Earth Abides

sympathy with his father, not at an impression that the words might have made. Any child, even a precocious one like Joey, lived in the present; to talk of ten years away was merely, for a child, to talk of centuries.

Ish looked at the little face again, and he saw the eyes roll slightly outward with drunkenness and sleepiness, and there was incongruity in the two. Yet Ish felt this love for his son welling up more strongly than ever within him. “This one, this one,” he thought, “is the Child of the Blessing! This one will carry on!”

He saw the eyes lose focus, and the eyelids drop shut, and so he spoke no more, but he sat there by the bed, holding the hand in his own. Then, perhaps because sleep is so like death, a horrible fear swept in upon him. “Hostages to fortune!” he thought. When a man loved greatly, he laid himself open. He himself had good luck. He had loved greatly with Em, and now, again perhaps, with Joey. With Em he had the luck—but then one could never even think of Em in terms of death. She was the stronger. With Joey it was different. Holding the hand, he could feel the faint throb of the pulse in the wrist, and it seemed very close to the surface. A mere scratch would be enough. What were the chances for a little boy, not strong of body, driven on always by too powerful a mind?

Yet, this might be the one who could shape the whole future. He had only to grow in stature and in mind, to gain wisdom with the years, and to live.

Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard. Heart-beat flutters, knife flashes, horse stumbles, cancer grows, more subtle foes invade….

Then they sit around the fire at the cave-mouth, and say, “What shall we do? Now that he is no longer here to lead us!” Or, while the great bell tolls, they gather in the courtyard, and say, “It should not have happened so. Who is there now to give us counsel?” Or they meet at the street-corner, and say sadly, “Why did it have to be this way? Now there is no one to take his place.”

Through all of history it runs as a plaint. “If the young king had not fallen ill…. If the prince had lived…. If the general had not so recklessly exposed himself…. If the president had not overworked….”

Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.

Once more the fogs thinned out, and then came the first hot days. “I have seen it again,” Ish thought to himself. “The great pageant of the year! Now is the time of dryness and death. Now the god lies dying. Soon the rains will come, and then the hills will be green. At last one morning I shall look out westward, here from the porch, and I shall see the sun setting far to the south. Then we shall all go together, and I shall carve the number into the rock. What shall we call this Year, I wonder!”

By now also it was time to be expecting Dick and Bob to return from their expedition in the jeep. Ish still worried and felt guilty sometimes at having allowed the boys to go, but now they had been gone so long that he was somewhat accustomed to the idea and did not feel the strain so much as he had earlier. And at the same time he had another worry and sense of guilt that tended to counteract this one.

The children! Their superstition and their ideas about religion! He had said to himself that all this would be easy to counteract; he had said that he would do something that next day. Yet all summer he had been flinching.

Was it actually that he did not want to do anything? Did he really want the children to think of Joey as the possessor of some special power? Deep within himself, did he want the children to think of him, Ish, as a god? Not every day or every year could a man have reason to play with the intoxicating idea that he was becoming a god. Oh, well—say, at least a demi-god, a being of some degree of special power!

Ever since the incident of the hammer, he had been studying curiously the children’s attitude toward him. It was changeable and uncertain. Sometimes, he sensed that feeling of awe which he had seen on that day of the incident with the hammer. He, like Joey, but even more so, had mana within him. He could perform strange feats. He knew the meanings of the puzzling words. He knew the curious ways of numbers. He knew, by some strange power, what the world was like, away beyond the horizon, out through the Golden Gate, that there were islands far in the ocean beyond the little rock-tips of the Farallones, that they sometimes saw standing up above the horizon on clear days.

The children, he came to realize, were not only children, but they were also unsophisticated and inexperienced as children in the Old Times had rarely been. None of them had ever seen more than a few dozen people. Though their lives, he believed, had been happy, they had been happy with the simplicity of a few satisfying experiences, repeated again and again. They had not suffered the continual shock of change which had so affected children in the old days, both for good and for bad, making them nervous on the one hand, and yet alert on the other.

Children so unsophisticated might easily come to feel a certain dread of him, to regard him as a being with powers different from their own, not altogether earthly. At times he sensed this feeling and even saw definite evidences of it.

Yet at other times, indeed generally, he was merely their own father or grandfather, or Uncle Ish, a person they had known all their lives, with whom they had romped on the floor when they were little. They had no more respect for such a person than children ever had. In fact the bigger ones already showed the adolescent feeling that the older man was blundering and quite obtuse. Perhaps they stood in some awe, but still they played tricks on him.

Once, not a week after the incident of the hammer, they had set a tack for him in his chair, though that was one of the oldest of all tricks to play on a teacher. And again, after they had left the room with much suppressed giggling, Ish discovered that someone had worked that other old trick of pinning a strip of cloth to his rear, so that it hung down like a white tail behind.

Ish accepted such tricks in good spirit, and did not attempt to find out which one of the children had done them or to inflict any punishment. In some ways the tricks pleased him, for they showed him that children considered him one of themselves. But the tricks also chagrined him a little. His ego was not above being pleased with the belief that he was a folk-hero or demi-god. Was this a way to treat a demi-god, by putting tacks on his chair or pinning a tail on him, behind? Yet, as he thought farther, he realized that the two attitudes were not incompatible or altogether unprecedented.

That is a strange thing—to be a god! They bring the fat ox with the gilded horns, and at your altar they strike him down with the pole-ax. You are proud of the sacrifice. But then they take head and horns and tail and hide, and in the hide they wrap the entrails. All this noisomeness they burn before your altar, and then go to feast themselves on the fat haunches! You see the deceit, and you are angry with a god’s anger. You gather the thunderbolts, and your black clouds assemble. But, no, you think then, “They are my people!” This year they are fat and proud and insolent—but who would wish his people to be mean and meeching? Next year, if there is pestilence, they will really burn the ox—nay, many oxen! So you pass it off, with only a little thunder, scarcely noticed in the pleasant confusion of the feasting. “I am not stupid,” you say to The Son, “but there are times when a god should seem stupid!” Then you wonder if you should have shared with him any secret of godship, but rather have looked for a convenient mountain to pile upon him. He is altogether too handy with a sickle these days….

Even you terrible ones who call for human sacrifice, you too must wink! Ah, it is magnificently horrible! The shrieks of his wife and the moans of the victim and the flailing axes of the killers! There he lies, covered with blood, his tongue hanging out, a picture of loathsome death! Yet soon, in the confusion of the dance, he rises suddenly and dances with the others and the red mulberry juice mingles with his sweat and disappears. Then you, the terrible one, must be a wise god and remember only the horror of the seeming death, though every child in the village knows you are tricked….

“No, there is no need to grovel and rub the face in the dirt. Merely bow the head, as you enter, ever so slightly.”

Yet in the end, though he half feared the test, Ish could not resist an experiment. Perhaps the incident of the hammer had really meant nothing. He was curious.

He picked the time carefully—late one morning, when it was only a few minutes before dismissal. He was preparing himself a retreat, if things got too embarrassing. There was no difficulty, since he was the teacher, in