“Stop it, Shirl, you’re being….”
“I’m being what? Truthful? Would you let me stay here if I didn’t sleep with you?”
“That’s different!”
“Is it?” She began to tremble. “Andy, I hope it is, it should be—but I just don’t know any more. I want us to be happy, I don’t know why we fight. That’s not what I want. But things seem to be going so wrong. If you were here, if I was with you more …”
“We settled that the other night. I have my work—what else can I do?”
“Nothing else, I suppose, nothing …” She clasped her fingers together to stop their shaking. “Go to sleep now, you need the rest.”
She went into the other room and he did not stir until the door clicked shut. He started to follow her, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. What could he say to her? Slowly he pulled off his shoes and, fully dressed, stretched out and pulled the blanket over him.
Tired and exhausted as he was, he did not fall asleep for a very long time.
4
Since most people don’t like to get up while it is still dark, the morning line for the water ration was always the shortest of the day. Yet there were still enough people about when Shirl hurried to get a place in line so that no one ever bothered her. By the time she had her water the sun would be up and the streets were a good deal safer. Besides that, she and Mrs. Miles had fallen into the habit of meeting every day, whoever came first saved a place in line, and walking back together. Mrs. Miles always had the little boy with her who still seemed to be ill with the kwash. Apparently her husband needed the protein-rich peanut butter more than the child did. The water ration had been increased. This was so welcome that Shirl tried not to notice how much harder it was to carry, and how her back hurt when she climbed the stairs. There was even enough water now to wash with. The water points were supposed to open again by mid-November at the very latest, and that wasn’t too far away. This morning, like most of the other mornings, Shirl was back before eight and when she came into the apartment she saw that Andy was dressed and just ready to leave.
“Talk to him, Shirl,” Andy said. “Convince him that he is being a chunkhead. It must be senility.” He kissed her good-by before he went out. It had been three weeks since the fight and on the surface things were the same as before, but underneath something had changed, some of the feeling of security—or perhaps love—had been eroded away. They did not talk about it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, peeling off the outer layers of clothing that swaddled her. Andy stopped in the doorway.
“Ask Sol, I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you in great detail. But when he’s all through remember one thing. He’s wrong.”
“Every man to his own opinion,” Sol said placidly, rubbing the grease from an ancient can of dubbing onto an even more ancient pair of Army boots.
“Opinion nothing,” Andy said. “You’re just asking for trouble. I’ll see you tonight, Shirl. If it’s as quiet as yesterday I shouldn’t be too late.” He closed the door and she locked it behind him.
“What on earth is he talking about?” Shirl asked, warming her hands over the brick of seacoal smoldering in the stove. It was raw and cold out, and the wind rattled the window in its frame.
“He’s talking about protest,” Sol said, admiring the buffed, blackened toe of the boot. “Or maybe better he’s talking against protest. You heard about the Emergency Bill? It’s been schmeared all over TV for the last week.”
“Is that the one they call the Baby-killer Bill?”
“They?” Sol shouted, scrubbing angrily at the boot. “Who are they? A bunch of bums, that’s who. People with their minds in the Middle Ages and their feet in a rut. In other words—bums.”
“But, Sol—you can’t force people to practice something they don’t believe in. A lot of them still think that it has something to do with killing babies.”
“So they think wrong. Am I to blame because the world is full of fatheads? You know well enough that birth control has nothing to do with killing babies. In fact it saves them. Which is the bigger crime—letting kids die of disease and starvation or seeing that the unwanted ones don’t get born in the first place?”
“Putting it that way sounds different. But aren’t you forgetting about natural law? Isn’t birth control a violation of that?”
“Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church—and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic—tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired. There was even a guy named Bruno that got burned at the stake because he didn’t believe in absolute truth and natural laws like these. Everything was against natural law once, and now birth control has got to join the rest. Because all of our troubles today come from the fact that there are too many people in the world.”
“That’s too simple, Sol. Things aren’t really that black and white….”
“Oh yes they are, no one wants to admit it, that’s all. Look, we live in a lousy world today and our troubles come from only one reason. Too goddamn many people. Now, how come that for ninety-nine per cent of the time that people have been on this earth we never had any over-population problems?”
“I don’ know—I never thought about it.”
