THE DUMP
Pulling aside the dingy kitchen curtain, she looked out. "It's starting again," she said tensely.
To the north, a scant mile from the house, a great greasy billow of black smoke rolled skyward. Squealing sea gulls flapped over huge mounds of smouldering trash. Although she couldn't see them from the window, the woman knew that the reeking wasteland literally crawled with an army of voracious rats.
Somehow, the omniscient, all-encompassing State had overlooked the dump. In its dynamic zeal to provide prefabs, food capsules and carefully edited newstapes for all citizens, the State may have bypassed the dump temporarily.
There was a rumor to the effect, however, that the wasteland had been deliberately preserved as a sort of monstrous museum area, a "See-how-things-used-to-be" tourist attraction.
In any event, in the very midst of marvels of efficiency, exactitude and unending impersonal energy, there it remained, a sour, rat-sluiced tract carefully shunned by the average State citizen.
If people still existed in the dump itself, or even in its immediate environs, it was generally conceded that it was their own fault. The State always stood ready to house and feed the indigent.
Broken springs groaned as the man arose from a cot. He shook his head. "Wish you'd relax, Lucy. Little smoke ain't hurtin' you none."
She turned, eyes bright with anger. "Little smoke!" she repeated. "Smoke that seeps right through the shingles into the house! Smoke that gets in your lungs, in your hair, in your food, in your clothes—even in your skin! I tell you I've had enough of smoke and cinders and rats—and sea gulls! Sea gulls! Hah! Those dirty birds screeching like hungry cats all the time. They're dump gulls. Garbage gulls! I'd like to wring their filthy necks!"
Slipping into a threadbare jacket, the man started toward the kitchen door. "You sure get worked up over nothin'. Sea gulls got to live, like everything else."
The woman's voice rose in fury. "I suppose you'd say the rats have got to live too! You'd even defend the rats!"
The man paused, his hand on the door knob. He looked aggrieved. "Why that ain't fair, Lucy. We fight the rats. You know that."
"You fight them!" she mocked. "Well, let me tell you something! You're losing the fight! The rats are winning! They're taking over! There must be a million out there!"
The man rubbed his chin reflectively. He looked thoughtful. "They're tough, all right. But they're under control. We club a couple hundred to death, most every night." He opened the kitchen door.
As he stepped out, the woman's fury seemed suddenly to vanish. Her voice was no longer shrill; it was flat, listless. "When will you be back, Ralph?"
He shrugged. "Can't say, exactly. We might go on a rat kill. Take a couple hours. Maybe we'll poke around for stuff till dark. Maybe just gab over a can of mulligan." He closed the door.
From the window, she watched him cross the littered back yard and disappear in the adjacent cattails.
Supper time came and went and he had not returned. She had a cup of tea and a biscuit and then sat up, trying to read, but found herself unable to concentrate. Finally she crossed to the kitchen window.
Darkness had fallen, but the Enemy was still visible, revealed in the lurid flickering light of towering trash fires. At night the dump seemed even more forbidding. You never knew what that flame-riven darkness might conceal.
As she stood at the window, she imagined that the approaches to Hell itself might resemble the scene before her—fires circling the night and beyond in the deeper darkness terrors and frights unspeakable.
At last, wearily, she undressed for bed. But she did not sleep peacefully. This evening the nightmare came swiftly. There were variations, but the essential outline was nearly always the same.
From the outside darkness, from above and below and from all sides, came subdued but ominous whispers of sound—gnawing, scraping, squeaking, scuttling. And then the house began to settle, literally to sink, like a ship in the sea. The busy rats had eaten away its foundations and now it was being engulfed in great tides of trash. The dump was closing in on it, like a monstrous growth. Soon it would disappear out of sight in the slimy darkness. As it slipped into the sour earth, the rats broke through. They poured through the windows, the doors, down the chimney—huge, hairy creatures with red eyes and yellow flashing fangs. They leaped upon the bed, lunged for her throat.
She was sitting up in bed, screaming, bathed in sweat, when she finally awoke.
Ralph had not yet returned. She got up, drank tea, and went back to bed for a few minutes' fitful sleep in the hour or two before dawn.
