And then he found the greatest treasure of all, a box of stubby short candles, under the serving counter. Evidently power failures were not unheard of around here—something, Groff reminded himself automatically, to keep in mind when he talked to the burgess tomorrow.
Ifhe talked to the burgess tomorrow. There was something there that would need thinking about, too, but the thing to do right now was locate some matches. His own, of course, were more than merely wet—the striking surface had soaked right off them. But there was a cigarette machine, and fortunately a mechanical, not an electrically operated, one.
By the time Sam got back with the others Groff was busy by candlelight, trying to brace a Coca-Cola easel display to cover the window they had broken. Sharon Froman was hugging the briefcase full of manuscript.
You don't last thirty years in the resort business unless you know how to take your mind off your troubles. Mrs. Goudeket, sipping delicately from a quart bottle of black cherry soda, chattered gaily: "Soda pop! Three years I haven't had a drop of soda pop. Now don't tell on me, Dick. If Dr. Postal ever finds out, he'll kill me next time he comes to the hotel—" She choked on a swallow of the soda.
Dick McCue sat on one of the counter stools, sneering at the spectacle Sharon Froman was making of herself over that Mickey Groff. All the same, he admitted to himself, it was a real championship performance. She hadn't had two minutes alone with him, but McCue was willing to bet she could tell to a nickel how much a transistor manufacturer, in process of expansion from forty employees to a hundred, was likely to have in the bank. And there wasn't a chance in the world that this Groff knew what she was doing. This was the no-nonsense Sharon, the hard-working first-week-of-the-season Sharon, who was right by Groff's side when he needed a hand, who didn't ask foolish questions, who kept calm and ready. And to think that as late as Monday night, sneaking back to his own room, he had begun to think—
Sharon and the manufacturer came in from the storeroom with another load of newspapers and dumped them. "All right," said Groff, "I guess that's all we'll need. They won't be very comfortable, but maybe somebody'll come by before morning."
"I don't expect to sleep much anyhow," said Sharon cheerfully. She tapped Zehedi on the shoulder. "Move your feet a little, will you, Sam?"
The grocer started. He picked his feet up so she could spread the newspapers, and when she was through she had to remind him he could put them down again. Five years down the drain. Five more years of hot dogs and that muddy water they call coffee. I'll be thirty-five years old, and still three or four years to go—
Everybody felt it at once.
"The wind?" ventured Mrs. Goudeket. They stared at each other; the building seemed to be vibrating slightly.
Dick McCue, suddenly white, stumbled across the floor and pressed his face to the door.
"Take a look!" he yelled. "That ain't wind!"
Even in the blackness, they could see the river that had been a road outside, the comb of current around the gas pumps, the surging water that lapped at the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
An air watcher, it doesn't matter which one of the thousands he was, stepped from the hospital elevator at the third, and top floor. He went through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and climbed iron stairs to the roof. It was black and drizzling; he hoped the rain wouldn't get worse, at least not during his tour of duty. He had heard on a news broadcast that west of his area there were cloudbursts.
He was tired from a long day at his appliance store on Broad Street and he was a little sorry he had signed up for this Ground Observer Corps thing, but everybody in Rotary was taking a shift so he felt he had to go along. He threaded his way around the invisible obstacles that studded the hospital roof and groped at the black-out curtain of the shack.
It was dry and bright inside the little cubicle, but somewhat crowded. The man he was relieving yawned, looked at the clock—so he was two minutes late!—and said: "Howdy. Ready to go?"
"Sure. Everything quiet?"
"Yeah. CMA Flight 24 was early and south of their course, so I phoned in for the hell of it. Coffee's hot."
"Maybe later. Well, I relieve you."
The man passed over the night glasses and went yawning through the curtains. The air watcher wiped the drizzled lenses of the binoculars, sighed and stepped out onto the roof. He slumped into the swivel chair, tilted back in the patter of rain and watched the overcast sky with boredom. The little town's lights were bright; after a few minutes outside you could see how far they really shone. And a few minutes more and you could see the lights of the next little town, fifteen miles away, as a dim haze on the horizon. By the time his tour was over they would have gone out and everybody would be in bed, light rain comfortably pattering on their roofs.
The phone inside the shack jangled—most unusual!
He blundered in through the curtains, blinking at the naked bulb. He picked up the direct-wire phone and gave his GOC post number.
"Filter Center," said the phone. "Is your town flooded?"
"No!" he said, astounded.
"How much rain are you having?"
"Just a light drizzle. Why?"
"Thanks," Filter Center said, and hung up.
"Now what the hell—?" he gasped, standing there with the phone in his hand, not realizing that he—one of thousands—had just played his part in alleviating state-wide disaster.
The Filter Center was in the basement of the College's newest structure, the Physical Sciences Building. Its location was a low-grade secret in that it was never published in the papers. Since it was staffed mostly by unpaid volunteers, that was about as far as the secrecy went.
The government had spent a lot of money on it in 1949. The money had transformed an ordinary storage and heating-plant basement into an air-conditioned, soundproofed office of enormous size. There was a huge table with an inlaid map of the area; this was the heart of the center and the numerous other installations were designed either to send information to the table or take information from it. Information came by phone from watchers like our man on the roof; his messages buzzed from headsets into the ears of girls who stood at a plexiglas sheet ruled off in grids. At word from him that he had sighted a plane—direction traveling, height and type if possible—they scribbled symbols in china-marking pencil on the sheet. One of the girls around the map table then shoved a marker to the right spot on the map. The Air Force liaison officer constantly on duty at the table checked the marker against his list of submitted flight plans from the Civil Aeronautics Authority and decided that all was well. If the marker did not correspond with any submitted flight plan he picked up a phone and called an interceptor base, usually to find that radar units had beaten the filter center and its volunteers to the warning, that jet fighters had scrambled, perhaps that the errant plane had already been identified as a strayed commercial flight and that the fighters were down again. Twice in five years the volunteers had beaten the radar, and the lieutenant considered those two times well worth the cost of the center and the boredom of duty there.
It was a very dull night, and the lieutenant was looking forward to his relief when the call from the State Director of Civil Defense came in.
"Hell's busting loose, Lieutenant," the director said succinctly. "I'm getting calls from here and there with spotty reports of flooding, but mostly from scared people who want to know what's going on and what they should do about it. Can you call all your air watchers and get a summary of the situation?"
"I'll put the chief operator on it, sir," the lieutenant said. "We can put the reports on the map. I'll report this to Group at once; I'm sure they can get a meteorologist here at once to try and evaluate it for you. And maybe the army will lend us an engineer officer with some experience in flood control."
The night was turning out to be not so dull after all. Diplomatically—he was liaison, not command—he filled in the chief operator, and she made a little speech to the matrons and girls, detailing half of them to continue meticulously with the aircraft work and the rest to start phoning the watchers. The lieutenant rapidly devised a set of symbols to summarize the conditions at each point; his weather studies helped there.
Within minutes they were jotting them down on the map table. One girl came to him with the question, what do you do when you can't get a wire through?
"Put down anF," he said. "For flooded."
