“Oh, yes. But art, too, you know. Music, literature, culture.”
“Yes, mystery-stories and those funny Negro jazz bands that always made my ears hurt.”
He was crestfallen, even though he knew she was having a little fun with him.
“Another thing, though, about civilization,” she said. “There’s this matter of time. We don’t really know what month it is. We’ll want to be sure when his birthday comes, so that we can celebrate it, something less than two years from now.”
Perhaps, he felt in his mind, that was the difference! That was the difference between woman and man. She felt only in terms of the immediate, and was more interested in being able to spot her child’s birthday than in all the future of civilization. Again, he felt superior to her. “One thing I didn’t do, though,” he said, “was to read any of those obstetrics books today. I’m sorry—but there’s no hurry, is there?”
“Oh, no. Maybe not even any use of it at all. Don’t you remember that even in the Old Times babies were always being born in taxis and hospital lobbies? Once they’re started, nobody can stop them.”
Later, when he had thought things over, he could not but admit that she had made a suggestion of something important. The more he thought about it, the more fundamental he considered her idea of keeping track of time. After all, time was history, and history was tradition, and tradition was civilization. If you lost the continuity of time, you lost something that might never be recovered. Probably it had already been lost unless some of the other survivors had been more careful about the matter than he had been. Take the seven-day week, for instance. Even though you were not religious, you had to admit that the seven-day week with its one day of rest was a fine old tradition of mankind. It had been going on for at least five thousand years, clear from Babylonian times, and no one knew how much further. Would he ever be able to figure out again just which day was Sunday?
As for getting the proper day of the year, that should not be too difficult. He knew enough about the fundamentals of astronomy to do that, and if he got the time of the solstice correct, he could figure back on last year’s calendar and perhaps re-establish the day of the week.
This was the time of the year to get busy on the problem. Although he did not know exactly, he could tell from the progress of the weather and from his general knowledge of how much time had elapsed since the catastrophe, that it must have come now pretty well toward the middle of December. If the solstice was to be in a week or so, he could easily tell by watching where the sun set.
Next day he found a surveyor’s transit, and although he did not know much about the use of it, he set it up on the porch, facing the west. He blackened its lenses with soot, so that he could observe the sun without hurting his eyes. His very first observation showed that the sun was going down behind the hills of San Francisco, to the south of the Golden Gate. From memory he knew that this was very near to its most southern point of setting. He left the transit in position, and recorded the angle of the sunset.
The next evening it set still a little farther south. And then, as systems do, his system went to pieces. A heavy storm blew in from the ocean, and during a whole week he could not observe where the sun set. Next time he saw it, it had already started north.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “we must be pretty close to it. If we add one day to the time when we last saw the sun, we ought to be very near to the solstice, and then if we add ten days to that, we would get to New Years.”
“Isn’t that rather silly?” she said.
“Why?”
“Well, I mean, that is, shouldn’t the year really start when the sun turns north again? Don’t you guess really that was what people tried to do once, and things got mixed up some way or other, and got about ten days out of kilter?”
“Yes, I imagine it was that way.”
“Well, why don’t we just start our New Year then with—what you call it?—the solstice? It seems simpler.”
“Yes, but you can’t just go fooling with the calendar. That’s been established for a long time. You can’t just shift it.”
“Well, didn’t someone named Julian do it, and weren’t there riots and things? But still, they did change it.”
“They did change it! Yes, you’re right—and I suppose we can change it now if we want to. It certainly gives a person a sense of power!”
Then in playfulness of imagination they decided that living where they did, they had a system all worked out before them, so that they would not even bother to have months and things like that unless they wanted to, because from the hill they could see the sun setting around its whole arc. They could merely date things by the time the sun set in the middle of the Gate, or the time it had reached the first big hump to the north, or the time it had begun to, reach the various points along the long slope of the mountain. What was the use of merely having months?
“Say!” she said, suddenly, “it must be pretty nearly Christmas, too. I hadn’t thought of that. You think I can get down before the stores close to pick you a tie?”
He looked back at her with a little smile. “I suppose we ought to feel pretty lugubrious this Christmas, and yet, some way, I can’t.”
“Next year,” she said, “this ought to be even more fun. We’ll have to get him his first tree.”
“Yes, and he can have a rattle, too, can’t he? What I’m looking forward to, though, is when he can get an electric train, and I can run it. No, poor guy, I guess there’ll never be an electric train for him. Maybe, though, when we have grandchildren, in twenty-five years, maybe, we’ll be able to get the electricity working again!”
“Twenty-five years! I’ll be a pretty old woman by that time. It’s strange, thinking forwards now, as well as backwards. For a while, I only thought backwards. But that thinking ahead brings up something else to my mind, also—the years! We’ll have to keep track of the years. Don’t people on desert islands cut notches in trees or something like that? You see, he’ll want to know what year it is; so he can vote or get a passport, or report to his draft board, maybe. Only perhaps, you aren’t going to restore things like that for us in this new civilization. What is this year, anyway, now?”