She was sitting in the kitchen when Ralph returned. Grey light was filtering over the cattails. In the distance a sea gull squealed.
Ralph yawned, stretched, sat down. "Quite a night. We musta clubbed a hundred rats. Maybe more. Jim Tavey got nipped, but not bad. When we got back, Fred Morgee's woman had a pail of the best damned mulligan I ever ate. Hot and spicy! Jeepers, that was good!"
She glared at him. "That filthy woman! Living in the dump! Bad enough to live next to it."
He spread his hands. "Why Lucy, it ain't bad. Morgee's rigged up a shack with a real tin roof. Got a floor and a potbelly. Got bunks. Sheila Morgee's the happiest female I ever did see."
She slammed her fist on the table top. "Well she can have her filthy shack in the dump!I'mthrough! Living here right on the edge is getting just as bad as being inside. Cinders, smoke, smells, sea gulls—and rats, rats, rats!" Her voice rose hysterically.
He spoke soothingly. "What can we do, Lucy? Twenty years ago we paid ten thousand for this place. Now the State wouldn't give us over three. How long would that last? In a year or so we'd be wards. Broke. The State would take us."
"What's so bad about that?" she countered. "We'd have two rooms in a plastic prefab. Plenty of food capsules. An entertaintime screen. Now they even give you the choice of a permajade juniper bush or a simulated maple tree for the lawn."
He snorted. "Lawn! Artificial grass you spray green in the spring and brown in the autumn!"
Her voice rose again. "That's better than looking out at those dingy cattails all day long—watching them shake as the rats swim around the roots!"
He was silent.
She continued, her voice weary but resolute. "I'm through, Ralph. I can't stand those nightmares no more. If you won't sell to the State, I'll bring suit for my share and I'll leave anyway. I'm not going on living like this."
He shook his head, frowning. "I won't fight, Lucy, if you really want to go. You can keep what the State gives for the house. But I'm telling you, it's a mistake. We ain't got much here, but at least we're alive."
Her voice was bitter. "I've had enough. I'm selling. If you won't come, go and live with the rats in the dump!"
He went to bed. He knew that further argument would be futile. A few weeks later the man from the State came. Ralph had already signed the papers, waiving his share of the proceeds from the sale of the house. The State had agreed to pay twenty-seven hundred.
Sitting down in the one stable armchair remaining in the living room, the State man—a Mr. Feckwith—opened his document case. "All that remains," he explained to Mrs. Leeson, "is for you to sign these papers." He passed them over to her.
As she read, a look of consternation spread on her careworn face. "What does this mean? Don't I get the twenty-seven hundred?"
Mr. Feckwith coughed politely. "Well, you see, Mrs. Leeson, before you can become a State ward and qualify for a prefab, plus furnishings and food, you have to turn all assets over to the State. Otherwise you are not considered, ah, dependent."
She hesitated. "But I—I won't have a penny!"
Mr. Feckwith smiled reassuringly. His chubby face beamed. "You won'trequirea penny, Mrs. Leeson! All needs are taken care of. Shelter, food, clothes, medicine. And you'll have all the extras—an entertaintime screen, the news tape delivered every day, the monthly excursion. Think of it!"
She thought of it. She thought of it while black soot drifted past the windows, while the sea gulls squealed and the dump fires flared. She thought of it and she signed.
Three days later the State sent a tronicar to pick her up. She was glad that Ralph was away. It made things easier.
As the car sped off, she turned for a last sight of the dump. A huge pall of thick smoke hung over the area. Tireless sea gulls flapped above the refuse heaps, screeching raucously. Sighing with relief, she looked away, concentrating on the tronicar's gleaming interior. Within seconds the dump was far behind her.
Her new life was like a dream. She had two private rooms in a plastic prefab, complete with entertaintime screen, newstape projector and remote music disc. Food, mostly in capsule form, was delivered daily. The trugrass lawn, freshly sprayed, boasted a simulated maple tree over eight feet high.
If she felt ill, all she needed to do was press the button marked "Dispensary." A State doctor would arrive in three minutes.
