by John Varley
“I can’t speak for mammoths,” he said. He cautiously took her hand. He realized he was treating her like a recovering mental patient, treading carefully. “I’ve heard that elephants try to tend to their sick or wounded. Maybe mammoths did, too. And many animals care for their young, will fight for them against great odds if they have to. I guess that qualifies as a dream.”
“He didn’t know it, that mammoth,” she went on, “but his whole race was doomed. Before long there would be no more mammoths. And I wondered, was it some consolation to him that his mate and his child would go on? Even if the race of mammoths was soon to die out?”
He didn’t like where this was going. He gently turned her to face him.
“Karen, this is a great tragedy, but it is not the end of the world.”
“It isn’t? It sure looks like it.”
“I know it does, but there’s hope. We will not die out, the human race will get through this. The big question for me lately has been, will we get through it? Me, and you, and our child. Our family.”
“I haven’t really been a part of the family lately.”
“No. You haven’t. But that was then. All it takes now is for you to…I know this isn’t as easy as it sounds, you can’t just turn off depression, but…honey, we need you. Addison and me. We need you to buckle down like I know you can. If we work at it, we can survive this. I know we can. But we have to have your help.”
When she finally looked at him there were tears in her eyes.
“I’ll try.”
“That’s all I ask.”
“I guess there are two things I need to do then,” Karen sighed.
“I’m eager to hear what they are.”
“First…do you think it’s still possible for us to drive to Oregon?”
“I think it would be difficult, but I wouldn’t say impossible. Not quite like crossing the Donner Pass in a covered wagon in the winter.”
She looked at him to see if he was kidding. The truth was, of course, he didn’t know if it was possible.
“I’ve heard some communities have been setting up roadblocks on Interstate 5,” Dave said. “A lot of towns feel like they’ve already taken in all the extra people they can handle. But they might not be hostile if we could convince them we’d just be passing through.”
“Do you still think going to Oregon is a good idea?”
“It’s hard to say. It’s the trip that worries me. I don’t think there’s any question that being in Oregon right now would be better than being here. They’ve got plenty of water and they should have plenty of electricity. They’ve got more arable farmland, and the farmland is closer to the population centers.”
She sighed.
“The time we should have left was back when you first suggested it, wasn’t it?”
“No question.”
“My fault.”
“Well, Karen, I could say yes and beat you up about it, I guess. But I’ve thought about that a lot, and I can’t say that if the situation had been reversed, if you had come to me with such a crazy story and no real evidence to back it up, I might not have believed you, either. It’s as if I’d told you we were about to be invaded by Martians. So, I think it’s best if we just pass over all that and deal with the situation we have now.”
“I will if you will.”
He wanted to hug her, but she was still keeping a physical distance from him and he wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
CHAPTER TEN
Karen called her brother in Oregon to ask if they would be welcome, assuming it was possible to get there at all.
It took her a while to get through. Phone service had been getting spotty, especially the landlines. But cell service was a bit more reliable, and after several attempts she got her brother Martin on the line. She put him on the speakerphone.
Martin and Karen were not close. He was eleven years older than her; she was an unplanned baby. Martin had been a high-school and college basketball star, almost made the NBA, and had worked as an assistant college coach and then as head coach at a Portland high school. He lived with his wife of twenty-seven years in a large home on two or three acres about twenty miles east of the city. The area was semirural, with some larger spreads where actual farming was done.
Martin and his wife, Brenda, were deeply religious, born-again Baptists. Three of their five children had scattered to distant colleges in the East, while their youngest daughter continued to live at home. Their contact with Karen and Dave was largely limited to exchanging Christmas cards.
Dave was counting on Martin’s sense of Christian charity to allow them to squat in one of their spare rooms until he could work out a way to make a living. He was hoping that Karen could sell that proposition.
Martin and Brenda were sick with worry about three of their children. The eldest, who had been working for her master’s degree in Seattle, had made it home just before the gas rationing began.
The other three were undergraduates in New York, Atlanta, and Columbus. The situation in Georgia and Ohio was not good—it wasn’t good anywhere in the country—but things were still more or less under control. Both those children, a boy and a girl, had been in contact in the last few days.
Jenny, the daughter in Ohio, wanted to come home and was trying to get a ride on one of the buses the Ohio State engineering department had been adapting to burn biodiesel, ethanol, or coal. These refugee vehicles had been setting out regularly during the last few weeks on circuitous routes aimed at getting students back to their homes, but there were not enough of them yet.
Herbert, who was a junior at Georgia Tech, was electing to tough it out in Atlanta. It seemed he had a local girlfriend whose family had taken him in, and he still believed that education could go on at some level during the crisis, though most people were dubious that classes would begin in the fall in most places in the U.S.
They were worried about both of them, but nothing like they worried about their son Ben, twenty-five years old, who had just completed his first year of postgraduate study at Columbia University in New York. They hadn’t heard from him in over a week.
