Tunnel in the Sky

  “Sure…if Rod says so.”

  “Well, I don’t say so. Look, Carol, I don’t like the situation. To tell the truth…well, I was pretty sour at being kicked out of the captaincy. But I can’t let the rest of you pull out on that account. There aren’t enough of us to form another colony, not safely.”

  “Why, Roddie, there are three times as many people still back in those trees as there are here in camp. This time we’ll build up slowly and be choosy about whom we take. Six is a good start. We’ll get by.”

  “Not six, Carol. Four.”

  “Huh? Six! We shook on it last night before Jimmy woke you.”

  Rod shook his head. “Carol, how can we expect Bob and Carmen to walk out…right after the rest have made them a wedding present of a house of their own?”

  “Well…darn it, we’d build them another house!”

  “They would go with us, Carol—but it’s too much to ask.”

  “I think,” Jacqueline said grudgingly, “that Rod has something, Carol.”

  The argument was ended by the appearance of Bob, Carmen, and Jimmy. They had been delayed, explained Jimmy, by the necessity of inspecting the house. “As if I didn’t know every rock in it. Oh, my back!”

  “I appreciate it, Jim,” Carmen said softly. “I’ll rub your back.”

  “Sold!” Jimmy lay face down.

  “Hey!” protested Caroline. “I carried more rocks than he did. Mostly he stood around and bossed.”

  “Supervisory work is exceptionally tiring,” Jimmy said smugly. “You get Bob to rub your back.”

  Neither got a back rub as Roy Kilroy called to them from the wall. “Hey! You down there—lunch hour is over. Let’s get back to work.”

  “Sorry, Jimmy. Later.” Carmen turned away.

  Jimmy scrambled to his feet. “Bob, Carmen—don’t go ’way yet. I want to say something.”

  They stopped. Rod waved to Kilroy. “With you in a moment!” He turned back to the others.

  Jimmy seemed to have difficulty in choosing words. “Uh, Carmen… Bob. The future Baxters. You know we think a lot of you. We think it’s swell that you are going to get married—every family ought to have a marriage. But…well, shopping isn’t what it might be around here and we didn’t know what to get you. So we talked it over and decided to give you this. It’s from all of us. A wedding present.” Jimmy jammed a hand in his pocket, hauled out his dirty, dog-eared playing cards and handed them to Carmen.

  Bob Baxter looked startled. “Gosh, Jimmy, we can’t take your cards—your only cards.”

  “I—we want you to have them.”

  “But—”

  “Be quiet, Bob!” Carmen said and took the cards. “Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you very much. Thank you all.” She looked around. “Our getting married isn’t going to make any difference, you know. It’s still one family. We’ll expect you all…to come play cards…at our house just as—” She stopped suddenly and started to cry, buried her head on Bob’s shoulder. He patted it. Jimmy looked as if he wanted to cry and Rod felt nakedly embarrassed.

  They started back, Carmen with an arm around Jimmy and the other around her betrothed. Rod hung back with the other two. “Did Jimmy,” he whispered, “say anything to either of you about this?”

  “No,” Jacqueline answered.

  “Not me,” Caroline agreed. “I was going to give ’em my stew pan, but now I’ll wait a day or two.” Caroline’s “bag of rocks” had turned out to contain an odd assortment for survival—among other things, a thin-page diary, a tiny mouth organ, and a half-litre sauce pan. She produced other unlikely but useful items from time to time. Why she had picked them and how she had managed to hang on to them after she discarded the bag were minor mysteries, but, as Deacon Matson had often told the class: “Each to his own methods. Survival is an art, not a science.” It was undeniable that she had appeared at the cave healthy, well fed, and with her clothing surprisingly neat and clean in view of the month she had been on the land.

  “They won’t expect you to give up your stew pan, Caroline.”

  “I can’t use it now that the crowd is so big, and they can set up housekeeping with it. Anyhow, I want to.”

