting the kid out of a tree?” someone else demanded.
“Geoffrey’s in the car with a wounded arm right now!” Cot shouted.
“And Mike Kittredge’s dead.”
There was a babble of voices. The burst of sound struck Cot’s ears, and he felt himself crouch, fists balled, as the knot of fury within him exploded in reply.
“All right,” he shouted. “All right! I came up here to ask you to stop the Kittredges with me. I see they got to you first. All right! Then we’ll take them on alone, and the devil can have all of you!”
Somehow, in the storm of answers that came from the porch, Mr. Holland’s quiet voice came through.
“No good, boy. See, when I said ‘against you,’ I meant it. It’s not a case of them not helping you—it means they’re going to start shelling your place in two hours, whether you’re in it or not.”
“No.” The word was torn out of him, and even he had to analyze its expression. It was not a command, nor a request, nor a statement of fact or wonder. It was simply a word, and he knew, better than anyone else who heard it, how ineffectual it was.
“So you’d better get your family out of there, son.” The other men on the porch had fallen silent, all of them watching Cot except for the two men with the rocket launcher, who ignored everything but the armored car.
Mr. Holland came off the porch and walked toward him. He put his hand on his shoulder. “Let’s be getting back, son. Lots of room at my place for your family.”
Cot looked up at the men on the porch again. They were completely silent, all staring back at him as though he were some strange form of man that they had never seen before.
He shuddered. “All right.”
Mr. Holland climbed through the hatch, and Cot followed him, slamming it shut behind him and settling into the drivers’ saddle. He gunned the idling engine, locked his left rear wheels, and spun the car around. With the motor at full gun, the dust billowing, the armored car growled back down the road.
“I heard most of it, Cot,” Geoffrey’s tight and bitter voice came over the intercom. “Let’s get back to the house in a hurry. We can dump a ton of fray on that porch before those birds know what’s hitting them.”
Cot shook his head until he remembered that Geoffrey couldn’t see him. “They’ll be gone, Jeff. Scattered out to their houses, getting ready.”
“Well, let’s hit the houses, then,” Alister said from behind the machinegun on the car’s turtledeck.
“Wouldn’t stand a chance, son,” Mr. Holland said.
“He’s right. They’ve got us cold,” Cot agreed.
What had happened to the code? His father had lived by it. All the people in the community had lived by it. He himself had lived by it—he caught himself. Had tried to live by it, and failed.
* * *
Cot stood in the yard in front of Mr. Holland’s house. It had taken an hour and a half of the time Hollis had given him, to get back to his house and move his family and a few belongings to Mr. Holland’s house. There had been a strange, uncomfortable reunion between Mr. Holland and his grandmother. He had kissed his mother just now, and raised his hand as she turned back at the doorway. “I’ll be all right, mother,” he said. “There are a few things I’d like to attend to.”
“All right, son. Don’t be long.”
He nodded, though she was already inside.
Geoffrey and Alister had gone in before her, taking care of their grandmother and the younger children. Cot smiled crookedly. Alister would be all right. He hoped Geoffrey wasn’t too old to adapt.
Mr. Holland came out.
“I’d like to thank you for taking us in,” Cot said to him.
Mr. Holland’s face clouded. “I owe it to you, boy. I keep thinking this wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t chivvied you along.”
Cot shook his head. “No—one way or the other, it would have happened. That’s rather easy to see, now.”
“You coming inside, Cot? I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.”
Cot looked at the sun. No, not enough time.
“I’ll be back, Mr. Holland. Got a few loose ends to tie up.”
Holland looked over the low, barely visible roof of Cot’s house. A small dustcloud was approaching it from the other side. He nodded. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, you’d better hurry up. Don’t have more than about twenty minutes.”
Cot nodded. “I’ll see you.” He dropped the carbine into his hand and loped across the yard, not having to worry about the dog now, cutting through the scrub underbrush until he was just below the crest of a rise that overlooked his house. He flattened himself in the high grass and inched forward, until his head and shoulders were over the crest, but still hidden in the grass.
He’d been right. There were three men just climbing out of a light guncarrier.
Well, that’s what our grandparents were, he thought. Looters. He slipped the safety. And our parents had a code. And, now his brothers had a community. But I’ve been living a way all my life, and I guess I’ve got integrity.
He fired, and one of the men slapped his stomach and fell.