The director was back on the wire, and he hadn't even called Group yet. "You'd better send a man of your own down here, sir," he advised. "Somebody from your staff who can do nothing but report to you."
"Good idea. He's on his way, Lieutenant."
He got through to Group, the officer of the day first and then the sleepy executive officer. The exec carefully avoided commenting on his action but said, "We'll send you a meteorologist pronto. I'll message First Army about the engineer officer. Meanwhile, keep at it—and don't forget your primary mission, Lieutenant."
He would not forget. One of the girls at the plexiglas scribbled a symbol, but nobody at the table picked it up; they were too busy twittering and tutting over the grim picture shaping up along the rivers of their state. "Get that intercept!" he snapped at the girl who was responsible for the sector.
"Sorry," she said, burning red, and picked out a marker to shove carefully to the right spot on the map. Multi-engine, approximately angels ten, bearing 280. The lieutenant checked his list; it was CMA Flight 24 a little off course.
And the girls kept calling; from some alert watchers they got unbelievably exact information relayed from local police or newsmen—normal river depth, present river depth, rise during the past 24 hours, condition of phone and power lines. From others they got only brief impressions that there was trouble, and how much. From many they got nothing at all. Down the river valley towns on the map table crawled the menacing symbolF, over and over again.
CHAPTER SIX
The man in the winterized jeep unzipped a window, leaned out and yelled: "The burgess around here?"
The four soaked men working around the tow truck didn't even answer. One of them gestured down the road with an arm and they went back to trying to get a line to a car that had gone off the road. It was now roof-deep in the torrent that had once been a drainage ditch, and up to five minutes ago it had looked as though something was moving behind the windshield.
The man in the jeep spat into the rain and drove on. He finally found the burgess's car parked with its lights on, along with a couple of others, a few yards from the edge of the river. That was crazy, he thought, why didn't they park them up on the highway, twenty-five feet above the water? Then he remembered that he was on the highway.
"Man wants you, Henry."
The burgess turned around to face his chief of police. "If it's that Artie Chesbro again, tell him to take his goddamn car and—"
"No. Lloyd Eisele—don't know if you know him, he's got a dairy farm up in the hills."
"Then why didn't he have sense enough to stay there?"
"His boy's a radio ham, Henry. He's got a message for you."
Burgess Starkman snapped at the man: "Well?"
The dairy farmer said, "The kid has a contact with a phone line open to the Civil Defense Filter Center in Springfield. They want an estimate of damage; they want to know what help and supplies you'll need in the morning. And they've got instructions for you." He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it over.
Burgess Starkman said to his chief of police, "What do you think? Should I send somebody back with him to talk to them?"
"Sprayragen," said Chief Brayer promptly. "He's too old for this anyhow. Let him sit down for a while." He went off to get him.
The dairy farmer looked around at the cars, the fire engine, the men with flashlights and electric lanterns moving around in the downpour. "Something happen?" he wanted to know.
"You could say that," the burgess said wearily. "There was a boy's camp a mile up the river. It's gone now, and eight of the kids are missing. We put a boat in the water, and all that happened was we lost a boat." He glanced at the dairy farmer. "How'd you know where to find me? Have you been in Hebertown?"
The dairy farmer nodded.
"Is it bad there?"
The dairy farmer coughed. "You haven't been in town for a while, have you?" He didn't look at the burgess. "The water was up to the corner where the Moose building is—you know? Somebody told me all the stores on Front Street are gone."
He went on from there. By the time the chief of police got back with old Sprayragen the burgess had pieced together an ugly picture.
As the jeep turned around, Burgess Starkman yelled, "Oh, by the way—thanks!" He looked blankly at Brayer. "Did you hear what he said?"
"Enough." Brayer looked sick. He burst out, "God amighty, Henry, we're doing this all wrong. We ought to be back in town, running the show, instead of out here trying to do everything ourselves. We ought to have two-way radio on the pumpers, and a first-aid emergency truck, and an organization set up year-round with volunteers trained for emergency work. Sure, it'd cost a little money, but what the hell, the taxpayers'll stand for it. Something like this will make godfearing citizens out of them for a while anyhow."
"Sure," said the burgess gently. "Sure, Red. You finish up here and come on back to town and we'll start over." He left the chief of police there, with his thick mustache running water and his old face worried and indignant. As he headed back to the car where the Chesbros were waiting, he thought: Red's a good man and he's right, only he hasn't finished thinking it through yet. We need all those things all right. But after this—what taxpayers?
Artie Chesbro was sulking. If that power-mad son of a bitch Starkman had been willing to give him two lousy minutes of his time, they could have got the whole thing over with and he'd be back in Summit by now, getting a good night's sleep, instead of catching pneumonia sitting in the car. He couldn't even help out in their lousy Boy-Scout act—they'd chased him back to the car the second time he'd fallen in, on the pretext that they didn't have another flashlight to replace the one he'd lost. So there went a fine chance to get Starkman's ear. Thank God, he told himself virtuously, nothing like this could happen back in Summit. For two cents he'd turn around and head back and the hell with the burgess—the old Swanscomb place wasn't worth all this trouble.
Or anyway, it wouldn't be, if it hadn't been for the signed option agreement he'd given the men from Chillicothe, Ohio.... "Shut up that damn humming," he snapped at his wife.
Mrs. Chesbro laughed softly.
Chesbro didn't even notice the burgess until the door of the car opened. "How's it going, Henry?" he demanded cordially. "Hope you found those kids. Damn shame about the camp, but if they will build on low ground they have to expect something like this."
"Let's head back for town," said the burgess. He looked at the clock on Chesbro's dashboard. That couldn't be right! Two—three—four hours they'd been out here, he counted.
That was time enough to wash all of Hebertown away. He leaned back, and let himself be weary. He hadn't been up this late in—in—he couldn't remember.
Chesbro was at it again, he noticed abstractedly. It didn't take him fifty words to get from the flood to Topic A—why the borough of Hebertown should, ought and must give him the old Swanscomb place. But the burgess didn't mind. Chesbro was a saturation-talker; his tactic was to hammer, hammer, hammer away, never giving the other man a chance to get an adverse word in; and it wasn't too hard, after all, to listen to the rain on the car roof instead. He realized vaguely that that rain had been coming down awful hard for an awfully long time. Once, he remembered, they had had a big summer thunderstorm and Bess had read him out of the paper the amazing statement that more than four inches of rain had come out of that one storm. This had to be more than that. Much more.
What about Bess, by the way? Their house was high enough up, he calculated, there wasn't much chance of flood water reaching it. But had she stayed home? It wouldn't be like Bess to stay home by herself, especially when he didn't show up and the phones were down. She would have tried to cross the highway into the borough and found out that that was impossible. Then she would have—he checked off the possibilities—probably she would have gone to her sister's house. That was all right; good location. Barring some freak like a falling tree or a collapsing roof.
He leaned back, his mind slowly going blank and relaxed, under the soothing drone of the flapping windshield wipers and the pounding rain and Artie Chesbro's ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta. Mrs. Chesbro had let her head slump onto the burgess's shoulders. She was probably used to that maddeningly persistent voice. Maybe asleep.
He glanced down at her.
