The set of his muscles, the leverage of his arm should have warned Justin to brace himself when the package was handed over, but he was disarmed by the smallness of the thing. He took the package, found it amazingly heavy, fumbled it for a moment, and dropped it, almost on his toe. It sank an inch into the not particularly soft ground.
“Oops!” Rawson said apologetically. “I should have warned you it was heavy.”
“Yes,” Justin said. “And maybe you should have warned me it was an atomic bomb.”
“Just part of one,” Rawson said.
“You know Betsy Cardew?” Justin asked, looking at the package by his toe, wondering vaguely about radioactivity, wondering whether he ought to move his toe.
“Of course. Mailwoman.”
“Are you and she in this together?”
“In what?” Rawson asked blandly.
“We are not amused, Rawson. This thing—” He choked. “I got beautifully mad at her. I’m still sore. I think she’s a silly kid who had no right to get me involved. You—you know the score. So—why me, Rawson? Why me?”
The legless man said brutally: “If you think I’m going to flatter you, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s you, Justin, because we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Our best and bravest are in Siberian labor camps now, or mining uranium in the Antarctic. Why you, indeed! Have I got any business scooting around after dark with a suitcase bomb in my lap?”
“But what’s it all for?” Justin almost begged. “What can we do? Suitcase bombs, yes, but then what?”
“That,” Rawson said, “is none of your business, as a moment of thought will convince you. Will you handle the transfer or won’t you?”
“I will,” Justin said bitterly. “Thanks for your confidence in me. I hope it’s well placed.”
“So do I, Justin. So do I. Will you push me off?”
He went creaking down the road.
Justin relit his pipe and studied the dying sunset. Then he picked up the heavy little package, walked to the barn, and hid it behind a bale of hay. It was not very well hidden. He wanted to be able to get it fast and get it off his hands fast. Furthermore, he knew very well that no amount of energy spent in hiding unshielded uranium or plutonium would safeguard it against search with a scintillation counter.
He stepped quietly past Gribble, sleeping on the porch, and went upstairs to his bedroom. He did not intend to sleep that night—not while waiting for an unknown person to pick up an atomic-bomb subassembly for use in some insane, foredoomed scheme of sabotage.
He tried to read but could not. He smoked the last of his tobacco in two unwanted pipefuls.
Insane, the whole business! There were supposed to be 5 million occupation troops east of the Mississippi alone. Their own third-rate shopping place, Chiunga Center, was garrisoned by the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit, which, when administrative transport and medical frills were ripped off, turned out to be a reinforced infantry regiment: about one thousand fighting men armed to the teeth.
And what could you do?
Well, you could denounce Rawson and turn his bomb over to the 449th SMGU. You could denounce Betsy Cardew—nit-witted rich girl who used sex and your vestigial pride to unload a deadly menace on you. You could get written up as a patriotic citizen of the North American People’s Democratic Republic, get a life pension as a Hero of Socialist Labor. And then there would be nothing for you to do but cut your throat in self-loathing.
In spite of himself he fell asleep at 3:00 A.M., with the 40-watt bulb shining on his face and the unread book open across his chest.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He woke with a panicky start at eight-thirty. What was wrong? Something was terribly wrong.
At the window he saw the cows turned out to pasture. But they should have been bellowing, unmilked, for an hour or more—
But the milk cans were stacked on the loading platform for the pickup truck. Gribble had milked them! With only a few words from yesterday afternoon to go on he had worked the milking machine and turned the cows out.
And that meant he had been in the barn, where—
Justin dashed downstairs, his heart thudding, and then slowed deliberately to a walk. He found the little man in the yard before the barn scouring the milker and pails. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, Mr. Justin. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but the cows were stamping around and I remembered what you told me—it wasn’t hard.”
“You did exactly the right thing. I couldn’t get to sleep last night. And when I did, I guess I couldn’t wake up. I’m sorry I left it all to you. Have you been in the—kitchen?”
Gribble smiled nervously and shook his head.
“I’ll fix breakfast.”
