A Town Is Drowning

by Frederik Pohl

  “Jesus! We knew there was some rain last night, but we never had any idea—” The cowboys stared at each other.

  “How about giving us a hand?” Mickey Groff requested. “This man’s in bad shape. If we don’t get him to a doctor I don’t think he’ll make it.”

  The cowboys scratched their heads for a while, and finally Mickey Groff showed them how to sling the stretcher between two of the horses. “Hold them tight and walk them slow,” he ordered, putting a cowboy at the head of each horse. “The ladies can take turns riding the other horse, I guess.”

  But he got no customers for that; Mrs. Goudeket was scandalized, and the young girl was too excited, and Polly Chesbro wouldn’t get that far from the sick man. Finally Artie Chesbro said offhandedly, “Hell, no sense in wasting the horse.” He was in the saddle before anybody could object.

  It didn’t make things good, but it made them better. Mickey Groff, walking ahead, reasoned that he had disposed his forces well. According to the cowboys, they had a good three miles to go on the road—if they could follow the road even approximately. An hour and a half—double it because of the weather—maybe double it again, he thought worriedly, if there were too many detours. He looked back at the motionless figure between the horses. That was stretching it, but there was a chance the old man might hang on that long.

  Maybe the cowboys’ first idea—slinging the old man across a saddle bow and galloping away—was the right one after all. But no; they had to stick together, at least until they found out if the road would take them all the way. And besides, thought Mickey Groff, aware of his limitations but also aware that he had succeeded to the command of the party, you have to make up your mind and stick to it.

  The girl came prancing up beside him. “You look like a good guy,” she commented. “Here.”

  He took the bottle from her; it was a pocket-sized half-pint of whiskey. It was like a gift from God. He took two measured swallows and put the cap back on; he could feel it biting in his throat, invading the back of his nose, spreading warmly through his chest.

  “God bless you,” he told the girl sincerely.

  “Sure. But don’t tell on Charley, will you? I knew he had it, but if Mrs. Koontz ever finds out she’ll pulverize him.” He started to hand the bottle back to her. “No, you keep it. You might want some more, and if Charley gets his hands on it again, good-by whiskey.”

  “Thanks.” He slipped it into his pocket; then, remembering the rest of the party, turned and glanced at them. McCue was plodding along head down; Chesbro was glaring at him; Mrs. Goudeket was watching but she caught his eye, smiled faintly and shook her head. Good enough, thought Mickey Groff; we’ll save what’s left. He tried to remember what the current position was on giving liquor to old men dying of pneumonia. If it looks bad enough, he decided, we’ll try giving him a shot; otherwise better not.

  The girl was chattering: “Won’t the old lady plotz when she hears about all this? That joker on the horse back there says he thinks the whole town’s washed away.”

  “I doubt it.”

  The girl was disappointed. “Well,” she said, “I bet there’s going to be plenty of excitement in Hebertown, anyway. I always wanted to be a nurse—you know, not in a hospital, a Red Cross nurse or something like that, going away in the wars and all like that. My sister was a nurse’s aide, only they wouldn’t let me in because I was too young.”

  “Eh? Nurse?” He glanced at her quickly. “Know anything about pneumonia cases?”

  “Sure. Penicillin, keep them warm, bed rest—”

  “That’s enough. Thanks.” It had been a hope, but looking at her killed hope.

  They plodded on and came to a blacktop. “I know where we are,” one of the phony cowboys said. “Straight on in to Hebertown, two miles. It’s a ridge road; it ought to be clear sailing.”

  A car was buzzing in the distance; frantically they flagged it down as it closed up on them. It was a late-model suburban with a New York plate in the rear, man and wife in the front seat, three kids rioting in the back. They all looked very strange to Mickey Groff, and he realized at last what the strangeness consisted of. They were clean, fed and rested.

  “What do you want?” the man asked from behind the wheel, a little nervously.

  What did they want. Penicillin. Beds. Warmth. Coffee.

  “Take us into town, will you?” Mickey Groff said wearily.