She wasn't asleep. Her eyes were squeezed shut with anguish and her mouth was suffering. Not with physical pain. The burgess realized slowly that she was not used to the maddening voice at all and had infinitely more reason to hate its clacking than he.
"Cigarette?" Artie Chesbro said again. Now what was the matter with the old son of a bitch? He said more loudly: "Cigarette, Henry?"
"Uh, sure." Chesbro grinned wisely; the burgess had just come across Polly in one of her queer moods. He reached over to the glove compartment. "Matches? Here, here's my lighter."
The burgess spun the wheel of the lighter and held the flaming wick to his cigarette for a long second while he took three puffs. Mrs. Chesbro moved over a little. The darkness outside and the momentary brightness inside the car turned the windshield into a mirror; he could see her tortured smile.
The brightness inside almost wrecked them. As the burgess snapped the lighter shut and you could see through the windshield again, Chesbro gasped and tramped on the brake; fast as he was, the car was already nosing into a surging stream that cut across the road.
The engine chugged and died. There was a long moment of silence. How little we know our land, the burgess thought, too tired for panic, filled with resignation. The hills and valleys we know and name, but the little draws in the hills down which the heavens drain into our river, we glance stupidly at them in a dry season and see nothing. But this torrent before us is one of those draws. No doubt we paid just enough attention to it—only where it crossed this road—to bury a culvert that would guide it in time of rain and thought we were through with it for all time. But the rain began and first it soaked into the pasture and woodlot duff until they could hold no more; the rain went on and raced in a sheet across pasture and cropland until it found the draw and gurgled into it and raced down the hillside safely channeled, hit the culvert with a gurgle and poured through and tumbled down the hill on the other side, and still the rain sheeted down and the culvert filled, and when it was gorged to the full the rain still fell, and the water rose above the culvert and blindly poured across the road six inches deep, a foot, a yard, and here we are. Try to get through and blue sparks will snap from the sparkplug terminals to the wet block, the vapor in the cylinders will not fire and Artie Chesbro's pride, his joy, his car, will soon be a coffin for three drowned bodies, costlier than any bronze sarcophagus.
But Chesbro was swearing and tramping on the starter. "Stay in!" he yelled as his wife half-opened the door. "I'll get this son of a bitch started or know the reason why!"
There was a lopsided chugging. One terminal was dry enough; it had been only spray. And then the motor roared. The car backed violently up the hill in the dark. "There was a side road," Chesbro panted. "Headed uphill. Can't turn around on this damn thing, we'd go into the ditch, but I can flip onto the side road when we come to it."
He felt good; this was what he was good at. From high school on he had been a fast, hard driver who delighted in tricky maneuvering; for years now he had been in the habit of passing anything on the road; it made him feel good and he felt good now. He backed the car, roaring, twisted full around in the seat and peering into the dark. He remembered a straightaway and a left curve; as the car backed into the curve he slowed a little but not much. And then they came to the side road. "What did I tell you?" he cried happily. "There's the son of a bitch right where I said it would be!"
He shifted and roared into the right turn up the hill. "Where does this take us, Henry?" he snapped, as from the bridge to the chartroom.
The burgess smiled in the dark. "I don't know, Arthur," he said. "How little we know our land...."
"Eh?" The old man was tired and rambling. Too bad; now it was all on his shoulders. But when he got at him later he'd remind him that he had, in a way, saved his life, that he didn't expect anything for himself, but that he wanted to do something for the community—
"There's a light!" screamed Mrs. Chesbro.
It seemed to be a filling station; there were the pumps and there was a two-storey frame building behind them. One of those crossroads groceries, Chesbro thought as they swept past.
"But aren't you going to stop, Arthur?" she asked.
"Nonsense, dear," he grunted. "We started for Hebertown and that's where we're going."
How little we know our land, thought the burgess again. For there, ahead in the twin beams, was a sheet of muddy water. Their speed was such that they plowed into it with a tremendous gush of spray. "We'll make it," Chesbro cried. Water rose chillingly inside the car to their calves as they plowed heavily forward and then lurched to a stop.
Chesbro said between his teeth: "Like last time." He ground the starter three times; the fourth time he tramped on the button nothing happened. The battery was shorted out.
"Here we are," Mrs. Chesbro said inanely.
Chesbro tramped on the dead button again and again.
"It's rising, isn't it?" said the burgess. "Let's get out and wade before we have to swim."
Hating him, his wife and himself, hating the car and the water, Arthur Chesbro opened the door; more water swirled in, seat-high. "Let's go," he said gruffly. "Five minutes and we'll be in that filling station, grocery, whatever it was."
He gingerly lowered himself into the water; it came to his waist and chilled the bone. "I'll lead," he said. "Come on."
Surprisingly there was a strong current; he had thought it would be a sort of pond. Instead it was a temporary catch basin for the living water that was thundering down from the heavens on its way to the river and finally the sea. They were simply in a low spot where water was detained for a while before rushing on. The same cubic yard of water could wash out a power line running along a high ridge, wash out a dirt road lower down on the hill, pour through a farmhouse lower down smashing the windows and depositing stinking mud on the floor, short his battery here, trapping the three of them, and still rage on with a long career of ruin before it. It was the secret of the flood's destructiveness.
Chesbro inched his way forward, taking care to keep the current abeam of him, feeling for the hardtop with his feet. The burgess and his wife held the skirt of his raincoat, one to a side.
He stepped on something slippery and crashed face-forward into the muddy water; it was the burgess who, with unexpected wiry strength hauled him upright again while he floundered.
"Fish or something," he sputtered.
They trudged forward, dead-tired after fifty feet of it, the current and the sullen resistance of the water itself, but the level was dropping about them as they climbed the rim of the basin in the land.
In ten minutes they kicked through inch-deep water to the road surface, wet only with the pelting rain. Silently they splashed along the road.
"Wait," the burgess said abruptly. They stopped. He still had Chesbro's lighter; he crouched and snapped it alight. "The water's still rising," he said. "Following right along behind us." As they stood there it lapped at the soles of their shoes.
Ten more interminable minutes—hard walking, their weight increased fifty per cent by their sodden clothes—and Mrs. Chesbro said: "There's the light."
They shambled into a trot by unspoken agreement. It suddenly seemed very important to them all that they should get to a warm, dry place, shed their clothes, eat, sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sharon Froman shepherded the woman from the car, this Mrs. Chesbro, into the back room—a queer one, she was, but that could wait. "Take off what you can spare and hang it up," she said briskly, efficiently, and headed back for the front room. There had been something when the woman's husband and Mickey Groff met. Sharon Froman wanted to see.
They were comparing notes on the flood, and that was all right. If you didn't have an ear skilled in detecting the grace notes of conflict it might have sounded like any other strangers in common trouble, but Sharon's ear caught resonances beyond that. Take the woman's husband, for instance. He was chattering away to, of all people, sick-pup Dick McCue; but his eyes kept wandering to Mickey Groff.
Mrs. Goudeket scolded: "Sharon! The blanket for Mr. Starkman, you forgot it?"