Justin kept himself, by an effort of will, from walking into the barn, in plain sight of Gribble, and looking to see whether that bale of hay had been disturbed. He turned to the house, started the stove, and cooked oatmeal. Half a pint of withheld butterfat made oatmeal breakfast enough for a morning’s hard work. When it was cooked, he called Gribble, who stopped on the porch apologetically until the door was held open for him.
They ate silently.
“Mind washing up?” Justin asked at last. “I’ll be working in the kitchen garden.” As he left, he latched back the screen door, feeling like a fool.
He was heading not for the garden but for the barn when the chug of a worn-out truck sounded along his road. It was Milkshed arriving ahead of time, he absently supposed, and went over to the loading deck to give a hand with the cans. But it wasn’t the Milkshed truck that rounded the turn. It was a worn blue panel job throbbing and groaning out of all proportion to its size. On the near panel was lettered: Bee-Jay Farm Supplies and Machinery, Washington, Penna.
It stopped by the milk cans and a nondescript driver leaned out. “This the Justin place?”
“Yes. I’m Justin. You have anything for sale, mister?”
“Might let you have some plastic pipe.”
“Got an electric pump to go with it? My spring’s downhill from the barn.”
“Yes, I guess I passed it. Sorry about the pump, but we don’t have them yet. Maybe by next spring, the way things are going.”
“That’s good to hear. You know you’re the first salesman I’ve seen here in three years?”
“That’s what they all say. Bee-Jay’s an enterprising outfit. We got the first A-440 passes in the state. Say, are you by any chance a friend of Rawson’s?”
Justin knew then who he was. “I know him,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t take the pipe if I can’t use it right away. Seen Rawson lately?”
“I heard he was somewhere around here. He didn’t happen to leave anything for me, did he?”
“Just a minute.” He went to the barn aware that this was the moment of decision. There was no reason why Rawson and Betsy couldn’t be framing him. There was no reason why Gribble couldn’t be a planted witness for corroboration. The heavy package was behind the bale of hay where he had put it in darkness. He couldn’t possibly know whether Gribble had found it and replaced it or not. And now, picking it up, carrying it, handing it silently to the man in the truck, he had completed his treason to the North American People’s Democratic Republic. He had received, harbored, and transmitted fissionable material. His head was in the noose from that moment on.
He felt all the better for it.
“Good old Rawson,” the Bee-Jay man chuckled, hefting the package. “Well, Mr. Justin, I’ll try to pass by again—with a pump.”
“Do that,” Justin said steadily. “And if you ever feel any need to call on me, do it. I’m available. For anything.”
The man smiled blandly. The starting motor cranked and strained for fifteen seconds before the engine caught and the little truck lurched off down the road. Justin followed it with his eyes until it was over the next crest and out of sight.
He turned to find Gribble staring at him from the corner of the barn. Justin w
asn’t frightened; the time for that was past. He realized that he would feel physical fear before long while he waited in some schoolhouse cellar for the MVD to come clumping in with truncheons and methodically reduce him to a blob of pain, shrieking confessions on demand. But he did not fear the fear to come.
He told Gribble easily: “The first salesman in three years. He had some pipe but he didn’t have a pump. Maybe by spring, he said. I guess things are picking up all around.”
“Yes,” Gribble said vaguely, his eyes full of tears.
They worked steadily through the morning and afternoon. Gribble spent two hours on the milk cooler, which had been grunting, gurgling, and creaking for a month, on the verge of a breakdown. Whatever else he was besides—quoter of Molière, Pentagon colonel—he was unquestionably an able refrigeration mechanic and bench hand. He serviced the motor and coils, disassembled the pump, cut new gaskets from a discarded inner tube, filed a new cam from scrap metal and installed it. The cooler whispered happily and the red line of the thermometer dropped well below the danger mark for the first time that summer. He showed Justin his work, dimly proud, and then joined him in cultivating the knee-high field corn until it was time to haul water from the spring again. They had a late supper at three-thirty: a dubious piece of boiled salt pork, potatoes from the barrel in the cellar, milk. It was then that Gribble asked whether Justin happened to have anything to drink.