The other two dove apart, their own rifles in their hands. Cot laughed and threw dirt into their faces with a pair of shots. One of them bucked his shoulders upward involuntarily, as the dirt flew into his eyes. Cot fired again, and the shoulders slumped. Thanks for a trick, Jeff.
The other man fired back—using half a clip to cut the grass a foot to Cot’s right. Cot dropped back below the crest, rolled, a
nd came up again, ten feet from where he had been.
Down by the house, the remaining man moved. Cot put a bullet an inch above his head.
He had about ten minutes. Well, if he kept the man pinned down, the first salvo would do as thorough a job as any carbine shot.
The man moved again—a little desperately this time—and Cot tugged at his jacket with a snap shot.
Five minutes, and the man moved again. He was shouting something. Cot turned his ear forward to kill the hum of the breeze, but couldn’t make out the words. He pinned the man down again.
When he had a minute of life left, the man tried to run for it. He sprang up suddenly, running away from the weapons carrier, and Cot missed him for that reason. When the man cut back, he shot him through the leg.
Damn! Jeff would have done better than that!
The man was crawling for the carrier.
Over at the Kittredges, the first muzzle-flashes flared, and the thud of guns rolled over the hills.
Cot put a bullet through the crawling man’s head. He’d been right. The Kittredges’ gunnery was poor. The first salvo landed a hundred yards over—on the crest of the ridge where he was standing with his rifle in his hand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This happened many years after the plague, at about the same time things were beginning to run down in the Great Lakes region and the Seventh Republic there tried to buy time with a legend. But this happened toward the south:
I
Jeff Garvin moved through the loosened window like a darker shadow in the night, and his feet made no sound as he touched the floor. He grinned quietly as he closed the window behind him and adjusted his eyesight with near- animal ease to peer at the darkness of the room.
He was in the dining room. He took quick stock of the doorways and chose the one most likely to lead to the kitchen. He moved toward it without hesitation, holding his rifle with his right forefinger on the trigger while he nudged the door gently open. He’d been right—it was the kitchen, and he stepped noiselessly into it.
He located a storage cabinet, and began to fill his pack, grimacing because most of the food was home-canned in glass jars. He’d have to be careful with those, if he got in a fight. He packed them as carefully as possible, stopping to listen carefully after each barely audible tink! of their touching. When he had a full load, he slipped the pack onto his shoulders and picked up his rifle again. He crossed the kitchen, opened the door, and stepped back out into the dining room.
“Whoa, feller,” the voice said, and the rifle was jerked out of his hand. He saw the glint of faint light on the barrel of a shotgun, and stopped still, the spring of his muscles sagging into dissolution. He squinted at the shadowy figure, feeling a despair wash through him, and knew that was it, this was the end, a thousand miles and five years away from home. He had fought and tracked his way this far, over the cold plains and through the long nights, with men against him all the way, and this was where he had finally come to the end of it all.
A girl had caught him. A girl with a shotgun. He grinned at the thought and let her see the grin where she sat in the semicircle of people who were looking at him. He liked the way she didn’t try to avoid it, but kept looking at him—looking, not staring the way the rest of the women were doing at the wild outlaw.
“What’s your name, mac?” the man who seemed to be running things asked.
“Jeff Cottrell,” he said with the right amount of hesitation. He’d found out long ago that Garvin wasn’t a popular name in some places. He had no idea if it was the same way here, but there was no use taking chances with a dull knife or a slow fire.
“What were you doing in the Boston house?”
He looked at the man expressionlessly, wondering what sort of local quirk of justice demanded particulars of a man about to be executed out of hand.
“Stocking up,” he said, willing enough to play along.
The man nodded. “Been out on the plains a long time?”
That was a trick one. Nobody could do it very long without raiding a lot of towns, and a man who raided a lot of towns was bound to run into times when he didn’t come and go without leaving some of the citizenry bleeding. On the other hand, if he gave them some ridiculously short figure, they’d simply lose patience with him and get it over with now.
“Being cagey about it, huh?” the man said. “All right, we’ll let that one go.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed.
“How many people have you killed?”
“My share,” he answered instantly. It was a foregone conclusion anyway.
The man took it without any surprise, and started another question, but the girl cut him off.
“Don’t see any point to carrying this business on any longer,” she said, standing up.
Whew! I didn’t think it’d be you that yelled for blood first, Jeff thought.