"He can take mine," Sharon said—she didn't want to go back to the storeroom just then. She handed the holed, grease-spotted rag to the old man, then remembered and carefully draped it around his shoulders. "They stink," she told him cheerfully. "And I think they've got bugs; but they're better than pneumonia." She grinned at Mickey Groff.
"Thank you, Miss," said Henry Starkman. He had not failed to notice that the girl was playing up to Groff. Gold digger, he diagnosed, archaically and without passion. He was waiting for Chesbro to switch his attention from the kid to Groff. Starkman had sat enough hours in the law-offices of county politicians to smell the beginnings of a deal before it really existed. Chesbro wasn't ready yet; he hadn't even made up his mind to offer something to Groff—quite. But it was in the air. Pretty soon Chesbro would turn to the manufacturer and say something bluff and hearty like, "Well, I see we're going to be chewing each other's ears off in the ring tomorrow," and then, if Chesbro could find a private place to do it, the two of them would be talking quietly for a while....
Starkman hugged the smelly blanket around him. Shivering, he thought querulously: What's the matter with Bess? I want my cocoa.
He shook his head to clear it, and got up to look at the rain outside. He shouldn't be here at all, of course; what had the people made him burgess for, at that fat and sought-after salary of two hundred dollars a year, if not to be on hand when the community was in trouble? And if a flood wasn't trouble—
A sort of choking sound from Mrs. Goudeket made him turn around.
The Chesbro woman was standing in the doorway to the storeroom. In the light from the candles she had no eyes, the ragged blankets she wore were robes, she was blindly staring marble. She had swept the blankets spirally around her body and over her wet hair; a hobble skirt at one end and a turban at the other. She was striking, and she stood for a moment posed as though she knew it.
Mrs. Goudeket made a tongue-smacking sound. Artie Chesbro looked around vaguely. "Oh, hello, honey," he said. "Now, this thunderstorm we had in Summit in forty-six a couple of cellars were flooded all right, but—" Dick McCue nodded mechanically, his eyes fixed on the woman.
She came over to Starkman and sat down next to him. At close range, the costume didn't seem as extreme as half-lit by the candles, but the burgess felt uneasy. She was too close to him, that was it; she was sitting on the floor, looking up at him.
"I'd better get you something to sit on," he said, and escaped.
They managed to build a fire in the storeroom—there were a couple of sheet-metal soft-drink signs; they raised one, punctured for draft, on a row of bottles and placed another one underneath to catch the hot ashes. It worked. Mickey Groff had placed his bet on the normal air leakage around the window frames carrying off the worst of the smoke, and so it did. It didn't pay to sit too close to it. You had to watch it minute by minute to keep it fed and keep it from setting fire to the shack. But it served to dry out their clothes, and besides it felt more cheerful.
The men settled among themselves a plan for rotating guard duty—guarding against fire and flood. Sam Zehedi and Dick McCue took the first shift, one to keep the other awake; they sat and looked at each other. They had nothing to say; and besides, it was hard enough for the others to sleep without their talking.
Artie Chesbro, sharing a double pad of newspapers with his wife, schemed feverishly: He hasn't said a word, he's waiting for me to make the first move. How much should I cut him in for? Or for that matter, do I have to—?
Well, yes. He'd seen enough of the burgess by now to know that the deal he had optimistically outlined in the newspaper was out. Starkman wouldn't cave in; you could use the anti-outsider theme just so far, and then you had to come across with something tangible for Starkman himself, or for the borough of Hebertown. On the other hand, what about this: Suppose Groff cooled off on the location after being stuck in this crazy flood they had down here? Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to convince him Hebertown was a lousy idea—maybe even, this was a chance to do something with the old Ackerman tract north of Summit. He doubted that; Groff would know a swamp when he saw one; but suppose, an hour and eight minutes from now, when they went on guard duty together as he had carefully arranged, he merely suggested it to the manufacturer and made it sound good.... He wished his wife would stop that damn humming in his ear. God, why couldn't they at least be home, where they could be decently asleep in their own individual rooms?
Asleep, Mrs. Goudeket's face was curved in a smile. She was dreaming of 1926, a bride, the rooming house at Brighton Beach. Between her and Mickey Groff, Sharon's face was smiling too, sweetly and trustfully, as she nestled obliviously against the manufacturer, but of course she wasn't asleep.
Sam Zehedi sat torpidly over the fire, waiting for the last of it to burn itself out. He'd nearly dropped off three times, and he and McCue, consulting, had decided it was more dangerous to leave it burning than to put it out. It did stink pretty bad, he thought fuzzily; putting water on it had been a mistake. It smelt a little oily.
He swallowed and rubbed his stomach. That lousy candy bar, he didn't like it, he didn't want it, why had he eaten it? He wistfully turned his thoughts to pickled mussels wrapped in grape leaves, now farther out of reach than ever, and a nice, plump black-eyed girl to serve them.
McCue had dozed off, he noticed. A kid. Well, let him sleep. What difference did it make?
Funny, he thought dizzily, not even broiled lamb seemed attractive right now. He shouldn't have drunk that cream soda either—he gulped and wrenched his thoughts away from that cream soda. The smell of the dying fire was getting pretty strong and he felt nauseous, as if the floor were moving about underneath him.
Now the sleepers were turning and coughing. There was something wrong, Sam Zehedi fuzzily thought. He swayed to his feet and lurched toward the door. Clear the air, he thought. The last embers of the fire winked out and he thought for a vague moment that he had lost his eyesight. He flung the door open with his last strength and took a deep sobbing breath. Images of white-tiled walls, green-painted corridors swirled through his head; he was ten again and they were wheeling him along the green-painted corridors to have his tonsils cut out, Morrisania Hospital—
He fell heavily across the restless, coughing shape of Mickey Groff.
Groff sat up slowly, choking. His head thudded as if with the hangover to end them all.
Gas.
"Get up!" he cried, swaying. "Get up!" Around him they stirred and coughed.
"Gasoline fumes!" he yelled. "Get up! Up the stairs! Move!" He staggered through the dark room, kicking at them and yelling. The stairs were in back—back. And this was—a wall. He leaned against it. It would be good to slump down and rest for a moment, just a moment—
He lurched along the wall to the corner, to the open stairway that let to the upstairs room. "Over here!" he choked at them. "I'm standing by the stairs. Come on! Come on!"
One by one they stumbled to the sound of his voice and began to drag themselves up the shaky stairs.
One. Two. Three.... Four.... Five....
"Come on! I'm standing by the stairs. The stairs. This way. This."
Two more to come. Two. More. Some fool was striking a light, a blue-green light to blow them to hell. But no; it was his eyes, glazed and burning, that made the light. Two more to come.
His raw throat and bursting lungs silenced him. He lurched across the floor and stumbled over something soft. He knelt, took it under the armpits and dragged it to the wall, followed the wall to the corner, to the stairs. Feet on the stairs.
A young voice in the darkness choked: "Mr. Groff. Come up. I'll get him. Can you make it?" Young McCue. Strong arms took his burden over and it bumped up the steps. That was seven. One to go. He headed back into the thick sweetness of the fumes and crashed to the floor. He never felt McCue come to his aid and heave him up the steps, but through it he was muttering: "One more."
