Читать книгу Not This August (Sci-Fi Christmas Tale) - Cyril M. Kornbluth - Страница 7

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Along about one o'clock people began to drift dazedly from the store—to their homes in Norton to talk in stunned whispers on the board sidewalk fronting the grocery. Old man Croley turned the radio off when a girl's voice said between replays of the surrender statement that there would be a new announcement broadcast at 9:00 P.M. for which electric-current restrictions would be temporarily relaxed.

"That'll be the surrender terms," Gus Feinblatt said to Justin.

"I guess so. Gus—what do you think?"

There were four thousand years of dark history in Feinblatt's eyes. "I think the worst is yet to come, Billy."

"You'll get your kids back."

"At such a price. I don't know whether it's worth it . . . Well, life goes on. Mr. Croley?"

The storekeeper looked up. He didn't say "Yes?" or "What can I do for you?" He never did; he looked and he waited and he never called anybody by name. He wasn't an old-timer as old-timers went in Norton; he had come ten years ago from a grocery in Minnesota, and had used those ten years well. Justin knew he sold hardware, fencing, coal, fuel oil, fertilizer, feed and seed—in short, everything a farmer needed to earn his living—as well as groceries. Justin suspected that he also ran a small private bank which issued loans at illegal rates of interest. He did know that there were farmers who turned pale when Croley looked speculatively at them, and farm wives who cursed him behind his back. He was sixty-five, childless, and married to an ailing, thin woman who spent most of her time in the apartment above the store.

"Mr. Croley," Gus said, "I might as well get my feed. My wagon's outside the storeroom."

Croley put out his hand and waited. Gus laid twenty-seven dollars in it, and still the hand was out, waiting. "Coupons?" Gus asked wryly.

"You heard him," Croley said. (After a moment you figured out that "him" was the President, who had said that civilians were to continue as before, maintaining order.) Gus tore ration coupons out of his "F" book and laid them on the money. The hand was withdrawn and Croley stumped outside to unlock the storeroom door and stand by, watching, as Feinblatt and Justin loaded sacks of feed onto the stake wagon. When the last one went bump on the bed, he relocked the door, turned, and went back into his grocery.

"Gus," Justin said, "would you mind waiting a minute? I want to see if Croley happens to have a pump rod for me—and then I'd like to bum a ride home from you."

"Glad to have your company," Feinblatt said, politely abstracted.

Croley listened to Justin in silence, reached under his counter, and banged a pump rod down in front of his customer. He snapped: "Twelve-fifty without hardware coupon. Three-fifty with."

The old skunk knew, of course, that Justin had used up his quarterly allotment of hardware coupons to fix his milker. Justin paid, red-faced with anger, and went out to climb alongside Feinblatt on the wagon. Gus clucked at the horses and they moved off.

Rumble-rumble over the Lehigh tracks and up Straw Hill Road, with Tony and Phony pulling hard on the stiff grade, the wagon wheels crashing into three years of unfixed chuckholes. Halfway up Feinblatt called "Whoa" and fixed the brake. "Rest 'em a little," he said to Justin. "All they get's hay, of course. Feed has to go to the cows. How's your herd?"

"All right, I guess," Justin said. "I wonder if I can let 'em go now. You want to buy them? I guess I don't get drafted for a road gang now if I stop farming."

"Think again," Feinblatt said. "My guess is you better stick to exactly what you've been doing. Things are going to keep on this way for a while—maybe quite a while. You know about the postal service in the Civil War?"

Feinblatt was the local Civil War fanatic; every community seemed to have one. They spent vacations touring the battlefields ecstatically, comparing the ground with the maps. They had particular heroes among the generals and they loved to guess at what would have happened if this successful raid had failed, if that disastrous skirmish had been a triumph.

"Lincoln called for volunteers," Gus Feinblatt said impressively. "Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. The war was on. And yet for months there was no interruption of the U. S. mail between the two countries. Inertia, you call it. So maybe even if there isn't any war left to fight now, maybe even if the Reds kick the President and Congress out of Underground, D. C., there will still be people on the state and local level to enforce drafting you for labor if you quit farming." He released the brake and clucked to the horses. The bay geldings strained up the hill again.