  “I’m going to give her two needles and some thread. Bob made her leave her sewing kit behind in favor of medical supplies. But I’ll wait a while, too.”

  “I haven’t anything I can give them,” Rod said miserably.

  Jacqueline turned gentle eyes on him. “You can make them a water skin for their house, Rod,” she said softly. “They would like that. We can use some of my Kwik-Kure so that it will last.”

  Rod cheered up at once. “Say, that’s a swell idea!”

  “We are gathered here,” Grant Cowper said cheerfully, “to join these two people in the holy bonds of matrimony. I won’t give the usual warning because we all know that no impediment exists to this union. In fact it is the finest thing that could happen to our little community, a joyful omen of things to come, a promise for the future, a guarantee that we are firmly resolved to keep the torch of civilization, now freshly lighted on this planet, forever burning in the future. It means that—”

  Rod stopped listening. He was standing at the groom’s right as best man. His duties had not been onerous but now he found that he had an overwhelming desire to sneeze. He worked his features around, then in desperation rubbed his upper lip violently and overcame it. He sighed silently and was glad for the first time that Grant Cowper had this responsibility. Grant seemed to know the right words and he did not.

  The bride was attended by Caroline Mshiyeni. Both girls carried bouquets of a flame-colored wild bloom. Caroline was in shorts and shirt as usual and the bride was dressed in the conventional blue denim trousers and overshirt. Her hair was arranged en brosse; her scrubbed face shone in the firelight and she was radiantly beautiful.

  “Who giveth this woman?”

  Jimmy Throxton stepped forward and said hoarsely, “I do!”

  “The ring, please.”

  Rod had it on his little finger; with considerable fumbling he got it off. It was a Ponce de Leon senior-class ring, borrowed from Bill Kennedy. He handed it to Cowper.

  “Carmen Eleanora, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”

  “I do.”

  “Robert Edward, do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? Will you keep her and cherish her, cleaving unto her only, until death do you part?”

  “I do. I mean, I will. Both.”

  “Take her hand in yours. Place the ring on her finger. Repeat after me—”

  Rod’s sneeze was coming back again; he missed part of it.

  “—so, by authority vested in me as duly elected Chief Magistrate of this sovereign community, I pronounce you man and wife! Kiss her, chum, before I beat you to it.”

  Carol and Jackie both were crying; Rod wondered what had gone wrong. He missed his turn at kissing the bride, but she turned to him presently, put an arm around his neck and kissed him. He found himself shaking hands with Bob very solemnly. “Well, I guess that does it. Don’t forget you are supposed to carry her through the door.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “Well, you told me to remind you. Uh, may the Principle bless you both.”

  10

  “I So Move”

  THERE WAS NO MORE TALK OF LEAVING. Even Caroline dropped the subject.

  But on other subjects talk was endless. Cowper held a town meeting every evening. These started with committee reports—the committee on food resources and natural conservation, the committees on artifacts and inventory, on waste disposal and camp sanitation, on exterior security, on human resources and labor allotment, on recruitment and immigration, on conservation of arts and sciences, on constitution, codification, and justice, on food preparation, on housing and city planning—

  Cowper seemed to enjoy the endless talk and Rod was forced to admit that
the others appeared to have a good time, too—he surprised himself by discovering that he too looked forward to the evenings. It was the village’s social life, the only recreation. Each session produced wordy battles, personal remarks and caustic criticisms; what was lacking in the gentlemanly formality found in older congresses was made up in spice. Rod liked to sprawl on the ground with his ear near Jimmy Throxton and listen to Jimmy’s slanderous asides about the intelligence, motives, and ancestry of each speaker. He waited for Caroline’s disorderly heckling.

  But Caroline was less inclined to heckle now; Cowper had appointed her Historian on discovering that she owned a diary and could take shorthand. “It is extremely important,” he informed her in the presence of the village, “that we have a full record of these pioneer days for posterity. You’ve been writing in your diary every day?”

  “Sure. That’s what it’s for.”