Sitting in her foamease chair, in front of the entertaintime screen, she reveled in her new luxury. No dump smoke seeped into these rooms. No soot drifted past the windows. When she looked out, instead of dingy cattails she saw the bright green simulated maple tree and the sparkling trugrass lawn. No more rats scampering across her back yard. No noisy sea gulls circling overhead.
She felt sorry for Ralph. He would probably die in the dump. He'd end his days in some dirty shack, slurping up mulligan stew. He'd die alone, some dismal night, while the dump fires flickered and the filthy rats squealed and scuttled in the darkness.
After the first week she got to know some of her new neighbors. There were twenty-nine other units on her block, each with its own trugrass lawn. Some, like hers, boasted a simulated maple tree. Others were graced with one of the permajade juniper bushes. She was welcomed warmly. They were all very friendly, all very polite. She never mentioned the dump. They talked about the past as if it were life on another planet. They talked about their favorite programs on the entertaintime screen, about where they had gone on the monthly tronicar excursions sponsored by the State. They talked about their illnesses.
And yet, it seemed to Lucy Leeson, they did not actually talk very much. Perhaps it was too much effort. Mostly they just sat in front of their entertaintime screens and watched. Most of their meals they could swallow in capsule form without even moving from their foamease chairs.
The weeks came and went and finally a man appeared one morning and sprayed the trugrass lawn a uniform brown. A week or so later he came back, worked a mechanism at the base of the simulated maple tree and all the bright green leaves curled up tight and invisible against the limbs. It was autumn.
The man told her they had tried leaving everything green all year round, but in the long run the people didn't approve of it. They liked to look out, some fine spring morning, and see the trugrass lawn and the maple trees unexpectedly green again. The service men came just before dawn to spray the lawns and unfold the maple leaves.
It was a landscaping marvel. The grass never had to be cut and Lucy knew that the simulated maple tree would never be over eight feet tall. No pruning, no troublesome roots, no falling leaves to rake.
Her only criticism was that the birds seemed to avoid both lawn and tree. She looked out, rather wistfully, in hopes of seeing a bird. But she rarely saw one. She remembered with a pang of nostalgia the red-winged blackbirds which descended on the cattails bordering the dump every spring. They were such bright, frolicsome, saucy creatures! But they never flew over the trugrass lawns.
After a while, Lucy stopped visiting her neighbors. For some reason which she could not specifically name, they depressed her. They were old and listless and often ill, but it was more than that.
At length she knew the reason. They were dead; they were corpses waiting for interment. They would be transferred from the plastic prefabs to State permaplastic coffins with scarcely a groan of protest. They were just waiting for death, day after day. Consciously, they swallowed their capsules, read their daily newstapes and sat with their eyes riveted on the screens. But subconsciously they had stopped living. Subconsciously they longed for death to release them from the bondage of State security, State brainwashing, the bland and eternal aura of State assurance and reassurance.
She began to feel that she was being smothered to death in the plastic prefab. She grew to loathe the food capsules. The endless entertaintime programs finally filled her with boredom. The newstapes were some diversion but she resented them because she sensed that all the news had been too carefully sifted and predigested beforehand.
She stared out at the meek leafless tree and hated it. Sometimes she sat on the floor because she was so tired of the foamease chair. Once she pressed the "Dispensary" button just to see what would happen, but she never tried it again because she was subjected to a tedious two-hour examination which left her exhausted and taut with irritation. The examination was thorough but so impersonal she was left feeling like an inanimate object.
She no longer had nightmares about the dump rats but now a new and even more terrifying dream haunted her sleep. She dreamed that the State, unable to supply prefabs fast enough to meet the thousands of new applicants, secretly filled some of the food capsules with sleeping powders. The sleeping victims, chosen at random, were then carried out of their quarters, slipped into State permaplastic coffins and quietly buried. In her dream the plastic prefab became a permaplastic coffin. Doped with sleeping powder, she was buried alive. She would wake up, night after night, screaming, throwing her arms in the air to claw her way out.
At length she began to sit up most of the night; during the day she would sleep at frequent intervals in the foamease chair. This routine effectively ended the dream of being buried alive, but she still dreaded the nights.
She would sit for hours thinking about the dump—the sea gulls squealing, the trash fires flaring, soot flying past the windows and finally Ralph tramping in with his crazy stories about the rats or the mulligan stew or the fortune someone had found in a discarded fruit jar.
