Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

“Hello, Jimmy,” she said. She had grown much older than he remembered her, and needed Bob to support her after the long trip. Jim smiled and nodded reassuringly again.

“Hello, Holland,” Bob said, licking his lips nervously. “This is Merton Hollis,” he added, indicating the other man, who looked at the crowd uneasily, the arrogant lines of his face lost in the lax indecision of his face.

Holland raised his eyebrows.

“Can you—can you find us a place to stay here?” Bob asked.

Holland grinned crookedly. “Permanently, I take it? Exile is such a nasty word, isn’t it?”

Garvin winced, but said nothing.

“Hello, Bob,” Jim said.

“Hello, Jim,” his brother answered without looking at him.

“I guess there’s lots of room around here,” Holland said. He grinned savagely. “Just one thing—I’m staying around. There’s three sisters with a big farm and no man around. I kind of like one of them. One thing, like I said. Don’t trespass.” He patted the stock of his rifle.

“What happened to Mary, Mom?” Jim asked her.

Slow tears began to seep over Margaret Garvin’s face. “She’s dead, Jimmy. She and Ted. The—the people came and…and they…” She looked at Jim with complete bewilderment. “But now the people say they’re sorry. Now they say they love them, and they keep telling me they’re sorry…I don’t understand, Jimmy.”

Jim and Holland looked at Bob’s face, and found corroboration in it. Jim laughed at his expression. Then he swung himself forward and looked into the helicopter’s cabin. “Take a passenger back to New York, buddy?” he asked the pilot.

The man shrugged. “Makes me no never-mind. You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes, though.” He pulled a jackknife out of his pocket and jumped to the ground. He began to scrape out the blue-red stripe.

“Hey, don’t be an idiot, Jim.” Garvin cried. “They ask you what kind of a Garvin you are, nowadays.”

Jim looked at him wearily. “When you find out, let me know, huh?”

He happened to glance at the crowd, and saw Edith, pressed forward by the villagers.

“Why is he taking out the stripe?” she was saying excitedly to a militiamen. “Why is he doing that? That’s the freedom flag! He can’t do that.”

“Got a tip for you, Bob,” Jim said, smiling thinly. “You’ve got one friend here, anyway.” He wondered how that would work out.

He wondered, as the helicopter jounced northward, how a lot of things would work out. He wondered just exactly what legacy Ted Berendtsen had left the human race.

Had he died just in time, or too soon?

And Jim knew that no historian, probing back, could ever know, any more than he or Jack could know. Even now, even in the end, you had to trust Berendtsen’s judgment.

This happened in New Jersey a generation later, with Robert Garvin and Merton Hollis both dead in a duel with each other. Robert Garvin left a legacy, and this is what happened to it:

Cottrell Slade Garvin was twenty-six, and had been a sex criminal for three years, when his mother called him into her parlor and explained why she could not introduce him to the girl on whom he had been spying.

“Cottrell, darling,” she said, laying her delicately veined hand on his sun-darkened own, “You understand that my opinion of Barbara is that she is a fine girl; one whom any young man of your class and station would ordinarily be honored to meet, and, in due course of time, betroth. But, surely, you must consider that her family,”—there was the faintest inhalation through the fragile nose—“particularly on the male side, is not one which could be accepted into our own.” Her expression was genuinely regretful. “Quite frankly, her father’s opinion on the proper conduct of a domicile…” The sniff was more audible. “His actions in accord with that opinion are such that our entire family would be embroiled in endless Affairs of Integrity, and you yourself would be forced to bear the brunt of most of these encounters. In addition, you would have the responsibility of defending the notoriously untenable properties which Mr. Holland pleases to designate as Barbara’s dowry.

“No, Cottrell, I’m afraid that, much as such a match might appeal to you at first glance, you would find that the responsibilities more than offset the benefits.” Her hand patted his as lightly as the touch of a falling autumn leaf. “I’m sorry, Cottrell.” A tear sparkled at the corner of each eye, and it was obvious that the discussion had been a great strain to her, for she genuinely loved her son.

Cottrell sighed. “All right, mother,” he said. There was nothing more he could do, at this time. “But, should circumstances change, you will reconsider, won’t you?” he asked.

His mother smiled, and nodded as she said, “Of course, Cottrell.” But the smile faded a bit. “However, that does seem rather unlikely, doesn’t it? Are there no other young ladies?” At his expression, the smile returned, and her voice became reassuring. “But, we’ll see. We’ll see.”

“Thank you, mother.” At least, he had that much. He rose from his chair and kissed her cheek. “I have to be sure the cows have all been stalled.” With a final smile exchanged between them, he left her, hurrying across the yard to the barn. The cows had all been attended to, of course, but he stayed in the barn for a few moments, driving his work-formed fist into a grain sack again and again, sweat breaking out on his forehead and running down his temples and along the sides of his face, while the breath grunted out of his nostrils and he half-articulated curses that were all the more terrible because he did not fully understand at whom or what they were directed.

Vaguely sick to his stomach, he gently closed the barn door behind him, and saw from the color of the sunset and the feel of the wind, that it would be a good night. The realization was one that filled him with equal parts of anticipation and guilt.

The air temperature was just right, and the dew had left a perfect leavening of dampness in the night. Cot let the false door close quietly behind him, and slipped noiselessly up and across the moist lawn at an angle that brought him out on the clay road precisely at the point where his property ended and Mr. Holland’s began.

He walked through the darkness with gravel shifting silently under his moccasins, his bandolier bumping gently against his body, with the occasional feel of oily metal against his cheek as the carbine, slung from his shoulder, touched him with its curving magazine. It was a comforting sensation—his father had felt it before him, and his father’s father. It had been the mark of free men for all of them.

When he had come as close to Mr. Holland’s house as he could without disturbing the dog, he left the road and slid into the ditch that ran beside it, cradling his carbine in the crooks of his bent arms, and bellycrawled silently and rapidly until he was as near the house as the ditch would take him.

He raised his head behind a clump of weeds he had planted during a spring rainstorm, and, using this as cover, swept the front of the house with his vision. For any of this to be possible without the dog’s winding him, the breeze had to be just right. On such nights, it was.

The parlor window—perhaps the only surface-level parlor window in this area, he commented to himself—was lighted, and she was in the room. Cot checked the sharp sound of his breath and sank his teeth against his lower lip. He kept his hands carefully away from the metalwork of his carbine, for his palms were sweated.

He waited until, finally, she put the light out and went downstairs to bed, then dropped his head and rested it on his folded arms for a moment, his eyes closed and his breath uncontrollably uneven, before he twisted quietly and began to crawl back up the ditch. Tonight, so soon after what his mother had told him, he was shocked but not truly surprised to discover that his vision was badly blurred.