Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

“A typical day in our fair city,” Cottrell said when Matt filled him in on what had happened this morning.

Matt grunted. He had washed the caked blood off Cottrell’s chest, and swabbed out the wound, which was showing signs of a mild infection unimportant in itself.

The bullet was deep in Cottrell’s chest—too deep to be probed for. And there was a constant thin film of blood in the old man’s mouth. Garvin re-bandaged him and threw the dirty swabs and bandages away. Then he put the bottle of germicide down on the table beside the bed, together with the rest of the supplies. He strapped his knapsack shut, testing its balance in his hand. He picked up his shotgun and took the shells out of it.

“Being busy won’t accomplish very much, Matt,” Cottrell said quietly.

Garvin looked up from the gun, his breath gusting out in a tired sigh. The blood in Cottrell’s throat and bronchial tubes made him cough. When he coughed, the wound that bled into his respiratory system tore itself open a little farther. And more blood leaked in and made him cough harder.

“I don’t know very much medicine,” Garvin said. “I’ve read a first aid manual. But I don’t think you’ve got much time.”

Cottrell nodded. He coughed again, and smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid you’re right.” He threw the newly bloodied facial tissue into the wastebasket. “Now, then, what are your plans?”

The two men looked at each other. There was no point to hedging. Cottrell was going to die, and Margaret would be left defenseless when he did. Garvin was in the apartment—a place he never could have reached without Margaret—and Margaret could not now survive without him. On the level of pure logic, the problem and its answer were simple.

“I don’t know, exactly,” Garvin answered slowly. “Before I met Margaret, I was going to find myself someplace to hole up with a couple of years’ worth of supplies, if I could gather ’em. There’s more in this town than most people know.”

“Or are expert enough to get away from other people?”

Garvin looked at Cottrell with noncommittal sadness. “Maybe. I’ve come to my own way of looking at it. Anyhow, I figure if I can hold out long enough, when they start getting desperate and break into apartments—if I can make it through that, then somebody’s bound to get things organized sooner or later, and I can join ’em. I figure we’re in for a time of weeding-out. The ones who live through it will have brains enough to realize turning wolf doesn’t cure hunger.

“Anyway—now that I’m here, I guess I’ll do what I was intending to. Carry in all the stuff I can, and just hope. It isn’t much,” he finished, “but it’s the best I can think of.” He did not mention the obstacle he was most worried about, but it was one over which he had no control. Only Margaret could say what her reaction would be.

Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. “No, it isn’t much.” He looked up. “I think you’re probably right in theory, but I don’t think you’ll be able to follow it.”

Garvin frowned. “I don’t see why not, frankly. It’s pretty much what you’ve been doing.”

“Yes, it is. But you’re not I.” Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on.

“Matt, I’m part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I’d estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled.”

Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected.

“We have no distribution or communication,” Cottrell went on. “I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know—the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die.

“And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don’t know how to produce the necessities of life, and can’t buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two—take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again.

“I am a hoarder, yes,” he said. “I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they’d come from. I did it because I realized that I—that all of us—had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn.”

“Yes, sir,” Matt said politely. He couldn’t see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans.

Cottrell smiled and nodded. “I know, I know, Matt… But the point is, as I’ve said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours.”

“Sir?”

“You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You’re not what I am—an average American turned caveman. You’re an average caveman, and you haven’t turned anything—yet. But you will. You can’t escape it. Human beings don’t stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can’t. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it’s impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable—putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he’s got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else—” Cottrell smiled oddly, “his wife nags him into it.”

Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. “Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter’s got more orders than he can handle—so somebody else becomes a carpenter’s apprentice. You see?”

Matt nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It’s just beginning, but it’s a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves—maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you’ll do, exactly, I don’t know. But it’ll be effective.”

Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter’s husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man’s last performance of his duty toward Margaret.

“I think, Matt,” Cottrell went on, “that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture—a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It’s the nature of the beast.