A Town Is Drowning

by Frederik Pohl

  TORN FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES

  this novel takes you right into the heart of the new flood country, the Northeast United States which had generally been free of hurricanes and attendant floods. Now disaster has struck, more than once—terrible and grim.

  Although this novel will give you an accurate and brilliantly vivid picture of what it’s like to live through a flood, even more importantly it will show you what the people are like who fought the catastrophe and how those who survived are still fighting. In the persons of Starkman the burgess, Groff the dynamic young executive, Sharon the shrewd opportunist, Mrs. Goudeket, the resort owner, and others, you will meet and understand the varying human elements that the flood unleashed and intensified. Through it all you will sense a growing feeling of pride—that despite the selfishness of some, the people of the town met the terrible onslaught with courage and a sense of mutual help.

  Already well known for their superb science fiction, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kombluth demonstrate here their equal power in the realistic contemporary novel.

  By

  Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

  Contemporary Novel

  A TOWN IS DROWNING

  Science Fiction

  THE SPACE MERCHANTS

  SEARCH THE SKY

  GLADIATOR-AT-LAW

  This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by Ballantine Books, Inc.

  A TOWN IS DROWNING

  by

  FREDERIK POHL

  and

  C. M. KORNBLUTH

  BALLANTINE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  © 1955 by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kombluth

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 55-12407

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

  404 Fifth Avenue • New York 18, N. Y.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The man in the filling station was clearly of two minds about it, but finally he buttoned up his raincoat and pulled on his hat and came out to Mickey Groff’s car. “Sorry to make you come out in the rain like this,” Groff said. “Fill it up, will you?”

  He rolled up the window and picked out the least soaked wad of Kleenex to wipe the mist off the inside of the windshield. The car radio stopped playing show tunes and began to talk about freezer food plans. Groff snapped it off and leaned back to watch the turning dials on the gas pump. By the time the man had put back the cap and sloshed around to the window Groff had the exact change ready in his hand. “How far is it to Hebertown?’

  ‘

  “Five miles,” the attendant said, and went inside without counting the money. As Groff pulled out he saw the lights go out on the pumps and the big sign overhead.

  You couldn’t blame him, he thought; there weren’t enough cars out in this rain to make it worth while. He had been lucky to find even one station open.

  It was nearly impossible to see the road, no matter how hard the windshield wipers worked. Rain was spraying in somehow; all the windows were closed tight, but Groff could feel the thin mist on his face. He rolled around a long, downgrade curve, and when he touched the brake for a moment there was a queasy slipping sensation; the rain was coming down faster than it could flow off the highway.

  Foolish to drive all the way to Hebertown, Groff reflected; but the only alternative, actually, was to take a bus. The railroads didn’t bother much with this little out-l of-the-way corner of the state. And that was something to keep firmly in mind when he talked to the burgess the next morning, he reminded himself. An industry-hungry town could make you some tempting offers; there was a firm promise of a tax break and bank credit, and the suggestion that maybe a suitable factory building could be turned over to you for nearly nothing at all. But you had to keep freight differentials in mind too; and what about labor supply? Well, no; he crossed that off. That was the whole point of the burgess’s cooperative attitude; Hebertown had plenty of available labor ten months of the year, it was only when the vacationers came up from New York and the other big cities that local unemployment and the state of the local tax rolls ceased to be a problem. Still, what about that? Were you supposed to close down in the months of July and August?

  He shifted in his seat, forcing himself to lean back—it did no good to peer into the rain—and tried to relax. Mickey Groff was a big man and not used to sitting. It gave him a cramped, unwelcome feeling of confinement.

  There was a light ahead; it turned out to be a store with a neon sign that said Sam’s Grocery, but it gave Groff enough help to let him pick up his speed to nearly thirty-five miles an hour. He had been nearly an hour covering the last twenty miles, he saw irritably. Of course, it didn’t matter—it meant just one hour less to spend sitting in the lobby of the Heber House, since there wasn’t a thing he could do until the next morning in this rain. But why did he have to pick this particular Thursday to come up?