They were a sick lot when he awoke an hour later.
In the dark upstairs, cluttered with boxes and cans Mrs. Goudeket was saying: "The water, it seeped into the gas tanks underground, it must be. The gas floated up and all around us on top of the water. God be thanked, nobody lit a match and the fire was out. As it was we were almost poisoned in our sleep, thanks to that Arab." There was hatred in her voice, fifteen centuries of it.
Burgess Starkman's voice emerged from an attack of coughing. "He's dead, Mrs. Goudeket. You shouldn't—" He broke into coughing again.
Mickey Groff grunted, trying to talk. It was important to clear that up. His head was pounding, but Mrs. Goudeket didn't understand. "He was a Syrian," he croaked. "A civilized Christian people."
"Mr. Groff!" said Mrs. Goudeket. "You're better! We were afraid—You're a hero, Mr. Groff. You saved our lives. Except—"
"Zehedi?" he asked.
He knew that she was nodding in the darkness, just as he knew that she was bitterly ashamed of her outburst. "Too late," she sighed. "Ai, too late. Dick went down with the handkerchief around his mouth and pulled him up the stairs. His heart was going, and then it wasn't. Maybe fifteen minutes. Too late."
A plump arm slid around him and Sharon Froman's voice said in his ear, "Try to sit up. We all felt better after we sat up." She supported his back and eased his trunk upright; he thought his head would explode. He leaned against her dizzily and felt her cool palm against his forehead. "Better," he grunted. "Thanks."
The burgess's old voice said abruptly, "Sing a psalm for Sam Zehedi, the sad Syrian. Bess? Bess?"
"He's wandering," Sharon said very softly to Mickey Groff. "He won't sleep."
Mrs. Chesbro moved across the floor to the sound of the burgess's voice.
"Where are you going, Polly?" Arthur Chesbro snapped.
"To the poor old man," she said. "Maybe I can talk him into signing the lease before he takes wing."
Now, what did she mean by that? They didn't have a pen, there would have to be witnesses, Groff was right there to break things up if they tried to pressure him, it wouldn't work in a million years. The stupidity of that woman was sometimes absolutely astounding.
She found the bony bundle that was Burgess Harry Starkman. "How little we know ..." he was mumbling. "I was at Belleau Wood, you know. Leatherneck couple wars back. They poured gas shells in for forty-eight hours, but the leathernecks didn't have gas casualties. Court-martial for gas casualties. Not like the doughboys, threw away their masks. Got through Belleau Wood and here I am a gas casualty anyway, thirty-seven years later. Ambushed in Hebertown Township. The boys at the Legion'll get a kick out of that." He sat up abruptly and anxiously called out: "Bess?"
She soothed him and urged him down. "Rest," she said. She felt and unbuttoned his shirt, loosened the blanket around her and spread it over the two of them, pressing herself against his bare chest.
"I remember," he said. "King Solomon. Old reprobate. But don't go away, child." He fell into an uneasy doze, his breath rattling in his chest. She pressed herself against him and lay still and silent.
Dick McCue said, "I wonder if it's safe to smoke."
Mrs. Goudeket snapped: "In a situation like this you don't take chances."
Groff said slowly, "I think it's all right. Gas fumes are heavy; they hug the ground. If we hadn't been sleeping on the floor—"
"I guess I'd better not," McCue said uncertainly. "You can't smell much up here but—I wonder where the water level is now."
"We'll know in the morning," Chesbro said. "Couple of hours. My God, who would have thought it yesterday?"
Sharon Froman said, "It's bad, Mr. Chesbro. It means a permanent loss of industry—unless we move fast."
"What permanent loss?" Chesbro snapped. "We shovel out the mud, we replace the machines, we get going again. The government'll help any sound business in a case like this."
"I am thinking," she said, "of the South."
"The South? What's the South got to do with this?"
"This is the godsend they've been waiting for! Think, Mr. Chesbro! They've spent millions on advertising and promotion to attract industry—to steal it, if you like. Tax exemptions. Rent-free plant. This flood is worth a billion dollars to them, Mr. Chesbro. If it's as big as it looks from here, it's worth all the sixteen-page ads they'll ever run in the SundayTimes. Believe me, I know. There are going to be task-forces from the Bureau of Industrial Development of every southern state calling on every manufacturer and distributor in this area. 'Frightful about your tragedy,' and 'Us Delta folks want to he'p you any way we can,' and 'Don't get us wrong, friend, we ain't out to steal industry from the No'th at a time like this, but—' And then it starts. They'll woo them with sites, with tax write-offs, with cheap labor rates. They'll strip the area of industry, clean as a whistle. Unless."
"My God!" said Chesbro, appalled.
He had never considered the angle but she was, God knew, dead-right.
Nor, he reflected self-pityingly, wouldheget any such offers. What did he have that would attract a Mississippi chamber of commerce? It was all intangibles that his fortune was going to come from—was almost coming from already, he assured himself panickily. He had come pretty close; it was only a question of time until the legislature authorized the trotting track, until the money borrowed from his wife's father and invested in that promising Geiger-positive tract north of Summit turned up real pay dirt, until—
Until never, now. Not if this frighteningly plausible young woman was right. And she sounded right.
He said slowly, "You're a very smart young woman, Miss Froman. Have you had any experience in this field?"
She smiled candidly. "Only enough to get the feel of it, Mr. Chesbro. I'm a writer. You might say I've made a study of everything." (And besides, I typed Hesch's thesis for him, didn't I?The War Between The States, Round Two: A Study in Industrial Dynamics.)
He nodded. "You said 'unless.' Unless what?"
She said composedly, "Unless we get there first. Unless we form an organization immediately—on a regional basis—to hammer home our side.Skilledlabor that's been through the birth-pangs of organizational strikes. They're the roughest kind, and they still lie ahead for the South. Access to the markets. A good life for the management and supervisory workers. Bracing climate. Sound Republican territory."
She had him. She could feel it, and she was never wrong. Let him nibble at the bait a while; let him taste it and want it, and bite down into it all by himself—bite down on that buried "we" that would hook him, deep and clean and gasping.
It had looked like a mighty dull autumn, but things were looking better, thought Sharon Froman contentedly. True, if she was going to help this interesting Mr. Chesbro with the curious wife it would mean deferring work on her novel again. Too bad. But she didn't mind the sacrifice. She had made it often enough before.
Regional organization. Hammer hard. Grants from the government? Sure. Tax breaks from the northern states, panicky attempts to match whatever the South might offer? Sure, thought Artie Chesbro; he could arrange that easily. And then?
No more waiting for the legislature to approve or for the assayers to report or for any of the other soul-killing delays that had been the sum of his life; he would be in, he would be at the top of something big. Where he had always wanted to be. Where he deserved to be.
He looked across to where his wife had gone. And her, he thought, satisfied, she would learn at last! Everything he had had to put up with from her, over. Just because her father had a little money she'd thought she owned him—him! Artie Chesbro!
He cleared his throat. "We'd better get some sleep, Miss Froman," he told the girl. "We've got to talk about this in the morning. I think there's a good deal in it—for both of us."