“You’re not the only one. The reason—aside from wars and floods and earthquakes, unimportant things like that—was that everybody was sick like dogs. A lot of babies died, a lot of kids died, and everybody else died young. A coolie in China living on nothing but polished rice used to die of old age before he was thirty. I heard that on TV last night, and I believe it. And one of the Senators read from a hornbook, that’s a Schoolbook they used to have for kids back in colonial America, that said something like ‘be kind to your little sister or brother, he won’t be with you very long’. They bred like flies and died like flies. Infant mortality—boy! And not so long ago, I tell you. In 1949 after I got out of the Army, I was in Mexico. Babies there die from more diseases than you or I ever heard of. They never baptize the kids until after they are a year old because most of them are dead by that time and baptisms cost a lot of money. That’s why there never used to be a population problem. The whole world used to be one big Mexico, breeding and dying and just about staying even.”
“Then—what changed?”
“I’ll tell you what changed.” He shook the boot at her. “Modern medicine arrived. Everything had a cure. Malaria was wiped out along with all the other diseases that had been killing people young and keeping the population down. Death control arrived. Old people lived longer. More babies lived who would have died, and now they grow up into old people who live longer still. People are still being fed into the world just as fast—they’re just not being taken out of it at the same rate. Three are born for every two that die. So the population doubles and doubles—and keeps on doubling at a quicker rate all the time. We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that’s the answer. We got death control—we got to match it with birth control.”
“I still don’t see how you can when people still think it has something to do with killing babies.”
“Stop with the dead babies!” Sol shouted, and heaved the boot the length of the room. “There are no babies involved in this—alive or dead—except in the pointed heads of the idiots who repeat what they have heard without understanding a word of it. Present company excepted,” he added in a not too sincere voice. “How can you kill something that never existed? We’re all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the—if you will excuse the biological term—the sperm who were the losers in the race.”
“Sol—what on earth are you talking about?”
“The ovarian derby. Every time an egg is fertilized there are
a couple of million sperm swimming along, racing along trying to do the job. Only one of them can win the derby, since the very instant fertilization takes place all the rest of them are out in the cold. Does anyone give a damn about the millions of sperm that don’t make it? The answer is no. So what are all the complicated rhythm charts, devices, pills, caps and drugs that are used for birth control? Nothing but ways of seeing that one sperm doesn’t make it either. So where do the babies come in? I don’t see any babies.”
“When you put it that way, I guess they don’t. But if it is that simple how come nothing was ever done before this?”
Sol breathed a long and tremulous sigh and gloomily retrieved the boot and went back to polishing it.
“Shirl,” he said, “if I could answer that they would probably make me President tomorrow. Nothing is ever that simple when it comes down to finding an answer. Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That’s the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they’re dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it’s good enough for me. Bango, dead. When the UN sprayed the houses with DDT in Mexico—to kill the mosquitoes who carried malaria that killed the people—they had to have soldiers hold the people back so they could spray. The locals didn’t like that white stuff on the furniture, didn’t look good. I saw it myself. But that was the rarity. Death control slid into the world mostly without people even knowing it. Doctors used better and better drugs, water supplies improved, public health people saw to it that diseases didn’t spread the way they used to. It came about almost naturally without hardly being noticed, and now we got too many people in the world. And something has to be done about it. But doing something means that people must change, make an effort, use their minds, which is what most people do not like to do.”
“Yet it does seem an intrusion of privacy, Sol. Telling people they can’t have any children.”
“Stop it! We’re almost back to the dead babies again! Birth control doesn’t mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals—or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children—whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there,” he added, pointing out of the window.
“If the world is like that—then everyone must be unthinking and selfish, like you say.”
“No—I think better of the human race. They’ve just never been told, they’ve been born animals and died animals, too many of them. I blame the stinking politicians and so-called public leaders who have avoided the issue and covered it up because it was controversial and what the hell, it will be years before it matters and I’m going to get mine now. So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence—and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted.”
Sol pushed his feet into the boots, laced them up and tied them. He put on a heavy sweater, then took an ancient, moth-eaten battle jacket from the wardrobe. A row of ribbons drew a line of color across the olive drab, and under them were a sharpshooter’s medal and a technical-school badge. “It must have shrunk,” Sol said, grunting as he struggled to close it over his stomach. Then he wrapped a scarf around his neck and shrugged into his ancient, battered overcoat.
“Where are you going?” Shirl asked, baffled.
“To make a statement. To ask for trouble as our friend Andy told me. I’m seventy-five years old and I reached this venerable state by staying out of trouble, keeping my mouth shut and not volunteering, just like I learned in the Army. Maybe there were too many guys in the world like me, I don’t know. Maybe I should have made my protest a lot earlier, but I never saw anything I felt like protesting about—which I do now. The forces of darkness and the forces of light.” He jammed a woolen watch cap down over his ears and stalked to the door.
“Sol, what on earth are you talking about? Tell me, please, Shirl begged, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.
