Thought of what would happen to that greenstuff. Thought of tomato juice on his chin, bread, ham . . . and then of the greyish quarter-loaf he would receive at supper, gritty in texture, under its sour crust more hole than crumb. That, and a bowl of the invariable watery broth in which floated a few anonymous vegetables. It was a common game to make bets on their identity. There was never meat, of course. It cost too much.
After a while he started wondering whom he could trust enough to tell about the Berendt conversion.
AFTERWORD
Some of Joseph the son of Jacob’s reminiscences should instantly be recognisable, above all the reference to the years of the ill-favoured kine. However, a few are likely to leave the reader in the infuriating state, “I’m sure I know where that comes from, but . . . !”
So here are the sources.
The description of scurvy among the soldiers at Alexandria is from Larrey’s memoirs; he was Surgeon-General to Napoleon. The Paris Zoo was used to supplement the rations of the besieged during the Franco-Prussian War. (They ate some even odder things than python.) Cannibalism at Leningrad is a recurrent rumour, recurrently denied.
The civil war in Brazil hasn’t happened yet; however, the land those poor devils are trying to farm was seen in a British TV documentary a few years ago. The description of the Indian famine is from the memoirs of a Dutch merchant called Van Twist, who was there in 1630-31. (The fourteen famines were from 1660 to 1750.) The man who took bread to the village of South Reen was a local justice of the peace; this is from a letter he wrote to the Duke of Wellington which W. O. O’Brien quoted in his book The Great Famine.
Authority for the diet of the subjects of John of Leyden can be found in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The comment about what people can be driven to put in their bellies paraphrases a remark in The Oxford Book of Food Plants’, the authors say, “Nor is it possible to include all those plants (though some are mentioned) which men will try to eat in the desperation of famine.” The specific examples given, and the ersatz cigarettes, are from the recollection of people who lived in Guernsey under Nazi occupation, 1940-45, and I found them in Comer Clarke’s England Under Hitler.
The horses eaten almost before their death are from Larrey again. The burning of fruit to keep the price up is quoted verbatim from Hard Times by Studs Terkel. And except that in those days they were using artillery instead of guided missiles, the shooting-down of UN relief planes could well refer to the Nigeria-Biafra war.
—JKHB
The Easy Way Out
No human being had any right to survive the crash of the Pennyroyal: tumbling insanely out of space through air that bit blazing chunks from its hull, down a thirty-mile sandslope sown with rocks, and ultimately wrong end first into a vast dune which absorbed it like a bullet ricocheting into the bank around a rifle range.
By a minor miracle the sand put out the fires on board. There had been a lot of those.
After that nothing happened for a long time.
I’m alive.
The thought floated sluggishly into Pavel Williamson’s mind. He; hated it. He was half-buried in something dense and yielding, and he was almost suffocated by choking fumes. Moreover he had been tumbled around and around in total blackness until he was sick with giddiness. His head ached foully, there was a taste of blood in his mouth, he seemed to be one vast bruise from the waist down, and there was a sharp pain in his right ankle.
Taken by themselves, those minor injuries were not sufficient reason for preferring not to be alive. But there was another, more important reason. As the ship’s medical officer, not concerned with matters of navigation, he had no precise idea where the Pennyroyal had been when a vast explosion shook it like a hammer blow, but he was absolutely certain that the planet they had crashed on was not the one they were bound for, a safe Earth-type world.
Therefore these fumes which were swirling about him might all too easily not be fumes at all, but the planet’s unbreathable atmosphere. In which case the best—the only—sane course open to him was to compose himself and wait for merciful extinction.
He was not a professional spaceman, just a young doctor who had signed on with a succession of spacelines in order to see a little of the inhabited galaxy before settling down on a world which suited him, but he had been impressed by the autohypnotic formulae some spacemen used in emergencies like this one. Closing his eyes—not that they had shown him anything when they were open, because it was absolutely dark in here—he began to recite one in his head.
And stopped.
A banging noise!
Some part of the wreckage settling? Something falling on a resonant steel floor? Most likely—
But it wasn’t! He jerked, and cursed his injured ankle which responded with another arrow of pain. No, the bangs had been too regular—and there they came again: one-two-three, pause, one-two-three, pause. Like a man hitting a bulkhead with a fist, or some hard object.
It dawned on him that someone else must be alive nearby, and that if someone else had survived the crash, it might not have been as bad as he’d assumed, and together he and some helpers might rig some sort of beacon to help a search party locate the wreck.
And if the fumes were fumes, not bad air, then they might have come down on—
He fumbled frantically among the mass of soft stuff he was almost over ears in, wondering what it was, and recognized it in moments. Furs! He’d known the Pennyroyal had a cargo of furs on board—it had been part of his duties when they were loaded to check them for parasites and disease germs—and he had
