A Town Is Drowning

by Frederik Pohl

  Mrs. Goudeket swallowed, as she considered where the four hundred dollars for the next batch of topsoil might be coming from. From the back seat Sharon Froman called sharply: “Watch yourself, Dick!”

  “I see him,” McCue said, slowing down. A battered pickup truck was wallowing around their entrance road, trying to turn around. The driver was being meticulously careful about staying off the shoulders, which made it a long process, but finally he got turned around and pulled over. As the station wagon drew close he leaned out and yelled: “This ain’t the road to Hebertown, is it?”

  Dick McCue leaned over his employer to roll the window down and yell back: “No! You have to turn left at the road, then the second right, left at the bridge— Look, just follow me.” He barely got his head out of the window before Mrs. Goudeket rolled it up again.

  “Follow him! Jeez, I ought to have an airplane!”

  Mickey Groff said, “We ought to be nearly there by now. Does it look familiar?”

  “Nothing looks familiar,” Sam Zehedi complained, trying to keep the lights of the station wagon in sight. He stole a look at the dashboard. Forty-two miles they’d come! Backtracking where the bridge was washed out, taking a shortcut that had turned out impassable, getting lost on the country roads down toward the river—forty-two miles, and they’d started out three miles from town. There was a mile marker right in front of the store…

  No, not any more there wasn’t. Sam Zehedi got a sudden cramp in his belly thinking about it. The important thing was whether the insurance covered it or not. He had the impression that he was covered for everything from artillery fire by the Argentine army to glacier damage; but that was a long time ago when he signed that check for the policy, and he couldn’t remember what it said about floods. Of course, he told himself valiantly, that guy in the car was nuts; the store couldn’t have been just washed away. It was just that it was so dark and you couldn’t see through the rain from as close as you dared to get in the car. Probably there was water in it, sure— but was that so bad? Look at those people in Missouri and places like that, they go through this every year.

  He thought of the new freezer, not yet paid for, and moaned.

  Mickey Groff snapped: “Are you sick? Want me to drive?”

  Sam Zehedi swallowed hard. “I’m okay,” he said. And he concentrated on the twin red lights ahead of him, the beating raindrops that slipped into the cones of the headlights and out again faster than the eye could follow. He concentrated on the feel of the gas pedal, feeding the gas delicately. You’re driving, he told himself. So drive and don’t worry.

  But in less than five minutes he humbly asked Groff, “You know anything about insurance?”

  “Some,” Groff said reluctantly. He could guess what was coming.

  “Well, to tell you the truth I don’t remember what my policy on the store was like. Fire, of course, and extended coverage. That means water damage, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Groff told him, feeling rotten. “Under some special circumstances, yes—but what’s back there, no. If it were primarily windstorm damage with water damage secondary—for instance, if wind tore your roof off and rain ruined your stock, you could collect. But nobody’s covered against—flood.”

  The word was out in the open at last. Zehedi choked back a sob. You’re driving. So drive.

  But in less than five minutes he found himself railing to Groff that it wasn’t fair, that he’d lost five years of work, that he would have been ready to look for a wife in another three years, a good old-fashioned girl from the New York or Detroit colonies of Syrians, somebody who could cook the old-country food—God, how sick he was of hamburgers and soda pop, sometimes he looked at a hamburger when he thought he was hungry and just put it down and walked away with a pain in his belly.

  “So why,” he asked indignantly, a little hysterically, “didn’t I stay in the colony and eat my mother’s cooking? I’ll tell you why. Because I wanted to be my own boss, I wanted to be a pioneer, it’s no good crowding into the big cities and working for other people. In this country you have to make money to be respected, nobody respects you if you’re just a working stiff all your life. So I saved and I bought that place through a broker and I’ve been slaving for five years, eating the lousy food and thinking about broiled lamb I’m going to eat every day when I find a wife, and then…

  He subsided and the rain drummed down.