  He passed the store, and at once the road was invisible in front of him again. He tramped on the brake, slipped and skidded, and straightened out. That was foolish, he told himself. He carefully slowed as the road curved again…

  Not enough. It was the other car’s fault, of course; he saw the lights raging at him down the middle of the road and automatically pulled over quickly. At once he felt the sidewise slip and sway of the skid, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  It could have been worse. Thank God there was a good wide shoulder right there. The only thing was, he seemed to be stuck in the mud.

  Mickey Groff wasn’t much of a waiter. There wasn’t a showdog’s chance of a car stopping to help him, of course —even if one came by, they’d hardly be able to see him. Anyway, Sam’s Grocery couldn’t be more than a quarter of a mile back along the road, and from there he could phone for a wrecker—or at worst, if the wreckers had their own problems on a night like this, for a cab to get him into Hebertown. Once the rain stopped, it wouldn’t be much of a problem to get pulled out of the mud.

  He almost changed his mind when he stepped out into the rain, but by the time he had locked the car door behind him it was too late—it was hard to imagine how he could get any wetter than he was. Mickey Groff had heard of rain coming down in sheets, but he had never experienced it before. This was something beyond all expectations; in ten seconds he was wet to the skin, in a minute he was drenched as a Channel swimmer. There was wind with the rain, too; part of the time it came swiping at him from the side, stinging into his eyes, infiltrating his ears, slipping up the cuffs of his sodden sleeves. By the time he got around the curve in the road he was shaking with chill.

  After ten minutes of staggering through the storm he wondered why he couldn’t see the lights of the store. Then he saw why, and it was like a fist under the heart; the lights were out. There was the store just ahead, but the neon was black, the windows were black, there was only the faintest suggestion of a glimmer at the edges of the glass.

  He went stumbling across a little gravel parking lot with water sloshing around his shoes and banged on the door. Then he saw that there was a light in the back of the store; it was a candle. He tried the door handle and it opened.

  Inside, the noise of the rain changed and dulled; instead of a slashing at his ears it was a drumming overhead. A man came out of a storeroom at the back, carrying a gasoline lantern, and the whole store brightened and began to look more normal.

  “Oh,” said Mickey Groff. “Your power’s out. I thought maybe you were closing up.”

  The man said sourly, “I might as well be. Jesus, did you ever see weather like this in your life? I been here—”

  “Have you got a phone?” Groff interrupted.

  “Phone’s out too.”

  Groff sluiced some of the water off hi
s face and hair. “Well,” he said. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that the phones might not be working. There wasn’t much sense in going back to the car again; he knew a mudded-in wheel when he saw one. You could push blankets and boards under those rear wheels all night and the mud would just swallow up what the wheels didn’t slide right off. “Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I’m stuck in the mud down the road and I’ve got to g-;t into Hebertown.”

  The grocer glanced at him appraisingly and then bent to adjust the flame on the gasoline lantern. “I’m all alone here,” he mentioned.

  Mickey Groff waited.

  “I hate to close up before time,” the grocer said virtuously. “I’d like to help you out—You stuck bad?”

  “Pretty bad. Anyway, I can’t rock it out. I was hoping to call a tow truck from Hebertown.”

  “I got a pickup truck with four-wheel drive,” the grocer said thoughtfully. “You’re welcome to wait here till I close if you want to. Wouldn’t be more than a couple of—”

  “How about ten bucks if you do it now?”

  The grocer’s eyes flickered, but he shook his head. “You don’t know the people around here,” he complained. “They wait till I’m just ready to close, and bingo, two-three cars come zooming up. Milk for Junior, catfood for the cat, coffee, they gotta have coffee, they wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t so jeezly important. Sit down and wait, mister. It’s only—’

  ’ He squinted at the advertising clock above his door, shadowed from the flare of the pressure lamp by a stack of tall cans on a top shelf—“It’s only half an hour.”