“There’s a rally. The Save Our Babies nuts are marching on City Hall, trying to lick the Emergency Bill. There’s another meeting, of people in favor of the bill, and the bigger the turnout there, the better. If enough people stand up and shout they might be heard, maybe the bill will get through Congress this time. Maybe.”
“Sol …” she called out, but the door was closed.
Andy brought him home, late that night, helping the two ambulance men carry the stretcher up the stairs. Sol was strapped to the stretcher, white faced and unconscious, breathing heavily.
“There was a street fight,” Andy said, “almost a riot when the march started. Sol was in it. He got knocked down. His hip is broken.” He looked at her, unsmiling and tired, as the stretcher was carried in.
“That can be very serious with old people,” he said.
5
There was a thin crust of ice on the water, and it crackled and broke when Billy pushed the can down through it. As he climbed back up the stairs he saw that another rusted metal step had been exposed. They had dipped a lot of water out of the compartment, but it still appeared to be at least half full.
“There’s a little ice on top, but I don’t think it can freeze all the way down solid,” he told Peter as he closed and dodged shut the door. “There’s still plenty of water there, plenty.”
He measured the water carefully every day and locked the door on it as though it were a bank vault full of money. Why not? It was as good as money. As long as the water shortage continued they could get a good price for it, all the D’s they needed to keep warm and eat well.
“How about that, Pete?” he said, hanging the can from the bracket over the seacoal fire. “Did you ever stop to think that we can eat this water? Because we can sell it and buy food, that’s why.”
Peter squatted on his hams, staring fixedly out the door, and paid no attention until Billy shouted to him and repeated what he had said. Peter shook his head, unhappily.
“Whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame,” he intoned. “I have explained to you, Billy, we are approaching the end of all material things. If you covet them you are lost….”
“So—are you lost? You’re wearing clothes bought with that water and eating the grub—so what do you mean?”
“I eat simply to exist for the Day,” he answered solemnly, squinting through the open door at the watery November sun. “We are so close, just a few weeks now, it is hard to believe. Soon it will be days. What a blessing that it should come during our lifetimes.” He pulled himself to his feet and went out; Billy could hear him climbing down to the ground.
“World coming to an end,” Billy muttered to himself as he stirred ener-G granules into the water. “Nuts, plain nuts.”
This wasn’t the first time he had thought that—but only to himself, never aloud in Peter’s hearing. Everything the man said did sound crazy but it could be true too. Peter could prove it with the Bible and other books, he didn’t have the books now, but he had read them so much he could recite whole long pieces out of them. Why couldn’t it be true? What other reason could there be for the world being like this? It hadn’t always been this way, the old films on TV proved that, yet it had changed so much so quickly. Ther
e had to be a reason, so maybe it was like Peter said, the world would end and New Year’s Day would be Doomsday….
“It’s a nutty idea,” he said out loud, but he shivered at the same time and held his hands over the smoking fire.
Things weren’t that bad. He was wearing two sweaters and an old suit jacket with pieces of inner tube sewed on to patch the elbows, warmer than anything he had ever worn before. And they ate well; he noisily sucked the ener-G broth from the spoon. Buying the Welfare cards had cost a lot of D’s but it was worth it, well worth it. They got Welfare food rations now, and even water rations so they could save their own water to sell. And he had been sniffing LSD dirt at least once a week. The world wasn’t going to come to an end for a long while yet. The hell with that, the world was all right as long as you kept your eyes open and looked out for yourself.
A jingling clank sounded outside, from one of the pieces of rusty metal hanging from the bare ribs of the ship. Anyone who tried to climb up to the cabin now had to push past these dangling obstacles and give clear warning of their approach. Since the discovery of the water they had to be wary of any others who might want to move in as occupants. Billy picked up the crowbar and walked to the door.
“I made us some food, Peter,” he said, leaning over the edge. A strange, bristle-bearded face looked up at him.
“Get down from there!” Billy shouted. The man mumbled something around the length of sharpened automobile leaf spring that he had clamped in his mouth, then hung by one hand and took out the weapon with his free hand.
“Bettyjo!” he shouted in a hoarse voice, and Billy jumped as something whizzed by his ear and crashed into the metal bulkhead behind him.
A squat woman with an immense tangle of blond hair stood among the ribs of the ship below, and Billy dodged as she hurled another lump of broken concrete at him. “Go on, Donald!” she screeched. “Get up there!”
A second man, hairy and filthy enough to be a twin to the first one, scrambled over the rusty metal and began to climb up on the other side of the ship. Billy saw the trap at once. He could brain anyone who tried to get to the strip of deck in front of the door—but only one at a time. He couldn’t guard both sides at once. While he was beating off one attacker the other would climb up behind him.
Make Room! Make Room! Page 19