“Phone service is out all over Manhattan,” Martin said. “I’ve been trying to get news from New York City. Have you heard anything?”
“Nothing at all.”
“We’ve heard that the bridges and tunnels to New Jersey are blocked, either by the National Guard or local people. Same thing with the roads to upstate.”
“We’ve heard the same thing about the communities to the north of us. They say the locals have blocked the interstate. It’s easy to isolate Los Angeles from the north, because there’s very few roads through the mountains.”
“Well, if you hear any—”
They were cut off, and it took Karen another ten minutes to get another connection. When they got him back, Martin cut to the chase.
“I suspect you didn’t call to hear about our woes, Sis,” he said. “I’m sure you have troubles of your own. I see no point in making you ask, so am I right that you’re calling to see if you could come live with us until this crisis is over?”
“It seems a lot to ask, Martin,” Karen said. “I should tell you that Dave thinks this…crisis…will last quite a long time.”
“Martin,” Dave said, “I learned a few things before this all even began. I don’t think it’s wise to talk about it on the telephone, even though it hardly matters now, because…well, the government has been saying one thing and I have reason to believe the truth is something else.”
There was a silence, and Dave wondered if they had been cut off again.
“Say no more,” Martin said. “I don’t know about down there, but up here a few reporters have sort of mysteriously vanished. A radio station that was critical of the federal government lost its license, and a television station that had been questioning some of the things we were being told suddenly had a whole new staff and isn’t reporting much of anything except government handouts. I’ve got a friend who knows somebody
who works there, and he says it’s been taken over by the National Guard. So if you have something you think might be dangerous to talk about, wait until we meet face-to-face.”
“If we can meet face-to-face,” Karen said.
“The answer is yes. You’re more than welcome to stay here.”
“Martin, thank you so much,” Karen said. “I know we can make ourselves useful. I’m a hard worker, and—”
“Let me finish,” Martin said. “You say you might have a problem getting out of Los Angeles. I’m afraid that’s only where your problems begin. Oregon has sealed the border. All the roads leading into the Pacific Northwest from the south are closed. People are being turned back.”
“Who’s turning them back?” Dave asked.
“The National Guard. The governor is in charge of it now, and he’s pretty much ignoring anything from the feds. We haven’t actually seceded from the Union, but that’s only because there’s been no formal declaration. Oregon and Washington, and I’m pretty sure Idaho, are virtually sovereign states now.”
“So no one is getting in?”
“Not everyone is being turned back. I don’t know how long that will last. I’m pretty sure that having a brother here would get you in. What I’ll do is write a letter confirming that you are my kin, and fax it to you. I’ll also send you a copy of my driver’s license to prove I’m a resident. You should be sure to bring all the ID you have, especially your birth certificates.”
“I have all that,” Karen said.
“Good. But let me caution you. I’m not absolutely sure you can get in. My understanding is they are concentrating on the main roads north from California, the 101, Interstate 5, 199 from Crescent City, 97 and 139 to Klamath Falls, and the 395 from Reno. Your best bet would be to enter Oregon on U.S. 95, which would take you to Burns and then to Bend. What everybody’s worried about is the masses of people coming in from California. But very few people are trying to get in from the east. Folks from Idaho are content to stay there. Plus, Eastern Oregon is not such desirable real estate.”
“I see what you mean,” Dave said. “But that would mean going all the way—”
“Yes, Interstate 80 to Winnemucca, then a bit over one hundred miles to the Oregon border. It’s two or three hundred miles farther than the direct route up I-5, but I really think you might have a lot more trouble on the interstate.”
“Martin, I don’t know if I have enough gas to go that route.”
“Well, the decision is up to you. If you can possibly make it that way, I’m sure it would be the best.”
They talked a little longer but everything that needed to be said had been said already. As soon as they hung up Addison came to her father, looking very worried.
“Daddy, how are we going to get Ranger to Oregon?”
“We’ll have to look into it tomorrow, honey.”
But he had spent some time figuring out how much gas they would need to get to Oregon, and the numbers did not look good.
Karen needed to get up to speed on everything that had happened while she was depressed and in denial.
He took her down to the basement and showed her the things he had stockpiled. She was impressed, and apologetic that she hadn’t been available to help.
“Why all the bleach?” she asked, looking at the dozen big plastic bottles.
“A few drops will sanitize a gallon of water.”
“You’ve been reading your Boy Scout Manual.”
“And a lot of other books. I’ll show them to you.”
“When I think of all the things that will be in short supply…”
“Food is the big one.”
They started picking out what they could pack into the Escalade, stopping every once in a while to watch the tar-pit disaster unfolding both on television and with their own eyes. The underground pressure exerted by the expanding pool of tar had moved north and had now destroyed most of Park La Brea. He could plainly see some of the apartment towers leaning out of true. The TV news showed people streaming away on foot, leaving their homes behind. More people who needed shelter, more mouths to feed.