  They’re an emotional people, Mickey Groff thought automatically, and then cursed himself. Damned fool! Here you are thirty years old and you’re babbling stereotypes to save yourself the trouble of thinking. Why the hell shouldn’t he be emotional with his store washed away? I seem to remember that when Zimmerman slipped the old knife between your ribs with the trick specially printed discount sheet and cost you forty thousand dollars you didn’t have, forty thousand dollars for him and Brody to spend on likker and wimmen, forty thousand dollars you might have air-conditioned the plant with for better productivity and fewer rejects, you weren’t exactly philosophical about it. Your screams, in fact, were allegedly heard as far west as Council Buffs, Iowa. So less guff, please, about any “they,” who exist only in your head, being emotional, or stingy, or stoical, or vindictive or, for that matter, generous and goodhearted. Take ‘em as they come, one by one, for what they show they are.

  Zehedi was under control again. He said; “That guy’s driving too fast.”

  “Watch out!” Mrs. Goudeket yelled at Dick McCue. “Watch out!” The white posts that marked the sharp left curve loomed big, too big, in front of them. McCue twisted the wheel and stepped on the brake pedal hard and fast. It was nightmarish to feel the rear of the car swivel around; it was uncanny to see the road passing in front of him, defying all his experience of perhaps a hundred thousand miles in a driver’s seat. The white center line flashed across his vision and then headlights glared into his eyes; it was the truck that had been following them. The skid continued for an interminable few seconds more; Sharon Froman was screaming in the back seat. The rear of the car jolted down and McCue and Mrs. Goudeket were thrown back against the seat as the front of the car nosed up; metal crunched behind them. Then it all seemed to be over. McCue took a deep breath, turned off the ignition and waited for Mrs. Goudeket to skin him alive verbally.

  She said, panting with relief: “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Dick. It must have made you nervous so that happened.”

  He could have kissed her, hairy mole and all.

  “If I’d been driving—” Sharon began coolly from the back.

  “If your aunt had you-know-whats she’d be your uncle,” said Mrs. Goudeket tartly. “No remarks are required from you, Miss Elegant Loafer.” Sharon laughed.

  “Both wheels in the drainage ditch,” McCue diagnosed, “and we seem to be hung up on the transmission.”

  “Can you get us out?” Mrs. Goudeket asked.

  “No. But that truck’s stopped. I guess we can get a ride.”

  Sam Zehedi laid his truck alongside the ditched sedan and got out. “Anybody hurt?” he called.

  “We’re okay, thank God,” Mrs. Goudeket told him shakily. “But my driver tells me the car is through. Could you maybe give us a lift into Hebertown? We’ll be okay from there.”

  Mickey Groff got out—soaked again!—and surveyed them. “You two ladies can fit in the cab with Mr. Zehedi here. The gentleman and I will ride in the back.”

  “Will you take these, please?” Sharon said, opening the rear door. “Put them in the back. Careful, that’s a typewriter. And very careful with that one—it’s manuscript. And these two are just clothes.”

  Groff wrenched open the double rear doors of the truck and put the four pieces of luggage inside. In the darkness there were crates and cartons. At least they’d be able to sit up instead of crouching on a metal floor. As the driver of the ditched car passed before the headlights he saw he was surprisingly young and obviously shaken by the accident. “Get in,” he said. “It might be worse.”


  Mrs. Goudeket, puffing, pulled herself up the high runningboard of the truck and slid in beside Zehedi. Sharon followed, and slammed the door. The truck moved cautiously off.

  In the dark rear of the truck Groff and McCue had found milk crates to sit on. “You all right?” Groff asked the young man. “Didn’t bump your head or anything?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of stop,” McCue said. He began to laugh. “I’m from Springfield, Ohio,” he said between chuckles.

  “Damned if I see the joke, fella.”

  “Well, mister, in Springfield, Ohio, damn near every spring, the little old Springfield river that runs through town begins to rise and rise. After a week of this it spills over the banks and the sandbags they put up every time at the last minute and downtown Springfield is a lake. Then everybody swears and gets the canoes and rowboats out of the garage and goes boating glumly around until the water subsides. Well, mister, I came east to college because I was tired of Springfield and its foolish floods, and I run into this mess!”

