be.
Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. “No, it isn’t much.” He looked up. “I think you’re probably right in theory, but I don’t think you’ll be able to follow it.”
Garvin frowned. “I don’t see why not, frankly. It’s pretty much what you’ve been doing.”
“Yes, it is. But you’re not I.” Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on.
“Matt, I’m part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I’d estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled.”
Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected.
“We have no distribution or communication,” Cottrell went on. “I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know—the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die.
“And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don’t know how to produce the necessities of life, and can’t buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two—take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again.
“I am a hoarder, yes,” he said. “I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they’d come from. I did it because I realized that I—that all of us—had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said politely. He couldn’t see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans.
Cottrell smiled and nodded. “I know, I know, Matt… But the point is, as I’ve said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours.”
“Sir?”
“You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You’re not what I am—an average American turned caveman. You’re an average caveman, and you haven’t turned anything—yet. But you will. You can’t escape it. Human beings don’t stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can’t. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it’s impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable—putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he’s got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else—” Cottrell smiled oddly, “his wife nags him into it.”
Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. “Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter’s got more orders than he can handle—so somebody else becomes a carpenter’s apprentice. You see?”
Matt nodded slowly. “I think so.”
“All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It’s just beginning, but it’s a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves—maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you’ll do, exactly, I don’t know. But it’ll be effective.”
Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter’s husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man’s last performance of his duty toward Margaret.
“I think, Matt,” Cottrell went on, “that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture—a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It’s the nature of the beast.
“And, it is also in the nature of the beast that some people, seeing their neighbor with his window screens, will not want to make the effort of building screens of their own. Some of them will try to bring their neighbor back to the old level—by killing him, by destroying his improvements.
“But that doesn’t work. If you kill one man, you may kill another. And the other people around you will band together in fear and kill you. And someday, after it’s been demonstrated that the easiest way, in the long run, is to build rather than to attempt to destroy—after everyone has window screens—some bright young man will invent DDT and a whole new cycle will begin.”
Cottrell laughed shortly. “Oh, what a nervous day for the window-screen-makers that will be! But the people who know how to make sprayguns will be very busy.
“The plague was a disaster, Matt,” he said suddenly, veering off on a new track. “But disasters are not new to the race of Man. To every Act of God, Man has an answer, drawn from the repertoire of answers he has hammered out in the face of the disasters that have come before. It’s in his nature to build dams against the flood—to rebuild after the earthquake. To put up window screens. Because, apparently, he’s uncomfortable with what this planet gives him, and has to change it—to improve on it, to make himself just a little more comfortable. Maybe, just for the irritated hope that his wife will shut up and leave him alone for a few minutes.
“Who knows? Man hunted his way upward with a club in his hand, once. You’re starting with a rifle. Perhaps, before your sons die, the world will once again support the kind of civilization in which a young man can sit in a cave, drawing pictures, and depend on others to clothe and shelter him.
“But not now,” Cottrell said. “Now, I wouldn’t entrust my daughter to anyone but a hunter.
“And I’m making you a hunter, Matt. I’m leaving you this dowry: responsibility, in the form of what my daughter will need to make her happy. In addition, I leave you the apartment as a base of operations, together with the stove, the water still, and the fuel oil. The First Avenue entrances to the Canarsie Line subway are on the corner. That tunnel connects with all the others under the city. They’ll be a relatively safe trail through the jungle this city has become. You’ll be able to get water from the seepage, too. Distilled water is easily restored to its natural taste by aeration with an eggbeater.
“Last of all, Matt, you’ll find my rifle beside the door. It’s a mankiller. There’s ammunition in the hall closet.
“That’s your environment, Matt. Change it.”
He stopped and sighed. “That’s all.”
Garvin sat silently, watching the old man’s breathing.
What would Cottrell have done if his daughter hadn’t brought a man home? Probably, he would have found comfort in the thought that, across the world, there were thousands of young men and women. His personal tragedy would have been trivial, on that scale.
Yes, doubtless. But would it have made the personal failure any less painful? Cottrell’s philosophy was logical enough—but, once again, in the face of actual practice, logic seemed not enough. Just as now, with all the philosophy expounded, there was still the problem of Margaret’s reaction.
Sweat trickled coldly down Garvin’s chest.
“By the way, Matt,” Cottrell said dryly, “For a young man who doubtless thinks of himself as not being a cave dweller, you’re apparently having a good deal of trouble recognizing the symptoms of shy young love, American girl style.”
Garvin stared at the old man, who went on speaking as though he did not see his flush, smiling broadly as he savored the secret joke he had discovered in his first glances at Margaret and Matt.
“And now, if you’ll call Margaret in here, I think we ought to bring her up to date.” He coughed violently
