“We should have electricity, Boris, particularly for refrigeration. I think I ought to let you have all the manpower you need.”
“It’s tough when we can’t use Shostovar and Grennig.”
“We agreed on the punishment and we’ll stick it out.”
That policy was the final evolution of the decision we made Christmas Eve. We gave the men their choice: exile or reform. If they chose to stay in our valley, they did so as children. At the time both of them had been hilariously amused; they weren’t laughing any longer. As soon as they had done the extra labor to pay for the stolen liquor and Lin Yeng’s lost time, we assigned them to the library and a special class conducted for them alone by Virginia Grant.
“It’s working out,” Yorovich told me. “At least for Shostovar. He’s beginning to take us seriously.”
“Roswell agrees with you. In any case, Boris, this is different from our old idea of criminal punishment. We could have locked the two of them up for a couple of months; this way we have a chance of changing the way they think and making them useful adults.”
“What about Grennig?”
“He talks a fast line, but it’s a sham; he hates us all…”
During the past three months I had read shelves of books on government; I had talked endlessly with Debby Zacharias and Stewart Roswell, picking their minds clean of ideas. I concluded that the most workable, the most man-centered government was the form I knew best—the constitutional organization of the United States.
My cigar was out. I tossed it in the fire. I stripped off my clothes and slid down into the envelope of blankets on my cot.
Three hours later I was awakened by a frantic pounding on the door. “Derry! Derry, tome twick!” It was a child’s voice, shrill with terror. I leaped out of bed, throwing a log on the dying fire as I crossed toward the door. The boy on the step was Don Harrow, the five-year-old adopted by Igor Morrenski and Emily Marsh. Don threw his arms around my neck. I carried him close to the fire. He was wearing his woolies. Snow had soaked through the cloth and the child was trembling from the cold.
“Karl Grennig’s beating up my Daddy!” Don said through chattering teeth. “An’ he hit my Mommy an’ made her face bleed…”
The Morrenski’s cottage door was open. Igor lay on the floor in front of the dying fire. I took his battered face in my hands and he seized my arm convulsively. In a choked whisper he said,
“Go after them, Jerry. He stole my wife.”
“After I get you—”
“The hell with me! I’m all right. Grennig has my Emily!”
“Which road did they take?”
“East, to the desert. Grennig has one of the horses.”
I ran to the corral. Psorkarian kept some small arms there. Apparently Grennig hadn’t known that, for the cabinet was still locked. I opened it with my own key and took out a rifle before I mounted one of the Cossack’s horses.
I rode in bleak darkness, hearing nothing but the howl of the wind. The powdery snow tore at my face like a thousand needles of ice. I was constantly bent low over the side of my horse so I could make out the trail in the snow. When I passed the four-thousand-foot marker the snow on the road was slush; a thousand feet lower it became a cold, driving rain. I had no more hoof marks to follow. If Grennig made the desert, he stood a good chance of getting away.
But there was one factor he hadn’t calculated: the quixotic behavior of a mountain storm. Suddenly I was out of the rain. Moonlight stabbed down through the broiling, wind-driven clouds. I was able to see the highway ahead.
I pushed my horse faster. The advantage shifted to me. Grennig was carrying a woman; I rode alone. I cantered another mile before I came to the long slide, which the desert bombing had thrown over the road. I saw Grennig then, almost across the slide area.
I fired my rifle high above his head. I heard Emily Marsh scream as Grennig dug spurs into his horse’s flank. She had been slumped across the saddle, playing unconscious until she knew someone was behind her.
She pushed herself from his horse, rolling on the asphalt. Grennig reined in his mount and went back after her.
I caught up with them as they fought on the shoulder of the highway. I swung from the saddle and prodded the German back with my rifle. He stood facing me with bared teeth. For the first time since I had known him, his eyes were neither candid nor child-like. The mask was gone and I saw the man: shrewd, savage, calculating —an ape with the cerebral cortex of a human being.
“You can go, Grennig,” I said, nodding toward the desert. “You don’t have a choice any longer. But Emily’s going back with me, where she belongs.”
“Always the Gallahad,” he sneered.
I smashed his face with my fist. His eyes glazed but he held his grip on consciousness. He seized a rock and tried to hammer it into my skull. I jerked my head aside. The stone ripped a gash in my cheek with an agonizing fire of pain. I doubled my knees and kicked him from me. He groped for the rifle, lying on the road. I threw myself at him. He swung the butt of the rifle in a wide arc. It grazed my shin.
