Chapter TEN

When they topped the rise and stood overlooking Hebertown there was a moment of silence and then a groan of horror burst from them all.

"Gutted," Arthur Chesbro said succinctly. "Not a thin dime left in town; not a nickel."

The true flood crest which they had missed in the hills had left a plain wake through the town. It was dark brown and even from their height they could smell its stink. Sewage, chemical waste, mud churned up from river bottoms where it had been rotting for a century. The brown smear lay over two-thirds of Hebertown, and there was something worse at its center, a long streak scores of yards to either side of the river. It seemed almost to have been bulldozed clean.

The river still boiled many feet above its normal height, and flotsam rolled past, dotting its swell. There were tree trunks, chicken houses, timber and swollen things you didn't want to guess at. The bridges were out, the stout PWA bridge and the two rickety county bridges.

Chesbro studied the view. "Gramatan Mills are wrecked," he said. "They'll never come back. They rebuilt on the river in ninety-seven right where the old waterpower mill was. Half their plant's--torn away."

"Let's get on down," Groff said.

McCue volunteered: "I'd try the school--if it's standing. That's where you always set up cots and aid stations."

Chesbro said: "The junior high's standing. Built well on the outskirts. Lucky it's on this side of the river."

They started down the hill. The stink grew worse.

First they came to frame houses with picket fences and vegetable gardens in the back. The porches were full; exhausted people looked dully at them. At the third or fourth house a man came to his gate to watch them pass.

Groff said, "We've got your burgess here. He seems to have pneumonia. Can we make him comfortable in your place and get a doctor for him?"

The man said tiredly, "There's no room in my place. I have twenty-five, thirty people. And the doctors won't make house calls, not today. All three of 'em are down at the school. Take him there."

Mrs. Goudeket said, "Could you maybe put me up, mister? We've been walking and walking--?"

"No room," he said. "I'm full up. Everybody's full up. Go to the school. They got stretchers there. The Air Force dropped 'em in the athletic field. I hope Henry gets better. Go down to the school. They'll take care of you there."

"For ten dollars, maybe--" Mrs. Goudeket began.

"Money's no good," the man said. His voice began to rise hysterically. "Nothing's no good. I work at the Gramatan Mills and look at it. I worked there twenty-seven years, I was going to get my pension in 1958, and now the mill's gone. My father drove down into town before it hit to see if he could help and he isn't back yet and I don't know if he's alive or dead." He took sudden hold of himself. "I have to go and tend the cookstove. You have to boil your water now. Thirty people drink a lot of water, we keep boiling it all the time. Take care of Henry." He went back up his path and inside.

Past the rustic houses on the fringe they came to a belt of substantial older places, the homes of the borough petty aristocracy. Here the smear of brown had reached; the horses picked their way uncertainly, fetlock-deep in stinking mud. A mad-eyed woman in a housecoat was on one of the handsome porches shoveling and shoveling; the silt plopped into the silt that covered her lawn.

They passed a house with a broken back. A towering poplar, surely the pride of the owner once, had stood in his front yard. The flood water had come; it had loosened the soil to the consistency of porridge; the tree had tilted a little, leaned; its wide shallow root system had given way and the trunk had crashed across the roof, caving and crumpling it in.

There was a house with black, dead eyes. Somehow fire had started; candles, or a fireplace carelessly laid for warmth when the electrically fanned oil heater clicked silent. The innards of the house had burned, and the fireman had not come. There was a pathetic pile of furniture outside, but where the people were you couldn't tell.

There was a house that, in all that chaotic destruction, had survived unscathed. Its windows had their glass, its doors were neatly locked, there were two spindly iron chairs on the porch. And then you looked and saw that it rested in the middle of a road, where the water had let it drop.

But it was the smell that hurt. You could imagine a hurt town mending itself and growing again. But this stench from the river bottoms was the stink of death. "I'll bet," said Artie Chesbro with a dreamer's eyes, "you could pick up any mortgage in town for five cents on the dollar today."

