A Town Is Drowning

by Frederik Pohl

  Artie looked alarmed. “Now, honey, don’t you get mixed up in—”

  She said, “Artie, I know how your mind works. Did you think if you got on the radio and told them that you and the congressman were handling relief here, that would keep him from backing out? Did you think everybody in the country would be listening—at this time of the morning!—and that would make it official?”

  “They’re recording,” Artie Chesbro said sullenly. “They’re going to rebroadcast in the morning. I already talked to one of the men from the network.”

  Dick McCue said, “Mr. Chesbro, it’s nothing to me one way or another. But there’s a curfew, you know. You can’t go running around out there tonight.”

  Artie Chesbro’s expression was petulant. “Leave me alone, will you? I know what I’m doing!”

  Polly Chesbro folded her hands and looked at him. “Artie, don’t you ever learn?” Her expression was gentle, her voice was calm—even warm, Groff thought, with a sudden shock that was almost jealousy. “Remember the television station?”

  Artie whined, “Honey, I told you a thousand times—”

  “You were all set to make a million dollars out of television,” she said. “Remember? Only you wouldn’t wait for the F.C.C. to grant the license. ‘We’ll start building,‘ you said, ‘and then they won’t have the guts to turn us down.’ Only they did. You never got that construction permit. What was it my father put up? Fifteen thousand dollars? And you lost it all, remember?’’

  “Honey! These people don’t want to hear—”

  “Then there was the drive-in theater. You only got five thousand out of my father for that. But that went down the drain, too, like all your other million-dollar ideas. What was it that time? You figured you could buck the motion-picture projectionists’ union? And then—”

  Mickey Groff cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, Polly. You’re embarrassing everybody.’

  ‘

  Polly laughed gently. “I’m sorry. But really, I hate to see my husband go off like this again.”

  Groff said to Chesbro, “Like I say, I don’t want to butt in; but remember what McCue said about the curfew, Chesbro. I happen to have been around when the national guardsmen got their orders; I wouldn’t go out there if I were you.”

  Mrs. Goudeket said heavily, “That’s right, Mr. Chesbro. I was down by the motor-pool place, and they’ve got guns and—”

  “Now you just listen to me!” It was Sharon Froman, her eyes flashing, her face a Valkyrie face. “Arthur Chesbro knows what he’s doing, and it isn’t up to any of us to try to stop him! You make me sick, all of you. I spent the whole day with Arthur and Congressman Akslund and, believe me, the congressman knows Arthur understands how to do things. And if Arthur’s all right with the congressman, I don’t see why he shouldn’t be all right with a wet-behind-the-ears kid—” Dick McCue’s jaw dropped open—“or a fat old biddy—” Mrs. Goudeket began to sputter—“or a mental case—” Polly Chesbro only nodded judiciously, but Mickey Groff sat up straight and cut in.

  “Just a minute, Miss Froman!” he started; but he couldn’t make himself heard. They were all talking at once—

  To Sharon Froman. Nobody paying any attention to Artie Chesbro at all.

  By the time anyone got around to paying attention to Artie, he wasn’t there.

  He closed the door quietly behind him and walked out the main door, nodding pleasantly to the guardsman, across the street to the car pool. It was all going so well, he thought dreamily, so very well. He even managed a little wry chuckle of amusement about the silly spectacle his wife had made of herself. That silly old business of the television station! That ridiculous story about the drive-in theater! But he could afford good-humoredly to overlook her raking up those long dead scores, because everything was going very well indeed.

  Curfew? Not a problem, he thought with satisfaction, not as long as he had been wise and clever enough to pick up Mrs. Goudeket’s trip ticket. The car was his now—he’d just have to say Mrs. Goudeket had sent him. He wouldn’t be on foot for any length of time, and no one would bother him in the car, with a regulation trip ticket. The whole world was well within his grasp, he realized with satisfaction and joy.

  And it was due at least in part to Sharon Froman. He nodded to himself in the darkness, picking his way carefully down the slippery street. She had written the official announcement of the plan for a Tri-State Emergency Allocations Supervisory Board that he and the congressman—with Sharon Froman—had cooked up.

