Twenty minutes later he found out. The starter wouldn’t kick over and he had to push. When the truck did start it kept right on going down the hill and Burgess stood there, suckered by the oldest trick in the world, watching his bundle go rolling of! down the switchback mountain road.
They talk of the speed of fear and the strength of despair. Has anyone dwelt sufficiently on the strength of fury when a man knows he’s just been taken? There is a special angel for madmen and drunkards. Burgess was mad. In twenty-foot leaps he went straight down the side of the mountain. When the decrepit truck came creeping down to the next hairpin curve, grinding against compression, the ratty mustached falluquero pumping on the brakes, Burgess saw that the right-hand seat was empty. He flipped open the door and jumped in. The driver looked at him surprisedly in the instant before Burgess delivered his all, right over the man’s ear. It took quick and fancy doing, but he got the door open, pushed the driver out, and kept one hand on the wheel all the time.
The woman was in back, picking at the knots on the bundle. “Up front or I’ll jump out and let you roll!” Burgess roared, not caring about accents. She took a quick look through the windshield and scrambled into the seat beside him. Then he cocked a fist and yelled “Out!” She didn’t hesitate to leap from the crawling truck.
Burgess surveyed his situation unhappily. He had a truck and didn’t know what to do with it. He thought of dumping it over the precipice, but it wasn’t that simple. Any traffic from behind would see the falluquero and his woman first. Burgess had to race them to Ensenada.
He wondered if they knew what was in the bundle or if they’d just hooked it on general principles—a blanket and another pair of pants to trade off somewhere. He wondered if the falluquero and his woman would make it without water. Mexican law would take a dim view of his tactics and the only fate worse than death that Burgess could think of was a stretch in a local jail. Then he calmed down and took stock. The gas gauge wasn’t working. He hoped the peddler had filled up in Tecate. Suddenly the engine quit.
He got out and thumped knuckles against the tank, it sounded full. In a moment he located the loose wire which had dropped from the end of the coil. Looking over his shoulder to see if the falluquero was coming, he slammed the hood shut. Then, suddenly visualizing a lifetime of looking over his shoulder, Burgess reached a decision.
He drove another mile before the trail widened enough to turn around. Coming down the mountainside, he saw the peddler and his woman trudging back toward Tecate. They made unfriendly gestures as he passed and the man, still rubbing his ear with one hand, threw a rock which broke the windshield on the off side and, in
Burgess’s estimate, improved ventilation. He saw their dwindling figures in the mirror long after he had passed.
Down on the valley floor it was even hotter. Burgess could barely see the twin dots, forlornly descending into shimmering waves of heat as he stopped. He. felt slightly sorry for them, so he left the tire pump leaning against one wheel. Then he shouldered his bundle, sure of several hours head start. And if they were as tired as he hoped, they might decide on a night’s sleep before pumping up four flat tires.
It was late afternoon when he reached the canon where he’d lost Elena’s horse. He tramped an extra half mile of dusty footprints before jumping to rocky ground and retracing his steps. A few hours of rest, Burgess decided, and he could walk to the border before daybreak. Across the barbed wire were paved roads where he could get a ride to the nearest police station. They wouldn’t really believe his amnesia story—but the insurance company would be too glad to get the money back.
He woke to the sound of neighing. Two horses were grazing on the sparse grass at the head of the little canon. Elena knelt beside him. “The horse came home too soon,” she said. “I was worried, so I trailed you.”
Burgess looked at her sweaty, dust-caked face. The magic was still there. “Do you like to fish?” he asked.
“Love it. Why?”
And Burgess knew he had reached the right decision.
Renaissance
As if a highly susceptible editor did not have troubles enough with the charms of female writers, there is the even more delicate problem of the male writers’ wives. . . . No: on sober reflection, it would be impolitic (as well as impossible) to attempt to do verbal justice to Carmen Edmondson. I shall content myself with the statement that her husband has once more compressed into a short story the material for a full-length novel, this time 01t the theme of survival after atomic devastation, and has freshened the theme with an ironic but resolute vigor—making it a story particularly recommended as a corrective to the supine futility of Nevil Shute’s currently popular ON THE BEACH.
