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had he known positively that there was some danger; for in the valley,
anything new was a change-even the fact, disastrous though it was, that
Scranton was about to go as permanently out of his life and world as
Betelgeuse. His own life thus far had held little but squirrel trapping;
stealing eggs from neighbors as badly off as his own family; hunting scrap to
sell to the mills; helping Bob nurse their father through repeated bouts of an
illness which, but for the fact that there was no one in thirty-second-century
America to diagnose it, would have been recognized as the ancient African
scourge of kwash.iorkor or malignant malnutrition; keeping the little girls
out of the berry patch; fishing for fingerlings; and watching the rockets of
the rich howl remotely through' the highest reaches of the indifferent sky.
He had often thought of leaving, though he had no trade to practice and knew
of no place in the world where his considerable but utterly untrained brute
strength could be sold at any price. But there was loyalty and love in the
motherless family, and it had often before sustained them wheti there had been
nothing to eat but fried dough and green tomatoes, and no warmth against the
Christmas
snows but huddling with the little kids under a -heap of the old rags that
were their clothes; and - in the end, Chris stuck by it as stubbornly and
devotedly as Bob always had. In all the depopulated Earth- there was no place
to which he owed more loyalty, and no place which could offer him more in
return-the worst possible substratum for dreams of escape, even for a
temperament as naturally sunny and sanguine as Chris's. In a world where a
Ph.D. in economics could find no one to teach, nor use his knowledge of how
the economy wagged to find any other niche in it-a world in which a thousand
penny-ante jobs left him no time even to tend his wife's grave, yet all the
same paid him less and less every year-what hope could his boys reasonably
cherish for any better future? The answer, alas, was all too obvious; and for
the little girls, the foreseeable future was even more grim.
The nomad cities offered no better way of escape. More often than not, Chris
had read, star roving was simply another form of starvation, without even the
company of a blue sky, a scrub forest or a patch of ground to grow turnips in.
Otherwise, why did almost every city which had ever left the Earth fail to
come back home? Pittsburgh had made its fortune on Mars, to be sure-but it was
a poor sort of fortune that kept you sitting in a city all your life, with
nothing to see beyond the city limits but an ochre desert, a desert with no
air you could breath, a desert that would freeze you solid only a few minutes
after the tiny sun went down. Sooner or later, too, his father said,
Pittsburgh would have to leave the solar system as all the other cities
had-not, this time, because it had exhausted the iron and the oxygen, but
because there would be too few people left on the Earth to buy steel. There
were already too few to justify Pittsburgh's coming back to the once-golden
triangle of rivers it had' abandoned thirty years ago; Pittsburgh had wealth,
but was finding it increasingly hard to spend on the Earth, even for
necessities. The nomad cities seemed, like everything else, to be a dead end.
Nevertheless Chris sat on the embankment and watched, for only a single,
simple reason: Something was going on. If he envied the city its decision to
leave the valley, he was unaware of it. He was there simply to see something
happen, for a change. - - -
A brief rustle of shrubbery behind him made him turn.
- A dog's head peered across the roadbed at him from the
foot of the mountainside, surrounded incongruously by the trumpets of tiger
lilies; it looked a,little as if it were being served up on a platter. Chris
grinned.
"Hello, Kelly. Look out for bees."
The dog whuffed and came trotting to him, looking foolishly proud of itself-as
it probably was, for Kelly was usually not very good at finding anything, even [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]