Grennig jerked back the bolt as I struck him with my shoulder. We both went down and the rifle was between us. The explosion was muffled by our bodies. I saw the look of surprise in his face—and the slow emptiness of death…
V. The City and the Valley—November, The Second Year
BY NOVEMBER—a year and a half after the war began—the population in the valley had grown to two hundred and fifty. I no longer felt any doubt. Some men had understood George Knight. We all would in time.
Yet there was always one question in my mind. Our greatest opportunity had been Los Angeles. Knight’s broadcasts had been made primarily to the city. But Los Angeles chose war. Why?
In November we set up our first formal government and we held our first election. I was chosen president by a vote of two hundred and twenty. Thirty of our children, defined as still socially immature, did not vote.
We held our election late in the afternoon, and afterward Cheryl and I walked up to the knoll above the lake. I felt a need to be alone with her, and the others understood that.
Cheryl and I sat together, looking at the lake in silence. The sun was setting and the fall wind was bitter with the first icy touch of winter. Cheryl moved closer to me. She slid her hand beneath my shirt to keep it warm. I felt the gentle touch of her finger tracing the muscle of my chest—her favorite, almost unconscious gesture of affection. I remembered that on this knoll we first found our love for each other; I drew her face toward mine. She lay in my arms with her lips soft and liquid on my cheek.
Far away I heard the sound of sudden gunfire. I pushed Cheryl from me. On the village street someone was screaming.
I sprinted toward the village. Yorovich came out of the lodge and tossed me one of our submachine guns. The street was in chaos. Our citizens were scurrying into the shelter of the empty stores. Bearded strangers on horseback were riding up and down the road, firing rifles into the mob.
Yorovich and I opened up on the horsemen. Four flung up their hands and fell in the street. The others retreated to the eastern end of the village and barricaded themselves in an empty building. Yorovich and I pinned them down long enough for our people to take cover and our men to break out their guns.
“It’s men from the city,” Yorovich said.
“After food, you think?”
“Obviously. Winter’s coming. There isn’t much left to pillage anywhere else.”
“We could buy them off with the canned goods we don’t need. But to hell with that.”
“You’re right, Jerry. You can’t buy peace from the savages. We fight it out right now, or they’ll destroy us sooner or later.”
When dusk came, we were attacked by a second force, which had lain outside the village. The men escaped from the barricaded store and the two groups formed a united front against us. The fighting was continuous until nearly dawn. Our superior weapons eventually forced them to retreat.
We re
sted after the night’s fighting until noon before we set out in pursuit of the invaders. Fifty of us went in our two big diesel vans.
Our war against the barbarians was short-lived and very one-sided. Although we faced an enemy outnumbering us five to one, we had superior weapons—and Psorkarian, in the helicopter, gave us an air force. By late afternoon we had taken nearly sixty prisoners.
The brigand stronghold had been the undamaged mansions on the ocean boulevard overlooking Los Angeles harbor. We were still rounding up four prisoners on the beach below the bluff, when the helicopter swung low overhead and Psorkarian called out my name.
“Yes, Cossack?” I shouted up to him. “What is it?”
“A ship of some sort, Jerry. Just outside the breakwater.”
“Armed?”
“Damned if I know. I never saw anything like this before.”
An hour later I understood what he meant. The monstrosity maneuvered through the harbor entrance, past the flattop sunk against the breakwater, and moved toward the beach. It was a box-like raft with a sail. The sail was a crazy patchwork of varicolored cloth hitched together with woven palm fronds. Along each side of the raft a superstructure held hand-carved oars which six men were plying. The thing stopped fifty feet offshore.
From the deck of the raft a man shouted at us, “Who are you?”
“Americans,” I answered.
“You survived in the city?”
“No; we’re from the hills.”
“We’re looking for a man. You may have heard of him—Jerry Bonhill.”
“Why?”
“He broadcast to the city. He told us how—”
“I’m Bonhill! come ashore.”
The raft ground on the beach. The man sprang ashore and shook my hand eagerly. He was emaciated, gray-bearded, yet still very distinguished looking. His face had been tanned leather-brown by the sun and the wind. He told me his name was Maurice Phelps, of the U. S. Navy.
He described the destruction of Los Angeles. The navy, he said, had entered the harbor without opposition. All day long, before the attack, they had been hearing broadcasts which began, “I am Jerry Bonhill; I am speaking for George Knight.” At first they thought it was a trick, but Soviet sailors in the submarines —sick men, barely able to stand—welcomed them as friends.
However, the Soviet commander had a hard-core defense of about three thousand men—out of the quarter million in the city. Russian planes bombed the incoming ships; the navy drove them off. As the Angelinos and their sick captors moved toward the harbor, the Russians bombed the city indiscriminately with explosives and incendiary bombs. The navy attempted to evacuate both civilians and friendly Soviet troops. The first wave of sick men was loaded into Phelps’ ship, and he was ordered to take them to Catalina.
