recognized him. His name was Jack Holland, and his father had been one of the three men who were cut down at the attack’s beginning. He carried a worn and battered toy of a rifle that was obviously his family’s second- or third-best weapon, but even with his teen-age face, he somehow invested that ridiculous .22 with deadliness. Garvin threw a quick glance at Berendtsen.
Gus nodded slightly, in the near-perfect communication that had grown between them. As long as Holland was speaking for them, there was no need for their own words.
“We’re the richest thing in this neighborhood,” the boy went on, his eyes and voice older than himself. “What’s more, those guys have kids and women going hungry on account of us cleaning out all the stores around here. We’ve been doing plenty to them.”
Garvin nodded back to Berendtsen, and there was a shift in the already complex structure of judgments and tentative decisions that he kept stored in his mind. In a few years, they would have a good man with them.
He found himself momentarily lost in thought at the plans which now were somehow far advanced in his mind, but which had first had to grow, bit by bit, over the past years. The Second Republic—he still smiled as he thought of it, but not as broadly—had expanded, and as it grew to encompass all of this building, so he and Gus had more experience to draw from, more men to work with and assign to the constantly diversifying duties.
Strange, to plan for a future, in the light of the past. But somehow good to plan, to shape, to hope. Even to know that, though the plan had to be revised from minute to minute as unexpected problems arose, the essential objective would never change.
He cut through the murmur of argument that had risen among the men. “Okay. Holland’s put it in a nutshell. We’re an organized outfit with a systematic plan for supplying ourselves. That’s fine for us, not so good for anybody that isn’t with us. We all expected something to happen when we started. Some of us may have thought our troubles with Conner these last few trips were the most we could expect. We should have known better, but that’s unimportant now. Here it is, and we’re stuck with it. Once again, now—what do we do?”
“We go in there and clean the sons of bitches out,” someone growled.
“You going first?” another man rasped at him.
“Damn right, boy,” a third said, leaving it a moot point as to whom he was supporting.
“That’s what I thought.” Berendtsen was on his feet, towering over the table as much as his voice crushed the babble. He waited a moment for the last opened mouth to close, his bleak eyes moving surely from man to man, his jaw set. Garvin, drawing on the thousand subtle cues that their friendship had gradually taught him to recognize, could catch the faint thread of amusement in the big man’s attitude—perhaps because he, too, had recognized the wry spectacle of the no-longer-quite-uncivilized afraid of the still-savage. But the men swung their glances hurriedly at Berendtsen, and only a few held sly glints in their eyes as they did so.
“You’re acting like a bunch of mice when a flashlight spots ’em,” Gus went on. “And don’t tell me that’s exactly what happened to you, because there’s supposed to be a few differences between us and mice.”
Matt grinned broadly, and a few of the men twitched their mouths in response. Berendtsen went on.
“This thing’s suddenly become serious, and it’s like nothing we’ve run up against before. When people start knocking on walls all around you, telling you the building’s being organized, it’s one thing. But those birds are off by themselves. We can’t make them do anything.”
He stopped to sweep the men with his glance once more. “And we’re not going to try to go into those buildings and take them room by room. It can’t be done to us. We can’t do it to them.”
“We can’t lick them, and they can’t lick us. But we can chop each other up little by little, and we can all starve while we’re doing it. Because we sure as hell can’t forage and fight a war at the same time. There’s plenty of other people out there to make sure it takes a strong party to bring home the bacon.
“There’s one way out. We can join up with each other. If we can get Conner to settle for something less than us being his slaves. It’s not the most likable idea in the world, but I don’t see any other way to save what we’ve got. Conner’s no prince. He’ll try and make it as tough on us as he can. But maybe we can work something out. I say it needs trying, because it’s a cinch we lose too much, any other way.”
The argument broke loose again, and Garvin sat letting it wear itself out. He didn’t think Gus was right. It meant somebody would have to stick his neck out, and that went against all his grain.
But he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Gus was right about that part, at least. Matt had been hoping that giving it time would show some way out. Now he didn’t know what to do, so, again by instinct, he was willing to let somebody else move. He looked across the table at Gus, who sat brooding at the blacked-out window, as if he could see the other buildings huddled in the night outside.
“Well, if we don’t do something,” Jack Holland’s sharp voice emerged from the tangle of words, “we can go down in history as a bunch of people who almost got things started again but didn’t make it.”
“I don’t give no damn for history,” another man said. “But I got five kids, and I want ’em to eat.”
And that about settled it, Garvin thought. But none of them could honestly call it anything except a bad bargain. Especially Gus and he, for it would be they who would have to go out and talk to Conner.
“Almost Christmas,” Gus said in a low, brooding voice. He and Garvin stood at the window, the blankets pulled aside now that the men were gone and the lamps were out. “Peace on Earth, good will to men. Oh, little town of Stuyvesant, how still we see thee…” He snorted. “A hundred years from now, they’ll have Christmases. They’ll have trees, and tinsel, and lights. And I hope the kids play with toy tractors.”
“I got Jim a stuffed bear,” Garvin said. “What’d you get for Ted?”
Gus snorted again. “What do you get any four-year-old? Books with lots of pictures—Carol wants to start his reading pretty soon. A wooden toy train—stuff like that. That’s for a four-year-old. When he’s a year or two older, we can start explaining how come the books don’t mean anything, and the train’s a toy of something that just isn’t, anymore. It’s the question of what you get him then that bothers me.”
Matt, too, found himself staring dull-eyed at the cold city as Berendtsen’s mood communicated itself and seeped into his system.
Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow was always better, for someone. The difficult task lay in ensuring that the someone was one of yours.
He had Jim, and one-year-old Mary. Moreover, Margaret was almost certain she was pregnant again. Gus and Carol had Ted.
The weight that rode Berendtsen’s shoulders slumped Garvin’s own.
“Think it’ll work?” Gus said expressionlessly.
“Up a pig’s tail, maybe,” Matt answered.
[Image]
Dawn slipped through the weave of the blankets over Garvin’s bedroom windows, and he shook his mind free of sleep. He swung off his side of the mattress, shivering.
“Stove’s gone out again, dear,” Margaret mumbled sleepily from under the blankets.
“I know. I guess I forgot to fill it before I went to bed. Go back to sleep,” he whispered, dressing hastily. She turned over, smiled, and buried her face in the pillow again. By the time he finished lacing his boots, she was asleep once more, and he chuckled softly at her faint snores.
He stopped to look in on the children before he went out to the kitchen to heat shaving water, and he lit the burner absently, staring down at the flame for a long while before he put the pan on. He walked quietly back to the bathroom with the pan in his hand, still bemused—less lost in thought than busy avoiding thought—washed, and shaved with a steady but automatic hand. He flushed the toilet with a pail of dishwater, filled and lit the stove, had breakfast, and finally sighed, pushed his dishes away, and stood up. He went over to the rough doorway that had been cut in the wall, and rapped on it lightly.
“Yeah, Matt,” Gus answered from inside. “Come on in. I’m just knocking off another cup of coffee.”
Garvin stepped inside, and sat down at Berendtsen’s table. Gus was leaning on his elbows, his neck drawn down into his shoulders, both hands on the big cup of yellowishly weak coffee that he held just below the level of his chin, raising it to his mouth at intervals. They sat without speaking until Gus finally put the emptied cup