“Some local brandy,” Justin said, wondering. The little man was tightening up again. If you were an artist you saw him as taut cords vibrating in the shape of a human body. He had seemed almost happy and slack when he showed Justin the cooler…
“Could I please—?”
Justin got the carelessly hidden bottle of Mr. Konreid’s popskull. Gribble methodically poured himself half a tumblerful, not bothering to rinse his glass of its skim of rich milk. Methodically he drank it down, his Adam’s apple working. “Rotten stuff,” he said after a long pause. Justin was about to be offended when he somehow realized that Gribble didn’t mean his liquor in particular. “I was partly tanked when I had that trouble in the—department store.” The taut strings were relaxing a little. “But sometimes you haven’t got anything else and you have to get to sleep.”
Uninvited, he refilled his tumbler to the halfway mark. Justin protested: “Man, what’s the good of getting drunk in the afternoon? We have another milking and the corner fence post is sagging; that’ll take both of us to fix. Pour that back in the bottle, will you? You can have it after supper if you can’t sleep.”
Gribble methodically drank it down. “No point in fooling around,” the little man said gravely. “You pretend you’re somebody else, fine. But you know you aren’t, especially when you’re trying to sleep. You’re still the fellow who closed the door. But that was only half the job, Justin. Funny part is if you do the first half—that is if you’re a fellow like me—then you can’t do the second half. They never thought of that. I must have looked pretty good on the profile. Hard-bitten, waspish executive and all that. But I didn’t fool the combat boys. I went right out of Prudential—you should have seen my office, Justin!—and right into the Pentagon. I told them—what do you say?—I told them: ‘Alert, capable executive desires connection with first-class fighting force. Feels his abilities are not being used to the utmost capacity in present employment.’ I went through the lieutenants and captains like a hot knife through butter. I’ve handled kids like that all my life. G-1 checked me through. You know why? Because G-1’s just office management in uniform. We talked the same language. I was exactly like them so they thought I was good. So I got my appointment with Clardy. Three stars. Colonel Hagen—imagine having a chicken colonel for a secretary—Hagen briefed him first, told him I was talent, hard-boiled talent, kind of talent they needed fast for a battalion, then a regiment, then maybe a division. You go up fast in wartime if you’ve got the stuff. So Clardy talked to me for a few minutes and then he turned to Hagen. As if I wasn’t there. Cussed Hagen out for wasting his time. ‘Good Lord, Colonel, get him something in G-1 or G-4, but don’t ever give him a combat command. Look at him! Can you imagine him committing troops?’
“You see, Justin? He was on to me in two minutes. They never say it, even among themselves, but they know combat command doesn’t take brains. They talk about brilliant field generals, but when you try to find out what the brilliance was it’s always this: G-1 gets the brilliant general his men; G-2 gets the brilliant general his information, G-3 trains the men and plans the attack, G-4 gets the supplies. Then the brilliant general says ‘Attack!’ and it’s another victory.
“You know, you don’t need brains to say ‘Attack!’ Plenty of them have brains and they don’t seem to do them any damage, but brains aren’t essential. What you need’s character. When you’ve got character, you say ‘Attack!’ at the right time. And Clardy saw in two minutes that I didn’t have it. That I’d wait and hang back and try to think of ways around when there aren’t any ways around at all. That when G-3 told me it was time to attack I wouldn’t take his word for it, I’d hem and haw and wonder if he really believed what he was telling me. Clardy saw clean through me, Justin. I’m a man who can cheerfully commit a battery of IBM card punches to the fray and that’s all.”
The little man lurched to his feet and stared, red-eyed, at Justin. Waiting.
Slowly and unwillingly Justin said: “What do you want, Gribble? What am I supposed to do about all this?”
Staring, Gribble said: “Very cagy, Justin. But you’ve got to help me. I know you’re committed. I milked the cows this morning. I’m a picture straightener; I always have been. So I started to straighten that bale of hay. Package behind it—heavy package. So heavy it’s got to be gold or lead or plutonium. And I know it isn’t gold or lead.