  Through the windows of the double door Groff saw they were passing a small frame building with gas pumps in front. It was dark. “Cigarette?” Groff asked steadily. He didn’t want to encourage the kid’s near-hysteria.

  “No, thanks. But the difference is, in Springfield it’s slow and steady and this is happening fast. And when it happens fast, sooner or later a crest comes along and then it isn’t one of those years when you just go boating around; it’s one of the years when you head for the goddam hills, and fast.”

  “Then you think we’re going to have a flood crest?”

  “Hell, yes. Thirty, forty feet of water smashing down through the valley. And when it comes, mister, we’d better not be there. Because those things don’t leave much behind.”

  They were stopping. “Now what the hell,” said Mickey Groff.

  There was a scratching at the double doors, and one of the women from the ditched car climbed in. “Grand Central,” she called. “Change for the downtown local. Follow the green lights for the shuttle to Times Square.”

  “You’re cheerful enough, Sharon,” the kid told her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Why, it’s nothing at all. We’re just out of gas, nothing else.” She turned to Mickey Groff. “Mr. Zehedi’s compliments, sir, and would you like to help him scout up some petrol?”

  They found the blacked-out gas station after squelching for a couple of interminable minutes through the sopping night.

  “I thought I had plenty of gas. How’d I know we’d be driving all over the valley? You said just a quarter of a mile down the road and—”

  “Shut up and let’s see if we can get in,” Groff ordered. Zehedi’s whining was getting on his nerves.

  There wasn’t a soul in the station. Not even a night light. Probably no power, Groff thought. That meant no burglar alarms in case they couldn’t find an unlocked window—though hell, he thought wryly, wouldn’t it be nice if a State Police car did come screeching up?

  “Up you go,” he told Zehedi, clasping his hands to receive the toe of Zehedi’s foot.

  “Locked,” reported Zehedi after a moment.

  “Break it open. With your elbow. Try not to cut an artery. Then when you get inside see if—” He jerked his head aside as glass tinkled around him.

  “Sorry,” apologized Zehedi.

  Groff heaved and got him through the window and went back to the front door to wait. He hoped to God Zehedi would be able to unlock something from the inside. They would never get the women through that upper window, and he didn’t want to have to break the front door. They would need every bit of shelter they could get.

  Zehedi appeared, tried the front door from the inside (you idiot, didn’t you see the padlock? Groff thought sourly), and made shadowy gestures toward the rear. He was yelling something, but you couldn’t hear a gunshot in the crashing rain. Groff got the general idea in any case, and stumbled around to the back. Zehedi let him in.

  The grocer was all keyed up. “That looks like a fuse box,” he chattered. “Didn’t see a switch for the pump motors”, but it ought to be right around there someplace, wouldn’t you say? And there’re some soda bottles in case we can’t find a gallon jug. All we have to do—”

  “Go get the others, Sam,” Groff ordered. He took his fingers off the light switch he had been trying, though he had known what the results would be ahead of time. “No electricity, you see? So the gas will just have to stay in the pumps for a while.”

  He closed the door behind the grocer and looked over their refuge. It wasn’t much of a filling station—a couple of pumps out in front, an ice chest full of soft-drink bottles and a little serving counter inside. They had come in through a sort of storeroom, and there was the chance that there might be something useful in there, but it had looked like nothing more promising than the usual collection of old newspapers and three-legged chairs. There was a rickety stair to, presumably, a couple more storerooms.

  Groff made thrifty inventory of what was on and behind the serving counter. A coffeemaker—no good. No power, though a cup of good hot coffee would have helped a lot. Easily a dozen cardboard boxes which, opened, proved to contain peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and Orioles. Candy bars and bags of peanuts beyond their utmost powers of consumption—they might get rickets, but they wouldn’t starve. But water, though—the place didn’t seem to have any.