Again he thought that was like a woman, to put even such an all-important thing as the very date in terms of her unborn child. But yet, as so often, her instinct was right—a great pity if the historical record should be broken at some point! Doubtless in the long run, archaeologists could restore the continuity by means of varves or dendrochronology, but it would save a lot of work if someone merely kept the tradition.
“You’re right,” he said. “And it’s simple, too, of course. We know what year it is now, and when we decide we’ve come to New Years, we’ll just chisel a new date on some good rock, and then every year chisel the next one. The chiseling will be quite a job, and so we’ll always remember whether we are up-to-date or not.”
“Isn’t that rather silly, too?” she said. “I mean, starting out with a date in four figures. As far as I’m concerned,” she paused for a moment and looked around with that quiet air which sometimes was so impressive, “as far as I’m concerned, this past year might as well be the Year One.”
That evening there was no rain. The clouds still hung low, but the air was clear beneath them. You could have seen the lights of San Francisco, if there had been any lights.
He stood on the porch, and looked out toward the dark west, breathing the cool damp air in deeply. His mood was still close to exaltation.
“Now we have finished with the past,” he thought. “These last few months, the tag-end of the year—we shall let the past have them. This is the Moment Zero, and we stand between two eras. Now the new life begins. Now we commence the Year One. The Year One!”
Now there lay before him no longer the mere drama of a world without men and of its constant adaptation. No longer would personal readjustment be his own dominating problem. Now there stretched away in the years ahead, the unfolding drama of a new society, reconstructing i
tself, moving on. And now he would not be the lonely spectator, at least, not merely that. He could read. He was equipped with the background of much knowledge already. He would extend that into technics, into psychology, into political science, if that were needed.
There must be others that he could find also to join with them—good people who would help in the new world. He would start looking for people again. He would look craftily, tying to keep away from all those who had suffered too much from the shock, whose minds or bodies were not what one wanted to build up the new society.
Somewhere within him there lingered still that one deep fear that she might die in childbirth, that the whole hope of the future might thus fade. And yet, he could really not fear it very deeply. Her courage burned too brightly. She was life. He could not associate her with death. She was the light for the future, she and those that would spring from her. “O mother of nations! And her children shall call her blessed!”
He himself would have had only the courage to live on, feeling death creep in closer year by year as once the darkness had crept in from the comers of the room when the lights were failing. Her stronger spirit had struck back against death, and already life built up anew within her. From her depths courage flowed out to him.
It was curious, doubtless even illogical, that the thought of the coming child should make so much difference. But he granted the difference. He had known despair, but now he knew hope. He looked forward with confidence to the time when the sun would again be setting in the southern end of its long arc and the two of them—or the three—would go to carve into some rock the numeral commemorating the end of the Year One. It was not finished. The thing would go on. A phrase leaped into his mind.
“Oh, world without end!” he thought. As he stood there, looking out into the dark west over the empty city, breathing deeply of the cool damp air, the words sang in his mind, “Oh, world without end! World without end!”
Here ends Part I. The inter-chapter called Quick Years follows, after a time-interval of one year.
QUICK YEARS
Not far from the house on San Lupo Drive there was that area which had once been a small public park. Tall rocks rose picturesquely, and at one place the tops of two of them leaned together, forming a high narrow cave. Near by, a smooth rock-surface, as large as the floor of a small room, sloped with the hillside, but was not too steep to sit on comfortably. In those older times which had been before even those that were now called the Old Times, some tribe of simple people had lived thereabouts, and on the smooth rock-surface you still saw the little holes where those people had pounded with stones to make their acorn-mash.
One day, after the round of the seasons had passed and the sun for the second time sank well to the south of the Golden Gate, Ish and Em climbed the hillside toward the rocks. The afternoon was calm and sunny, warm for mid-winter. Em carried the baby, wrapped in a soft blanket. (She was pregnant again, although not yet heavy on her feet.) Ish carried his hammer and a cold-chisel. Princess started with them, but as always went baying off on the trail of one of her rabbits.
When they came to the rock, Em sat down on it in the sun and nursed the baby, and Ish worked with hammer and chisel, cutting into the smooth surface the single numeral. The rock was hard, but with the heavy hammer and the sharp chisel, he soon finished an upright line. But it was fun to adorn the work a little, and some ceremony seemed fitting to mark the end of their first full circuit of the sun from south back to south. So Ish cut a clean serif at the base of the line, and a little hook at the top, so that the finished figure resembled the neat 1 which he remembered in the times of printing. When he was done, he sat close beside Em in the sun. The baby had finished feeding, and was happy. They played with him. “Well,” said Ish, “that was the Year One!”
“Yes,” said Em, “but I think I shall always remember it as the Year of the Baby. Names are easier to remember than numbers.”
Thus from the very beginning it came about that they called each year not so often by its number as by a name based on something that had happened during that time.
In the spring of the second year, Ish planted his first garden. He had never liked gardening, and that probably explained why, in spite of good resolutions and two half-hearted attempts, he had not grown anything during the first year. Nevertheless, as he turned over the dark moist soil with the spade, he felt a deep satisfaction at being in touch again with primeval things.