* * * * *

Dr. Soames was the town's only specialist. He had built a white Georgian house and a three-car garage out of something less than a quarter of a cubic foot of the human female anatomy. He was an expert on every fold and canal from the _labium minus_ to the hydatid of Morgagni, and of the hundred and four babies born in the borough of Hebertown and surrounding territory in the past twelve months, he had delivered ninety-three. They told scandalous anecdotes about his extra-official life--"Mrs. Hoglund? Hoglund? Oh, I didn't recognize you with your pants up"--and there had been a suggestion at the County Medical Association that some of his most profitable pregnancies were not permitted to come to term. But there was no human being in Hebertown and environs who doubted that Dr. Soames was the greatest doctor on earth.

And what good was he doing now, he demanded silently, swabbing alcohol on the morning's twenty-fifth rump to ready it for the needle.

He sighed and jabbed home the needle of yellowish fluid. The kid jumped and howled; Dr. Soames's hand was not as dexterous with injections as it might once have been. They were working themselves into a coma, all three of the doctors, with routine shots against typhoid and penicillin to keep the sniffles of the kids from getting worse; but any ambulance driver could have done as much. What these people needed--homes; help; money--was not in their little black bags.

"Dr. Soames!" Chief of Police Brayer was coming into the school's gym. The tired old face looked worried--almost panicked; Soames had thought the time for panic was over. "They're bringing Henry in, Doctor. He looks bad."

The burgess came in, under clean blankets, on an aluminum-frame stretcher at last. Soames took a quick look. Fever; coma; and the unmistakable racking, hard-fought breaths. Pneumonia? "Wake up Doctor Brandeis," he ordered; but he found a hypodermic and loaded it without waiting.

The other doctor's eyes were bleary when he staggered in, but there wasn't much doubt. "Pneumonites, all right," he said, auscultating the burgess's chest. "We ought to have oxygen, Frank." Chief Brayer listened to the doctors. He cut in, "Don't we have any oxygen?" Soames shook his head; and Brayer remembered. The oxygen was there, all right, in the firehouse, where it was handy for the pumpers to take along in case of drowning or asphyxiation or any of the other things Hebertown called out its fire department for; but it wasn't handy at all in case of floods, since the firehouse was in the Borough Hall. You couldn't even see the roof yet, though the water had gone down.

He blundered out of the room and buttonholed one of the other volunteers. "Who've we got who can swim underwater?" he demanded. "We have to get the oxygen out of the firehouse--Henry needs it."

They found a couple of high-school kids, on the swimming team, and they went down to survey the drowned-out hall. The water had slowed enough to put a boat out; they rowed down Front Street, over the back yards of the cottages, into the River Road. "Must be around here," Brayer said doubtfully, staring at the muddy water. "Some of the houses got moved, I guess...."

It wasn't there. One of the boys eventually went down, but only for a moment. He came up sputtering and grunting, his eyes squeezed tight; when they got him into the boat and he could talk coherently again he said, "Sorry, Mr. Brayer. Maybe there's still some of the firehouse down there. But that isn't water, it's plain mud. Even if I had a face mask, I couldn't see--and I don't have a face mask." They took him back to the school to have his eyes looked after. Chief Brayer leaned dizzily against the door frame, watching Dr. Brandeis bathing the kid's eyes. What, he wondered, was Hebertown going to be like without Henry?

* * * * *

Mickey Groff woke up. They must have given me a shot of something, he thought clearly, and sat up.

A girl in a white uniform with gold bars at the collar leaned over him and said, "You ought to go back to sleep. You've only had about two hours."

He shook his head. "How's the old man?"

"Which one?"

"Starkman--the burgess." But she didn't know the name. Groff stood up and staggered to a chair. What was an army nurse doing here, he wondered. Wings and a bar; maybe they'd flown in help from outside.

Somebody helped him to a garage, empty of cars, with duckboards laid over the mud on the floor; there was a sort of emergency feeding station organized there and he got hot coffee laced with thick canned milk, syrupy with sugar. He went out in the sunshine and drank it gratefully.

Sunshine!

He slowly accepted the fact that it wasn't raining any more. The sky was spotty with clouds, but there was a lot of blue.

"Mr. Groff." He tried to get to his feet; it was Artie Chesbro's wife. She stopped him.

"Where's everybody?" he asked.

"Sleeping, mostly. Except my husband, who is out looking for orphans to rob. Have you seen Henry?"

He blinked. "Henry?"