  Mickey Groff thought of lying to the man, giving him a story about a medical emergency or a big deal with a deadline, something he couldn’t decently brush off for the sake of two or three catfood customers. Then, because he didn’t like to lie, he shrugged, made a disgusted grimace at himself in the near-dark and sat down in a spindle-back chair to wait out the thirty minutes. He knew what the trouble was; U was the old thing. He had been born, apparently, geared up about twenty-five per cent faster than most people. This was very handy in some ways; he was a Rising Young Businessman at thirty and pretty soon now he’d be a Rising Young Industrialist. His picture had been printed in Nation’s Business along with eleven other promising youngsters who owned their own plants, and one day it would appear alone. He knew it and he knew it would be due to his built-in overgearing. But that didn’t make it any easier to sit and wait for the catfood customers.

  The storekeeper—as most people did—sensed his mood. “Like to look at the paper?” he asked, and handed him an eight-page sheet. It was the latest—yesterday’s—issue of the Hebertown Weekly Times. Groff had studied the last four issues preceding it, as well as those of a dozen other country papers, trying to get the feel of the communities they served. On one of those communities he would soon have to stake his play for the jump from forty employees to a hundred.

  He held the paper up to the lamplight and read the main headline, covering the three right columns. The chair crashed behind him as he snapped to his feet. “God damn it to hell!” he said.

  The storekeeper backed away, scared. “What’s the matter, mister?”

  “Sorry,” Groff said. “I didn’t mean you. I just thought of something I forgot to do.”

  Which was a lie. He forced himself to set up the chair again, sat down and reread the headline, pulses hammering at his temples. BORO MAY GRANT SWANSCOMB MILL TO CHESBRO AT NOMINAL RENT; MOVE HAILED AS EMPLOYMENT BOOM; OLD PLANT TO BE USED AS WAREHOUSE.

  The former Swanscomb Mill was the building he had his eye on as the shell for his projected new factory. It was ideal. It was empty and unwanted by anybody since Swanscomb had moved south; it was a low-maintenance brick shell with plenty of adjoining room for expansion; it was solidly built and able to support his machine tools; it had its own siding and a loading deck for trucks. And somebody else, by incredible coincidence, was after it too. The pounding pulses subsided and he steadied himself to read the story. It was one column down the right and it was strangely uninformative. It led off: “Civic leaders today hailed the announcement that Arthur Chesbro hopes to secure the old Swanscomb Mill from the Borough as a warehouse for the storage of materials and supplies.” It didn’t say who the civic leaders were. It went on to recapitulate the familiar history of the plant. It concluded by quoting Arthur Chesbro as hoping that at least a dozen local citizens would be employed as warehousemen in the plant.

  A car’s headlights outside turned the streaming store window into a sheet of refracted yellow glare. A woman bustled in and peered about uncertainly in the gloom. The storekeeper yes-ma’amed her and she apologized for coming so late, the rain was so terrible she could barely crawl, and could she have three cans of catfood?

  The storekeeper gave her the cans, and when he closed the door behind her—rain drove in during the brief moment and drenched a square yard of floor—turned to Groff and said: “What did I tell you?”

  “Who’s this Arthur Chesbro?” Groff demanded. “The one in the paper.”

  “Chesbro? A big wheel over in the next county. Justice of the peace. Owns business buildings; couple of radio stations; the newspaper, I don’t know the name. I just get copies of the Weekly Times’, they send them so I can check my ads. Every week I take one. You look on page seven, tell me what you think of it.”

  Groff yanked the paper open, looked at the grocer’s little ad on page seven and said: “You’re Sam Zehedi? Syrian?”

  The man looked gratified. “How’d you know?”

  “A couple of your boys used to work for me. Damn fine millwrights.”

