Make Room! Make Room!

“This is none of your business,” she said.

“I’m making it my business,” Mrs. Miles said, balling her fist and cocking back her arm.

“It’s none of your business,” Mike’s sister said, but she scuttled backward a few steps at the same time.

“Blow!” Mrs. Miles said triumphantly.

“You’re going to hear from me again!” Mary Haggerty called over her shoulder as she drew together the shreds of her dignity and stalked away. Mrs. Miles laughed coldly and spat after the receding back.

“I’m sorry to get you involved,” Shirl said.

“My pleasure,” Mrs. Miles said. “I wish she really had started some trouble. I would have slugged her. I know her kind.”

“I really don’t owe her any money…”

“Who cares? It would be better if you did. It would be a pleasure to stiff someone like that.”

Mrs. Miles left her in front of her building and stamped solidly away into the dusk. Suddenly weary, Shirl climbed the long flights to the apartment and pushed through the unlocked door.

“You look bushed,” Sol told her. He was heaped high with blankets and only his face showed; his woolen watch cap was pulled down over his ears. “And turn that thing off, will you. It’s an even chance whether I go blind or deaf first.”

Shirl put down her bag and switched off the blaring TV. “It’s getting cold out,” she said. “It’s even cold in here. I’ll make a fire and heat some soup at the same time.”

“Not more of that drecky meat flake stuff,” Sol complained, and made a face.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” Shirl said patiently. “It’s real meat, just what you need.”

“What I need, you can’t get any more. Do you know what meat flakes are? I heard all about it on TV today, not that I wanted to but how could I turn the damn thing off? A big sales pitch program on taming the wilds in Florida. Some wilds, they should hear about that in Miami Beach. They stopped trying to drain all the swamps and are doing all kinds of fancy things with them instead. Snail ranches — how do you like that? Raising the giant West African snail, three-quarters of a pound of meat in every shell. Plucked, cut, dehydrated, radiated, packed and sealed and sent to the starving peasants here in the frigid North. Meat flakes. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds very nice,” Shirl said, stirring the brown, woodlike chips of meat into the pot. “I saw a movie once on TV where they were eating snails, in France I think it was. They were supposed to be something very special.”

“For Frenchmen maybe, not for me…” Sol broke into a fit of coughing that left him weak and white faced on the pillow, breathing rapidly.

“Do you want a drink of water?” Shirl asked.

“No — that’s all right.” His anger seemed to have drained away with the coughing. “I’m sorry to take it out on you, kid, you taking care of me and everything. It’s just that I’m not used to lying around. I stayed in shape all my life, regular exercise that’s the answer, looked after myself, never asked anybody for anything. But there’s one thing you can’t stop.” He looked down gloomily at the bed. “Time marches on. The bones get brittle. Fall down and bango, they got you in a cast to your chin.”

“The soup’s ready—”

“Not right now, I’m not hungry. Maybe you could turn on the TV — no, leave it off. I had enough. On the news they said that it looks like the Emergency Bill is going to pass after only a couple of months of yakking in Congress. I don’t believe it. Too many people don’t know about it or don’t care about it, so there is no real pressure on Congress to do anything about it. We still have women with ten kids who are starving to death, who believe there is something evil about having smaller families. I suppose we can mostly blame the Catholics for that, they’re still not completely convinced that controlling births is a good thing.”

“Sol, please, don’t be anti-Catholic. My mother’s family…”

“I’m not being anti-nothing, and I love your mother’s family. Am I anti-Puritan because I say Cotton Mather was a witch-burning bum who helped to cook old ladies? That’s history. Your Church has gone on record and fought publicly against any public birth control measures. That’s history too. The results — which prove them wrong — are just outside that window. They have forced their beliefs on the rest of us so we’re all going down the drain together.”

“It’s not really that bad. The Church is not really against the idea of birth control, just the way it is done. They have always approved of the rhythm technique…”

“Not good enough. Neither is the Pill, not for everybody. When are they going to say okay to the Loop? This is the one that really works. And do you know how long it has been around and absolutely foolproof and safe and harmless and all the rest? Since 1964, when the bright boys at Johns Hopkins licked all the problems and side effects, that’s how long. For thirty-five years they’ve had this little piece of plastic that costs maybe a couple of cents. Once inserted it stays in for years, it doesn’t interfere with any of the body processes, it doesn’t fall out, in fact the woman doesn’t even know it is there — but as long as it is she is not going to get pregnant. Remove it and she can have kids again, nothing is changed. And the funny part is that no one is even sure how it works. It’s a mystery. Maybe it should be spelled with a capital M, Mystery, so your Church could accept it and say it’s God’s will whether the thing is going to work or not.”

“Sol — you’re being blasphemous.”

“Me? Never! But I got just as much right as the next guy to take a guess as to what God is thinking. Anyway, it really has nothing to do with Him. I’m just trying to find an excuse for the Catholic Church to accept the thing and give the suffering human race a break.”

“They’re considering it now.”

“That’s great. They’re only about thirty-five years too late. Still, it might work out, though I doubt it It’s the old business of too little and too late. The world’s gone — not going — to hell in a hand basket, and it’s all of us who pushed it there.”

Shirl stirred the soup and smiled at him. “Aren’t you exaggerating maybe a little bit? You can’t really blame all our troubles on overpopulation.”

“I damned well can, if you’ll pardon the expression. The coal that was supposed to last for centuries has all been dug up because so many people wanted to keep warm. And the oil too, there’s so little left that they can’t afford to burn it, it’s got to be turned into chemicals and plastics and stuff. And the rivers — who polluted them? The water — who drank it? The topsoil — who wore it out? Everything has been gobbled up, used up, worn out. What we got left — our one natural resource? Old-car lots, that’s what. Everything else has been used up and all we got to show for it is a couple of billion old cars that are rusting away. One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it’s gone now. One time the prairie was black with buffalo, that’s what my schoolbooks said when I was a kid, but I never saw them because they had all been turned into steaks and moth- eaten rugs by that time. Do you think that made any impression on the human race? Or the whales and passenger pigeons and whooping cranes, or any of the hundred other species that we wiped out? In a pig’s eye it did. In the fifties and the sixties there was a lot of talk about building atomic power plants to purify sea water so the desert would bloom and all that jazz. But it was just talk. Just because some people saw the handwriting on the wall didn’t mean they could get anyone else to read it too. It takes at least five years to build just one atomic plant, so the ones that should have supplied the water and electricity we need now should have been built then. They weren’t. Simple enough.”

“You make it sound simple, Sol, but isn’t it too late to worry about what people should have done a hundred years ago?”

“Forty, but who’s counting.”

“What can we do today? Isn’t that what we should be thinking about?”

“You think about it, honeybunch, I get gloomy when I do. Run full speed ahead just to stay even, and keep our fingers crossed, that’s what we can do today. Maybe I live in the past, and if I do I got good reasons. Things were a lot better then, and the trouble would always be coming tomorrow, so the hell with it. There was France, a great big modern country, home of culture, ready to lead the world in progress. Only they had a law that made birth control illegal, and it was a crime for even doctors to talk about contraception. Progress! The facts were clear enough if anybody had bothered to look. The conservationists kept telling us to change our ways or our resources would soon be gone. They’re gone. It was almost too late then, but something could have been done. Women in