  Artie Chesbro chuckled out loud. Why, it was even Sharon who had been so resourceful about the matter of the benzedrine. He had been pretty near passed out with fatigue early in the day, even before the congressman had arrived; and she had produced, out of what she gaily called her “kit of writing tools,” the little bottle of ten-grain tablets that had waked him up, sharpened his brain, made it possible for him to work on through the endlessly exhausting day.

  A fine girl. A great acquisition. They would go far together, thought Artie Chesbro, stumbling dreamily down the misty street, filled with the sense of power, alive with the joy of achievement—coked to the eyebrows.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mr. Cioni saw the man approach jauntily. Who, he wondered, can be full of bounce at this hour—one of the new people from the field hospital? But as the man came into the cone of light from the shaded Coleman lantern he saw that the fellow wasn’t army, that he wore in fact the uniform of an old-timer who had been through the day and a half on the spot. The uniform was a stained and shapeless suit, mud-caked shoes, red eyes and a growth of beard.

  “I’m Mr. Chesbro,’

  ’ the man said to Mr. Cioni. “I’ve come to pick up the car allotted to Mrs. Goudeket.” “The hotel lady? She said she’d be back herself.” Chesbro smiled and handed over the trip ticket, “She’s exhausted. I’ll pick her up and drive.”

  “I see. It’s that Dodge. Be careful.”

  Artie almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of advice from this nobody to him, confidant of Akslund, Johnny on the most wonderful spot imaginable.

  He drove off. River Street? Yes; the broadcasters were at River Street. He turned left and heard faintly a shout from the little nobody of the motor pool.

  A fragment of the Rubaiyat—now there was a poem, not like those jumbled things Polly wrote!—drifted by. Would we not shatter it to hits, and then remold it closer to the heart’s desire? Which was exactly what was going to happen. He had never really had a big chance before, but by waiting and building and sending out his lines of communication he had survived until the big chance came along. The county was shattered to bits, and he would remold it. It wouldn’t look like much to an 138 outsider—Akslund. To Akslund and his staff he would seem a disinterested and patriotic businessman working his guts out with no hope of personal gain to reconstruct the smitten area.

  He had better start thinking about his lists.

  The five walked into the motor pool. Mrs. Goudeket stared blankly at the empty space where the Dodge had been. She said to Mr. Cioni hopefully, “You moved it? Into the street?”

  Mr. Cioni looked sick. “Guy had your trip ticket,” he said. “Mr.-Cheese?”

  “Chesbro,” Dick McCue said. “Rat bastard Chesbro, to be exact.”

  “Just resourceful,” grinned Sharon Froman. “He’ll be back. Let’s wait. He just wants to get the statement out to the country. Time’s important, you know. He’s got to hit the morning papers and newscasts.” And I, she thought comfortably, pointed that out to him. The boy’s geared to a country-weekly tempo, but he’s got talent all the same.

  Mrs. Goudeket said something long, eloquent and heartfelt in Yiddish. Groff, the New Yorker, got the gist. It was a prayer that Artie Chesbro die of cholera upside-down with his head stuck in the ground like a radish and worms eating out his ears.

  His lists. There would be two of them, one of people to get the nod and the other of people to get the nix.

  “A sound busine
ssman and a hard worker, that boy. Built his place up from nothing. Guts and brains, the kind of man we want to help first—fast. I know his stock and his turnover, and I’d say fifty thousand would set him on his feet again. Of course he’s the kind who’ll consider it a debt of honor, won’t rest until it’s clear…”

  And the other. “Um. Yes. Know the man well. We’ve got to help him, of course, but I wouldn’t put him at the top of the list. The vital services have got to be restored first, of course. I know people need (shoes, gasoline, bread, hardware) but it’s my feeling that a more efficient man should be assisted first. We don’t want any free riders and we don’t want to subsidize chaotic competition in the first month.”

