So Andrew let her undo the bandage with the aid of scissors. When she saw that four fingers had been cut, she was amazed.
“Well, it didn’t happen the way I told it,” Andrew said. “I—This morning I saw this same tall fellow coming at me again—just to scare me out of his way as usual, I suppose, but I didn’t step out of his way, I let him walk right into the glass—point.” There it was plain, and as they stood by the kitchen sink, Andrew glanced at Kate’s face for shock, understanding maybe, for sympathy too.
“And you hurt him? Cut him, I mean?”
“Yes, I did.” Andrew said. “He came straight at me to scare me, you know, that’s why he didn’t get out of the way one bit. But what I was carrying wasn’t exactly a sack of eggs! I saw his stomach bleeding.” Andrew told her about the man and woman stopping, and said maybe they had found a doctor somewhere, but Andrew had walked on home. Andrew realized he was boasting a bit, like a small boy who had done something courageous. In fact, Andrew admitted to himself that he hoped he had given the boy a bad cut, and a wound like that in the stomach might be fatal, Andrew thought.
“I wonder that you got home alive! What about his pals?”
“He was by himself,” Andrew said, avoiding Kate’s eyes. He wasn’t going to say that he thought a couple of the boy’s pals had seen him. Anyway the injured boy was going to tell his chums.
Kate had more questions. How badly did he think the so-and-so was hurt? Andrew said he couldn’t say. Andrew said he had just wanted to stand up for people’s rights to walk on the sidewalk without having to jump aside like scared rabbits for neighborhood hoodlums.
But Kate’s plump, creased face still looked uneasy, she talked about getting penicillin powder for his fingers, about being afraid to take the Band-Aids off to change them. She said she would ring him later tonight, around nine, to see how he felt. Then she left.
As Andrew had supposed, Kate had told him he had better not go out of the house for the next couple of days, that she would find out by telephone what he needed and bring it to him. Andrew hadn’t remonstrated, but he didn’t want to be a semi-invalid, dependent upon Kate.
The next morning, Andrew found a letter from his son Eddie in his mail box. That was nice. Andrew read most of it, standing in the area between the unlocked front door and the door into his house. Eddie was well and so was Betty, his wife, and they had rented a cottage on the coast in South Carolina for a month this summer, and would Andrew like to join them for a week or two in June? Andrew at once asked himself, did they really mean it, really want him? Of course there was time to think about it, to read Eddie’s typewritten letter more carefully when he got home. Now Andrew needed, besides a little fresh air, a container of cottage cheese and a jar of mayonnaise. He intended to buy those at the delicatessen instead of the supermarket.
Andrew walked to the big avenue, made these purchases, and was on his way home, had greeted two neighbors on the way, when he heard running footsteps behind him. Andrew moved to the right to let whoever it was pass on the street side of the pavement, then he felt a violent blow against the back of his head, just above the neck. Andrew sagged at once as if paralyzed. He was on his knees on the sidewalk when the next blow came, something like a stocking swung over his left shoulder, catching him in the left temple with a crack like an earthquake, like dynamite, a gunshot even, then came the faint padding of sneakers running away. Andrew’s vision—one side of his head resting against pavement now—became gray, and the humming in his head was louder than anything else. He had a desire to vomit, couldn’t, was aware of shoes, trouser legs, a woman’s ankles near him, of voices which seemed to come through a thick sea, of a pair of feet that drifted away. This was their vengeance, and what could he do about it now? He had absolutely expected it, and it had come. He knew he was dying, knew if people tried to move him, as they were trying now, that it would not change anything. One died in one place or another. He was aware that he sighed, aware of a resignation like a wave of peace washing over him. He was aware of justice, of the absence of anger, aware of the value of what he had done—and done all his life, and even yesterday when he had struck a small blow in the name of his neighborhood. Kate would tell the neighbors. Kate would go to his funeral. But all that was unimportant compared to the great event happening to him, the event of dying, of stopping. What mattered justice, revenge, movement of any kind? He then reached a point of being unable to think further, and was aware of a most wonderful sense of balance.