Phelps’ ship was in the channel, five miles west of the breakwater, when the sound of firing suddenly stopped in the city. On the horizon they could see the flames of the burning city, but Phelps remembered hearing the motor of only one plane soaring over the ruins.
Ten minutes after that Phelps’ ship exhausted its last reserve of fuel. He had no choice but to drop anchor. Half an hour later a Russian submarine surfaced close to Phelps’ ship. Ten Russian sailors asked to come aboard—emaciated by the radiation sickness; a terrible horror in their eyes. They were the last men who escaped the city. They had been aboard the submarine when they heard ashore the cry of “Gas!” Instinctively they slammed the hatches and submerged. Through the periscope they saw the people on the landing fall dead. They saw the ships one by one go out of control. They watched the war-god in the gas mask slaughter a city. The last city of man, which Knight’s dream had almost saved.
Since the submarine had the almost inexhaustible power of atomic engines, Phelps used it to make repeated trips ferrying his men and the refugees to Catalina Island. Approximately half the men aboard his ship were Communist troops; the other evacuees were Americans who insisted on sticking by the sick enemy they were trying to help. “A remarkable display of courage,” Phelps admitted. “But the whole city was like that; the spiritual excitement of a Crusade. All of them talked constantly about Knight.”
The sea was running high and on its last trip back to the ship the submarine, manned by an exhausted crew, rammed it. Both vessels began to sink. Phelps and the fifteen seamen still aboard went ashore on a life raft. The island was a shambles, swept by fire.
“Our first year out there was rugged, Bonhill—pure hell. Half of us died of the sickness and starvation. But through it all we never forgot those broadcasts to the city. It gave us something beyond ourselves to work for. We had the Russians with us; we saw what it meant to teach them the meaning of America—our revolution, in place of the Communist sham.”
During the second summer they managed to grow a little food, but the Catalina colony had existed close to starvation. Fish was their staple diet; but the spirit of George Knight kept them alive.
The refugees had spent a good part of the summer building Phelps’ raft. The old life raft, which they had used for fishing, was in no condition to make the passage to the mainland. Before another winter came, they wanted to leave the island. Phelps and his six sailors had come to find a larger ship, which would be capable of moving the whole colony. Like the Wawona refugees, they surmised that I might have built a colony like theirs. They were ready to join forces. I told him they would be welcome to the valley, and I explained how much progress we had made toward rebuilding an organized society.
“So it’s President Bonhill.” He said it with an embarrassing reverence. “The first President of the American world—for the new breed of American. You’ll find us everywhere. In Russia and Africa. In Brazil and Ireland. It is our world, Bonhill; we won’t lose it again.”
Phelps and his six sailors examined the ships in the harbor. They found what they could use. We worked half the night helping them drain fuel from other rusting hulks to fill the tanks of that one vessel. They sailed immediately. Phelps thought he could land his Catalina colony in Los Angeles shortly after dawn.
I lay awake a long time looking at the stars, hazy above the coastal mists. I felt an inner peace and satisfaction; the last question mark was gone. George Knight had not failed in Los Angeles. One man had destroyed the city, yet even here Knight’s dream had not died.
At seven the next morning, when the thin, wasted survivors of the Catalina colony came ashore, our trucks were waiting on the road above the beach. It was a three-hour drive up the road to the valley. I sat with the driver in the cab of one of the trucks; the pale, gaunt people crowded in the van behind us were singing as we moved over the highways of the dead city.
When we reached the village the air was crisp and cold. Snow clouds were scattered over the sky. Our citizens welcomed the newcomers soberly, as friends and as brothers. They took them in and fed them.
I walked back to our cabin with Cheryl. The afternoon sun blazed through the windows. Our first winter fire burned on the hearth.
I dropped on the couch beside Cheryl. “The prisoners Yorovich brought in,” she said. “I thought if we put them—”
“We have an elected government, Cheryl. The responsibility isn’t all ours any longer.” I put my arm around her. “It seems to me we were interrupted yesterday—”
“And it isn’t right for the President to leave unfinished business. It sets a bad precedent for our children.”
Her fingers worked at the buttons of my shirt. I felt her hand caress my chest and move slowly toward the small of my back.
“Never a new world,” I murmured in her ear. “A man and a woman together—they found it long ago.”
She sighed and then, crooning deep-throatedly, she whispered Solomon’s song, the ancient magic of love,
“‘Behold, thou art fair, my beloved… The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.’”
And after that she had no more time for words.
THE END
AUTHOR PORTRAIT
Irving E. Cox, Jr., 1917-2001
Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) Page 19
