Harry Turtledove - Fallout

“Mr. Cummings, sir, you’ll have seen the petitions for an ambulance in the paper,” Marian said, hoping she sounded less scared than she felt. “We need-uh, Weed needs-ambulances for when bad things happen, so they won’t be as horrible as they were with poor Leroy van Zandt. We’ve all gathered signatures for these petitions, and we wanted to give them to you so you can see how the whole town feels about it.”

“That’s right,” Dolores said. The other four women nodded.

“If Shasta Lumber joins up with the other outfits in town, it won’t cost any of you too much money, and it’ll save lives for years,” Marian finished. “Who knows, Mr. Cummings, sir? One of them might even be yours.”

“So that’s what we’re here for,” Dolores put in. “We want to give you these here petitions, like Marian said. Just so you know, sir, I’ve got Doc Toohey’s John Hancock on mine. He thinks it’s a great idea, Doc Toohey does.”

She walked into the paneled office. The rest of the clerical workers followed her. One by one, they set the petitions on Cummings’ desk. That was also of mahogany, unlike the cheap painted-steel desks at the other end of the hall.

“I did know about the petition drive, yes. I couldn’t very well not know about it, could I?” Cummings paused to glance at some of the sheets of newsprint. Marian’s petition had, among other people’s, Dale Dropo’s signature, and Fayvl Tabakman’s, and Babs’ from the diner, and that of Miss Hamilton, who was Linda’s teacher.

“Have you, um, talked with people from the other lumber companies, sir?” Marian asked, that seeming more polite than barking So what are you going to do about it, you filthy capitalist, you?

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Carl Cummings said. Marian braced herself for what she feared was coming next. And you’re all fired, for having the gall to try to tell us what to do was what that boiled down to. The executive paused to light a Pall Mall, which only made her want to fidget more. After his first drag, he went on, “And we all think it’s the best idea anybody’s had for years. We know we’ve got a problem here. This lets us take a shot at fixing it without costing anybody too much. We’ve already started talking with an outfit down in Sacramento that sells ambulances. One ought to be here inside of a month.”

“You do?” Marian hardly believed her ears.

“You have?” Dolores sounded just as astonished.

“It will?” So did Claire Hermanson, who ran the switchboard.

“Absolutely,” Cummings said, and all at once he didn’t seem anywhere near so filthy to Marian. Still a capitalist, yes-who but a capitalist in Weed would have worn such an elegant gray pinstripe suit (or any kind of suit, for that matter: jeans and Pendletons were the usual menswear)? But maybe not one to spark a proletarian uprising. He nodded to Marian. “You know this Tabakman fellow who came up with the notion, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, still dizzy at how easy it had turned out to be. “We knew each other up in Washington before the bomb hit, and in the camp there afterwards.”

“Good for you. Good for him. He’s got a head on his shoulders-not like Dale Dropo.” Carl Cummings rolled his eyes. “That maniac thinks he can say whatever he wants because he runs the Press-Herald . He doesn’t understand that it’s a newspaper, doggone it, not a blackjack.”

Marian prudently kept her mouth zipped tight. Without the petitions in the Press-Herald, the lumber bosses might well have gone on thinking they could ignore what Weed needed. The blank forms in the paper must have been enough to get them going. They hadn’t waited for the ones full of signatures like those on Cummings’ desk.

“You’ve given us good news, Mr. Cummings, sir. Thank you.” Dolores still seemed flabbergasted, too. “I guess we’ll go back to work now.”

“Okay.” The executive nodded briskly. “Why don’t you close the door again on your way out?” He was already reaching for the telephone as the clerical staff beat a retreat.

Out in the hall, with the solid door closed behind them, the women clasped hands and hugged. “We did it!” Marian exclaimed. “We really did it! We went and belled the cat!”

“Yeah!” Claire Hermanson started back to her station. “I’m gonna call Doc Toohey. He’ll shit a brick when he hears, swear he will!” Marian wouldn’t have put it that way, not even after her spell at Camp Nowhere, but that didn’t mean she thought Claire was wrong.

At lunch, she headed for the diner to tell Babs the news. Babs had already heard, which wasn’t a shock, either. “That skinny Hebe made the big shots act like they weren’t jerks,” the waitress said. “Who woulda thunk anybody could?” She eyed Marian. “Tabakman, he’s sweet on you. You know that?”

“Who, me?” Marian said. Babs cackled. Marian went on, “Yes, I know. He knows I know. I’m still putting myself back together, though. He understands that. He doesn’t rush me or anything.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Babs said. “Men ain’t patient critters.” That was bound to be good advice, even if Marian wasn’t ready to take it yet.

She stopped at the Rexall on the way back to work. As she had in the Shasta Lumber hallway, she said, “We did bell the cat.”

Heber Stansfield was the one who’d first used that figure of speech. He nodded now. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. They got to do it without looking like they was bending too much. But with the whole world coming to pieces around our ears, who knows how much it’ll matter in the end?”

A radio behind the counter was giving the news. “What’s the latest?” Marian asked. “Do I want to know?”

“Murmansk. That Archangel place-somethin’ like that, anyways. Odessa.” Stansfield spoke of death and devastation with sour approval. He could afford to. He’d never known for himself what an atom bomb was like. “And they’re shootin’ looters in Boston and Washington.”

“Not in New York City?” Marian asked.

“From what the radio reporters say, in New York City, the looters, they shoot back.” The druggist spoke as if no iniquity coming out of New York City was too big for him to credit.

Marian bought a package of Life Savers to keep him sweet, then walked down the block to Fayvl’s cobbler’s shop. He looked up from an upside-down logger’s boot. “Hallo, Marian,” he said. “It’s an ambulance.”

“It sure is!” she agreed. “Everybody in town is going on about how smart you are, to come up with a way to make it an ambulance.”

“Foosh!” Tabakman waved that aside. “Anybody what thinks I’m smart, himself he ain’t so.”

“Don’t sandbag.” Marian wasn’t sure he’d get that. But he did. She realized that if he’d played a lot of cards to get his stake to come here, he would have to. She added, “I think you’re way too smart to be doing this for a job.”

“Why for you think that? It’s honest work. It ain’t such a bad living. And I enjoy it. So why I shouldn’t do it? What should I do instead?”

“I don’t know, not when you put it that way,” Marian said.

“Anything I used to did, I would think it was from God a blessing. Then the Nazis came, and God forgot about us if He was ever there at all,” Fayvl said. “So now I do what I feel like doing because I feel like doing it. It’s the same as before, only without God and without the blessing. I get by.”

Without God and without the blessing. Marian found herself nodding. “Me, too, Fayvl. Me, too.”

–

Vasili Yasevich wanted to pay a call on David Berman to see how the old Jew’s “niece” or “cousin” or whatever they decided to call her was coming along. He knew better than to do it, though. Unless Berman found work for him to do, someone would wonder why he was visiting him. He didn’t want anybody asking himself a question like that.