Algis Budrys: Some Will Not Die

If he had not been upset by his meeting with Mr. Holland, he would not have called Drill the following morning. If he had never seen Barbara at her window at all, there would have been nothing for Geoffrey to taunt him with, and no fear of exposure to drive him to the club. If he had not been drinking, Mr. Holland’s references to Uncle James would not have cut so deeply. Had there been no Drill, there would have been no quarrel with Charles Kittredge, and even if there had been Drill, Charles’s remarks would not have been so objectionable had there been no smoldering resentment from his talk with Mr. Holland.

For, it was true, he had been angry. Had he not been, Charles and Michael would not be dead, and he and his brothers would not now be in the car, trying to stop an upheaval of violence that would involve the entire community. But his anger had not been his responsibility. A breach of Integrity remained a breach of Integrity, no matter what the subjective state of the Party at Grievance.

But where did it really begin? If his mother had ever introduced him to Barbara, would any of this have happened?

He rejected that possibility. His mother had been acting in accordance with the code that his father and the other free men who had settled in this area had evolved. And the code was a good code. It had kept the farmlands free and in peace, with no man wearing another’s collar—until Michael Kittredge broke the code.

And so, while he thought, he turned the car off the road and stopped in front of the club.

The porch of the club was already crowded with men. As he climbed out of the car’s hatch, he saw that all the families of the community, with the exception of the Kittredges, were represented. Olsen, Hollis, Winter, Jordan, Park, Jones, Cadell, Rome, Lynn, Williams, Bridges—all of them. Even Mr. Holland stood near the center of the porch, his lined face graver than Cot had ever seen it.

He walked toward them. The news had spread rapidly. He remembered that a lot of households had radios now. He’d never seen any use for one, before. Probably, he ought to get one. As long as the families were uniting, a fast communications channel was a good idea.

“That’s far enough, Garvin!”

He stopped and stared up at the men on the porch. Lundy Hollis had lifted his rifle.

Cot frowned. One or two other guns in the crowd were being raised in his direction.

“I don’t understand this’” he said.

Hollis sneered, and snorted. He looked past Cot at the car. “If anyone in the buggy tries anything, we’ve got a present for them.”

The men on the porch drew off to two sides. Two men were crouched in the club’s doorway. One held a steady antitank rocket launcher on his shoulder, and the other, having fed a rocket into the chamber, stood ready to slap the top of his head and give the signal to fire.

“I’ll ask once more—”

“Looks like you’ve united the community, boy,” Mr. Holland said. “Against you.”

Cot felt the familiar surge of anger ripple up through his body. “Against me! What for?”

There was a scattered chorus of harsh laughs.

“What about Chuck Kittredge?” Hollis asked.

“Charles Kittredge! That was an Affair of Integrity!”

“Yeah? Whose—yours or his?” Hollis asked.

“Seems like the day of Integrity has sort of come and gone, son,” Mr. Holland said gently.

“Yeah, and what about Michael Kittredge?” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. “Was that an Affair of Integrity, too?”

“What about those two brothers of yours shooting the kid out of a tree?” someone else demanded.

“Geoffrey’s in the car with a wounded arm right now!” Cot shouted.

“And Mike Kittredge’s dead.”

There was a babble of voices. The burst of sound struck Cot’s ears, and he felt himself crouch, fists balled, as the knot of fury within him exploded in reply.

“All right,” he shouted. “All right! I came up here to ask you to stop the Kittredges with me. I see they got to you first. All right! Then we’ll take them on alone, and the devil can have all of you!”

Somehow, in the storm of answers that came from the porch, Mr. Holland’s quiet voice came through.

“No good, boy. See, when I said ‘against you,’ I meant it. It’s not a case of them not helping you—it means they’re going to start shelling your place in two hours, whether you’re in it or not.”

“No.” The word was torn out of him, and even he had to analyze its expression. It was not a command, nor a request, nor a statement of fact or wonder. It was simply a word, and he knew, better than anyone else who heard it, how ineffectual it was.

“So you’d better get your family out of there, son.” The other men on the porch had fallen silent, all of them watching Cot except for the two men with the rocket launcher, who ignored everything but the armored car.

Mr. Holland came off the porch and walked toward him. He put his hand on his shoulder. “Let’s be getting back, son. Lots of room at my place for your family.”

Cot looked up at the men on the porch again. They were completely silent, all staring back at him as though he were some strange form of man that they had never seen before.

He shuddered. “All right.”

Mr. Holland climbed through the hatch, and Cot followed him, slamming it shut behind him and settling into the drivers’ saddle. He gunned the idling engine, locked his left rear wheels, and spun the car around. With the motor at full gun, the dust billowing, the armored car growled back down the road.

“I heard most of it, Cot,” Geoffrey’s tight and bitter voice came over the intercom. “Let’s get back to the house in a hurry. We can dump a ton of fray on that porch before those birds know what’s hitting them.”

Cot shook his head until he remembered that Geoffrey couldn’t see him. “They’ll be gone, Jeff. Scattered out to their houses, getting ready.”

“Well, let’s hit the houses, then,” Alister said from behind the machinegun on the car’s turtledeck.

“Wouldn’t stand a chance, son,” Mr. Holland said.

“He’s right. They’ve got us cold,” Cot agreed.

What had happened to the code? His father had lived by it. All the people in the community had lived by it. He himself had lived by it—he caught himself. Had tried to live by it, and failed.

Cot stood in the yard in front of Mr. Holland’s house. It had taken an hour and a half of the time Hollis had given him, to get back to his house and move his family and a few belongings to Mr. Holland’s house. There had been a strange, uncomfortable reunion between Mr. Holland and his grandmother. He had kissed his mother just now, and raised his hand as she turned back at the doorway. “I’ll be all right, mother,” he said. “There are a few things I’d like to attend to.”

“All right, son. Don’t be long.”

He nodded, though she was already inside.

Geoffrey and Alister had gone in before her, taking care of their grandmother and the younger children. Cot smiled crookedly. Alister would be all right. He hoped Geoffrey wasn’t too old to adapt.

Mr. Holland came out.

“I’d like to thank you for taking us in,” Cot said to him.

Mr. Holland’s face clouded. “I owe it to you, boy. I keep thinking this wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t chivvied you along.”

Cot shook his head. “No—one way or the other, it would have happened. That’s rather easy to see, now.”

“You coming inside, Cot? I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.”

Cot looked at the sun. No, not enough time.

“I’ll be back, Mr. Holland. Got a few loose ends to tie up.”

Holland looked over the low, barely visible roof of Cot’s house. A small dustcloud was approaching it from the other side. He nodded. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, you’d better hurry up. Don’t have more than about twenty minutes.”