Mrs. Goudeket almost pounded the floor with her fists. Again on her feet! Always this Miss Froman would land on her feet! Without hard work, without virtue, always by black magic being in the right place, always by the smiling face and the straightforward look fooling the one person she had to fool. And this time it wasn't one man, it was two. So let Mickey Groff slip through one snare, she had Artie Chesbro caught in another. God, you call this fair? she demanded.
Better she should have left her at Goudeket's Green Acres. What could she have caught there? That star of stage and screen andbrissim, Dave Wax? The horse-wire expert, Mr. Semmel? But no! She had to throw the girl out—into this!
Mrs. Goudeket moaned and put her fingers in her ears to shut out the maddening words.
CHAPTER EIGHT
That star of stage, screen andbrissimshouted fuzzily at the door: "Go to hell! Let me sleep!"
"Dave!" It was Mr. Semmel's voice. "There's some men here. They want to talk to you."
Dave Wax made an obscene suggestion to Mr. Semmel. He was a tummeler, not the manager of the hotel; let Mrs. Goudeket come back and talk if somebody should do it—"Wait a minute. What'd you say, Semmel?"
The concessionaire repeated it. "The flood's over?" demanded Dave Wax. "The roads are dry?" He staggered over to the window to see the miracle for himself.
Semmel let himself in. "They came in a boat."
"Oh." But it was no surprise. It was still raining. "All right. I'll come down."
He found himself hurrying in spite of himself. It was only a couple of minutes before he was hurrying through the lobby. He saw with a shock that the sofas and chairs in the lobby were occupied—guests too panicky to sleep in their rooms, too exhausted to stay awake; they were sprawled and snoring.
The men from the boat were in the kitchen drinking coffee that the cooks had somehow contrived to make. "I'm Brayer—Hebertown police chief. You people all right here?"
"All right?" You call a hundred and sixty scared, sore guests all right? You call wondering if the whole damn place is going to float away all right? "I guess so," Dave Wax said slowly. He was almost afraid to ask: "How—how is it outside?"
The man rubbed at his mustache. "It's a flood," he said succinctly. "Ask me in the morning. Anyway, we're beginning to get a little organized." His voice took on a mechanical, rehearsed quality. "Don't let anybody drink water unless it's been boiled for ten minutes. Use up everything you can that's in the refrigerators tomorrow morning. What's in the freezers ought to be good till tomorrow night, if you don't open them too often. What you don't eat by then,don't eat. Throw it away. You probably don't have any water pressure, do you? Your own electric pump, I guess? All right; you'll have to set up latrines—use chamber pots if you have to. Dump them in the river to empty them—you're far enough away from everything here."
"Wait a minute." Dave was a little slow to grasp the implications of it. "You mean even by tomorrow night we won't have the power back?"
"I'll consider us very lucky," the police chief said heavily, "if Hebertown ever has power again."
He got up. "They say that by daybreak the weather will be clear enough for helicopters. If you need anything—a doctor if there's an emergency, anything like that—hang a white sheet out of a window and keep somebody standing by. When a helicopter or boat patrol comes by they'll see it and investigate; then you wave another sheet at them and they'll see that somebody gets here."
Dave Wax and Mr. Semmel watched Brayer and his boatman chug away. "Hebertown Chief of Police," said Wax. "Isn't he a little out of his jurisdiction?"
"He said they were looking for somebody. Wanted to know if we'd picked up any refugees. God forbid." Mr. Semmel shook his head firmly. "A mess. Now, in New Hampshire there wouldnever—"
It was cracking daylight when Brayer got back to Hebertown. He sat down in the police station, now an emergency shelter with men, women and children sprawled all over everywhere, and dazedly pushed away the coffee somebody offered him. He hoped he would never see another cup of coffee again.
He said heavily, "Henry'll turn up. I have a lot of confidence in Artie Chesbro's instinct for self-preservation; he'll find a place to hole up in."
"Sure, Red." The head of Hebertown's Civil Defense Squad, an organization with an honorable history extending back nearly four hours, dug his fingers into the bags under his eyes and tried to stay awake. He owned a ready-to-wear establishment on North Front, and he had once allowed the Red Cross to use his second-floor storeroom as a fund-drive headquarters, a record of achievement which had done very little to fit him for staying up all night. "I went down at eleven o'clock to look at the water," he said meditatively. "I didn't want my cellar flooded again, like in thirty-nine, so I shoveled dirt up against the windows, and then I went home to bed." He laughed. He had gone by his store again two hours later—in a boat—and had had to bend down to look through the windows of the loft the Red Cross once had used. "I heard on the radio a list of all the cities that were hit—the worst ones. They didn't even mention Hebertown.... Say, what are you going to tell Bess Starkman?"
CHAPTER NINE
Gray light filtered through the dirty panes of the second-floor window. Arthur Chesbro woke slowly, aching in every bone. When he opened his eyes stickily and peered across the grimy little room he could not at first believe what he saw.
"Polly!" he choked, amazement and outrage blended. His wife, apparently unclothed, was snuggled close to old Harry Starkman, under a single blanket.
She looked up, smiling. "Hush," she said. "I finally got him to sleep. His chest sounds terrible and he has a fever, but if he sleeps he can't be too bad—for now."
She got up gracefully, managing to swirl the blanket around her without showing, Chesbro hoped,toomuch. Then he noted that the youngster from the hotel was gawking. He cleared his throat loudly and the kid looked away.
Mrs. Goudeket grunted to her feet. "Fever?" she asked. "Let me." She went to the sleeping old man and felt his forehead. "He's burning up," she announced grimly. "An old man to walk through the rain and then he got his lungs full of gasoline fumes. I suppose it's pneumonia."
They were silent.
"Excuse me," said Mrs. Goudeket. "I'm going downstairs, nobody should follow me until I come back."
Mickey Groff thought: sensible woman. Somebody had to speak up. He stood for a moment over Sam Zehedi. The poor guy had died hard, fighting it; his eyes were ugly and his mouth contorted. His face in the dim light was bluish, the hue of a swimmer's lips when he's been in too long on a cool day.
Groff went to the window. Some time during the night the rain had lightened; it pattered now instead of drumming. There was mist. He struggled with the window and managed to inch it open against the swelling of its frame and old incrustations of paint. Fresh air swept gratifyingly through the storage room—and then he thought of the burgess.
Sharon Froman understood his glance. She threw her blanket over the old man and said, "He'll be all right." She stretched stiffly. "The old woman's taking forever," she said.
Arthur Chesbro said firmly, "Mrs. Chesbro will be the next to go downstairs. To find her clothes and put them on."
Polly Chesbro grinned amiably. "This thingisscratchy," she said.
Groff leaned out and peered through the mist. All he could tell was that there was water below; how much of it the enigmatic surface did not say.
Mrs. Goudeket puffed up the stairs, a big carton in her arms. "Cheese wafers," she announced. "Somebody open them."
Polly glided to the door, sculptural in her improvised robe, and went down the stairs.
McCue, with the appetite of youth and an athlete, tore open the corrugated cardboard and began gobbling wafers from the first carton he came to.