"I guess you're right," Justin said reluctantly. "Things won't be squared away for a long while. I guess after things get settled, they replace government people with Reds, if they can find enough." He laughed unpleasantly. "Wait and see what happens to that snake Croley then! If ever there was anybody who qualified in the Commie book as a dirty capitalist exploiter it's our buddy down in Norton."

Feinblatt shrugged. "He made his bed. When I think my boys were fighting for him——!" He spat over the side of the wagon, his face flushed.

"What do you hear from them?" Justin hastily asked. He had stopped one in Korea, but was guiltily aware that there was a keener agony of war that he had never known—the father's agony.

"Card from Daniel last week. Infantry replacement training center in Montana. He was just finishing his basic. We worked out a kind of code, so I know he was hoping they wouldn't ship him South as a rifleman, but he thought they might. He was bucking for 75-millimeter recoilless gunner. It would have kept him on ice for another two weeks. From David not a word since he joined the 270th at El Paso. I don't know, Billy. I just don't know. It's over, sure, they'll come back maybe, but I don't know. . . ."

There was little more talk from then on. "Here's where I get off," Justin said at last. "My best to Leah." He swung down at his mailbox and limped down the steep hill to his house. May be able to get some decent shoes after things settle down, he thought bitterly. That'll be something.

It still did not seem real.

Obviously things were badly disorganized somewhere. The house lights kept going on and off; the phone rang his number now and then, but when he answered there was only the open-circuit hum of a broken line. He couldn't call anybody himself. He had a useless electric clock on the mantel which told him that the electric service was going badly off the beam. He timed the second hand with his watch and discovered that the alternating current delivered to his house was wobbling between 30 and 120 cycles per second instead of flowing at an even 60 per. A bomb at Niagara? Fighting for a power substation somewhere? Engineers quitting their posts in despair?

But the Eastern Milkshed Administration truck had picked up his milk cans while he was gone. He herded his cows into the barn, belatedly washed the milker and pails, and relieved their full udders once more. God alone knew whether the milk would ever reach (cholera-ridden?) New York City, but the mail would go through, the EMA truck driver would report him if there were no cans to pick up, and the administrative machinery of a nation which was no longer alive would grind him through the gears into a road-mending crew whether it mattered a damn or not.

Once during the afternoon somebody goofed at the local radio station, which was rebroadcasting the message of capitulation. A woman's voice screamed hysterically: "Rally, Americans! Fight the godless Reds! Fight them in the streets, from behind bushes, house to house——" And then, whoever she was, somebody dragged her away from the mike and said wearily: "We regret the interruption of our service due to circumstances beyond our control." Then, again: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States."

"My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with a——"

The current went off again, this time for an hour.

* * * * *

There was a calm, slow knock on the door. Through the kitchen window Justin recognized Mister, sometimes The Reverend Mister Sparhawk. Sparhawk happened to be the last man on Earth whom he wanted to see at the moment. He also happened to be a man practically impossible to insult, completely impervious to hints, maddeningly certain of his righteousness.

Justin sighed and opened the door. "Come on in," he told the lean old man. "Just, for God's sake, don't talk. Find something to eat and go away." He opened his breadbox and retreated into the living room hoping he wouldn't be pursued. Sparhawk was a ref, an Englishman. Justin was sick of refs, and so was everybody. The refs from the Baltic, the Balkans, Germany, France, England, Latin America—he vaguely felt that they ought to have stayed in their countries and been exterminated instead of bothering Americans. English refs were the least obnoxious, they didn't jabber, but Sparhawk——

The lean old man came into the living room eating bread and cheese. "Buck up, m' boy," Sparhawk said cheerily. "All this is only a Trial, you know. You should regard it as a magnificent opportunity. Here's your chance to play the man, acquire merit, and get a leg up on your next incarnation."

"Oh, shut up," Justin said.