“Maybe you’re right, Pat,” the man admitted. He turned to the rest of the crowd—the town’s entire adult population, probably—and directed his next question at them. “How do you people feel about it?”
There was a scattering of nods, and a few people said “Pat’s right,” or things to the same effect. Jeff braced himself.
The man turned around and looked at him. “We’ve got a proposition.”
Jeff felt the air rush out of his chest. “You’ve got a what,” he asked completely astonished.
The man smiled tightly. “This is something we decided on a while ago. This is a farming town,” he explained. “Every one of us has enough to keep him busy all day and half the night. We can’t keep up any sort of adequate guard against people like you; and people like you are a nuisance. So we’ve got a standing offer to every one of you we catch that doesn’t flunk the little oral examination. Goes like this: we’ll let you draw food and clothing from the town supplies and give you a place to stay. In return, you keep the neighborhood cleaned out of light- fingered tramps like yourself.”
“I’ll take it,” Jeff said.
The man held up his hand. “Let’s not get hasty, feller. There’s a catch, far as you’re concerned. One of us goes with you everywhere you go around town. He carries a gun. You don’t. When you go out hunting, we take shifts and send two people with you. You get your rifle outside the town limits, and turn it back in before you get inside ’em again. If we catch you heading out, we shoot you down as a sort of generalized favor to all the other towns around here.”
“I’ll still take it.”
“Funny,” the man said, “they all do, at first.” There was a ripple of cold grins through the crowd, and Jeff didn’t waste a thought on wondering why the position was currently empty.
The man stepped up and held out his hand. “We might as well get to know each other. You’re bunking with me. My name’s Pete Drumm.”
Jeff nodded thoughtfully. It was a hard, tough hand.
“Ever ride a horse before?” Pat asked.
Jeff shook his head and looked carefully at the bay hitched to the porch upright.
The girl sighed. “Well, Mister, that’s a tired horse. He’s been tired for the past five years. So even if you’re lying, don’t expect to get very far very fast. Get aboard him.”
Jeff shrugged and walked over to the animal. He slipped the reins loose and climbed cautiously into the saddle, feeling his thigh muscles stretching into unaccustomed lengths and resigning himself to considerable—and probably laughable—soreness if he kept this up very long. Fortunately, the horse did no more than twitch his tail.
Pat looked up and grinned. “No, you’re never been on a horse before,” she said. “You look as though you expected to wet your pants any minute.”
He stared at her for a minute, then burst out laughing in the first genuine amusement he’d felt in weeks. Damn, he liked that girl!
She swung up into her own saddle, and they walked slowly through the town while Pat kept up a running commentary. “That’s Becker’s place. Got a wife, four kids. The kids sleep downstairs, so they
can pretty much take care of themselves. That place next to them is Fritch’s. Old Fritch lives alone, but he’s a sly one. He’s got traps all around the place. Wouldn’t hurt to look up this way every once in a while, though.”
By the end of the afternoon, he had a fairly clear picture of the town’s layout. It was much like all the others he’d seen on the plains—the houses close together for protection, with fields running out in all directions. It was late fall now, and the fields were bare, but he could picture how it would look in the summer: green and prosperous, tough as the grass that constantly fought the prairie wind. He spotted a string of bare poles marching toward the horizon, and nodded at them.
“Telephone line,” the girl explained. “Branch out of Kansas City. Some easterners were through here last July, hooking up with the St. Louis exchanges. They’ll be stringing wire in the spring. All the old stuff blew down long ago, of course.” Abruptly, she turned in the saddle and looked at him. “What’s it like, back East?” she asked, laughing wryly. “Funny, how we’re all part of the same lousy mess, and there’s the big difference between city people and small-town farmers. But Pete tells me it was always like that.”
She seemed genuinely interested. To make conversation, at first, and then out of some long pent-up well of talk as he forgot himself, he began telling her about life back in New Jersey, about what the people were like, and about his family. She listened intently, asking a question here and there, occasionally making a surprisingly levelheaded comment. By the time they reined up in front of her house, she knew a great deal about him, and not even his screaming muscles and aching knees were enough to kill his odd feeling of relaxation.
But one thing he never quite let leave his mind; some way, somehow, he had to find a way to escape.
By the time he had been in Kalletsburg a week, he knew how he was going to do it. It was the only way that would work, with these people. It might take a year. Perhaps two. But when the time came, he would leave. And he found himself toying with the idea that it just might be possible to take Pat with him.