They were both a little amazed and bemused at how little they owned that was truly valuable, in any sense, either in terms of being sellable or tradable, or things with sentimental value.
They had one photo album that held only the oldest original prints from both their families, some of them going back almost a hundred years. These seemed to them to fall into the category of historical artifacts, and when they began scanning their photo-print collection into the computer they had kept these old, yellowed or color-faded snapshots. Everything else was now on a few DVDs, the originals thrown away.
He had wondered if they would have any trouble with Karen’s wardrobe. It turned out he was worrying for nothing. Her mind had apparently not been idle during her depression. She had realized that almost everything in her closet—bigger than the bedroom in their first apartment together—was useless. Later, she told him that realization was something that made her depression even deeper, to look at those racks and racks of designer clothes and know all that money had been wasted.
“Well, you got enjoyment out of them at the time,” he pointed out.
“You could have said the same if it had been a cocaine habit instead of a shopping habit,” she said. “And I would have had just as little to show for it.”
Both of them wished she had been more interested in jewelry, as gold and diamonds were sure to retain their value in the coming times. She had some, and of course they packed it. Almost all her pieces had come from him as birthday presents.
In the end, they got all the clothes the three of them would be taking into two large suitcases and one medium-sized one.
After that, everything got painful.
He pulled the Escalade out of the garage and opened the back. He had long ago removed the last row of seats. Now he removed the seat behind the front passenger seat, leaving only the one behind the driver.
What had looked cavernous before now looked all too small.
The manual said the cargo space with just the back row of seats removed was 90 cubic feet. Take out the second row and you had a staggering 137 cubic feet. Keeping one seat in the second row he estimated they had somewhere around 100 cubic feet of usable space to pack.
His thoughts turned to the western pioneers setting out on the Oregon Trail in Conestoga wagons. What did they bring? For food they would have brought staples: flour, cornmeal, sugar, dried beans. It had to last a long time. For his family, he figured that if they weren’t in Oregon in a week, they were probably never going to get there. They could eat mostly out of cans.
The pioneers would have expected to hunt wild game along the way. That meant gunpowder and shot, or bullets. He certainly intended to bring his small arsenal, but he didn’t figure he’d be plugging any bunny rabbits along the way.
He thought they could count on Martin and his family to have everything needed to furnish a home. So they packed their propane stove and as many lanterns as he could fit in, and only basic cooking things.
But first things first. Priority One was taking all the gasoline he had stockpiled.
He started from the back, lining the cans up in rows. They ended up taking about a quarter of his available load space.
They packed only as much water as they thought they’d need on the trip north. Once out of the arid Southland, he didn’t see that water would be a problem.
Next came the food. He let Karen select it, and he packed. He wanted to take all they could, but he didn’t stack it all the way to the roof.
Then Karen and Addison devoted themselves to filling in the blanks. They stuffed in blankets and sheets and towels and even pillows until all the space between the food and the ceiling was filled. Anything lightweight and foldable. Why not? It wouldn’t be heavy enough to affect the gas mileage.
He tackled the problem of the bikes and scooters. He wasn’t about to leave them behind.
He had d
ecided early on that irregular shapes like that would take up entirely too much space inside the Escalade. But he had a lot of rope.
After hours of struggling and much sweat and scraped knuckles and having solved geometrical problems that might have challenged Einstein, he had all the bicycles and two of the suitcases secured to the luggage rack on top. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to untangle them again, but he was satisfied they wouldn’t shake free during the trip.
The only place he could figure out for the scooters was hanging over the sides. He made slings of rope and tied them to the rails of the luggage carrier, then ran ropes under the vehicle and pulled everything tight.
The sun was going down when they were finished. The three of them stood back and looked at it. Two things came to mind. Karen beat him to the first one.
“Those scooters look like lifeboats hanging off the sides of an ocean liner,” she said. And then he heard a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time: Karen laughing. He looked at her, standing at his side, hair disheveled, dusty and sweaty, and was flooded with love for her. For a while there he didn’t think he’d ever get her back. He still felt cautious, but maybe she was back.
“What it looks like to me,” he said, “is the Joad family’s car, on its way to the promised land in California. Except they didn’t have an eighty-thousand-dollar Cadillac with a DVD player, OnStar, a rearview camera, and a heated steering wheel.”
“Yeah, but they had Henry Fonda.”
“That would help,” he admitted.
The next day the television people were calling it the Tar Bubble. There indeed seemed to be some sort of bubble, a swelling underground that was causing the surface to bulge up in a ridge about two miles long by half a mile wide. All the towers of Park La Brea still standing were tilting madly.
The Tar Bubble was easy to see. In the center it was now two or three hundred feet high. All the buildings of LACMA had collapsed. The Page Museum was no longer visible. During the night three of the apartment towers had fallen over.