A loud exclamation or command from one of the people lifting him was unintelligible to Andrew, like another language.
Please Don’t
Shoot the Trees
“We were on the subject of water conservation in summer!” a voice screamed. “Just in principle!”
“We never finished the fish!” cried another voice, even shriller.
“Who’s the chair today?”
“And the trees . . .” That voice faded off.
Elsie Gifford smiled, sighed, but was sufficiently interested to rise a little in her chair and look behind her to identify, if possible, the ones who were crying out. She had come to listen today, not having any particular problem at the moment.
“Be damned to you all!”
Laughter! That had been a hell of a voice.
Elsie laughed too. This would be something to tell Jack about tonight—though Jack thought Citizens for Life a silly organization. Elsie and Jack, like most of the people at the meeting, lived in a protected residential area called Rainbow, far enough south of Los Angeles to be free of smog. Los Angeles, in fact, was now abandoned by industry and residents, yet poor people still lived there. “The better-off” were doing their own fighting back now, thrusting their protected areas farther into the cesspools of such cities as Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. Now it was the underprivileged, the poor, forced to move ever closer together in the cities, because they had nowhere else to go. Everything had become so tidy, nobody could even go camping any more, park a trailer anywhere, or even sleep in the woods.
“The trees!” the same voice was shrieking again, and she was being shouted down.
What was that tree rumor, anyway? Elsie leaned towards a woman on her left, whom she knew by sight but whose name she had forgotten. “What’s the business about trees?”
But her last words were drowned out.
The back doors—rather the front doors some distance behind Elsie—had burst open. A chorus of voices screamed:
“The Forty-Niners are here!”
More laughter! Lots of groans. Boos, even.
“Get them out!”
But there was a patter of applause too.
Elsie smiled again, because she had been thinking that this was all the meeting needed—the Forty-Niners. They were a group of teenagers (average age nineteen, Elsie remembered) who used a covered wagon as their emblem, and aimed to make the West, chiefly California or the Golden Gate, as pure as it had been, presumably, back in 1849, the year of the Gold Rush. Jack laughed at them, because the men of the Gold Rush era had not been particularly pure in spirit, and hadn’t used covered wagons to get to California, just ponies, stagecoaches and shoe leather. But this was 2049, so the kids had hitched onto the date.
Now the youngsters were streaming down the aisle, holding aloft a banner ten feet long—or three meters—fixed to two poles, with a brown covered wagon painted on it and the words: KEEP THE WEST GOLDEN!
“Halt nuclear tests! Halt nuclear reactors!”
“You can stop them! You women! And men!”
“Many of you are married to men making these nukes!”
“. . . which are shattering the foundations of your own houses!” Several girls’ voices came out clearest.
The Forty-Niners were always well-rehearsed. They kept their numbers around two hundred. They were a self-styled elite.
&nbs
p; “An earthquake is fore-CAST! An earthquake is fore-CAST!” chanted the Forty-Niners.
Some rather senior citizens had folded their arms, smiling indulgently, but with an air of surrender. The meeting was finished, as far as scheduled agenda went. The Forty-Niners always took from five to seven minutes to make their point, then departed, but so many people had to get home or to work (there were so many job shifts now), that the agenda could never be resumed.
“. . . ABOLISH NUKES!”
What would Jack shout back if he were here, Elsie wondered. Jack was a physicist, and considered nuclear energy the greatest boon to mankind ever invented, or discovered, by technologists. He would certainly remind these kids that the Rainbow scientists had extinguished an awful holocaust, that had been melting a nuke, by means of chemicals that had been right on hand, as demanded by law. Lots of people were leaving now, Elsie saw. She got up too.
“Aren’t they loudmouths!” This was from Jane Newcombe, a blondish woman of Elsie’s age, a neighbor.
Elsie smiled more broadly. “But they mean well,” she replied, laying on the tongue-in-cheek tolerance, playing it safe. “Can I give you a lift home, Jane?”
“Thanks, I came in my own copter. How’s everything?”
“Oh, as usual. Fine,” Elsie said.