“The farm salesman came by. I looked in the barn—no package. You’re in it, Justin. You’ve got to help me. I can’t help myself. Five thousand of them! And then, of course, I couldn’t pull the second half of the job. Clardy was right…”
He stood up, swaying a little. “Come along, Justin. You’ve got to do something for me.”
Gribble lurched through the doorway, past the latched-back screen door, down the cement walk to the road.
Justin followed slowly. “It’s about fifteen miles,” Gribble said over his shoulder.
I’ve got to go along, Justin told himself. The little man’s guessed—and he’s right—that I’m a traitor to the People’s Democratic Republic. He might tell anybody if it takes his fancy. Perhaps, he bleakly thought, I’ll have to kill him. Meanwhile he doesn’t get out of my sight.
“What do you want me to do, exactly?” he asked Gribble in a calm, reasonable voice.
The little man said abruptly: “Open a door.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
They walked for two hours, Gribble in the lead and mumbling.
Justin tried at first to get him to make sense, then to at least accept a cover story. “We’re going to Bert Loughlin’s about a calf, Gribble. O.K.? Will you tell them that if we get stopped? Bert Loughlin’s about a calf—”
“Cobalt,” Gribble said, preoccupied.
Six miles along the road they were overtaken by a wagon, Eino Baaras at the reins. He was returning from Clayboro to Glencairn—“Little Finland”—with locust poles. He scowled at them and offered a ride.
“Thanks,” Gribble said. “We’re going to see Bert Loughlin about a calf.”
Baaras shrugged and waited for them to get up before he said: “Loughlin ain’t got no calf.” He touched up the team and the wagon rolled.
“Selling, not buying,” Justin said.
“Loughlin ain’t got no money,” Baaras said unconcernedly.
“Maybe something to swap,” Justin said. He was clenching his fists. What came next? Loughlin ain’t got nothing to swap. Where you really headed, Yustin? But Baaras just dipped some snuff, spat into the dust, and said nothing.
Silent Finns, Justin thought suddenly, drowsy with the af
ternoon heat. Worse for them than for us. They’ve been followed halfway around the world by the neighbors they fled while we sat and waited and perhaps were happy in our blindness…
He dozed for a while; Gribble shook him awake. “We get off here, Mr. Justin.” The wagon had stopped and Baaras was sardonically waiting.
“Thanks,” he said to the Finn, and looked uncertainly at Gribble for a lead. The little man started up a rutted and inconsiderable wagon track that angled from the blacktop. Justin followed him, disoriented for a moment. Then he realized that they were on the west side of Prospect Hill and heading up it.
Baaras looked at them, shrugged, and drove on. Justin thought flatly: A total botch. I said the wrong thing, we got off at the wrong place. I couldn’t have botched it worse if I’d been waving a flag with TRAITOR embroidered on it. The only thing to do now is wait and hope. Baaras is going to talk about my peculiar goings on, and the people he talks to will talk. Eventually it’ll get to somebody like Croley and that means I’m dead.
Meanwhile you keep climbing Prospect Hill.
The Hill was about 2,500 feet high and heavily wooded. It was supposed to be owned by one of the great New York real-estate fortunes. Farmers who tried to buy small pieces adjoining their fields for woodlots were rebuffed. A fair-sized local mutual insurance company which tried once to buy a big piece for development got an interview in New York City and a courteous explanation that the Hill was being held against the possibility that the area would experience major growth. The president of the company considered that interview one of the high points of his life, and Justin had heard all about it. So had practically everybody who’d spent ten minutes with the president.
The Hill was posted against hunting and fishing, but not fenced in. Farmers around it had more or less fenced it out with their own wire, but there were gaps like the one Gribble had found. Kids and hunters stayed clear of the Hill for the most part. Among the kids there was a legend that the Vanderbilts—or was it the Astors?—would jail you for twenty years if you got caught trespassing. And the hunters knew that the Hill had no springs and only one intermittent stream. It was against local custom to carry a canteen for a day’s hunting; you were heavily joshed for dressing up like a Boy Scout. So you pretty much stayed away—
Not This August Page 6
