by Jerry
“My telescope’s gone,” she said. Sure enough, it was. The tripod was all by itself on the balcony, on its side.
I untwisted the wire on a champagne bottle. The toast popped up, and Leslie found a knife and spread both slices with foie gras. I held the bottle near her ear, figuring to trip conditioned reflexes.
She did smile fleetinglyas the cork popped. She said, “We should set up our picnic grounds here. Behind the counter. Sooner or later the wind is going to break those doors and shower glass all over everything.”
That was a good thought. I slid around the partition, swept all the pillows off the floor and the couch and came back with them. We set up a nest for ourselves.
It was kind of cozy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.
I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting. And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other’s arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.
“We’re going to die,” she said.
“Maybe not.”
“Get used to the idea, I have,” she said. “Look at you, you’re all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn’t it been a lovely night?”
“Unique. I wish I’d known in time to take you to dinner.”
Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. “Me too,”she said when we could hear again.
“I wish I’d known this afternoon.”
“Pecan pralines!”
“Farmer’s Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would you have murdered, if you’d had the time?”
“There was a girl in my sorority—”
—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boyfriend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.
The lights flickered, then came on again.
Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”
“It better be back to normal. Otherwise we’re dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter.”
“Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Yellow dwarf stars don’t go nova.”
“What if ours did?”
“The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you’d guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-naught yellow dwarf. They don’t go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”
She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”
“Something did.”
“What? I don’t believe it. We’d remember.”
“Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”
“Of course. We watched it at Earl’s Lunar Landing Party.”
“They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.
“Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.
“Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there’s no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn’t stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”
The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie’s ear.
“We’d remember. It couldn’t have been this bad.”
“I’m not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn’t do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who’d know? The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.
“I believe you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
“Then shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”
“We are.”
“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there’re going to be floods!”
“You bet your ass there are, but they won’t rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I’ve thought this through. We’re in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It’d take more than a hurricane to knock it over.
“As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won’t get far tonight, not with the streetsflooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that’s what. That area won’t stand up to what’s coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”
“Suppose the polar caps melt?”
“Yeah . . . well, we’re pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah’s Flood. Maybe it’s happening again. Sure as hell, there’s not a place on Earth that isn’t the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
“At least we’ve got food!” I shouted. “If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!”
“But if the power goes, we can’t cook it! And the refrigerator—”
“We’ll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs—”
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I’d been stupid; I’d waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—
Leslie screamed, “We’ll have to use the oven!”
Of course. The oven couldn’t possibly fall on us.
We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie’s thiry-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn’t trust the rain as a water source; I couldn’t control it.
The sound. Already we’d stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we’d be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I’d have been doing it anyway. You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she’d probably thought of it herself.
The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I’d put all the food in Baggies.
Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.
For some time, I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I’m not sure what I thought about. I didn’t sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightningflashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.
My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I’d been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Floods, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe . . . but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower doors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough . . .
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now . . . Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I’d get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
AN UNEVEN EVENING
Steve Herbst
Peter’s back had been bothering him again; when he reached for the newspaper on a nearby table, he stiffened. There was no crick of pain this time. I am swiftly becoming an old man, he told himself.
“Peter, how’s your back feeling?”
“It’s all right.”
Nancy read her McCall’s on the sofa, ignoring the television set, which she had turned on to play the early evening news. She seemed content to keep her body still and move only her eyes. The magazine’s pastel advertisements held her attention completely.
My wife is a boring woman, Peter thought. See how her fat face never alters its expression. See how her body rests slackly against the cushions and how her arms lie at her sides. See how the magazine on her lap is her evening plaything. See how I am left to fill a chair silently and become boring also.
And how boring I feel, he thought. What an incapable person I am. A dead weight suited to living-room chairs. On Wednesday nights I hit pool halls and drink beer, for of that am I capable. That is, when I ride in the car with Teague and Marvin Sapello. With Marvin and Teague I am a functioning organism, but when I am home I fill chairs.
Peter filled his chair and read his paper until the doorbell rang, to his great relief. Teague and Marvin came into the living room after wiping their feet on the floor mat.
“You look bored, old buddy,” said Marvin jovially and lowered himself into a chair.
“Hey, hey,” Teague said at the same time, sagging against a wall and hanging his jaw. “Ready to go?”
My evening of boredom, Peter thought, is giving way to one of virile entertainment. I now reject studied inactivity and uneasy introspection for the security of my friends, old games, and a more forceful and satisfying social role. An escape from air-conditioned purgatory into culturally competitive paradise.
“Mellow,” he said. He hit Teague in the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
They were in Teague’s small Plymouth, Teague and Peter in front and Marvin in the back. Peter looked out the window. He kept his lips pressed tightly together as usual, betraying a minimum of emotion.
“How many games we gonna play tonight, eh?” Teague smiled, looking straight ahead into traffic.