Elsie climbed into her battery-run copter and rose gently straight up. At sedate speed, she turned south towards Rainbow and floated almost noiselessly towards it. On either side little red and green lights of other copters circulated like lazy butterflies, heading for labs, factories, or home. To the west on her right lay the darkness of the Pacific, bordered by a thin string of lights that marked radar stations, all laser-gun equipped, though the lights from a height looked like a carelessly tossed diamond necklace, or like something natural, anyway, due to the shoreline. She could also see the great more-than-half-circle of purple and orange lights that marked the eastern boundary of Rainbow and extended almost to the shore. Rainbow’s two arcs of light were laser gadgets which could slice through anything metal, however thick, which might be flying towards Rainbow with unfriendly intent. Elsie descended, approaching her home now. Her copter, like most household copters, went only sixty kilometers per hour maximum. Such helicopters (the two for the kids had a fifty MPH maximum) were considered patriotic and conservative, because they used minimum juice and made almost no noise. They suited Elsie perfectly, though Jack sometimes griped about the low speed.
Elsie made a pass straight over their copter hangar whose roof had a scanning device. A number was written under her copter, and the roof automatically opened for her. She lowered the copter, and the automatic radar took over, parking her. Jack wasn’t home yet, but the boys were, she saw from their two copters. Today had been a sports afternoon, and they had stayed until 5 P.M. at school.
Since it was already past seven, Elsie decided on a pushbutton dinner. Her U-Name-It machine held thirty-six dinners, and it was now more than half empty. One ordered an entire cylinder, glass-fronted, refrigerated, but with individual electronic heating devices to heat the section desired. There were kosher cylinders, vegetarian, diabetic, low-calorie, but the Giffords preferred the mixed, which offered four Chinese meals, four Mexican, Greek, Italian and so on.
“UNDER CONTROL,” JACK Gifford said with a smile, when Elsie asked him about the earthquake rumors. “We know all about the San Andreas fault.”
Elsie told him about the meeting, not that there was much to tell, because of the break-up by the Forty-Niners.
At the mention of the Forty-Niners, their son Richard, aged ten, left the table to get something, and now he was coming back with a yellow airplane made of a folded piece of paper. “They were dropping these today,” Richard said.
“Oh yeah, yeah,” his younger brother Charles put in. “Dropping by copter. Lots of ’em.”
Elsie opened the paper airplane and read:
MESSAGE FROM THE FORTY-NINERS:
AN EARTHQUAKE
is predicted—though you’ll never hear it
from the “Authorities”!
DO YOU CARE?
FIGHT NOW AGAINST NUKES AND UNDERGROUND
NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS!
Y O U R EARTH IS TREMBLING!
TREE ROOTS ARE BEING DISTURBED!
TREES ARE DEVELOPING STRANGE DISEASES,
DYING!
DO YOU CARE? MARCH WITH US TO GOLDEN GATE
STATE CAPITOL
NEXT SATURDAY NOON!
ASSEMBLE FIRST 11 AM GOLDEN GATE TOWN HALL
(outside)
or send a donation to FORTY-NINERS
Box 435 Electron Blvd
South San. Fran. OR DO BOTH!
Jack glanced at the paper too. “Always asking for handouts, you can bet on that. The parents ought to keep those kids at home. South San Fran! That slum!”
Elsie remembered when she and Jack had got out in the streets in the late thirties, before they were married, protesting—what? Elsie had some fellow-feeling for the kids, even the Forty-Niners, who seemed so much more militant and well-organized than any groups she and Jack had known.
“But what is all this about an earthquake? Just not true?” Elsie asked.
Jack put down his plastic chopsticks—it was a Chinese dinner—and replied, “First of all, not true, because we know one’s not due for years. Second, if it came, we’d have hours of warning, and we’d control it by counterbombing underground, which would simply drain off the strain. I explained all that to you.”