  No indeed. We want to organize the area. A nod to Flaherty, the fuel man whose note I hold. A nix to Green-lease, the hardware man who unpatriotically carries his current obligations and improvement loans in Philadelphia. A nod to Erpco Feed, who buy their sacks from my very good friend and associate Don Rider, who is under my thumb because of his lease. A nix to Fowling, the appliance wholesaler who won’t use my trucks when he’s in my territory. A man who doesn’t encourage local business is asking for trouble, and this is his chance to get it. An emphatic nod to Rorty and his skinny new wholesaling business; in a year he’ll pass Fowling and I’ll be in the driver’s seat.

  Turn nobody down, he cautioned himself. Merely postpone, and postpone, and postpone. And eventually there will be no more money left and the nixed will find themselves in a poor competitive position and a little later they’ll find they’re broke and out of business. And the people in business will be my men.

  I will have approximately one hundred operations tied to me, covering every phase of manufacturing, real estate, wholesaling, retailing, distribution and finance in the area. I’ll trade with myself, supply myself, transport myself and finance myself and anybody who tries to move in will never know what hit him. It will be positively pathetic if anybody tries to compete with Artie Chesbro.

  The car crept slowly along the littered road toward River Street. His thinking had never been so clear and lightning-fast—and his heart had never thudded so alarmingly. The benzedrine, he supposed. Well, you use things for what they’re worth and take the incidental consequences like a man.

  A big man. First the valley area, perhaps a year to consolidate it. Then move down-and upriver, slowly at first. But he knew the pace always accelerated. The bigger you get the faster you grow. Rockefeller, Morgan, Zeckendorf, Odium—they all had started somewhere. This was his somewhere. Artie Chesbro considered quietly that he’d be running the state by 1959. If there was a war, knock a year off the timetable. Wars were good business for a good businessman.

  And, he thought quietly, with the clarity of benzedrine, they pruned the human tree.

  An eighteen-year-old sprig of the human tree, Luther G. Bayswater, was walking slowly down River Street with a feeling of intense unreality enveloping him.

  It seemed frightfully queer that he should have a helmet on his head, heavy boots with two-buckle flaps on his feet and around his waist a full cartridge belt with a first-aid kit, a bayonet and a canteen hitched to it. Queerest of all was the rifle slung on his right shoulder, whose sling he held in the fork between thumb and forefinger like a hick eternally about to snap his gallus.

  Luther was a private in the National Guard because his mother had a confused notion that this would keep him from overseas service, ever. Somebody had told her so. She missed her little boy, she said, when he was away on summer training and she didn’t like the idea of him going through the dark streets—so late, and in strange neighborhoods!—for his armory sessions, but she comfortably reported that it was all worthwhile for her to have her peace of mind about Luther not having to go overseas.

  His mother was at that moment in bed with a high fever induced by the phone call from the company clerk that had mobilized Luther.

  His mission—unreal!—as given him by the hardware merchant who was his platoon leader was to cover two blocks of River Street like a cop on a beat.

  “It isn’t interior guard duty,’

  ’ the lieutenant explained.

  “None of that halt-advance-officer-of-the-day-post-number-four stuff. Just make like a cop and don’t let any monkey-business happen. Fire a warning shot if you have to. And, ah—” The lieutenant was embarrassed. “If you have to, uh, shoot at anybody, aim for the legs. Any questions?” There were questions, a world of questions, but Luther wasn’t sure what they were. And besides the hardware-lieutenant was in a hurry to get back to Company, where the captain was waiting for an explanation of why the platoon sergeant had been found to have his pockets stuffed with half-pint liquor bottles.

  Private Bayswater saw lights and heard a motor running and, in his state of acute disbelief in what was around him, stood stock-still for most of a minute, staring at the vehicle. It was parked at the foot of Wharf Avenue, a panel truck. By and by he made out that it was a radio broadcasting truck, and remembered that the lieutenant had told him it was in the area. Perfectly all right.

  He stayed near it; it was less lonesome there. Until by and by Private Bayswater became conscious of a nagging yearning for a smoke.

  Luther didn’t smoke much, because his mother had proved to him, with graphs and charts and doctors’ reports, that terrible things went on in the lungs of men who smoked cigarettes. But he wanted a cigarette bad. And anyway, there wasn’t anyone around. Everybody in town knew that the National Guard was patrolling, with orders to shoot if they had to. Nobody would be stupid enough to try anything. Nobody had—and he’d been on duty for nearly an hour.