  The man hit the lock button on his door and cranked the window up a little. “It’s only a little way on,” he said evasively. “We aren’t going any place special, we just heard about it on the radio and thought we’d come and see what was up—”

  He hit the gas and the car zoomed on.

  “Sightseers.” Mrs. Goudeket said, wide-eyed. “God in Heaven, sightseers.*’

  Mrs. Chesbro was swearing.

  Arthur Chesbro was swearing and trying to remember what the license-plate numerals were.

  After a while they trudged on, there being nothing else to do.

  A helicopter came from the west as they marched, dipped low above them and hovered for a moment while they yelled and waved. The pilot pointed back into the body of the chopper with big exaggerated gestures after they had pointed at the burgess on his litter. Then he buzzed on eastward.

  Mickey Groff said: “I guess he was telling us he was full up.** He rubbed his back for a moment. “Maybe he meant he’ll be back for us.** But he didn’t really think so, and the helicopter didn’t come back their way.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When they topped the rise and stood overlooking Hebertown there was a moment of silence and then a groan of horror burst from them all.

  “Gutted,” Arthur Chesbro said succinctly. “Not a thin dime left in town; not a nickel.”

  The true flood crest which they had missed in the hills had left a plain wake through the town. It was dark brown and even from their height they could smell its stink. Sewage, chemical waste, mud churned up from river bottoms where it had been rotting for a century. The brown smear lay over two-thirds of Hebertown, and there was something worse at its center, a long streak scores of yards to either side of the river. It seemed almost to have been bulldozed clean.

  The river still boiled many feet above its normal height, and flotsam rolled past, dotting its swell. There were tree trunks, chicken houses, timber and swollen things you didn’t want to guess at. The bridges were out, the stout PWA bridge and the two rickety county bridges.

  Chesbro studied the view. “Gramatan Mills are wrecked,” he said. “They’ll never come back. They rebuilt on the river in ninety-seven right where the old waterpower mill was. Half their plant’s—torn away.”

  “Let’s get on down,” Groff said.

  McCue volunteered: “I’d try the school—if it’s standing. That’s where you always set up cots and aid stations.”

  Chesbro said: “The junior high’s standing. Built well on the outskirts. Lucky it’s on this side of the river.”

  They started down the hill. The stink grew worse.

  First they came. to frame houses with picket fences and vegetable gardens in the back. The porches were full; exhausted people looked dully at them. At the third or fourth house a man came to his gate to watch them pass.

  Groff said, “We’ve got your burgess here. He seems to have pneumonia. Can we make him comfortable in your place and get a doctor for him?”

  The man said tiredly, “There’s no room in my place. I have twenty-five, thirty people. And the doctors won’t make house calls, not today. All three of ‘em are down at the school. Take him there.”

  Mrs. Goudeket said, “Could you maybe put me up, mister? We’ve been walking and walking—?”

  “No room,” he said. “I’m full up. Everybody’s full up. Go to the school. They got stretchers there. The Air Force dropped ‘em in the athletic field. I hope Henry gets better. Go down to the school. They’ll take care of you there.”

  “For ten dollars, maybe—” Mrs. Goudeket began. “Money’s
no good,” the man said. His voice began to rise hysterically. “Nothing’s no good. I work at the Gramatan Mills and look at it. I worked there twenty-seven years, I was going to get my pension ih 1958, and now the mill’s gone. My father drove down into town before it hit to see if he could help and he isn’t back yet and I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.” He took sudden hold of himself. “I have to go and tend the cookstove. You have to boil your water now. Thirty people drink a lot of water, we keep boiling it all the time. Take care of Henry.” He went back up his path and inside.

  Past the rustic houses on the fringe they came to a belt of substantial older places, the homes of the borough petty aristocracy. Here the smear of brown had reached; the horses picked their way uncertainly, fetlock-deep in stinking mud. A mad-eyed woman in a housecoat was on one of the handsome porches shoveling and shoveling; the silt plopped into the silt that covered her lawn. They passed a house with a broken back. A towering poplar, surely the pride of the owner once, had stood in his front yard. The flood water had come; it had loosened the soil to the consistency of porridge; the tree had tilted a little, leaned; its wide shallow root system had given way and the trunk had crashed across the roof, caving and crumpling it in.