"Natural reaction, very. I don't blame you a bit, m' boy. But sober reflection on the great events of this day will show you their spiritual meaning. How else would you haughty Americans get the chance to humble yourselves and practice asceticism if there were no Red occupation?"

Justin studied Sparhawk's neatly pressed garb, a collection of donated items in good repair. He snapped: "If you're so damned ascetic, why don't you go around in a jockstrap like your beloved yogis?"

Sparhawk stiffened ever so slightly. "My dear young man," he said, "Anybody who wore only a loincloth in your atrocious climate might or might not be a saint, but he'd certainly be a bloody fool. I see you're in no mood for serious discussion, sir. I'll bid you good day."

"Good riddance," Justin muttered, but only after Sparhawk had shouldered his rucksack again and was going down the kitchen steps.

* * * * *

At about seven in the evening Justin decided to visit his friends the Bradens a mile and a half up the battered road. He hadn't seen much of them during the winter; his meager gas allotment had been cut to zero in the general reduction of November 1964. He had missed them personally, missed their off-beat chatter and Amy's generously shared home brew. The only other liquor in the area was a vicious grape brandy illegally distilled by old Mr. Konreid on Ash Hill Road. It put you under fast. The next morning you wished you could die.

Lew Braden had a weird profession. He was a maker of fine hand-laid papers for bookbinders and etchers. Before the war it was his custom to tour the country each summer in a battered Ford offering picayune prices to farm wives for their soft old linen tablecloths and napkins, washed thousands of times, worn to rags, and stored thriftily in an attic trunk. He would finish his tour with bales of the inimitable material and spend the winter turning it, with the aid of simple tools, dexterity, and a great deal of know-how, into inimitable special-purpose papers. The Braden watermark was internationally famous—to about five hundred bookbinders and etchers—and he cleared perhaps three thousand dollars in an average year. It was, he often said nostalgically, a very easy buck. Under the Farm-or-Fight Law he and Amy had elected to start a piggery and truck farm for the reason that it required less effort than dairying or field crops. They turned out to be right. They had sailed through three years of war without much trouble, with time to read, paint, play violin-piano duets, and drink. Justin, chained to the twice-daily milking and the niggling hygiene of the milk-house, envied their good sense.

Good sense, he thought, picking his way around the chuck-holes in the moonlit road—maybe they can explain to me what the devil has happened and what happens next.

The countryside was winking on and off in the dusk like a Christmas tree. The Horbath farm up the hill, the Parry farm to the south with its big yard light, his own house behind him alternately flared with lights in every window and then went out. He hoped the current would steady down by nine—time for "the further announcement."

Lew Braden prudently called as he entered their dark yard: "Who's there? I've got a shotgun!"

"It's Justin," he called back.

The yard light went on and stayed on. Braden studied him with mild perplexity. "Darned if you aren't," he said. "Come in, Billy. We were hoping somebody'd drop by. What's going on with the lights and the phone?"

"You haven't heard?"

"Obviously not. Come in and tell us about it, whatever it is. Nobody's been by and the radio won't go since Amy fixed it."

The radio was indeed roaring unintelligibly on an end table.

"It's over," Justin said. "That's what it's all about. Fraley surrendered at El Paso. The President capitulated through the embassies in Switzerland. They've been broadcasting it since noon. Let me see that damned radio. It sounds as if you just haven't got it on a station."

He pulled the chassis out of the plastic case and saw the trouble. The cord from the tuning-knob pulley to the variable condenser was slack instead of taut; the radio worked but you couldn't tune it from the knob. He picked up a stub of pencil and shoved the condenser over to one of the CONELRAD stations.

". . . in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States I now order all officers and enlisted men to cease fire. Maintain discipline, hold your ranks . . ."

They listened to it twice through and then turned it down. Between each of the replays now the woman's voice announced that a further statement would be made at nine.

Lew and Amy were looking at each other. The expression on their faces was unreadable. At last Lew turned to Justin and said softly: "Don't worry about a thing, Billy. You're going to have to make a big readjustment in your thinking, but so will almost everybody. You'll find out you've been fed a pack of lies. You'll fight the truth at first, but finally we'll prove to you——"

"We? Who's we?" Justin demanded.