  He leaned against a sagging warehouse-front experimentally, and it didn’t sag any more than before. He bounced on the steps, and though they shook it didn’t seem likely he would fall through. He stepped inside, closed the door as nearly as it would go, and greedily tore the paper on the pack getting a cigarette out.

  Cupping the cigarette, he looked out of an unglassed window and was pleased to find that he could observe the streets as well from in here as from outside. Fantastic! It was the first good chance he had had to look over the damage done to Hebertown. He wondered briefly about what kind of people were crazy enough to build their houses in a place like this, where the water could come up and do what had been done to these, but Luther Bayswater was not much given to worry about other people’s troubles—

  And besides, he heard a noise.

  It sounded like a door slamming. Car door? But he could see the panel truck. Nobody was moving there. The two men were still inside, busy about whatever they had to be busy about, or else just waiting for daybreak and their first direct broadcast. A door in one of the buildings?

  Maybe. Luther Bayswater wished he had been listening more attentively. A door slamming in a building—that might be just the wind, of course. But if it wasn’t the wind, it was one of the hazy mythological figures called looters that he was supposed to be on the lookout for.

  He swore a tepid oath, ground out his cigarette and opened the door. It made a frightful racket; he hadn’t noticed anything of the kind when he came into the building.

  The noise scared him. He unslung the rifle and gripped it in the approved port-arms position, crosswise over his chest, one hand comfortingly near the trigger guard; and he stepped out into the inimical street.

  Somebody was moving, not near the radio truck but in the other direction; someone who seemed to be trying to stay out of sight, moving in and out of the shelter of the buildings.

  Luther Bayswater pulled the bolt of the rifle back. It made a tiny, unmenacing sound—he’d hoped it would crash through the streets like a thunderbolt and send the terrified criminal fleeing. He raised it to his shoulder and called waveringly: “Halt! Who’s there?” Perfectly safe; there was no chance the gun would go off and make him appear an idiot, not as long as he didn’t close the bolt.

  The figure stumbled and ducked out of sight. Baffled, Luther lowered the rifle, which was wea
ringly heavy. Almost absent-mindedly he shoved the bolt home—still perfectly safe, still nothing that would make him look ridiculous, for he knew enough to keep his finger off the trigger. He cleared his throat and called again: “Come out of there! I see you!”

  Fantastic cowboys-and-Indians scene! Luther couldn’t help feeling embarrassed at how badly he was doing his part of it. Suppose the man did come out? Suppose he came running at him, with a knife or a pistol, and Luther was standing there flatfooted and gapmouthed, trailing the gun? He brought the butt up to his shoulder, snapped up the range leaf, curled his finger lightly through the trigger guard—perfectly, perfectly safe; these Springfields took a good heavy tug to go off—and as meticulously as on any qualifying range laid the bead of the front sight between the V-edges of the rear, just at knee level, just where the man had been. He waited.

  Good-humoredly, Artie Chesbro shrugged and parked the car. He got out and started to walk down the rubbly street; there was no sense trying to drive down here, where the river had swept beams and bottles and cinder-blocks helter-skelter across the pavement; he had decided that the third time he had spotted something in his way and wildly swerved the wheel, and hit something else instead. He thought detachedly that perhaps his reflexes were a touch overstimulated by the benzedrine. Amusing. But it didn’t in the least matter, not when he could see everything in the clear luminous light the benzedrine gave.

  He tripped over something, stepped down on something else that rolled, and stumbled almost into one of the buildings. Careful, he warned himself, suppressing a chuckle. Why, it was almost like getting a load on! But without any of the disadvantages, because he certainly wasn’t slowed down or incapacitated in the least; he could feel it.

  Somebody yelled at him. Artie Chesbro paused thoughtfully to listen—what had the man said?—and became conscious of the deeper, louder thudding of his heart. Possibly that fourth tablet had been one too many, he admitted; better get this over with and rest for a while. A touch concerned—after all, he didn’t want to be too exhausted for the big day tomorrow—he stepped forward to see what the man wanted.