Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

Time was when the editor of a collection such as this could sit down and sort out the stories into tidy piles under such subheadings as Space Travel, Time Travel, Planetary Adventure, Marvelous Invention, Alien Visitors, Mutation, Atom Doom, and the like.

Presumably this could still be done. The space ships, inventions, and mutations are still there—but that’s not what the stories are about. The end result would be only to multiply confusion. If I used subheadings here, the two main ones would have to be: Whither Civilization? and Inside Man.

One of the old labels would still fit, though—Atom Doom —and the next three stories could be grouped under it. The first of them is the work of a young British author who has only recently begun to appear in print in this country.

The time: After World War III.

The place: Sydney, Australia.

The hero: A junkman.

My name is Badger Gowland. It’s an ordinary sort of name for an ordinary sort of bloke. For the past twenty years I’ve worked as scrap merchant in this big, war-torn city. The city happens to be Sydney, but I suppose that, with minor variations, what I’m going to tell you might have happened in any war-torn city: Singapore, New York, Hamburg, Moscow, London. In that twenty years, I’ve come across many strange stories, but the strangest is that of Tosher Ten-Toes. Tosher was my cobbler. Here’s his story, and you’ll have to take it as it is, without frills.

This particular morning, the last morning of Tosher’s life, there was something vague about him. He was preoccupied. I spotted it even in the way he came toward me when he came to work, but thought nothing of it at the time. His amnesia made him like that at times, and all the lads were used to it and thought nothing of it.

“Come on, Tosher!” I shouted. “The other scrap gangs have already left. Time we were moving.”

I was seated in the helicart, waiting to go. He scrambled up beside me apologetically. I let in the clutch, the vanes began to spin above us and up we went. Helicarts are absolutely silent in action; we might have been birds, the way we took the air.

It was a fine, warm spring day with air as still as syrup, just the sort of day for our job. The enemy raid over the city the night before had been chicken feed—a paltry couple of satellite-to-Earth squadrons of Depressors dropping a few “suitcases.” “Suitcases” are what we call the light type of H-bombs that Depressors generally carry: small stuff equivalent to not more than eighty thousand tons T.N.T. The best thing about them from our point of view is that they’re clean—no R.A. fall-out—and so we don’t have the bother of cluttering ourselves with anti-suits while we are salvaging.

Directly the raid was over, I had phoned through to Civil Maintenance and bought a couple of freshly damaged ten-story buildings cheap. They stood fairly close together on George’s Heights, looking out across Obelisk Bay and the sea. I slid the co-ordinates into the cyberpilot now and we were away. Tosher pulled his wind-cheater off and stowed it in the locker, just to show he was all set for action.

In the sunshine, the city looked good from the air. Neat. Even the beggars starving in the gutters look tidy when you’re a couple of hundred yards up. A bright, early-flowering weed lent a touch of gaiety to the craters among the buildings. The waters of the port shone like brass.

“What have we got today, Badger?” Tosher asked.

“A tenner with courtesy and a jigsaw tenner,” I said. Those are just the cant terms we use in the trade. A building “with courtesy” means some sort of Government office block—if you get courtesy from them, you get precious little else. A “jigsaw” is private flats or homes; we call them that because when they are busted open they look like a pattern of interlocking pieces—like a smashed dolly house.

In no time we were circling over our new property. Good slices of both of them were still standing. Far below, the demolition squads were busy roping off the area. They always move in and blow up the unsafe buildings after we have paid our brief salvage visits. “The vultures” is what they call us; I won’t tell you what we call them. They grudge us an honest living. Yet what we scrap lads pay the civic authorities pays those chaps’ wages. Besides, with all raw materials in short supply owing to the war, we are valuable members of the community—all that sort of bunk!

“My turn for out,” Tosher said, casting round for his gear.

I had leveled out close to the ten-story jigsaw, holding the helicart steady against the ruined top floor. We always work from the top down. And we always do the jigsaws first because they are more exciting; you never know what you’re going to find. In a courtesy job, it’s all cut and dried: so many desks, so many wash basins, so many lavatory bowls. After a time, a good scrap man—like me or Tosher —can fillet a courtesy with our eyes shut.

Anyhow, Tosher strapped his tool haversack on his back, slung one end of the pulley system over his shoulder, and stepped out onto the upper story of the doomed building. I climbed out the back of my cab into the helicart platform and set up the other end of the pulley tackle. By that means, we transfer the booty into our flying pantechnicon.

Then I sat back, lit a mescahale, and waited for Tosher to reconnoiter and do his stuff. I forgot to tell you why we call him Tosher Ten-Toes.

It started as a joke. The war had hardly begun, nine years ago, when Tosher appeared near my house in a dazed condition. Nothing on but pants and vest and half a shirt; barefoot. Speechless. Total amnesia. There were a lot of poor devils about like that when the raids started. I was short of hands in the yard at the time; my missus and I took Tosher in and looked after him. Tosher Ten-Toes was what the kids called him. You know what kids are: they think it’s funny to see a man walk barefoot down Portobello Street.

Tosher began to get better. I got busier as the raids increased. In no time, he was off the yard and working second man in the helicarts. Now for the last four years he was my right-hand man. He might not have had a lot to say, but I wouldn’t have changed him for all the you-know-what in China. He still did not know who he was, but that began to trouble him less and less. Nothing of the old days had come back to him, except the memory of Judy. Not that Tosher knew who Judy was, it was just that he used to wake up in the night crying her name. He was faithful to her name, wouldn’t look at another woman, not even at Kate, who often looked at him.

Fixing up his end of the pulley, he stood and surveyed the ruined jigsaw. It was in a poor way. Half of it had been sliced into dust, and the foundations were undermined. Spreading his legs, Tosher began to rock from side to side; as he gained momentum, the building began to rock from side to side with him. He killed the motion at once. “Thank heaven there’s no wind about,” he said to himself.

He was standing in what had been till a few hours ago an attic box-room. Against the inner wall, four empty trunks were piled. Without bothering to use the pulley system, he threw them over into the hold of the helicart. Nobody had the raw materials to waste on making trunks now; they were scarce and would be worth about six hundred apiece.

Without wasting any time, but moving cautiously, he went to the door and opened it. Outside were stairs, winding down to the floor below. A quarter way down, just past the first bend, the outer wall had been blasted away, leaving the stairs sagging over emptiness. Stepping carefully on the inside of the treads, Tosher came down onto the next floor.

All the walls on the landing were intact—curtains undisturbed round the landing window, just a little white dust over the ornament on the sill. No doubt Tosher felt that feeling you always feel, that you’ve no right to be there, that you’re an intruder, or a burglar, or perhaps a vulture, or a ghost.