“Please, Matt?” Margaret asked.
She was right. It was too big a chance not to take.
“Sure, Hon,” he said. “But get my rifle and cover the door from the hall,” he added softly.
“All right,” he said, raising his voice. “Come over.”
“Right,” Berendtsen answered. “Be a minute.”
The words were jovial enough, Garvin thought.
He heard Margaret move back into the hall, and his mind automatically registered the slight creak of the sling’s leather as she lifted the rifle to cover the door.
And then he heard Carol Berendtsen’s voice faintly through the wall.
“I—I don’t know,” she was saying to Gus, her voice uncertain. “Will it be all right? I mean, I haven’t talked to another woman in… What’ll she think? I haven’t got any good clothes. And there’s a strange man in there… Gus, I look so—I’m ashamed!”
And Gus Berendtsen’s voice, clumsy but gentle, its power broken into softness. “Aw, look, Toots, they’re just people like us. You think they’ve got any time for frills? I bet you’re dressed just fine. And what’s to be ashamed of in being a woman?” And then there was a moment’s silence. “I’ll bet you’re prettier than she is, too.”
“You’d better think so, Gus.”
Something untied itself in Garvin. “I think you can put that rifle away, Hon,” he said to Margaret. He saw her look of uncertainty, and nodded to emphasize the words. “I’m pretty sure.”
Garvin poured out another finger of the Scotch. He raised his glass in a silent mutual toast with Berendtsen, who grinned and lifted his own glass in response. Gus chuckled, the soft, controlled sound rumbling gently up through his thick chest. The glass was almost out of sight in his spade of a hand, huge even in proportion to the rest of his body. He sat easily in the chair that should have been too small for him, the shaped power of his personality reflected in his body’s casual poise.
“Ought to be able to set up a pretty good combo,” he said. “One of us stays home to hold the fort while the other one goes out for the groceries. Take turns. Might try knocking a hole through this wall, too. Be easier.” He slapped the plaster with his hand.
Garvin nodded. “Good idea.” They both smiled at the drift of women’s voices that came from one of the bedrooms. “Make it easier on the baby-sitter, too.”
“My gal was a little worried,” Berendtsen agreed. He grinned again. “You know, we may have something here.” He raised his glass again, and Garvin, catching his train of thought, matched the gesture. “To the Second Republic,” Berendtsen said.
“All six-and-two-halves rooms of it,” Garvin affirmed. Then his glance reached the living room window, and he realized that there was still something undone. He got up to loosen the sheet and let the body fall to join the others that lay scattered among the dark buildings.
But he stopped before his hand touched the sheet. No one would know, now, how much honesty there had been within the fear of the intruder’s voice. But it was time somebody in the world got the benefit of the doubt. They’d carry him down to the ground, Gus and he, and give him a burial, like a man.
CHAPTER THREE
It was winter again, and seven years since the plague. December snow lay deep between Stuyvesant’s buildings, under the frosty night, while Manhattan raised its blunt stone shoulders up and, here and there, silent figures in the department stores took time from their normal foraging and climbed the prostrate escalators to the toy counters.
A delegation from the next building in the block made a gingerly meeting with Matt Garvin and Gus Berendtsen, out on one of the windswept playgrounds.
Garvin watched the delegation leader carefully. It was an older man, fat and small-eyed—a man who’d been somebody before the plague, he guessed.
Matt knew he was being nervous for no clear reason. But he didn’t like dealing with older people. There was no telling how much they had time to learn—how many little tricks they remembered from the old days.
The man smiled affably, proffering his hand. “Charlie Conner,” he boomed. “I guess I run that shebang back there,” he said deprecatingly, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward his own building. But the young, wolfish riflemen with him did not twitch their eyes to follow the gesture.
“Matt Garvin. And this is Gus Berendtsen,” Matt noticed Gus was looking at Conner the same way he’d looked over each member of each new family they’d found in the apartments of their building. “I guess between us we do your job for our building.”
Conner grinned. “Tough, isn’t it? What’d you do—just spread out gradual, sweating it out every time you made contact with a different family?”
“Something like that,” Gus cut in. “Make your point.”
Conner’s eyes shifted. “Don’t get jumpy,” he soothed. “All I am is figuring now we’ve got our whole buildings organized, it’s time we joined up together. The more people we’ve got, the more we can control things. The idea is to make sure your own rules get followed in your own territory, right? Nobody wants any wild hares fouling things up. You want to be sure that as long as you follow the rules, everything’s all right, right? You want to know your family’s protected while you’re out someplace. You want to be sure there’s a safe store of food, right? Well, the bigger the community, the more sure you can be. Right?”
Garvin nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Conner spread his hands. “All right. Now, I’ve got my place organized nice as pie. Ought to. Fifteen years District Captain in this ward. Lots of experience. Now, I’m sure you boys have things going pretty well, but maybe there’s one or two things you could stand to have better. Okay, here I am. My people’re satisfied. Right, boys?” he asked his riflemen.
“Right, boss.”
Gus said: “What you mean is, we should join you.”
Conner chuckled. “Well, now, look, I’m not likely to want to join you, now, am I?”
He leaned negligently against the crudely painted sign Gus and Matt had seen planted through the playground’s asphalt: “Meet me here tomorrow, and we’ll talk joining up together. —Charlie Conner.”
Gus and Matt exchanged glances. “We’ll think about it,” Gus said.
“You do that,” Conner said. “Oh, look, I know you think you’ve been doing all right. And you have—no question about it. But now you’re ready to spread out into more than one building, and you’ve got to figure sooner or later you have to meet somebody with more experience, running things. It just figures, that’s all. You didn’t hope you could start a whole city government, did you? I mean, you boys weren’t going to run one of you for Mayor or anything, were you?” Conner chuckled uproariously.
“We’ll think about it,” Gus repeated. “You’ll hear from us.”
Conner’s eyes narrowed. “When?”
Matt said: “When we’re ready.”
Conner looked thoughtfully at the two of them. “Don’t stall me too long, now.”
“You worried you might die of old age?” Gus asked. They turned around and walked away. Conner looked after them, turned, and stalked back toward his own building. The rifle parties of both sides waited until everyone else was gone, and then they backed away from each other. Finally, the playground stood empty again.
In their apartment, Matt put his rifle down softly. “Well, now we know,” he said. “I thought we’d been running into too many rival foraging parties. They had to come from someplace nearby.”
“What do you think about Conner?”
“I think he’s lost more people than we have, or he would have let things go on the way they have been, with his foraging parties and ours leaving each other alone unless they were both set on picking up the same thing.”