She had hated it all before but now she wasn't sure she hated it very much. Maybe she no longer hated it at all. What was it Ralph had said? How did it go? Oh yes: "We ain't got much here,but at least we're alive."
The words echoed in her mind. She thought of them a hundred times a day.
It was a small thing that decided her. One morning she was standing at the window, looking out across the trugrass lawn, when a State dispensary ambucar drove up. Two hospital men entered the prefab across the road. In a few minutes they came out carrying old Miss Quinsonby in a plastic bag.
Lucy Leeson felt sick. Although she was perfectly aware that Miss Quinsonby had been ailing for months, the memory of her nightmare came back to torment her. Was it possible that the State actually did "dispose" of the very old and infirm in order to make room for new applicants? The thought was fantastic, and yet the State people were so deadly, impersonally efficient in so many ways....
That very afternoon she signed up for the next monthly tronicar excursion. She had nearly two weeks to wait and she counted the days. One afternoon when she was sleeping in the foamease chair she had a new nightmare. She dreamed that she became ill and pressed the Dispensary button. In the prescribed three minutes two State hospital men appeared. One of them winked at the other and they both smiled slyly at her. Then she noticed that the one who had winked held something behind his back. It was a big folded plastic bag. She awoke with a scream.
On the morning set for the tronicar excursion, she stuffed some personal items in a small kit and went outside to wait. The tronicar driver was supposed to stop and touch her signal chime, but she was taking no chances. She waited nearly an hour, afraid the car might come early. When it finally swung into view down the street, she hurried to the ramp.
After the tronicar had picked up its cargo of State wards and left the immediate prefab area, the driver began an oral travelogue, describing new buildings, sites and developments as the car sped past. She scarcely heard his monotonous speel droning over the speaker system.
Her plans were made. When the car stopped in Newbridge, she would get off on some pretext and simply keep on going. She knew the tronicar excursions were tied to a rigid schedule. The driver would not wait for her very long.
Assuring him that she would return in five minutes, she got out in Newbridge and scurried away in the crowds. Once out of sight, she signaled for a cruisecab.
As the cab slid smoothly through city traffic toward the highway which skirted the dump, horrible doubts assailed her. Suppose Ralph had left? Suppose all of them had left? What would she do? Where could she go? The State owned the house. She did not possess any money. She would have to go back to the prefab, back to the trugrass lawn and the simulated maple tree, back to—Death. Once she had spoken it in her mind, she kept on repeating it. Death, death, death. She would have to go back to death. She would have to go back to death.
It became a refrain, ringing in her head. The crisp voice of the driver came through the partition tube, startling her. "This is the refuse area, lady. Where did you want to go?"
Her heart began to pound. She looked out the window, searching for landmarks. "About a mile yet. There's an old empty warehouse and then some catalpa trees. Right after that."
In a minute or two the cruisecab glided to a stop. She paid the driver and got out. Her heart was pounding so hard she could scarcely breathe.
"You want me to wait, lady?" The driver regarded her quizzically.
She shook her head. "No—no thanks. I—I'm meeting someone here."
The driver glanced at the smoky pall of the dump and shrugged. Seconds later the cruisecab was disappearing down the highway.
She walked past the clump of catalpa trees bordering the highway. There were bushes and then set back a bit would be the house. She stopped, staring, motionless. The house was gone. The State had torn it down and filled in the cellar hole.
As she looked across the littered back yard toward the clump of cattails, she experienced a strange sense of unreality. Sea gulls cried overhead and the sun filtered down through a pall of smoke, but the familiar scene seemed eerily unfamiliar.
Scowling, she closed her eyes momentarily and forced down the panic crowding within her. The house was gone; that was what made everything seem so strange, so unreal. Now she would take the little path that led across the back yard into the cattails. She would find Ralph and the others. Surely they were here somewhere. They would have shelter, at least a substitute for a house. She was acting like a fool. She should have expected the house to be gone; even if it hadn't been, it was no longer hers. She would have no right to enter it, if it were still standing.