SINCE THE SUMMER OF 1952 WHEN he answered a blind ad for an artist and met the lady who financed his expeditions, the life of Oswald Friedlander, Ps.D. had been dedicated to warning humanity that the world was coming to an end.
Oswald had a sneaking suspicion that his patroness had scragged her husband for the insurance money and was using. Oswald’s talent to ease her conscience but it made no difference to him. Oswald so loved his work that he would have done it without pay. The Chicago widow’s contribution was pure gravy. Still, it permitted him to buy a much better grade of paint. He experimented with light reflective pigments until other gentlemen of the trade nicknamed him Johnny Hell for the peculiar brilliance of his blue flames.
One day along Highway 80 between San Diego and El Centro, just as he was putting the finishing touch on REPENT YE SINNERS, THE END COMETH, the first bomb went off. Careful craftsman that he was, Oswald merely glanced over his shoulder and muttered, “I told ye so.” After a moment’s deliberation he outlined the blue hellfire with chrome yellow.
Historians with a sufficiently detached viewpoint would have called it World War III but it detached all the historians so suddenly they didn’t have a chance.
Those who survived possessed a certain immunity to gamma radiation and thus had little to worry about except a collapsed economy, some bubonic, some Russians who didn’t know the war was over, and Oswald Friedlander, Ps.D. The next time we pick him up he’s still warning a group of survivors that the world’s coming to an end. Oh, about that Ps.D., he got it from the College of Universal Truth and Erudite Balderdash. Mail order, $15 C.O.D. He thought it added class to his calling.
By the time somebody got sick of listening to Oswald the situation was well in hand. The hand belonged to Sergeant Major Am Aalstrom, USMC.
Destiny and the personnel division work in strange ways. Sergeant Major Aalstrom attained his rank of Commandant, U. S. Marine Corps, by processes of succession and elimination.
A youthful proclivity for Kelly pool had earned him the position of BAR man—Browning Automatic Rifle to the uninitiated. Some tactician thought that farm boys who supposedly grew up, rifle in hand, could be outshot by citified pool sharks. The only citified pool shark this general ever saw shoot had, between games of pool, ridden shotgun on one of Capone’s beer trucks.
Private Aalstrom couldn’t hit the hornless end of a bull with a scoopshovel. The platoon sergeant knew this but Aalstrom was a towheaded lad of brawn and willingness. The BAR weighs twenty pounds at parade rest and sixteen tons after the first mile so he was allowed to carry it. There was an understanding that when time to fire came Aalstrom would relinquish control to a lanky ex-moonshiner from Kentucky who couldn’t shoot pool. He shot revenooers.
In spite of strict orders to keep his conjugative hands off of it, Aalstrom tried to field strip the BAR at every opportunity. The fact that his reassembly invariably produced leftover pieces had much to do with this injunction. When the sergeant nearly caught him one morning he slipped an extra piece into his pocket and forgot it. A little later thirty Imperial Japanese Marines banzaied across the meadow, waving thirty big hairy bayonets. The first burst drove the BAR’s breech block far enough into the moonshiner’s skull to relieve him of any personal interest in subsequent events.
The last
Jap killed, the platoon sergeant took time to express his impatience with the future commandant. The sergeant, Aalstrom, and two other privates were all that remained of the platoon. The privates lasted just long enough to be killed by the next wave.
A First Division AMTRAC came and scooped up Aalstrom and the platoon sergeant in the proverbial nick of time. The sergeant died on the way back so the final score was fifty Japs and twenty-eight Americans. On recovering from various scratches and bruises, Aalstrom was awarded the Bronze Star and three stripes.
He killed half of another platoon before somebody transferred him into the quartermaster dept. There he lost no time in supplying the Iceland garrison with pith helmets and South Pacific marines with mukluks. Eventually somebody transferred him back to the States for a bond tour and recruiting duty. The Army started coming into its own.