  “Good! From here on it will be an official account. I want you to record the important events of each day.”

  “All right. It doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference, I do anyhow.”

  “Yes, yes, but in greater detail. I want you to record our proceedings, too. Historians will treasure this document, Carol.”

  “I’ll bet!”

  Cowper seemed lost in thought. “How many blank leaves left in your diary?”

  “Couple of hundred, maybe.”

  “Good! That solves a problem I had been wondering about. Uh, we will have to requisition half of that supply for official use—public notices, committee transactions, and the like. You know.”

  Caroline looked wide-eyed. “That’s a lot of paper, isn’t it? You had better send two or three big husky boys to carry it.”

  Cowper looked puzzled. “You’re joking.”

  “Better make it four big huskies. I could probably manage three…and somebody is likely to get hurt.”

  “Now, see here, Caroline, it is just a temporary requisition, in the public interest. Long before you need all of your diary we will devise other writing materials.”

  “Go ahead and devise! That’s my diary.”

  Caroline sat near Cowper, diary in her lap and style in her hand, taking notes. Each evening she opened proceedings by reading the minutes of the previous meeting. Rod asked her if she took down the endless debates.

  “Goodness no!”

  “I wondered. It seemed to me that you would run out of paper. Your minutes are certainly complete.”

  She chuckled. “Roddie, want to know what I really write down? Promise not to tell.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “When I ‘read the minutes’ I just reach back in my mind and recall what the gabble was the night before—I’ve got an awfully good memory. But what I actually dirty the paper with…well, here—” She took her diary from a pocket. “Here’s last night: ‘Hizzoner called us to disorder at half-past burping time. The committee on cats and dogs reported. No cats, no dogs. The shortage was discussed. We adjourned and went to sleep, those who weren’t already.’”

  Rod grinned. “A good thing Grant doesn’t know shorthand.”

  “Of course, if anything real happens, I put it down. But not the talk, talk, talk.”

  Caroline was not adamant about not sharing her supply of paper when needed. A marriage certificate, drawn up in officialese by Howard Goldstein, a Teller law student, was prepared for the Baxters and signed by Cowper, the couple themselves, and Rod and Caroline as witnesses. Caroline decorated it with flowers and turtle doves before delivering it.

  There were others who seemed to feel that the new government was long on talk and short on results. Among them was Bob Baxter, but the Quaker couple did not attend most of the meetings. But when Cowper had been in office a week, Shorty Dumont took the floor after the endless committee reports:

  “Mr. Chairman!”

  “Can you hold it, Shorty? I have announcements to make before we get on to new business.”

  “This is still about committee reports. When does the committee on our constitution report?”

  “Why, I made the report myself.”

  “You said that a revised draft was being prepared and the report would be delayed. That’s no report. What I want to know is: when do we get a permanent set-up? When do we stop floating in air, getting along from day to day on ‘temporary executive notices’?”

  Cowper flushed. “Do you object to my executive decisions?”

  “Won’t say that I do, won’t say that I don’t. But Rod was let out and you were put in on the argument that we needed constitutional government, not a dictatorship. That’s why I voted for you. All right, where’s our laws? When do we vote on them?”

  “You must understand,” Cowper answered carefully, “that drawing up a constitution is not done overnight. Many considerations are involved.”

  “Sure, sure—but it’s time we had some notion of what sort of a constitution you are cooking up. How about a bill of rights? Have you drawn up one?”

  “All in due time.”

  “Why wait? For a starter let’s adopt the Virginia Bill of Rights as article one. I so move.”

  “You’re out of order. Anyhow we don’t even have a copy of it.”

  “Don’t let that bother you; I know it by heart. You ready, Carol? Take this down…”

  “Never mind,” Caroline answered. “I know it, too. I’m writing it.”

  “You see? These things aren’t any mystery, Grant; most of us could quote it. So let’s quit stalling.”

  Somebody yelled, “Whoopee! That’s telling him, Shorty. I second the motion.”