"Manners, Dickie." Sharon Froman smiled. He swallowed his mouthful convulsively and eyed her.
"Help yourself," he said coldly. "You're no cripple."
"WhyDickie," she purred. "After all we'vebeento each other!"
Mrs. Goudeket looked up. "What's this?" she snapped.
Sharon looked amused and said nothing.
"I don't know what she's talking about," McCue said. The tone automatically indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced him for unlawful cohabitation. "I'll talk to you later," Mrs. Goudeket promised grimly.
Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for free—
He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they played their cards right. "Tear their heartstrings out," she urged. "Get editorials; I've got some contacts in New York. You'd be The Man Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro."
"Call me Arthur," he said. "We're going to be working closely together; I can see that. My prestige and your ideas—"
Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. "He'll never make it without penicillin fast," she commented, helped herself to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.
Mickey Groff looked around; nobody was making a move for the stairs. He stepped over the body of Sam Zehedi and went down. First outside into the drizzle, where water was ankle-deep. He attended to his needs and went back into the store. A bottle of pop caught his eye and he was suddenly burning with thirst. He tore off the cap on a wall opener and gulped it down as fast as the stuff would gurgle from the narrow neck; after a queasy moment he ran for the door and made it in time. The pop gushed up again violently. He sat down, swaying, on the wooden step up to the door and retched a couple of times experimentally. He'd have to be careful eating and drinking for a while. He had got a stiff dose of the fumes.
Zehedi's blue-green, well-worn panel truck was just visible down the road in water to the hubcaps, looking bulky and competent. The goddam thing. And there stood the two gas pumps, goddam them too, and if you could only get the pumps to work you could pump gas from their underground tank into the truck and away they'd buzz, getting somehow into town where the old man could be pumped full of penicillin and dosed with oxygen as needed instead of dying like a sick dog in this kennel.
He went wearily upstairs and said, "Next."
Sharon got up and said, "Excuse me, Arthur."
"Keep out of the cash drawer," Mrs. Goudeket said sourly.
"Did you leave anything?" Sharon asked, wide-eyed. Arthur Chesbro laughed a laugh which turned hastily into a cough when Mrs. Goudeket glared his way.
McCue said suddenly, "I think the rain's stopped." They crowded to the window; he was right. The drizzle had ended and the mist was clearing.
"Good," Chesbro said. "They'll be able to get helicopters up. It's only a matter of time now until they spot us."
Groff said, "I don't think the old man can wait."
Chesbro spread his hands eloquently. "What can we do?"
"Pack him in on our backs," Groff said.
Chesbro said soothingly, "I don't think that'd be practical, Mickey. We're all exhausted, we've all had a touch of gas poisoning. We know more or less where we are and we know which way the town is, but we don't know what lies between us and the town. We may just circle around until we drop from exhaustion. There's a better chance of us being spotted if we stay in this place."
"We're three able-bodied men," Groff said, his temper rising. "We can take turns. A helicopter's just as likely to spot us on a road as it is to spot us here. Chesbro,I'dlike to sit here and wait to be rescued too;Idon't have a yen to go sloshing through the water with Starkman on my back either. But I don't think he can wait. We've got to do everything we can."
"I've got my manuscript to carry," Sharon said apologetically.
"We'lldoeverything we can," Chesbro said reasonably. "But what's the sense of endangering all of us uselessly? The trip wouldn't be good for him. And the women—my wife isn't strong, Mickey, she shouldn't be subjected to—"
"Arthur," said his wife. "Shut up."
She smiled pleasantly at the gathering. "Who's going to be the first to pack him?"
Naturally that's me, of course, Dick McCue thought sourly, sliding in the mud. I'm an athlete, so they figure I'm Superman or somebody. He missed his footing and nearly fell. They might just as well have carried him pickaback as on this door, wrenched out of the upper rooms.... From behind him Mickey Groff called: "Time for you to take over, Chesbro."
McCue relinquished his end of the improvised stretcher to Artie Chesbro. His arms felt wrenched out of their sockets, and they had covered five hundred yards, at the most.
The rain hadn't really stopped, not quite. There was still water to be wrung out of the scudding stratus, and it came down in little bursts of droplets. Polly Chesbro stumbled along beside the sick man, trying to keep the rain off him when it came, ready with a smile when his eyes jolted open and, for a moment, he stared wonderingly about him.
It was going to be a long trip. They had had to skirt around a sort of contour line instead of following the road. Polly wondered briefly if there would come a point where the road dipped down into the streaming water, and there wasn't any useful hill handy. She didn't know this road at all; had seen Hebertown only once or twice before last night; had only the vaguest impression of what the terrain might be like. For that matter, none of them knew much about the country they were hiking across. On this Day, her mind inscribed in a crabbed hand, our Party suffered the Loss of Its two Aboriginals, reposing our Destiny to the care of the Greatest Guide of All.
Mickey Groff was remembering the Ligurian coast of Italy. The American bombers had smashed it flat from Anzio to Genoa, and Groff had thought proudly, a little selfishly, that no such destruction could ever come to his own country. But this was as bad, at least as bad. They had come across few houses, but there were ominous objects sailing down stream that once had been houses and barns and all the other structures man builds and his enemies sweep away. He tried to reconstruct the terrain as it must have been before the flood, but there was a rightness about the broad sheets of water that made it impossible. They were there; they must always have been there. Why did people build their homes down near the water, anyhow? Was a burbling brook in the back yard worth having if suddenly, unpredictably, it could destroy your home?
He wondered if the War Department was able to look itself in the face that morning, remembering the careful charts the colonels had shown him that called for dispersal, concealment, removal of such essential industries as his own. Suppose, they had said gravely, New York should take a bomb; you'd be out of commission; you must move out of the city to where you can be safe, since the production of your shop is of great importance to the country's defense. And they had showed him the maps, marked "Secret," of the instrument plants in Connecticut, the explosives factories in the Delaware valley, the electronics laboratories along the Jersey streams.
Two-forty-eight, two-forty-nine, two-fifty. "All right, Dick," he told the golf pro, "you can take over for a while." He surrendered the back end of the stretcher and looked around.
"Wait a minute!" he ordered sharply. "What's that up there?"
There was a private dirt road slanting down toward them, and something was moving. They all set up a waving and bellowing, and a group of horsemen appeared on the rim of the highway and came toward them, three or four of them, picking their way through the mud.
"The United States Cavalry," said Polly Chesbro clearly, "is charging to the rescue."
Two of the riders were men in chaps and sombreros and the third was a thirteen-year-old girl. They goggled unbelievingly at the litter bearers. They were from a dude ranch up in the hills, and they were on their way to Hebertown to complain because their lights and phone were off.
"Jesus! We knew there was some rain last night, but we never had any idea—" The cowboys stared at each other.
"How about giving us a hand?" Mickey Groff requested. "This man's in bad shape. If we don't get him to a doctor I don't think he'll make it."
The cowboys scratched their heads for a while, and finally Mickey Groff showed them how to sling the stretcher between two of the horses. "Hold them tight and walk them slow," he ordered, putting a cowboy at the head of each horse. "The ladies can take turns riding the other horse, I guess."