"The burgess. Mr. Starkman." He shook his head. She said gently, "I've been with him all morning. If they don't get help for him soon--"

He noticed that her eyes were unaccountably filled with tears. "I thought I saw an army nurse--"

"Yes. But they didn't have oxygen, and that's what he needs. It's on its way, I guess, or anyway they say it is." She looked at the coffee. "Wait a minute. I want some of that."

Mickey Groff looked after her and sighed. Now, why was she mothering the old man? And what was that "orphans to rob" remark? It had been fairly obvious that she and her husband were not cut from the same bolt, but was it possible for her to see her husband that clearly, and keep on living with him?

He was beginning to wonder whether he shouldn't get up and start somehow helping out when she came back and sat beside him. She was humming to herself, he noticed, and glanced at her curiously; evidently she wasn't so upset after all.

"I knew," she said, dreamily swirling the coffee around in the mug to stir it, "that two of us would go. It is the difference between six and eight."

"The what?"

She laughed as if a child had done something clever. "I knew you weren't a student of the Great Science," she said cheerfully. "There are perfect numbers, and imperfect numbers; the imperfect numbers are--imperfect, and the worst of them are the deficient ones. Eight is an imperfect number, you see." She grinned at him. "You think I've flipped," she commented.

"Well, I wouldn't say--"

"But you'd think it. No matter, Mickey--do you mind if I call you Mickey? I'm quite sane--I have the advantage of you, you see, because I have my diploma to prove it." She sipped her coffee. "That's what makes Artie so mad," she said pleasantly. "He got me committed to the Haven, and they kept me there for nearly a year; and now when he threatens to tell people I'm crazy I don't have to worry, because six perfectly fine psychiatrists agree that I'm not."

Mickey Groff said weakly, "That's very nice, Mrs.--Polly, I mean."

She said seriously, "You mustn't think that the Great Science is one of these crackpot cultist affairs. I know gematry has a bad name, but you'd be astonished at the great minds that have worked on it. Fermat, Bachet--back as far as Diophantos, in fact. Why, if you'd just--oh, please, Mickey." She touched his arm as he started to move. "I'll stop. This isn't the time to talk about important things."

"Important."

"This," she said, "is a time for shallow, surfacy affairs, a time when distractions come crowding in and cannot be ignored. One such distraction is that Mr. Starkman is dying and needs oxygen."

"I have an idea," he said. "Come on."

There was a boy of fourteen standing by with a handkerchief tied around his left arm, an improvised brassard. "Son," Groff said, "do you go to the junior high?"

"Yes."

"The burgess, Mr. Starkman, needs oxygen and they can't get at the firehouse tanks. It occurred to me that there might be some in the school--those little tanks they call lecture bottles that they use for demonstrations in chemistry classes."

"I haven't taken chem yet, mister, I don't know," the boy said unhappily.

"Are there any teachers here?"

"Yes sir! Mr. Holtz the math teacher's making the coffee back there."

Groff approached Holtz, a small, harried man. Holtz listened and said: "Not in the junior high, no. No lecture demonstrations, just recitation and lab. But the senior high across the river would have some. My good friend Mr. Anderson lectures there and he believes in making it spectacular. Yes; they would have lecture flasks. I'd guide you there if I weren't assigned. Perhaps you can find somebody--"

Groff decided he would not. These people were working at top capacity now. He could do the job on his own.

Groff and Polly picked their way through the silt to the river bank. A rowboat manned by two husky youngsters with the improvised brassards was unloading a weeping woman and a silent child.

"Get to the school," one of them told her in an important, basically uncertain voice. "They'll take care of you there. They've got nurses and everything."

She walked off clutching the child's hand, still weeping.

The kids looked after her, round-eyed. They told Groff: "That's Mrs. Vostek. Her husband drowned. We just found her sitting on her porch crying. Maybe she's gone crazy."

"Can you get us across the river? We want to get into the high school and look for oxygen bottles. The sick cases need it."

"That's what we're here for, mister!"

Good kids....

On the other bank, perilously attained, the kids pointed Groff and Polly in the right direction and took aboard two grim brassarded men who carried a limp, moaning girl of ten between them.

