Дэймон Найт: Orbit 3

To be fair I’ve tried to remember the last 10 books I read before doom. Probably be a pretty stupid list if I was following my usual random reading pattern—off on an Erie Stanley Gardner or James Bond kick and reading everything available all at once.

Aside from his obligation to humanity to sire a new race, what was there for him to do? Rolfe considered the possibilities, dividing them into two groups: necessities (duties or obligations) and pastimes (including frivolities).

Under necessities he put:

Keep a journal for posterity, if any. He was already doing that

Give Siss the equivalent of a grammar school education; more if she could take it.

Try to elevate her taste for the sake of the unborn children she would one day influence.

Keep his family fed and sheltered. Would it be necessary to clothe them, except for warmth in the winter? Nudity might be more practical, as well as healthier.

Then he jotted down on a separate piece of paper “Obligation to self paramount” and looked at it. He felt that he had to come first, with his duty to Siss a little lower (on the paper and in his estimation) because he was smarter than she was and therefore more worth saving.

Then he had another look and amended it. Siss was more worth saving because she was a woman and able to reproduce her kind.

But not without his help, of course.

Finally he put himself and Siss together at the top of the list. No good saving one without the other.

Pastimes. Take up a sport to keep fit. What one-man sports were there? Woodchopping? Fat chance. Too blister-prone, he. Hiking? Maybe he and Siss should hike around the world to make absolutely positively sure there was nobody else. Or around the eastern United States, anyhow. Or just up and down the Hudson River Valley? Somehow walking didn’t seem to be his sport, either.

He might take up cooking. Men had always been the best chefs and now ingenuity would be needed to make nourishing and palatable meals from what was available to them. They couldn’t depend on canned and preserved food forever. Okay, he’d be a cook. Of course that was a sport that tended to put pounds on, not take them off. He’d better find an antidote, like swimming or handball.

How about collecting? What—money? Diamonds? Great art? Neither money nor diamonds, obviously; neither had any intrinsic value in a World of Two—and then art was best left where it was, as well-protected as anything in the poor old world. If he wanted Siss to see a Rembrandt or an Andrew Wyeth, he’d take her to it.

From his notebooks:

Collecting old-fashioned windup phonographs against the day when no elec. Also old-fashioned 78 records. Got to keep so many things I can’t reproduce.

Music. Good; Siss likes. She enjoys Tchaikowsky, Wagner and Beethoven (what wildness must stir within her poor head sometimes!) She’ll sit still for Bach. I can’t complain.

We’re both crazy about Cole Porter, she for the music, I for the words, those great words, so much more ironic now than he had ever meant them to be.

“It’s All Right With Me,” for instance.

We’ve found a place. We—Is that the first time I’ve used the word?

It’s far enough away from the city to be really country; beyond the stink and the reminders of dead glory; yet close enough so I can get in for supplies if I need them. I’ve stored up enough good gassed-up cars so that travel is no problem, but I think I’ll try to stay here as much as I can. I used to be a fair woodsman. Let’s see how much I remember.

It’s peaceful here. My stomach-ache is better, all of a sudden.

He insisted on thinking of her as a person who had come into his custody and for whom he was responsible. For a long time all he felt toward her was pity; no desire. And for that reason he also pitied himself.

Because she was what she was, it would be unthinkable for her to touch him in any but the most innocent of ways, as she would one of her animal friends.

And when she called him anything but Mr. Ralph, using a word like honey, he was not flattered because he had heard her apply it also to a squirrel, a bluejay and a field mouse.

“Mr. Ralph, can I ask you a favor? Would you mind if you took me for a ride?”

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to go anywhere; apparently her enjoyment lay in sharing the front seat with him; he noticed that she sat very close to him, in almost the exact center of the seat and did not, as he had speculated she might, sit at the far right, next to the window.

For her ride she chose an ornate costume which included a hat, a silk scarf, dark glasses, jacket, blouse and skirt, stockings and half-heel shoes.

She picked the costume at what she called the Monkey Ward store while he shopped down the block for a fairly clean convertible with sound tires and a fair amount of gas in the tank.

They rode out past the quarry. Long ago he had stored away the fact that Quarry Road was the highway probably least littered with debris.

There was one bad place where he had to get off into a field to skirt what looked as if it had been a 50-car chain-reaction smashup. Otherwise, it was good driving all the way to the lake.

He parked near the old boat-launching site and automatically scanned the watery horizon for any sign of sail or smoke. He had never entirely abandoned hopes of finding other people.

He had brought from the liquor store (catty-comer from Monkey Ward’s) a fifth of a high-priced Scotch and as they sat looking out over the lake he carefully opened it, preserving the tinfoil for her.

Then he ceremoniously offered her a drink. She declined, as he knew she would, saying:

“Not now, thanks. Maybe some other time.” Apparently a piece of etiquette she’d learned was that it was bad manners to refuse anything outright—especially something to eat or drink.

Rolfe said: “I’ll have one, though, if you don’t mind.” And she replied, in what must have been a half-remembered witticism, “Take two, they’re small.”

He took two in succession, neither small.

The lake was serene, the sun was warm but not hot, a breeze blew from the east and the bugs were infrequent.

“Doesn’t it bother you that there’s nobody else?” he asked her. “Don’t you get lonesome?”

But she said: “I’m always lonesome. I was. Now I’m less lonesome than I was. Thanks to you, Mr. Ralph.”

Now what could he say to that? So he sat there, touched but scowling out at the horizon, and then he reached for the very old Scotch (the world had still lived when it was bottled) and took a very big swallow. Only later did he think to offer her one.

“Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Not right now.”

There came a day when her last brassiere lost its hooks and she obtained his dispensation to stop wearing it. And another when her blouses lost their buttons and refused to stay closed by the mere tucking of their tails into her skirts, and he told her it didn’t matter in the least; until finally her last rags fell from her.

She said to him: “You’re my Mr. Ralph, honey, and it’s not wrong to be this way with you, is it, Mr. Ralph?”

This touched him so that he took her naked, innocent body in his arms and kissed the top of her clean, sweet head and he said:

“You’re my big little girl and you couldn’t do anything wrong if you tried.”

And only then, for the first time, he felt a desire for this waif—this innocent in whom the seeds of the whole human race were locked.

She gave him a quick daring kiss on the cheek and ran off, saying: “It’s time I started supper now. My gosh, we have to get you fed.”

He remembered with shame a pathetic scene early in their life together. They had gone to Monkey Ward’s and dressed from the skin out in brand-new evening clothes. He’d had to help her cancel some tasteless combinations but at last she stood before him like an angel. Or, as he’d said: “Damned if you don’t look like a Madison Avenue model.”