  There was a house with black, dead eyes. Somehow fire had started; candles, or a fireplace carelessly laid for warmth when the electrically fanned oil heater clicked silent. The innards of the house had burned, and the fireman had not come. There was a pathetic pile of furniture outside, but where the people were you couldn’t tell.

  There was a house that, in all that chaotic destruction, had survived unscathed. Its windows had their glass, its doors were neatly locked, there were two spindly iron chairs on the porch. And then you looked and saw that it rested in the middle of a road, where the water had let it drop.

  But it was the smell that hurt. You could imagine a hurt town mending itself and growing again. But this stench from the river bottoms was the stink of death. “I’ll bet,” said Artie Chesbro with a dreamer’s eyes, “you could pick up any mortgage in town for five cents on the dollar today.”

  Dr. Soames was the town’s only specialist. He had built a white Georgian house and a three-car garage out of something less than a quarter of a cubic foot of the human female anatomy. He was an expert on every fold and canal from the labium minus to the hydatid of Morgagni, and of the hundred and four babies born in the borough of Hebertown and surrounding territory in the past twelve months, he had delivered ninety-three. They told scandalous anecdotes about his extra-official life— “Mrs. Hoglund? Hoglund? Oh, I didn’t recognize you with your pants up”—and there had been a suggestion at the County Medical Association that some of his most profitable pregnancies were not permitted to come to term. But there was no human being in Hebertown and environs who doubted that Dr. Soames was the greatest doctor on earth.

  And what good was he doing now, he demanded silently, swabbing alcohol on the morning’s twenty-fifth rump to ready it for the needle.

  He sighed and jabbed home the needle of yellowish fluid. The kid jumped and howled; Dr. Soames’s hand was not as dexterous with injections as it might once have been. They were working themselves into a coma, all three of the doctors, with routine shots against typhoid and penicillin to keep the sniffles of the kids from getting worse>-but any ambulance driver could have done as much. What these people needed—homes; help; money—was not in their little black bags.

  “Dr. Soames!” Chief of Police Brayer was coming into the school’s gym. The tired old face looked worried— almost panicked; Soames had thought the time for panic was over. “They’re bringing Henry in, Doctor. He looks bad.”

  The burgess came in, under clean blankets, on an aluminum-frame stretcher at last. Soames took a quick look. Fever; coma; and the unmistakable racking, hard-fought breaths. Pneumonia? “Wake up Doctor Brandeis,“ he ordered; but he found a hypodermic and loaded it without waiting.

  The other doctor’s eyes were bleary when he staggered in, but there wasn’t much doubt. “Pneumonites, all right,” he said, auscultating the burgess’s chest. “We ought to have oxygen, Frank.” Chief Brayer listened to the doctors. He cut in, “Don’t we have any oxygen?“ Soames shook his head; and Brayer remembered. The oxygen was there, all right, in the firehouse, where it was handy for the pumpers to take along in case of drowning or asphyxiation or any of the other things Hebertown called out its fire department for; but it wasn’t handy at all in case of floods, since the firehouse was in the Borough Hall. You couldn’t even see the roof yet, though the water had gone down.

  He blundered out of the room and buttonholed one of the other volunteers. “Who’ve we got who can swim underwater?” he demanded. “We have to get the oxygen out of the firehouse—Henry needs it.”

  They found a couple of high-school kids, on the swimming team, and they went down to survey the drowned-out hall. The water had slowed enough to put a boat but; they rowed down Front Street, over the back yards of the cottages, into the River Road. “Must be around here,” Brayer said doubtfully, staring at the muddy water. “Some of the houses got moved, I guess…”

  It wasn’t there. One of the boys eventually went down, but only for a moment. He came up sputtering and grunting, his eyes squeezed tight; when they got him into the boat and he could talk coherently again he said, “Sorry, Mr. Brayer. Maybe there’s still some of the firehouse down there. But that isn’t water, it’s plain mud. Even if I had a face mask, I couldn’t see—and I don’t have a face mask.” They took him back to the school to have his eyes looked after. Chief Brayer leaned dizzily against the door frame, watching Dr. Brandeis bathing the kid’s eyes. What, he wondered, was Hebertown going to be like without Henry?