"Shut up, Lew," Amy said briefly.

He turned his kindly, round bespectacled face to her. "No, Amy. You, too, are having difficulty in readjusting. Conditions have changed now; we're suddenly no longer conspirators but the voice and leadership of America. A new America."

Guilelessly he turned again to Justin. "We're Communists, Billy. Have been for twenty years. This is the grandest day of my life."

Justin felt an impulse to back away. "You're kidding. Or crazy!"

"Neither one, Billy. You see, this is the first of the readjustments you will have to make. You think a Communist must necessarily be a fiend, a savage, a foreigner. You couldn't conceive of a Communist being a soft-spoken, reasonable, mannerly person. But Amy and I are, aren't we? And we're Communists. When I was on those linen-buying trips, I was doubling as a courier. I was in the Party category you call 'floaters' then. Since the war I've been what you call a 'sleeper.' No conspiratorial activity, no connection with the activist branch. I have merely been under orders to hold myself in readiness for this day. I know who lives hereabouts, I know their sentiments. I am, I think, almost everybody's friend. My job will be to educate the people of this area.

"You see? Your education is beginning already. There will be no brutal, foreign tyrants around here. There will be Amy and me—friends and neighbors—just the way we always were, explaining to you the new America.

"And what an America it will be! Freed from the shackles of capitalist exploitation and racial hatred! Purged of the warmongers who imposed a crushing armament burden on the workers and finally goaded the U.S.S.R. and the C.P.R. into attacking! An America freed from bondage to ancient superstition!"

There were tears of joy in his eyes.

Justin asked slowly: "Have you spied? Have you been traitors?"

Lew said with dignity:

"You're thinking of cloak-and-dagger stuff, Billy. Assassination. Break open the locked drawer and steal the great atomic secret for godless Russia. Well, there was a little melodrama, but I never liked it. I've risked my life more than once and I was glad to. Amy and I were couriers in the Rosenbergs' apparatus; drawings from Los Alamos passed through our hands. It was only by a fluke that the FBI didn't stumble onto us. If they had, I suppose we would have fried with the Rosenbergs. Gladly. For America, Billy. Because I did not spy against the people. I did not commit treason against the people."

Justin said: "Good night, Lew. Good night, Amy. I don't know what to think. . . ."

Lew said confidently to his back: "You'll readjust. It'll be all right. Don't worry."

* * * * *

He walked home and found that the current was on again, apparently for good. He climbed to the attic and brought down a half-full gallon of old Mr. Konreid's popskull. He filled a tumbler and sipped at it until nine, when the radio said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of State."

"Fellow citizens, I have been ordered to communicate to you the Articles of Surrender which were signed in Washington, D.C., today by the President on behalf of the United States, by Marshal Ilya Novikov on behalf of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and by Marshal Feng Chu-tsai on behalf of the Chinese People's Republic.

"One. The United States surrenders without conditions to the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. Acts of violence against troops of the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. on or after April 17, 1965, are recognized by the high contracting parties as criminal banditry and terrorism, subject to summary and condign punishment.

"Two. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the criminal guilt of the United States in provoking the late war and recognize and admit the principle that the United States is liable to the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. for indemnities in valuta and kind.

"Three. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the personal criminal war guilt of certain civilians and soldiers of the United States and recognize and admit that these persons are subject to condign punishment."

The Secretary's voice shook. "I have been further asked to announce that the central functions of the United States Federal Government were assumed today by Soviet Military Government Unit 101, which today arrived by air in Washington, D.C., under the escort of two Russian and two Chinese airborne divisions.

"I have been further asked to announce that under Article Three of the Articles of Surrender I read you the President and Vice-President of the United States were shot to death at eight o'clock, P.M., by a mixed Russian and Chinese firing squad."

That was all.

Justin's hand was trembling so the raw brandy slopped over the tumbler's edge.