Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

“Good. You kids better get at your books. Hey, stop that! Education will be very important, afterwards. You never know what will be useful. And maybe only your mother and I to teach you.”

“Gee,” Herbie nodded at Josephine. “Think of that.”

She pulled at her jumper where it was very tight over newly swelling breasts and patted her blonde braided hair. “What about my mother and father, Mr. Plunkett? Won’t they be—be—”

“Naw!” Herbie laughed the loud, country laugh he’d been practicing lately. “They’re dead-enders. They won’t pull through. They live in the City, don’t they? They’ll just be some—”

“Herbie!”

“—some foam on a mushroom-shaped cloud,” he finished, utterly entranced by the image. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, as he looked from his angry father to the quivering girl. He went on in a studiously reasonable voice. “But it’s the truth, anyway. That’s why they sent you and Lester here. I guess I’ll marry you—afterwards. And you ought to get in the habit of calling him pop. Because that’s the way it’ll be.”

Josephine squeezed her eyes shut, kicked the shed door open, and ran out. “I hate you, Herbie Plunkett,” she wept. “You’re a beast!”

Herbie grimaced at his father— women, women, women!—and ran after her. “Hey, Jo! Listen!”

The trouble was, Plunkett thought worriedly as he carried the emergency bulbs for the hydroponic garden into the cellar—the trouble was that Herbie had learned through constant reiteration the one thing: survival came before all else, and amenities were merely amenities.

Strength and self-sufficiency—Plunkett had worked out the virtues his children needed years ago, sitting in air-conditioned offices and totting corporation balances with one eye always on the calendar.

“Still,” Plunkett muttered, “still—Herbie shouldn’t—” He shook his head.

He inspected the incubators near the long steaming tables of the hydroponic garden. A tray about ready to hatch. They’d have to start assembling eggs to replace it in the morning. He paused in the third room, filled a gap in the bookshelves.

“Hope Josephine steadies the boy in his schoolwork. If he fails that next exam, they’ll make me send him to town regularly. Now there’s an aspect of survival I can hit Herbie with.”

He realized he’d been talking to himself, a habit he’d been combating futilely for more than a month. Stuffy talk, too. He was becoming like those people who left tracts on trolley cars.

“Have to start watching myself,” he commented. “Dammit, again!”

The telephone clattered upstairs. He heard Ann walk across to it, that serene, unhurried walk all pregnant women seem to have.

“Elliot! NatMedarie.”

“Tell him I’m coming, Ann.” He swung the vault-like door carefully shut behind him, looked at it for a moment, and started up the high stone steps.

“Hello, Nat. What’s new?”

“Hi, Plunk. Just got a postcard from Fitzgerald. Remember him? The abandoned silver mine in Montana? Yeah. He says we’ve got to go on the basis that lithium and hydrogen bombs will be used.”

Plunkett leaned against the wall with his elbow. He cradled the receiver on his right shoulder so he could light a cigarette. “Fitzgerald can be wrong sometimes.”

“Uhm. I don’t know. But you know what a lithium bomb means, don’t you?”

“It means,” Plunkett said, staring through the wall of the house and into a boiling Earth, “that a chain reaction may be set off in the atmosphere if enough of them are used. Maybe if only one—”

“Oh, can it,” Medarie interrupted. “That gets us nowhere. That way nobody gets through, and we might as well start shuttling from church to bar-room like my brother-in-law in Chicago is doing right now. Fred, I used to say to him—No, listen Plunk: it means I was right. You didn’t dig deep enough.”

“Deep enough! I’m as far down as I want to go. If I don’t have enough layers of lead and concrete to shield me—well, if they can crack my shell, then you won’t be able to walk on the surface before you die of thirst, Nat. No—I sunk my dough in power supply. Once that fails, you’ll find yourself putting the used air back into your empty oxygen tanks by hand!”

The other man chuckled. “All right. I hope I see you around.”

“And I hope I see ...” Plunkett twisted around to face the front window as an old station wagon bumped over the ruts in his driveway. “Say, Nat, what do you know? Charlie Whiting just drove up. Isn’t this Sunday?”

“Yeah. He hit my place early, too. Some sort of political meeting in town and he wants to make it. It’s not enough that the striped-pants brigade are practically glaring into each other’s eyebrows this time. A couple of local philosophers are impatient with the slow pace at which their extinction is approaching, and they’re getting to see if they can’t hurry it up some.”

“Don’t be bitter,” Plunkett smiled.

“Here’s praying at you. Regards to Ann, Plunk.”

Plunkett cradled the receiver and ambled downstairs. Outside, he watched Charlie Whiting pull the door of the station wagon open on its one desperate hinge.

“Eggs stowed, Mr. Plunkett,” Charlie said. “Receipt signed. Here. You’ll get a check Wednesday.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Hey, you kids get back to your books. Go on, Herbie. You’re having an English quiz tonight. Eggs still going up, Charlie?”

“Up she goes.” The old man slid onto the cracked leather seat and pulled the door shut deftly. He bent his arm on the open window. “Heh. And every time she does I make a little more off you survivor fellas who are too scairt to carry ’em into town yourself.”

“Well, you’re entitled to it,” Plunkett said, uncomfortably. “What about this meeting in town?”

“Bunch of folks goin’ to discuss the conference. I say we pull out. I say we walk right out of the dern thing. This country never won a conference yet. A million conferences the last few years and everyone knows what’s gonna happen sooner or later. Heh. They’re just wastin’ time. Hit ’em first, I say.”

“Maybe we will. Maybe they will. Or—maybe, Charlie—a couple of diflFerent nations will get what looks like a good idea at the same time.”

Charlie Whiting shoved his foot down and ground the starter. “You don’t make sense. If we hit ’em first how can they do the same to us? Hit ’em first—hard enough—and they’ll never recover in time to hit us back. That’s what I say. But you survivor fellas—” he shook his white head angrily as the car shot away.

“Hey!” he yelled, turning onto the road. “Hey, look!”

Plunkett looked over his shoulder/Charlie Whiting was gesturing at him with his left hand, the forefinger pointing out and the thumb up straight.

“Look, Mr. Plunkett,” the old man called. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” He cackled hysterically and writhed over the steering wheel ..

Rusty scuttled around the side of the house, and after him, yipping frantically in ancient canine tradition.

Plunkett watched the receding car until it swept around the curve two miles away. He stared at the small dog returning proudly.

Poor Whiting. Poor everybody, for that matter, who had a normal distrust of crackpots.

How could you permit a greedy old codger like Whiting to buy your produce, just so you and your family wouldn’t have to risk trips into town?

Well, it was a matter of having decided years ago that the world was too full of people who were convinced that they were faster on the draw than anyone else—and the other fellow was bluffing any way. People who believed that two small boys could pile up snowballs across the street from each other and go home without having used them, people who discussed the merits of concrete fences as opposed to wire guard-rails while their automobiles skidded over the cliff. People who were righteous. People who were apathetic.