  Mickey Groff woke up. They must have given me a shot of something, he thought clearly, and sat up.

  A girl in a white uniform with gold bars at the collar leaned over him and said, “You ought to go back to sleep. You’ve only had about two hours.”

  He shook his head. “How’s the old man?”

  “Which one?”

  “Starkman—the burgess.” But she didn’t know the name. Groff stood up and staggered to a chair. What was an army nurse doing here, he wondered. Wings and a bar; maybe they’d flown in help from outside.

  Somebody helped him to a garage, empty of cars, with duckboards laid over the mud on the floor; there was a sort of emergency feeding station organized there and he got hot coffee laced with thick canned milk, syrupy with sugar. He went out in the sunshine and drank it gratefully.

  Sunshine!

  He slowly accepted the fact that it wasn’t raining any more. The sky was spotty with clouds, but there was a lot of blue.

  “Mr. Groff.” He tried to get to his feet; it was Artie Chesbro’s wife. She stopped him.

  “Where’s everybody?” he asked.

  “Sleeping, mostly. Except my husband, who is out looking for orphans to rob. Have you seen Henry?”

  He blinked. “Henry?”

  “The burgess. Mr. Starkman.” He shook his head. She said gently, “I’ve been with him all morning. If they don’t get help for him soon—”

  He noticed that her eyes were unaccountably filled with tears. “I thought I saw an army nurse—”

  “Yes. But they didn’t have oxygen, and that’s what he needs. It’s on its way, I guess, or anyway they say it is.“ She looked at the coffee. “Wait a minute. I want some of that.”

  Mickey Groff looked after her and sighed. Now, why was she mothering the old man? And what was that “orphans to rob” remark? It had been fairly obvious that she and her husband were not cut from the same bolt, but was it possible for her to see her husband that clearly, and keep on living with him?

  He was beginning to wonder whether he shouldn’t get up and start somehow helping out when she came back and sat beside him. She was humming to herself, he noticed, and glanced at her curiously; evidently she wasn’t so upset after all.

  “I knew,” she said, dreamily swirling the
coffee around in the mug to stir it, “that two of us would go. It is the difference between six and eight.”

  “The what?”

  She laughed as if a child had done something clever. “I knew you weren’t a student of the Great Science,” she said cheerfully. “There are perfect numbers, and imperfect numbers; the imperfect numbers are—imperfect, and the worst of them are the deficient ones. Eight is an imperfect number, you see.” She grinned at him. “You think I’ve flipped,” she commented. ^

  “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

  “But you’d think it. No matter, Mickey—do you mind if I call you Mickey? I’m quite sane—I have the advantage of you, you see, because I have my diploma to prove it.” She sipped her coffee. That’s what makes Artie so mad,” she said pleasantly. “He got me committed to the Haven, and they kept me there for nearly a year; and now when he threatens to tell people I’m crazy I don’t have to worry, because six perfectly fine psychiatrists agree that I’m not.”

  Mickey Groff said weakly, “That’s very nice, Mrs.—Polly, I mean.”

  She said seriously, “You mustn’t think that the Great Science is one of these crackpot cultist affairs. I know gematry has a bad name, but you’d be astonished at the great minds that have worked on it. Fermat, Bachet— back as far as Diophantos, in fact. Why, if you’d just—oh, please, Mickey.” She touched his arm as he started to move. “I’ll stop. This isn’t the time to talk about important things.”

  “Important.”

  “This,” she said, “is a time for shallow, surfacy affairs, a time when distractions come crowding in and cannot be ignored. One such distraction is that Mr. Starkman is dying and needs oxygen.”

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Come on.”

  There was a boy of fourteen standing by with a handkerchief tied around his left arm, an improvised brassard. “Son,” Groff said, “do you go to the junior high?” “Yes.”