Gregory Benford - Timescape

PETERSON PULLED THE CAR INTO THE BRICK GARAGE and hauled out the suitcases. Puffing, he set them outside, on the path to the farmhouse. The garage doors locked with a reassuring clank. A biting wind was blowing off the North Sea, sweeping cleanly across the flat East Anglian landscape. He pulled up the collar of his sheepskin jacket.

No sign of movement from the house. Probably no one had heard the car’s quiet purr. He decided to take a walk round, to survey and stretch his legs. His head buzzed. He needed the air. He had stayed in a Cambridge hotel overnight, when the sudden sinking feeling came over him again. He slept through most of the morning, and came down expecting lunch. The hotel was deserted. So were the streets outside. There were signs of life in the houses nearby, chimney smoke and an orange glow of lamps. Peterson did not stop to inquire. He drove out of a bleak and empty Cambridge and up through the flat, somber fen country.

He rubbed his hands together, more in satisfaction than to keep them warm. For a while there, when the illness first struck him again outside London, he had thought he would never make it this far. The roads had been clogged on the way from London, and then, next day, north of Cambridge, strangely empty. He had seen overturned lorries and burning barns north of Bury St. Edmunds. By Stowmarket a gang tried to hail him down. They had axes and hoes. He had ploughed straight through them, sending bodies into the air like bowling pins.

But here the farm lay quiet beneath the rolling gray clouds of East Anglia. Ranks of leafless trees marked the field boundaries. Black blobs hung in the latticework of bare twigs, rooks’ nests framed against the sky. He tramped through the western field, legs weak, the black mud sticking to his boots. To his right, cows stood patiently by a gate, their breath steaming in the air, waiting to be led home to their shed. The harvest had been cut two weeks ago—he’d ordered that. The fields stood wide and empty now. Let them lie; there was time.

He circled round through the sugar beet acres to the old stone house. It looked deceptively run down. The only visible new note was a glass conservatory jutting to the south. The panes had cross-hatchings of wire imbedded, quite secure. Years ago, when he’d first begun, he’d decided on a system totally buried, completely isolated. The greenhouse had filtered water and fertilizers. Water tanks under the northern field held a year’s supply. The greenhouse could produce a reasonable supply of vegetables for a long time. That, and the stores buried under the house and barn, would provide ample backup.

He had hired it done, of course, using laborers from distant towns. He’d had the vast coal bin filled from Cambridge, rather than nearby Dereham. The mines in the fields and along the one road—capable of being armed either on command or by the detection system—he’d had a mercenary install. Peterson had arranged that the man be hired on some Pacific operation soon after, and he had not returned. The electronic watchdogs that dotted the farm he had brought in from California and hired a technical type from London to do up. Thus no one person knew the extent of the operation.

Only his uncle knew it all, and he was the grimly silent sort. Bloody boring company, though. For a moment he regretted not bringing Sarah. But she would be the high-strung type out here, unable to bear the sameness of the long days. Of all the women he’d had in the past year, Marjorie Renfrew was the one most likely to fit in. She knew something of farming and had turned out to be unexpectedly lusty She had seen the need in him when he stumbled in last night and had met it with an instinctive passion. Beyond that, though, he couldn’t imagine living with her for even a week. She would talk and bustle about, fretting, alternately criticizing and mothering him.

No, the only companions he could imagine for what lay ahead were men. He thought of Greg Markham. There was someone you could have trusted not to trip and shoot you in the back in a deer hunt or run away from an adder. Intelligent conversation and companionable silence. Judgment and a certain perspective.

Still, it was going to be difficult without a woman. He probably should have spent more time on that, not dwelled in Sarah’s butterfly crowd. No matter how the world struggled out of the present muck, with hard times attitudes would change. There would be no more of what the social science lot called “free sexuality,” which to Peterson was simply getting what he’d always thought the world owed anybody. Women, women of all kinds and shapes and flavors. As people they varied, of course, but as tickets to a side of life beyond the brittle intellect, they were remarkably alike, sisters sharing the same magic. He had tried to understand his own attitude in terms of psychological theory, but had come away convinced the simple flat fact of living went beyond those categories. No convenient ideas worked. It wasn’t ego-enforcing or disguised aggression. It wasn’t a clever cover for some imagined homosexuality—he’d had a taste of that when young and found it thin gruel indeed, thanks. It was something beyond the analytical chat level. Women were part of that world-swallowing he had always sought, a way of keeping oneself sensual but not stupefied by glut.

So in the last year he had tried them all, pursued every possibility. He had known for a long while that something was coming. The fragile pyramid with him near the top would crumble. He had enjoyed what would soon pass, women and all the rest, and now felt no regrets. When you sail on the Titanic, there’s no point in going steerage.

He wondered, idly, how many of the futurologists had got out. Few, he would guess. Their ethereal scenarios seldom talked about individual responses. They had looked away uncomfortably on that northern African field trip. The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

He approached the stone house, noting with approval how ordinary and even shabby it looked.

“You’re back, m’lord!”

Peterson whirled. A man approached, pushing a bicycle. A man from the village, he noted quickly. Work trousers, faded jacket, high boots. “Yes, I’ve come home for good.”

“Ar, good it is. Safe ‘arbor in these days, eh? I’ve brought yor bacon an’ dried beef, I ‘as.”

“Oh. Very good.” Peterson accepted the cartons. “You’ll just put them on the account, then?” He kept his voice as matter-of-fact as he could.

“Well, I was meanin’ to speak to the house”—he nodded, pointing at the farmhouse—“ ’bout that.”

“You can deal with me.”

“Right. Well, as things is happenin’, I’d appreciate payment on the day, y’see.”

“Well, I see no reason why not. We—”

“And I’d like payment in goods, if you please.”

“Goods?”

“Money’s no good now, is it? Some of yor vegetables, p’haps? Tinned goods is what we’d truly like.”

“Oh.” Peterson tried to judge the man, who was giving him a fixed smile, one that had other interpretations than simple friendliness. “I suppose we can do a bit of that, yes. We don’t have many tinned goods, however.”

“We’d like ‘em, though, sir.”

Was there an edge to his voice? “I’ll see what we can do.”

“That’d be fine, sir.” The man sketched a brief gesture of touching a forelock, as though he were a retainer and Peterson the squire. Peterson stood still as the man swung onto his bicycle and pedaled off. There had been enough of parody in the gesture to give the entire conversation a different cast. He watched the man leave the property without looking back. Frowning, he turned towards the house.

He went round behind the hedge, avoiding the garden, and crossed the farmyard. From the henhouse came low contented cluckings. By the door he scraped his boots on the old iron scraper and then tossed them down in the passageway just inside the door. He slipped on some house shoes and hung up his jacket.