Crossing the yard, she hesitated at the edge of the cattails. She imagined she could hear rats squeaking somewhere in the tangle ahead. Finally she picked up a heavy stick, took a deep breath and stepped into the narrow path which twisted through the cattail marsh.
She had thought the marsh covered only a small area; now she became appalled at its size. The path twisted on and on, like some kind of maze laid out to confuse the unwary. Every few yards her feet got wet. At length she had to stop and sit down. There were squeaks and twitterings around her. The eternal sea gulls flapped overhead. Smoke drifted sluggishly skyward. She arose and went on.
Noon found her sitting at the base of a great mound of ashes and trash. The sea gulls still squawked and the sun glared down. The cattail marsh lay far away. She was tired, confused and fearful. The dump area seemed enormous and she had not met a single human being. She had believed, previously, that the dump was mostly a level plateau; now she found to her dismay that it actually consisted of a great many mounds, gullies, ridges and pits. Unless she climbed to the top of a mound, she could not see very far. And even then she could not see down into distant holes and depressions.
She had called out until her voice broke. Now she sat silently. A huge grey-brown rat scurried into sight. Her hand tightened on the stick which she carried. The rat pretended it was nibbling on a paper shred but she knew it was watching her. It did not dart away.
She had a sudden horrible thought of night closing in, of rats by the dozen, by the hundreds, watching her, waiting....
She arose so abruptly the rat took alarm and disappeared. She would have to get out, she told herself. She would return to the marsh, take the little path and go back to the highway. Once there, she would be relatively safe.
But she soon found that she was hopelessly lost. The cattail marsh had vanished. She trudged on with growing apprehension, encountering bigger mounds and deeper gullies. The blazing sun seemed reflected back from every inch of the scorched sour earth. Her head began to ache; she developed a raging, tormenting thirst.
Rats watched her warily. Once a sea gull swung down, surveyed her with its cruel eyes and flapped off silently.
Finally her legs simply gave out. She collapsed weeping. Ralph had gone; they had all gone. She was now convinced that she was alone in the dump. Surely, by now, someone would have seen her, heard her. They had all left; perhaps the State had driven them out.
Shadows were beginning to slant across the gullies by the time she got up. She was dry-eyed, but her legs ached, her eyes smarted and her throat was so parched she could scarcely swallow. When she tried to call out, her voice was only a whisper. Her first terror had passed. Now she felt a kind of calm despair.
Rounding a huge bank of calcified waste, she stopped, frozen. She was feverish, she concluded, dying maybe, for there scant yards away was a group of people, a shack of some sort, a cleared area which was like a little island of orderliness in an ocean of congealed chaos. She stared, unbelieving.
Someone saw her, exclaimed, and the whole group turned to stare at her.
"Lucy!"
It was Ralph. He broke from the group, bolted toward her. "Lucy! Lucy! How did you—What on earth—" She was in his arms then and he was laughing and she was crying. She was too exhausted and too thirsty to talk. She simply fell into his arms and he carried her toward the shack. The others crowded around, murmuring sympathetically.
Ralph settled her into a big broken-down armchair under the tin roof. Someone else held out a dipper of cool water, the sweetest water she had ever tasted in her life. Mrs. Morgee appeared with a wet cloth and began bathing her forehead and face. Someone took off her shoes.
In a few minutes she felt so much better, she sat up and looked around at them. Ralph hovered at her side, grinning idiotically. The rest of them only smiled at her, understanding that she did not yet wish to answer questions.
As darkness closed in, someone lit a fire. In a few minutes the aroma of mulligan stew spiced the air. Lucy's mouth watered; she was ravenous, she now realized.
After she had finished a huge bowl of stew, she could scarcely keep her eyes open. Mrs. Morgee led her inside to a cot, helped her undress and got her into bed. Ralph remained outside with the others, around the fire. Explanations could wait until morning.
She had the sensation of melting without effort into a deep, dreamless sleep. She had made up her mind. She would never return to the plastic prefab, the trugrass lawn, the simulated maple tree and the food capsules. She wouldn't be carried away, all alone some morning, in a plastic bag.
She'd never get used to the rats and she didn't like the smoke and the sea gulls, but now she knew there were worse things.
At least she felt alive.