Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“Couldn’t have come at a better time,” I agreed heartily. “Now maybe we can get a jump on the crowds at the store.” We struggled down into the wide trench the plow had made and looked far down the road toward the shopping center. We might easily have been birds standing in deep tire tracks in the snow, except I hadn’t seen a bird or a tire track for months. We took our snowshoes off and began to jog lightly down the road. Dirty, ragged, padded figures fought their way through the deep snow toward the cleared trench, all of us seeking the hard surface the plow had made. Sappenfield wore his Bowie knife and his pistol, fat little Hauser was being dragged by his Doberman, Hanson had a beard that looked like a five-year collection of steel wool and gritty dirt, and I’ll be damned if six-foot-tall Ms. Marr wasn’t out. Her husband stayed drunk most of the time. We began to come together in the trench, a loose crowd, like a golf-course gallery moving across the greens. A Peugeot diesel came slowly down the trench, stopped for one or two minutes, and was surrounded by people wanting to warm their hands on the hood. One man lay on the ground to press his hand against the muffler and resonator. Macy’s eyebrows were laced with icicles, and he complained that his chewing tobacco was cold in his mouth. We made it to the main access road in about one hour, then turned wearily to starboard and trudged along the turnpike. Both lanes had been cleared, and some sleighs and troikas jingled by, pulled by skinny, bloat-bellied horses, plumes of steam pumping from their nostrils. A peat-burning Fiat whispered past, followed by a brace of Honda Civitinos and a rare Subaru. Cars were rare in our neighborhood, and very few large vehicles existed at all except in museums or among the millions of cars abandoned on the streets. We passed vandalized houses, crumbling business booths, fellatio kiosks, and the remains of MacDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Royal Laundry, Majik Market, Dinkle’s Bakery, Seth’s Clothing Store, Harry’s Book and Tape Nook, Levitt Shoe Store, Pressley’s Hardware, Gazebo Fashions for Ladies, B & G Cafeteria—all long since bankrupt in the financial riots of 1980, looted, vandalized, abandoned, then squattered, fought over, burned, and grown up in weeds, later pulled from the ground for food and fuel. Now it all lay buried under the merciful snow. Autos lay three and four deep in service stations, a Lotus perched curiously atop a Continental, the tiny car’s height approximately doubled by the snow accumulation. Deep in the shallow bowl that had been a shopping mall, hundreds of abandoned cars lay beneath the snow. A large helicopter lay in their midst, one rotor snapped and sagging. Someone had a good fire going in the center of the lot, and there were some luxurious hovels fashioned from 450 SEs and Imperials.

We pushed our way into the commissary, a low metal building that had once housed the Social Security Administration, and glanced anxiously at the names on the allocation charts. This was the right day for us to show up, but the errors in allocation schedules were numerous and frustrating. A squad of provost robots scuttled from wall niches and barked strange little metallic-voiced orders for us to form six parallel lines to the counters where we would receive our rations. We moved fast, getting out our credit-line vouchers and readying our satchels and knapsacks and plastibags. Bleary-eyed clerks activated the credit-control registers, the robots queued up the lines carefully and started checking our voucher cards. Behind the row of clerks, the larder allocation tapes began to clack and spin, and the tiny, precious, compressed nutrient cubes clittered from the slots and into stiff, cold, dirty hands and all manner of sacks and boxes and containers:

BOBBITT, HAROLD E: 150 UNITS EQUINE MEAT, 75 SOYA BY-PRODUCTS, 10 VEGETABLE SURROGATES, 1 FIFTH LIQUOR

CARTER, BENJAMIN: 62 UNITS RICE PRODUCTS, 400 UNITS DRY DOG MEAL, 4 QUARTS BRASS MONKEY

HAINEY, GAITHER: 2 ISSUES PHEASANT UNDER GLASS, 2 UNITS SPINACH LEAVES, 3 UNITS BRANDY, 1 UNIT CREPES

SHAWN, JACK: 40 UNITS VODKA—

“Say, who the hell is Gaither Hainey?” old McDonough asked me from behind, a hellish black stogie jammed in his mouth, grinning with his sharp yellow canines exposed. A man in front of us told him that Hainey was a former textile millionaire who spent his monthly allowance on gourmet cubes and somehow survived thirty days on rations most people would use up in one week. Old Ms. Malone looked prim and clean as usual, waiting for her apricot brandy vials and protein blastulas, and I doffed my ski mask to her. Bailey had a new bandage on his leathery face. He was a retired gladiator, and still challenged young men to duels. The room grew noisy and incredibly odorous, the doors opened to admit bone-chilling air and closed to capture the kaleidoscope of olfactory cues, one balancing the other. People hugged their rations to themselves, hid them in belts and pockets and mittens, and looked suspiciously at those waiting as they left. Flimflams, trades, and outright assaults and thefts were not unusual on allocation days. There were always a few people around who needed rations and would prey upon those who might be easy pickings. The clerk looked at my voucher matter-of-factly and even managed a smile—damn, I was caught off guard—people smiled so little these days. I managed a feeble return smile as the tapes reeled off our allocations:

BARTON, HENRY: 30 UNITS PORK, 15 UNITS VENISON, 15 UNITS STARFISH, 30 UNITS TUBERS, 30 UNITS TRUFFLES (truffles were common, what with millions of old trees being uprooted) 51 UNITS RAGWEED STALKS

The cubes clattered from the chutes and Bill and I caught them in our knapsacks. As we turned to leave, Bill traded a tuber cube for a real peppermint stick an old man must have been saving for years. Old Bill Gain traded his entire ration of grits and eggs for tequila blatters and intravenes.

I knew things couldn’t keep going smooth for very long. Tom Varner stepped in front of us as we approached the door, blocking it, feet wide, arms akimbo. As usual, he wanted to bump somebody, and he was still sore because Alex and I doubleteamed him back in October. I could feel Bill tense up beside me, and I tried not even to break stride as we neared him. I said, “Let's take him!” in a quick, harsh whisper. We got him from both sides, thrusting our arms through his, and his fat-tomato face came apart in a flaccid autonomic droop, his fighting response just barely muffled by the ease and surprise of the attack. We dragged him stiff-legged, like policemen hustling a demonstrator toward a paddy wagon, and rammed his salt-and-pepper head against the corrugated metal wall. Goddam, you would have thought a truck had hit the wall, it made a hell of a noise, but didn’t do much damage to Tom. Bill chopped him behind the ear and that put him to sleep. Sam Ballas cheered; he hated Tom’s bully-guts, and so did most people who knew him. One of the provost robots castered over to us at once, requesting retinograph tapes of the incident. Big deal—citizens had long ago realized that they had to rely on themselves for protection; now we were about to be detained for roughing up one of the community bad guys. Sam left his place in line to speak loudly in our defense. He bonded himself in our advocacy, and fluxed on his I.D. beside ours on the warrant: CITIZEN VARNER VIOLATED PUBLIC SPACE AND MADE A PROVOCATIVE MOVE, the warrant read—shit, men had drawn pistols over lesser matters. About half the people in our neighborhood carried sidearms.

“Kin ah hev his snuff?” old Jock Tait asked the provobot, reaching for Tom’s vest pocket. Before the bot could muster a response, Jock had the small bag open and slipped a pinch of the snuff under his lip. Of all the crazy things, somebody started playing the Variations on the Star-Spangled Banner, full volume, on a portable cassette player, and I remembered the stories about circus musicians playing Stars and Stripes Forever when trouble started on the midway. Bill and I tended briefly to Tom, who seemed not to know what the hell was going on—“Stand at attention, you shitheads,” he muttered, “hit’s the national fuckin’ anthem—” We decided to leave before Tom recovered his senses. The Judicial Bank would process the case. If we lost, our food rations would be reduced. If we won, nothing would happen. Poor Tom: like most of the gladiator types, he had nothing to do with his aggression; it was a maladaptive trait pattern.