But he got no customers for that; Mrs. Goudeket was scandalized, and the young girl was too excited, and Polly Chesbro wouldn't get that far from the sick man. Finally Artie Chesbro said off-handedly, "Hell, no sense inwastingthe horse." He was in the saddle before anybody could object.
It didn't make things good, but it made them better. Mickey Groff, walking ahead, reasoned that he had disposed his forces well. According to the cowboys, they had a good three miles to go on the road—ifthey could follow the road even approximately. An hour and a half—double it because of the weather—maybe double it again, he thought worriedly, if there were too many detours. He looked back at the motionless figure between the horses. That was stretching it, but there was a chance the old man might hang on that long.
Maybe the cowboys' first idea—slinging the old man across a saddle bow and galloping away—was the right one after all. But no; they had to stick together, at least until they found out if the road would take them all the way. And besides, thought Mickey Groff, aware of his limitations but also aware that he had succeeded to the command of the party, you have to make up your mind and stick to it.
The girl came prancing up beside him. "You look like a good guy," she commented. "Here."
He took the bottle from her; it was a pocket-sized half-pint of whiskey. It was like a gift from God. He took two measured swallows and put the cap back on; he could feel it biting in his throat, invading the back of his nose, spreading warmly through his chest.
"God bless you," he told the girl sincerely.
"Sure. But don't tell on Charley, will you? I knew he had it, but if Mrs. Koontz ever finds out she'll pulverize him." He started to hand the bottle back to her. "No, you keep it. You might want some more, and if Charley gets his hands on it again, good-by whiskey."
"Thanks." He slipped it into his pocket; then, remembering the rest of the party, turned and glanced at them. McCue was plodding along head down; Chesbro was glaring at him; Mrs. Goudeket was watching but she caught his eye, smiled faintly and shook her head. Good enough, thought Mickey Groff; we'll save what's left. He tried to remember what the current position was on giving liquor to old men dying of pneumonia. If it looks bad enough, he decided, we'll try giving him a shot; otherwise better not.
The girl was chattering: "Won't the old lady plotz when she hears about all this? That joker on the horse back there says he thinks the whole town's washed away."
"I doubt it."
The girl was disappointed. "Well," she said, "I bet there's going to be plenty of excitement in Hebertown, anyway. I always wanted to be a nurse—you know, not in a hospital, a Red Cross nurse or something like that, going away in the wars and all like that. My sister was a nurse's aide, only they wouldn't let me in because I was too young."
"Eh? Nurse?" He glanced at her quickly. "Know anything about pneumonia cases?"
"Sure. Penicillin, keep them warm, bed rest—"
"That's enough. Thanks." It had been a hope, but looking at her killed hope.
They plodded on and came to a blacktop. "I know where we are," one of the phony cowboys said. "Straight on in to Hebertown, two miles. It's a ridge road; it ought to be clear sailing."
A car was buzzing in the distance; frantically they flagged it down as it closed up on them. It was a late-model suburban with a New York plate in the rear, man and wife in the front seat, three kids rioting in the back. They all looked very strange to Mickey Groff, and he realized at last what the strangeness consisted of. They were clean, fed and rested.
"What do you want?" the man asked from behind the wheel, a little nervously.
What did they want.Penicillin. Beds. Warmth. Coffee.
"Take us into town, will you?" Mickey Groff said wearily.
The man hit the lock button on his door and cranked the window up a little. "It's only a little way on," he said evasively. "We aren't going any place special, we just heard about it on the radio and thought we'd come and see what was up—"
He hit the gas and the car zoomed on.
"Sightseers," Mrs. Goudeket said, wide-eyed. "God in Heaven, sightseers."
Mrs. Chesbro was swearing.
Arthur Chesbro was swearing and trying to remember what the license-plate numerals were.
After a while they trudged on, there being nothing else to do.
A helicopter came from the west as they marched, dipped low above them and hovered for a moment while they yelled and waved. The pilot pointed back into the body of the chopper with big exaggerated gestures after they had pointed at the burgess on his litter. Then he buzzed on eastward.
Mickey Groff said: "I guess he was telling us he was full up." He rubbed his back for a moment. "Maybe he meant he'll be back for us." But he didn't really think so, and the helicopter didn't come back their way.
CHAPTER TEN
When they topped the rise and stood overlooking Hebertown there was a moment of silence and then a groan of horror burst from them all.
"Gutted," Arthur Chesbro said succinctly. "Not a thin dime left in town; not a nickel."
The true flood crest which they had missed in the hills had left a plain wake through the town. It was dark brown and even from their height they could smell its stink. Sewage, chemical waste, mud churned up from river bottoms where it had been rotting for a century. The brown smear lay over two-thirds of Hebertown, and there was something worse at its center, a long streak scores of yards to either side of the river. It seemed almost to have been bulldozed clean.
The river still boiled many feet above its normal height, and flotsam rolled past, dotting its swell. There were tree trunks, chicken houses, timber and swollen things you didn't want to guess at. The bridges were out, the stout PWA bridge and the two rickety county bridges.
Chesbro studied the view. "Gramatan Mills are wrecked," he said. "They'll never come back. They rebuilt on the river in ninety-seven right where the old waterpower mill was. Half their plant's—torn away."
"Let's get on down," Groff said.
McCue volunteered: "I'd try the school—if it's standing. That's where you always set up cots and aid stations."
Chesbro said: "The junior high's standing. Built well on the outskirts. Lucky it's on this side of the river."
They started down the hill. The stink grew worse.
First they came to frame houses with picket fences and vegetable gardens in the back. The porches were full; exhausted people looked dully at them. At the third or fourth house a man came to his gate to watch them pass.
Groff said, "We've got your burgess here. He seems to have pneumonia. Can we make him comfortable in your place and get a doctor for him?"
The man said tiredly, "There's no room in my place. I have twenty-five, thirty people. And the doctors won't make house calls, not today. All three of 'em are down at the school. Take him there."
Mrs. Goudeket said, "Could you maybe put me up, mister? We've been walking and walking—?"
"No room," he said. "I'm full up. Everybody's full up. Go to the school. They got stretchers there. The Air Force dropped 'em in the athletic field. I hope Henry gets better. Go down to the school. They'll take care of you there."
"For ten dollars, maybe—" Mrs. Goudeket began.
"Money's no good," the man said. His voice began to rise hysterically. "Nothing's no good. I work at the Gramatan Mills and look at it. I worked there twenty-seven years, I was going to get my pension in 1958, and now the mill's gone. My father drove down into town before it hit to see if he could help and he isn't back yet and I don't know if he's alive or dead." He took sudden hold of himself. "I have to go and tend the cookstove. You have to boil your water now. Thirty people drink a lot of water, we keep boiling it all the time. Take care of Henry." He went back up his path and inside.
Past the rustic houses on the fringe they came to a belt of substantial older places, the homes of the borough petty aristocracy. Here the smear of brown had reached; the horses picked their way uncertainly, fetlock-deep in stinking mud. A mad-eyed woman in a housecoat was on one of the handsome porches shoveling and shoveling; the silt plopped into the silt that covered her lawn.