Jack certainly had, and Elsie remembered. She looked at the faces of her two sons. The boys were listening with the neutral, vaguely amused smiles which Elsie had come to detest, smiles that said, “Nothing’s going to surprise us, because we don’t give a damn, see?” Elsie had seen the same smiles while they watched the most horrific television programs—and also when she had informed them, about a year ago, that their grandparents, her mother and father, had been killed in a helicopter collision over Santa Fe. Something had gone wrong with the radar in the other people’s copter, it had later been found. Helicopter collisions were impossible if the radar was functioning, even if one copter tried to ram another. The know-it-all, what-the-hell smiles protected Richard and Charles. Four or five years ago, when she and Jack had had the more or less usual trouble with the boy’s resistance to reading and short-interest-span syndrome, the psychiatrist had called them semi-autistic, but he had also let slip out apathetic, which Elsie preferred because it was more accurate, in her opinion. Good old Greek! She had managed to take a year of Greek in university in the last year it was being taught in America. Elsie forced her eyes, with a nervous jerk of her head, away from her sons, and said, “What?” because Jack was still talking.
“Well, hon, if you’re not listening—”
“I was listening.”
“We’ve freed Golden Gate—and America, the whole world from the fear of earthquakes. If the bastards on the other side of the world like Italy and Japan had the dough to buy our equipment . . .”
Yes, Jack. But Elsie didn’t say it. When she and Jack had been twenty-one or so, they hadn’t talked like this. There had still been a hope, an intention of sharing everything with everyone, at least that intention had prevailed among lots of people besides “rabels” of which she and Jack had been two—rabels being a combination of rebel and rabble. Now America itself was partitioned into four big “states” of which Golden Gate was the richest (all of California up to Canada), and they didn’t share anything with the others. The whole Western Coast was one big fortress against Sino-Russia, Japan being a demilitarized colony of theirs, Sino-Russia. The great cities had become unsupervised prisons of the poor and the black, and New York and San Francisco were dirty words, as dirty as Detroit and Philadelphia had been to Elsie’s grandmother.
“And the trees, Jack. Have you heard anything about diseases? They were talking tonight—not just the Forty-N
iners—”
“Nothing from our Forestry Department, hon. You know these kids ride the same old conservation jazz about spoiling nature, all that crap. Times haven’t changed. If our nukes or the testing were putting us in danger of anything, we’d stop ’em, wouldn’t we? We’ve got battery power in reserve everywhere.” Jack exuded confidence, reassurance. Even his cheeks were rosy with health. The scientists at Jack’s lab played tennis or swam three times a week, in the lab’s big gymnasium.
So Elsie felt better. Jack had degrees in seismology and oceanography as well as in physics. She had graduated from a liberal arts university, and felt her own diploma to be on a par with a degree in knitting.
The next morning—a fine, sunny October morning—Elsie decided to hop over to Rainbow Library some eight miles away. She had hardly sat down in her copter when she saw more yellow papers wafting down from the sky. She got out and picked one up from the graveled driveway.
TREES BLISTERS NOW . . .
DUE TO JIGGLED SAP!
ARE YOU INTERESTED?
PROTECT YOUR TREES! PROTECT EARTH!
PROTECT YOURSELF!
BAN NUKES AND NUKE TESTS!
The rest was a repetition of time and place of the Forty-Niners’ next meeting. Jiggled sap? What were they talking about? The page was badly printed as usual. Elsie got back into her copter.
There wasn’t any need for Elsie to go to Rainbow Library, because audio-video books could be ordered by telephone and delivered by helicopter. Every home in Rainbow had a pick-up and delivery tower, radar-locked. But Elsie enjoyed looking at the big lighted bulletin board that reeled off new titles available, enjoyed running into friends and having a chat and a coffee on the Library grounds. The building was a vast mauve construction in the shape of RL, but joined, as in an old cattle brand, legible from the air. Elsie returned a couple of cylinders and took out three, one contemporary novel, the complete works of T. S. Eliot including his essays, and a new offering which she was lucky to get—new Chinese and Russian poems. Elsie often played these while she pottered about the house or worked in the garden. One cylinder could be of eight hours’ duration. The same cylinder could be attached to the television set, and one could see the reader, plus background scenes appropriate to whatever the text was. The advantage in Elsie’s opinion was that the cylinders always had the complete text of the original. They were considered classics now, slow and old-fashioned.