The other side of the river was the older part of town; the inevitable slum had grown up there. Here in the streets and on the steps they saw drunken men and women with blank despair in their eyes tilting bottles skyward. One of them drained his bottle and yelled: "To hell with it!" and hurled the empty through the plate-glass window of a silt-choked little magazine-and-candy store. A man, not young, sitting in the store came charging out with a sawed-off ball bat in his hands, swinging. "You cheap rotten bum!" he yelled. "Things aren't bad enough, you have to make them worse!"

While the drunk stared stupidly, Groff rushed between them and caught the wrists of the man with the bat. "Easy," he said. "For God's sake, you'll kill him with that thing."

The drunk came to life. "Let him kill," he yelled. "What's the damn difference now? No job, no house, no furniture. Let him kill!" But he reeled off down the street while Groff held the furious man.

"Stupid bastard," the proprietor swore. "I'll give him bottles. Three-fifty he owes me, I'll give him bottles!" Then the fight suddenly evaporated out of him. Groff let go and they walked on, looking back to see him shamble into his store again and sit down with the bat across his knees.

They passed a bar, and there was no nonsense about that. Two men who looked like brothers stood grimly at the door. Each had a shotgun over his arm. When Groff and Polly walked by they shifted the guns a little and said nothing.

A corner grocery had become a sort of involuntary relief station. There was a long unruly line leading to the door. The grocer stood there; behind him in the store his wife was bringing up canned goods, bottled pop, everything. The grocer, sweating and afraid, was handing out the food and drink to the sullen people as they passed.

"Please," he was saying, "I haven't got time to write this down. Please remember what you take and come around and settle when things clear up."

After a fashion he was avoiding the sack of his store.

The high school was an old red brick building, smaller than the new junior high across the river. Groff marched up the steps and tried the door. "Bloody hell," he said. "Locked, of course."

She pointed. "There's an open window."

They climbed in and found themselves in the principal's office. Three men with sledge hammers and crow-bars were knocking the knob off the safe. They turned menacingly.

"Go ahead." Groff shrugged. "I can't stop you."

"Get the hell out of here," one of them said.

"We came to get some oxygen," Polly said. "For the sick people across the river."

"Sick people? Okay."

They went into the corridor and wandered from room to room; on the second floor they found an old-fashioned lecture theater, bowl-shaped with steep rows of seats focusing on a laboratory bench piped for water and gas. There was a promising-looking door behind it.

It was locked. Groff kicked at the door and swore with pain; the building was old-fashioned brick and its woodwork was old-fashioned golden oak, the stuff you can hardly drive a nail into. He trudged down to the office again. The three men were gone; the door of the safe swung open. They had left one sledge; somehow he had expected to find all the tools dropped, but apparently they were going to work their way methodically through every safe they could find.

He returned with the sledge and bashed at the golden-oak door until its latch sprung and it swung open. It was the storeroom for lecture supplies and the gas flasks were neatly stacked on the top shelf. There was a complete carton of a dozen twelve-inch cylinders marked O_{2} and another carton with eight cylinders.

"Thank God," he said. "Let's go."

The things were horribly heavy.

As they retraced their way to the river bank they were stopped three times by loungers collected in groups of half a dozen and had to show them the cartons' contents and explain that it was for the sick people across the river.

There was a long wait before they could hail one of the boats passing back and forth; finally a rowboat with a roaring outboard motor pulled up. Two men with American Legion caps manned it. They explained their mission and were taken aboard. One of the Legionnaires asked: "How are things in Old Town?"

"Breaking up fast," Groff said.

The man understood perfectly. "The goons," he said, nodding. "There's talk about sending in the National Guard," he said. "Meanwhile I guess it's our problem."

He took the heavier carton from Groff when they reached the river bank and Groff took Polly's; together they walked to the gymnasium where Harry Starkman lay.

One of the doctors--Brandeis?--looked at the lecture bottles dully, took one and shambled over to the burgess's litter. He drew the blanket over Starkman's face, slipped the bottle under and cracked the needle valve for a few hissing minutes, then checked the old man's pulse.

"Very good," he said at last to Groff and Polly. "There's something to hope for now. Now clear out, you two. Find something useful to do."

"There's going to be trouble in Old Town tonight," Groff said. "And it may spill over here."

Polly, preoccupied, said, "The number is still imperfect. Two of us will have to go. I do hope it won't be you, Mickey."