That was about all the satisfaction he got from the garden. To begin with, the seed (he had a hard time to find any at all because of the ravages of the rats) was several years old, and much of it failed to sprout. Snails and slugs soon moved in, but by scattering a box of Snale-Killa he eliminated them, and felt triumphant. Then, just as the lettuce was making a good growth, a buck jumped the fence and wrought havoc. Ish put another layer on the top of the fence. Next, some rabbits burrowed beneath—more destruction, and more work! One evening he heard crashing noises and rushed out just in minute to scare off a predatory cow on the point of smashing a way through the fence. More work!
By this time he was waking up at night with thoughts of ravening deer, rabbits, and cattle prowling around his fence and ogling his lettuces with eyes that gleamed like tigers’ eyes.
Then, in June, the insects arrived. He sprayed poison until he was afraid he would not dare eat the lettuce even if any lived to be harvested.
The crows were the last to find the garden, but when they arrived in July their numbers made up for their late arrival. He stood guard, and shot some of them. But they seemed to post sentries and swoop down as soon as his back was turned, and he could not watch during all the daylight hours. His scarecrows and dangling mirrors kept them off for a day, but after that they lost their fear. In the end he actually erected a shelter of fly-screen over the few rows of garden which seemed worth saving, and he harvested a little lettuce, along with some scrawny tomatoes and onions. But he conscientiously let some of the plants go to seed, and saved the fresh seed for the future.
He was as thoroughly discouraged as any amateur gardener had ever been. It was one thing apparently to grow vegetables when thousands of others were doing the same, and quite another when yours was the only plot and so from miles around every vegetable-hungry animal and bird and mollusk and insect came galloping or flying or oozing or hopping, and apparently sending out by signals to its fellows the universal shout, “Let’s eat!”
Toward the end of summer the second baby was born. They called her Mary, just as they had decided finally to call the first one John, so that the old names would not vanish from the earth.
When the new baby was only a few weeks old, there was another memorable event.
This was the way of it…. In those first years though Ish and Em stayed contentedly close at home, they now and then had visits from wanderers who had seen the smoke on San Lupo Drive and headed for it, sometimes in cars, more often on foot. These people, with one exception, seemed to be suffering from shock. They were bees who had lost the hive, sheep without a flock. By now, Ish concluded, the ones who had made a good adjustment must already have settled down. (Besides, no matter whether the wanderer was a man or a woman, the old problem of three’s-a-crowd reared up.) So Ish and Em were glad when one of these restless and unhappy people decided to continue wandering.
The exception was Ezra. Ish always remembered how Ezra came strolling along the street that hot September day, his face florid, his half-bald head even redder, his jaw narrow and pinched, his bad teeth showing suddenly when he saw Ish and stopped and smiled.
“Hi-ya, boy!” he had said, and though the words were American, still behind them somewhere was the ghost of a North-of-England accent.
He stayed until after the first rains. He was always pleasant, even when his teeth were growling. He had that miexpressibly great gift of making people feel comfortable. The babies always smiled for Ezra. Ish and Em would have urged him to stay permanently, but they feared the triangle-situation, even when
the outsider was as easygoing and perceptive as Ezra. So one day when he seemed restless they sent him off, telling him jokingly to find himself a pretty girl and then come back and join them. They were sad after he had gone.
At the time of his leaving the sun was again far to the south. So, when they went to the flat rock and cut the numeral 2, Ezra was still in their minds, though he was gone and they did not expect to see him again. He would have been, they thought, a good helper, a good person to have around. To his memory they called it the Year of Ezra.
The Year 3 was the Year of the Fires. Just after mid-summer the smoke suddenly drifted over everything, and it stayed, lighter and heavier, through three months. The babies sometimes woke up coughing and choking, their eyes watering.
Ish could realize what was happening. The western forests were no longer primeval woodlands of big trees through which a fire could sweep and do little damage. On the contrary, because of logging and man-caused fires, the forests consisted mostly of thick and highly inflammable second-growth, made all the worse by slash-piles and brush-fields. Man had produced this kind of forest, and it was dependent upon him, surviving only because of his vigorous efforts at fire-suppression. Now the hoses lay neatly coiled and the bulldozers reddened with rust, and in this summer, a very dry one, over all northern California, and doubtless in Oregon and Washington too, the lightning-set fires were raging uncombatted through the tangled second-growth and blazing up in the tinder-dry slash-piles. One horrible week they even saw the fires burning brightly in the night, all along the north side of the Bay, sweeping the slopes of the mountain from bottom to top, and dying out only when there was nothing left to burn. The broad arms of the Bay fortunately kept the fire on the north side, and there were no lightning storms on the south side to start new fires. When it was all over, Ish believed that there must be very few forests left unburned in California, and centuries would be required to grow them again.
In this year also Ish really settled down to reading—another sign that he was finally adjusting to the situation. He got his books from the City Library, and kept the million volumes of the University as a great reserve to be tapped when the time was ripe. Although he often thought that he should use his reading to make himself skillful in such fields as medicine and agriculture and mechanics, he found that what he actually wanted to read was the story of mankind. He plunged through innumerable volumes of anthropology and history, and went on into philosophy, particularly the philosophy of history. He read novels and poems and plays, which also were the story of mankind.
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