Earth Abides

refrigerator fixed up and working in two, three days, maybe.”

George stopped speaking, and Ish supposed that he had finished, for George was never much of a talker. Surprisingly, he went on:

“About those there laws, though, that you was talking about. I don’t know. I was kind of glad that we live in a place where we don’t have no laws. These days, you can do just about the way you want. You can go out and park your car anywhere you want to. Right by a fire-hydrant, maybe, and nobody’s going to give you a ticket, that is, you could park it right by the fire-hydrant if you had a car that would run.”

This was as far in the way of a joke as Ish had ever heard George go, and George responded to his own humor by chuckling quietly. The others all joined in. The standard of humor in The Tribe, Ish realized, had never been very high.

Ish was about to say something more, but Ezra spoke again.

“Come on, now, I propose a toast,” he said. “To law and order!” The older people laughed a little at hearing the old phrase again, but to the younger ones it meant nothing.

They drank the toast, and then everything slipped back quite naturally into merely a social occasion again.

After all, Ish reflected, it was a social occasion, just as well perhaps, not to let business interfere too much. Perhaps the seed he had planted with this rendition of his impassioned little speech would have some effect in the future. Yet, he felt doubts. You used to have the jokes about never fixing the roof until it rained. People were undoubtedly the same now, or worse. They might well wait until something happened that forced them to act; that something would almost certainly be unpleasant—most likely, serious.

Yet he drank the toast with the others, and with half his mind he listened to the talk. With the other half, nevertheless, he still kept to his own thoughts. This had been a good day; yes, on this day he had carved 21 into the smooth surface of the rock, and the Year 22 had begun; on this day, also, partly because the year had been named as it was, he had become more conscious of the possibilities in his youngest son.

He glanced to where Joey was sitting, and caught in return a quick bright glance, full of the small boy’s admiration for his father. Yes, perhaps, there was one at least who could understand fully.

In all that immense and complex system of dams and tunnels, aqueducts and reservoirs, by which water was brought from the mountains to the cities, one particular section of steel pipe in the main aqueduct supplied the fatal flaw. Even at the time of its manufacture certain imperfections had been apparent. It had happened, however, to go past the inspector just at the close of a day, when his senses were dulled and his judgment impaired.

No great harm resulted. The section of pipe was set into place by the workmen, and fiinctioned without difficulty. Shortly before the Great Disaster, a foreman had noticed that this section had developed a slight leak. By the welding of a patch upon it, however, it would be made as good as new, or even stronger than the average.

Then through the years no man passed that way again. A little trickle of water from the faulty section of pipe grew very gradually larger. Even in the dry summers a small patch of green showed by the dripping pipe; birds and small animals came there to drink. And still rust ate from the outside, and from the inside the corrosive action of the water itself slowly bored outward to meet the rust pits, piercing pinprick after pinprick in the tough skin of steel.

Five years, ten years—now a dozen jets of fine spray played from the surface of the pipe. Now the puddle was a drinking-place for cattle.

In five more years a little stream ran off from beneath, the only summer stream in all that dry foothill region. By now the pipe was beginning to be honey-combed with rust, its actual structure grown weak.

Beneath the pipe the ground had long been soft and muddy, and the tramping of animals had aided the erosion of a little gully. Finally, the erosion was sufficient to start a mudflow in the soft wet soil on which the concrete pier rested, the one which supported the pipe with its heavy load of water. As the pier settled, the weight of the water was thrown upon the weakened pipe. A long rent opened in its rust-riddled steel, and a broad stream of water poured out and gushed down into the gully. This torrent soon undermined the footing still more, and it shifted again. Once more the pipe tore, and the stream of water issuing from it became like a small river.

Just as Ish had crawled into bed that evening the sharp crack of a rifle shot brought him sitting full upright, tense. Another resounded, and then a fusillade began popping in the night.

He felt the bed shaking gently, as Em laughed quietly beside him. He relaxed. “Same old trick!” he said.

“Fooled you badly this time!”

“I’ve been thinking too much about all the future today, I suppose. Yes, I suppose my nerves are stirred up a little too much today.”

The fusillade was still popping in a good imitation of guerrilla warfare, but he lay down and tried to relax. He knew now what had happened. After everyone had left the bonfire, one of the boys had sneaked back and thrown a few boxes of cartridges into the hot ashes. As soon as the boxes were burned through and things became hot enough, the cartridges had let loose. Like most practical jokes it involved a certain element of risk, but at this time of year the grass was green, and there was no danger of starting a fire. Also, most of the people had been warned in advance or knew what was likely to happen and so would be sure to keep a long way from the hot ashes. Indeed, Ish reconsidered, he himself might have been the particular object of this joke, and everyone else might have known about it.

All right! If so, he was successfully baited. He felt a sense of irritation, but for more serious reasons, he thought, than because he had been fooled. “Well,” he said to Em, “there they go again—more boxes of cartridges popping off uselessly, and no one left in the world who knows how to make cartridges! And here we are in a country overrun with mountain-lions and wild bulls, and cartridges the only way we have of keeping them under control, and for food we don’t know how to kill cattle or rabbits or quail except by shooting them.”

Em seemed to have nothing to say, and in the pause his mind ranged petulantly over the events of the bonfire itself. That fire had been built up largely out of sawed timber brought from a lumber-yard, interspersed with cartons of toilet paper, which burned beautifully because of the holes through the middle. In addition, boxes of matches had been scattered through the fire because they went up with fine flares, and there had also been cans of alcohol and cleaning-fluid to give further zest. Doubtless, if you had to buy all those materials with money, the bonfire would have cost ten thousand dollars in the Old Times; now, those materials might be considered even more valuable, because they had come to be completely irreplaceable.

“Don’t worry, dearest,” he heard her say now. “It’s time to go to sleep.”

He settled down beside her, his head close against her breast, seeming as always to draw strength and confidence from her.

“I’m not worrying much, I suppose,” he said. “Maybe I really enjoy all this, feeling a little lugubrious about the future, as if we were living dangerously.”

He lay still for a moment more, and she said nothing, and then he went on with his thinking aloud.

“Do you remember I’ve been saying this a long time now, that we have to live more creatively, not just as scavengers? It’s bad for us, I think, even psychologically. Why, I was saying this way back even at the time when Jack was going to be born.”

“Yes, I remember. You’ve said it a great many times, and yet, some way or other, it still seems easier just to keep on opening cans as long as there are plenty of cans in the grocery stores and warehouses.”

“But the end will come some time. Then, what will people do?”

“Well, I suppose, whatever people there are then—they will just have to solve that problem for themselves…. And, dear, I’ve always wished you wouldn’t worry so much about it. Things would be different if you had a lot of people who were like you, that thought about things a long way off. But all you have are usual people like Ezra and George and me. And we don’t think that way. Darwin—wasn’t that his name? —said that we all came from apes or monkeys or something, and I suppose apes and monkeys and things like that never thought much about the future. If we’d come from bees or ants, we might have planned out things ahead, or even if we had been trained like squirrels to store up nuts for the winter.”