In spite of Aalstrom World War II was won. He stuck with the Marine Corps until time and dimming memories brought the exalted rank of Sergeant Major. Higher no man can go without metamorphosis from manhood to gentlemanhood.
One war taught those willing to learn that his presence at the front spelled national disaster so he stayed on recruiting duty. In the third war, twenty years later, Aalstrom’s survival at the rear spelled even greater disaster. He was as impervious to gamma radiation as he was to cerebration.
There might have been no survivors at all had it not been for Lloyd Yerrington. Yerrington had survived thirty years of sea duty as a machinist’s mate and belatedly realized an ambition to be a ham operator. His farm on the California coast was first in the path of radioactivity. The prevailing sea breeze gave him the first place to become reasonably cool. It also left him one heifer, sole survivor of its breed. Yerrington recorded an endless tape and fed it into his transmitter, asking for a bull. No bull ever came but thirty people did, Sgt. Maj. Aalstrom among them.
In addition to being Commandant, U. S. Marine Corps, Sgt. Maj. Aalstrom was now President of the United States. Since the Marine Corps is subordinate to Navy brass, Yerrington insisted that as Chief Petty Officer, USN Ret’d, he outranked Aalstrom. With a rare stroke of diplomacy, Aalstrom parted Yerrington’s gray hair with the slide of a .45 and the succession changed.
The President’s first official act was to declare martial law. Everyone was drafted into the Marine Corps. His second act was to detail mess cooks. The thirty-man-and-woman corps ate the heifer, thus botching any possibility of the human race’s ever tasting beef again. A week later they finished the last ham in Yerrington’s smoke house. A month later they finished the last of Yerrington.
A day or so after this they dishonored Oswald Friedlander, Ps.D., the prophet of doom.
Adversity brings out the best in men. President Aalstrom concluded that summary slaughter was not consonant with the American Way of Life. Moreover, it was unmilitary. He solved all problems by the book and the book was alphabetical. The A’s came first in chow line and the Z’s came first in chow. The fact that Aalstrom might be said to enjoy some advantage under this system must be dismissed as pure libel. Besides, he had the gun.
A Mr. Zimmerman was so thoroughly incensed that, on hearing this order, he broke ranks with great suddenness and was across the yard and into the brush before anyone remembered his name. The president wasn’t about to waste his few bullets on a moving target so Zimmerman was written of? as poor founding-father material. Any man who’d break ranks was obviously subversive.
Just how subversive was demonstrated two nights later when a fire started in Yerrington’s haystack. There being no cattle, the fire did not damage the economy but all hands turned out to watch it. The diabolical Zimmerman removed a certain Gladys Zybysko from the barricaded smokehouse while others were watching the fire. When citizens railed at this perfidy and tried to organize a rescue force Aalstrom shrugged. He rightly concluded that Miss Zybysko didn’t want to be rescued. Anyway, they’d both starve soon enough.
As it happened, they didn’t. Zimmerman was from the Jackson’s Hole country and knew what real winter was. He had moved to California three years ago at the insistence of a wife who disliked Wyoming.
Zimmerman hadn’t wanted to move. He’d had a small machine shop on the edge of town and twenty good acres of bottom land behind it. With work of infinite variety, inventing and repairing machinery for neighboring ranchers, fattening a few steers on the side, it had been a good life. Not exciting, but Zimmerman wasn’t the sort who craves excitement.
His wife was. At fourteen she had moved from a town twice the size of Zimmerman’s and never got over the feeling that she had been exiled just as youth and beauty were to flower. Marriage to Zimmerman had been a natural consequence of his owning the only hot rod in town. Too late she discovered that the ability to drive fast did not necessarily mean that Zimmerman was.
So the third war found Zimmerman in Southern California working in an aircraft plant, making payments on a house and clothes for a fading wife who took out all her disappointments on the nearest victim. Needing an excuse to spend more and more time in the basement, the victim took up radio. In time he acquired his mobile ham license. Though he had never met Yerrington, he had talked many times with the retired chief as the mobile hams flexed the sinews of their emergency communications net while driving to and from work.