“We can play until the owner throws us out,” Marvin answered, his cheeks bulging when he talked. “Wear us out a pool table, ain’t that right?”
“Yup,” said Peter.
Teague drove, impatiently, barely avoiding the night people in the streets, watching his headlight beams play on storefronts when he turned corners. His big arms rested fully on the steering wheel most of the time; he seemed to be embracing the car and the power it gave him.
“I told Willie Amberay and Sam Orr I’d pick them up. We’re gonna fill the car tonight, hey,” said Teague.
So he pulled up at Sam Orr’s house and ran up to ring the doorbell. Sam and Willie were outside immediately, loping down the stairs side by side. They got into the back seat, craning their necks and darting their eyes about.
“Hi, Pete. Marvin.”
“What’s up?” said Peter.
Sam pulled the door closed and Teague pulled away abruptly. Willie lit a cigarette, scenting the inside of the car.
“Hey, Teague, guess what we found out today,” Sam began.
“Yeah?”
“Get this, there’s a new torming hall just opened on East Andrew Street, they got twenty-five tubes and strong alignment. What do you think of that?”
“Twenty-five, huh? Pretty neat, y’know?”
“Listen, Teague, if you and everybody wants to go there tonight instead of the same old pool game? Huh?”
Peter wasn’t at all sure that he had heard that exchange correctly. What was Sam talking about, “torming” ? What kind of term was that?
But Teague seemed to know.
“That’s fine with me,” Marvin said. “I haven’t shot rings in, oh, a long time. Are they full-sized fields, do you know?”
“Yeah, right,” said Willie. “Ten rings, oh, maybe sixty degrees up and down. That’s what I heard.”
“Man,” said Sam. “It’s been so long. So long. Get the old form back, long dives, everything. Jesus!” He waved his arms in the air, grinning. “Jesus, such a long time.”
Peter began to worry. What in hell was torming? He considered asking and admitting his stupidity.
“Hey, Pete,” called Teague. “A good torm okay with you? We’ll let the pool go tonight.”
Peter decided to play it cool. “Yeah, great. How far is the place?”
“Oh, a few blocks down Andrew. I think fourteen hundred east.”
Peter nodded and turned his gaze back out the window. He was just the least bit worried.
The outside of the torming hall was a storefront with a small sign—”Torming/25 Tubes”-printed in neon. Then an unobtrusive doorway, and then a long escalator going down. Peter and his friends filed in neatly and descended to the front lobby.
The lobby was surprisingly big and modem. Gleaming metal arches spaced every twenty feet around the ellipsoidal room soared upward to a ceiling maybe fifty feet high. Carpeting on the floor and on walls between the arches was light-green and very thick. The pattern of metal and green was unbroken on all sides, exce
pt for washroom portals and a food concession at one end of the ellipse, and a counter set in the wall at the other end. The carpeting helped to absorb the noise made by the hall’s patrons and by a powerful air-conditioning system. A fragrant odor filled the place, and bright fluorescents overhead illuminated every square inch evenly.
Peter and his friends were standing in front of a long, polished desk in the center of the room behind which were banks of tiny lights, knob controls, and two receptionists. Teague murmured, “I’ve gotta use the john; get us a tube, okay?” Teague and Sam left.
Peter tried to hang back, hoping that either Marvin or Willie would take care of any arrangements. But, unfortunately, he found himself up against the desk, and one of the receptionists asked him, “Yes?”
He thought fast. If this place was anything like a bowling alley, then he was supposed to reserve a lane. Or, in this case, a tube.
“A tube?” he said casually, and the receptionist handed him a bulky plastic key with number 5 embossed on it. Peter wasn’t sure whether there was anything else to ask for, but the girl said, “Get belts over there,” and she pointed with her arm toward the opposite end of the lobby.
Belts?
Marvin and Willie were already at the belts counter, and Peter watched the man behind the counter select their sizes and hand them belts. So he went to the man and asked for a belt, got a belt, and put the belt around his waist.
The belt was heavy plastic half a foot wide and it had weights built into it. Three weights, evenly spaced around him.
What could the belt be for? A handicap of some sort? A thing to hold equipment? Peter walked as easily as possible under the added weight, trying to look as if nothing was new to him.
“What number, Pete?” asked Marvin.
Peter announced the number and said, “Where do you suppose that would be, eh?”
Marvin pointed toward the back side of the lobby and said, “Over there, probably.”
At least Marvin didn’t know everything for sure.
When they had walked behind the lobby, what Peter saw completely took his breath from him.
“Oh, no. Oh, no.”
They were standing on a balcony. In front of them the floor dropped a hundred and fifty feet in a long, slow curve. Fluorescent lights at the top of the huge torming room illuminated the smoke-filled air and set off dramatically the distance between balcony and floor, between balcony and opposite wall. Along this distance, down a seventy-three-degree angle, stretched the tubes.