  Cowper shouted for order. He went on, “This is not the time nor the place. When the committee reports, you will find that all proper democratic freedoms and safeguards have been included—modified only by the stern necessities of our hazardous position.” He flashed his smile. “Now let’s get on with business. I have an announcement about hunting parties. Hereafter each hunting party will be expected to—”

  Dumont was still standing. “I said no more stalling, Grant. You argued that what we needed was laws, not a captain’s whim. You’ve been throwing your weight around quite a while now and I don’t see any laws. What are your duties? How much authority do you have? Are you both the high and the low justice? Or do the rest of us have rights?”

  “Shut up and sit down!”

  “How long is your term of office?”

  Cowper made an effort to control himself. “Shorty, if you have suggestions or, such things, you must take them up with the committee.”

  “Oh, slush! Give me a straight answer.”

  “You are out of order.”

  “I am not out of order. I’m insisting that the committee on drawing up a constitution tell us what they are doing. I won’t surrender the floor until I get an answer. This is a town meeting and I have as much right to talk as anybody.”

  Cowper turned red. “I wouldn’t be too sure,” he said ominously. “Just how old are you, Shorty?”

  Dumont stared at him. “Oh, so that’s it? And the cat is out of the bag!” He glanced around. “I see quite a few here who are younger than I am. See what he’s driving at, folks? Second-class citizens. He’s going to stick an age limit in that so-called constitution. Aren’t you, Grant? Look me in the eye and deny it.”

  “Roy! Dave! Grab him and bring him to order.”

  Rod had been listening closely; the show was better than usual. Jimmy had been adding his usual flippant commentary. Now Jimmy whispered, “That tears it. Do we choose up sides or do we fade back and watch the fun?”

  Before he could answer Shorty made it clear that he needed no immediate help. He set his feet wide and snapped, “Touch me and somebody gets hurt!” He did not reach for any weapon but his attitude showed that he was willing to fight.

  He went on, “Grant, I’ve got one thing to say, then I’ll shut up.” He turned and spoke to all. “You can see that we don’t have any rights and we don’t know where we stand—but we are already o
rganized like a straitjacket. Committees for this, committees for that—and what good has it done? Are we better off than we were before all these half-baked committees were appointed? The wall is still unfinished, the camp is dirtier than ever, and nobody knows what he is supposed to do. Why, we even let the signal fire go out yesterday. When a roof leaks, you don’t appoint a committee; you fix the leak. I say give the job back to Rod, get rid of these silly committees, and get on with fixing the leaks. Anybody with me? Make some noise!”

  They made plenty of noise. The shouts may have come from less than half but Cowper could see that he was losing his grip on them. Roy Kilroy dropped behind Shorty Dumont and looked questioningly at Cowper; Jimmy jabbed Rod in the ribs and whispered, “Get set, boy.”

  But Cowper shook his head at Roy. “Shorty,” he said quietly, “are you through making your speech?”

  “That wasn’t a speech, that was a motion. And you had better not tell me it’s out of order.”

  “I did not understand your motion. State it.”

  “You understood it. I’m moving that we get rid of you and put Rod back in.”

  Kilroy interrupted. “Hey, Grant, he can’t do that. That’s not according to—”

  “Hold it, Roy. Shorty, your motion is not in order.”

  “I thought you would say that!”

  “And it is really two motions. But I in not going to bother with trifles. You say people don’t like the way I’m doing things, so we’ll find out.” He went on briskly, “Is there a second to the motion?”

  “Second!”

  “I second it.”

  “Moved and seconded. The motion is to recall me and put Rod in office. Any remarks?”

  A dozen people tried to speak. Rod got the floor by outshouting the others. “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman! Privileged question!”

  “The chair recognizes Rod Walker.”

  “Point of personal privilege. I have a statement to make.”

  “Well? Go ahead.”

  “Look, Grant, I didn’t know Shorty planned to do this. Tell him, Shorty.”