  Scratch water. They could get by on the soft drinks, or if worse came to worst, there certainly was much more water than they needed right outside.

  A telephone! He looked through all his pockets without coming up with anything smaller than a quarter; he slipped the quarter into the slot and there was a mellow bong to acknowledge it. There was nothing else. He held the receiver to his ears for a good two minutes, but the line was dead.

  And then he found the greatest treasure of all, a box of stubby short candles, under the serving counter. Evidently power failures were not unheard of around here— something, Groff reminded himself automatically, to keep in mind when he talked to the burgess tomorrow.

  If he talked to the burgess tomorrow. There was something there that would need thinking about, too, but the thing to do right now was locate some matches. His own, of course, were more than merely wet—the striking surface had soaked right off them. But there was a cigarette machine, and fortunately a mechanical, not an electrically operated, one.

  By the time Sam got back with the others Groff was busy by candlelight, trying to brace a Coca-Cola easel display to cover the window they had broken. Sharon Froman was hugging the briefcase full of manuscript.

  You don’t last thirty years in the resort business unless you know how to take your mind off your troubles. Mrs. Goudeket, sipping delicately from a quart bottle of black cherry soda, chattered gaily: “Soda pop! Three years I haven’t had a drop of soda pop. Now don’t tell on me, Dick. If Dr. Postal ever finds out, he’ll kill me next time he comes to the hotel—” She choked on a swallow of the soda.

  Dick McCue sat on one of the counter stools, sneering at the spectacle Sharon Froman was making of herself over that Mickey Groff. All the same, he admitted to himself, it was a real championship performance. She hadn’t had two minutes alone with him, but McCue was willing to bet she could tell to a nickel how much a transistor manufacturer, in process of expansion from forty employees to a hundred, was likely to have in the bank. And there wasn’t a chance in the world that this Groff knew what she was doing. This was the no-nonsense Sharon, the hard-working first-week-of-the-season Sharon, who was right by Groff’s side when he needed a hand, who didn’t ask foolish questions, who kept calm and ready. And to think that as late as Monday night, sneaking back to his own room, he had begun to think—

  Sharon and the manufacturer came in from the storeroom with another load of newspapers and dumped them. “All right,” said Groff, “I guess that’s all we’ll need. They won’t be very comfortable, but maybe somebody’ll come by before morning.”

  “I don’
t expect to sleep much anyhow,” said Sharon cheerfully. She tapped Zehedi on the shoulder. “Move your feet a little, will you, Sam?”

  The grocer started. He picked his feet up so she could spread the newspapers, and when she was through she had to remind him he could put them down again. Five years down the drain. Five more years of hot dogs and that muddy water they call coffee. I’ll be thirty-five years old, and still three or four years to go—

  Everybody felt it at once.

  “The wind?” ventured Mrs. Goudeket. They stared at each other; the building seemed to be vibrating slightly.

  Dick McCue, suddenly white, stumbled across the floor and pressed his face to the door.

  “Take a look!” he yelled. “That ain’t wind!”

  Even in the blackness, they could see the river that had been a road outside, the comb of current around the gas pumps, the surging water that lapped at the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An air watcher, it doesn’t matter which one of the thousands he was, stepped from the hospital elevator at the third, and top floor…He went through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and climbed iron stairs to the roof. It was black and drizzling; he hoped the rain wouldn’t get worse, at least not during his tour of duty. He had heard on a news broadcast that west of his area there were cloudbursts.

  He was tired from a long day at his appliance store on Broad Street and he was a little sorry he had signed up for this Ground Observer Corps thing, but everybody in Rotary was taking a shift so he felt he had to go along. He threaded his way around the invisible obstacles that studded the hospital roof and groped at the blackout curtain of the shack.

  It was dry and bright inside the little cubicle, but somewhat crowded. The man he was relieving yawned, looked at the clock—so he was two minutes late!—and said: “Howdy. Ready to go?”

  “Sure. Everything quiet?”