  “That’s us!” Sam Zehedi said. “You give a Syrian a busted machine and a wrench, he’ll have it going in five minutes. We’re a civilized, Christian people. We been Christian a lot longer than the French or the Germans. And you know what some dumb people called me when I first bought the store? An Ay-rab. A heathen Ay-rab.” “They’ll learn.” Groff shrugged. He studied the newspaper story. So this Chesbro was interested in newspapers. It looked, it very definitely looked, as though he might have a piece of the Hebertown Weekly Times in his pocket; the story was pure propaganda.

  Sam Zehedi went on: “Oh, they’re learning. It’s been five years now, and I didn’t let any grass grow under my feet. I’m a respected man in this community, mister. You don’t hear any Ay-rab talk any more, except maybe from some of the summer people. Jews—they’re bitter about Ay-rabs, but then somebody sets them straight. I guess I’m the first Syrian boy around here except for peddlers going through in the old days the way they used to. It’s like being a pioneer. Or a missionary.” He glanced at the clock. “What the hell,” he said. “I don’t think anybody else is coming in this rain. I’ll get the truck started and pull her around the front, then you can hop right in and I’ll lock up, then we’ll go tow you out.”

  “Fine,” Groff said. “I appreciate it very much.” The storekeeper disappeared in the back; a door slammed and over the drumming rain Groff heard a truck engine roar into life. Zehedi gunned it and held it for a minute and then took off, swinging the pickup around in front. Groff dashed for the cab when the door swung open and vaulted in. His speed hadn’t helped him a bit; he was wet all over again from his brief exposure.

  Zehedi got out on his side, sensibly swathed in a slicker, put out the lantern in the store and locked up. He climbed back into the cab and had to raise his voice to be heard above the rain beating on the top. “Well, here we go, mister. About how far?”

  “Quarter of a mile, maybe.”

  “We’ll get you there.” He put the truck in gear and crawled away from the store, feeding the gas lightly. “My tires are pretty good,” he said. “I’d hate to start spinning my wheels, though.” They crawled up the long, gentle grade into the driving torrents.

  “Notice my store’s located at the foot of the hill?” he chattered. “I picked it partly for that. People have time to see the sign, not like a flat straightaway where they go whizzing
past fast as they can.”

  Groff cranked down the window and stuck his head out. He couldn’t be wetter and he wasn’t perfectly sure that through the rain-streaked window his ditched car would be visible. The headlights seemed to bore yellow cones through the teeming rain without illuminating anything outside their sharp margins. The drops battered at his face and hair; he pulled his head in feeling a little stunned. The violence of this storm—he had a vague feeling that it couldn’t go on without something giving. What, he didn’t know.

  Headlights stabbed at their eyes from the rear-view mirror. Behind them a horn howled and out of the darkness behind plunged a shape. Zehedi gasped and twitched his wheel to the right. The car from behind zoomed past them, cut into the right lane again and roared on; its taillights soon were dim and then disappeared.

  “Crazy idiot!” the storekeeper gasped, appalled. “He could have wrecked us! He must have been going fifty! In this!"

  Groff twisted in the seat and stared through the rear window. There were headlights, far back but coming up fast. And the headlights went out as he watched, with a glimmer…

  He knew suddenly what had given. Even a city man, born and bred in city safety, could recognize the signs.

  “Step on it” he said to the storekeeper swiftly. “Flood-water behind us. Get us to the top of the hill. Fast.”

  Zehedi didn’t argue or hesitate. Few people argued or hesitated when Groff used that tone of voice. Quickly and steadily he stepped on the gas. They whirled around the curve where Groff’s car stood empty and past it. It was a long, straight upgrade from there. Either the rain had slackened off a little or Zehedi was more worried about what was behind them than about the rain; they roared up the hill, accelerating all the way, and only stopped when they saw another car parked by the side of the road, lights on and windshield wipers flapping, and a man leaning out of the opened door, staring back.