On the twenty-third day of the emergency Zimmerman used his civil defense Certificate of Preparedness to start a small fire where he camped for a night before abandoning the gasless car. He arrived at Yerrington’s three days after Aalstrom and thus missed out on alteration of the presidential succession. Gladys Zybysko arrived a day after Zimmerman.
Miss Zybysko was a placid, bovine creature whose dumpy and overweight body accurately reflected her unhurried personality. As a beautician she had overheard enough hair dryer confidences to realize that beauty was not everything. At 28, she had concluded that a book and a box of chocolates were excellent substitutes for a man—at least, for the kind of man any girl with her figure could hope to land. She failed to consider that reading is the most vicious of vices and the one hopelessly incurable habit.
Miss Zybysko was not fastidious in her reading. When her long widowed mother died Gladys inherited the total saccharine output of Gene Stratton Porter and devoured it with the same avidity which accounted for Gibbon’s Decline in one weekend.
When her favorite client offered Miss Zybysko a position as hairdresser and companion during a six months’ coronary convalescence, Miss Zybysko found herself in a hunting lodge belonging to her patron’s husband. A sudden relapse sent the old woman back to the hospital and in the shuffle, Miss Zybysko was abandoned for three weeks with a well stocked freezer, a fair wine cellar, and one solitary book. By the time she left, Miss Zybysko had memorized Fundamentals of Radio. In a month she was a licensed mobile YL. And that was how she got to know Yerrington and Zimmerman. When the latter rescued her, Gladys hadn’t had any books or chocolates for some time and skin draped in loose folds over her once plump body.
With a mountaineer’s instinct, Zimmerman led the way from the barren coast toward the Laguna range, fifty miles inland. The coast wasn’t as barren, he explained to Gladys, as it was going to be when the rains stopped and an irrigationless summer came.
Besides, he knew where he was going. When he got to the mountain top Zimmerman found a small village with food, clothing, power plant, and its own water supply. At one edge of the village were the famous Palomar telescopes. He had vague plans for putting a solar forge at Cassegrainian focus if he ever got time.
They wolfed a hurried meal in the bachelor astronomers’ kitchen, then relaxed for the first time. Zimmerman’s pot was gone and he felt ten years younger. The underbrush had ravaged Miss Zybysko’s clothing, exposing large patches of a newly tautened body. She found a comb and used it as she sat, looking thoughtfully at Zimmerman. Zimmerman inspected Miss Zybysko from the changed viewpoint of a full stomach. Suddenly life was good again.
Even Southern California winters are cold at that a
ltitude so meat in the freezer was fresh. With dry stores they were set for years. Zimmerman experimented with peas and beans and found some still fertile. He salted what meat he could and dried the rest before securing the light plant against the day when they could risk a trip down to the coast to hunt diesel oil.
He found enough batteries to light a house and rigged a wind charger from pirated equipment. One day they saw a fawn at the edge of the village. A week later a newly wakened bear strolled down the scentless street. There would be meat.
After the first rush of settling down they began listening to the UHF receiver Gladys built with parts from a calculator. A forest ranger up near Inyokern was calling daily. Zimmerman listened for several days, until he was sure the president had forgotten about Yerrington’s radio, before answering. After guarded soundings out they spoke frankly. The ranger brought a wife and twin baby girls.
Jane Stockham was thirty. Just as she had become resigned to a lifetime of teaching third graders Frank had come along. He was a large man, handsome in a rednecked British fashion. On his infrequent visits to town he had become resigned to flighty females who hovered about, inanely wondering what a ranger did all alone in the woods. Salesgirls and waitresses used his green whipcord uniform as a conversation piece, accusing him of membership in everything from the Secret Service to the Underground Balloon Corps.
Jane had been a pleasant surprise. When, one day, his jeep bumper intertwined with hers she was calmly and practically helpful. When she correctly identified his forest green without silly comment he was captivated. When they married, three months later, plain Jane had already blossomed under nature’s oldest stimulus until even third graders noticed the difference. Perhaps they didn’t live happily ever after but life at the lookout station had been a pretty fair substitute.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 9