Chapter NINE

Gray light filtered through the dirty panes of the second-floor window. Arthur Chesbro woke slowly, aching in every bone. When he opened his eyes stickily and peered across the grimy little room he could not at first believe what he saw.

"Polly!" he choked, amazement and outrage blended. His wife, apparently unclothed, was snuggled close to old Harry Starkman, under a single blanket.

She looked up, smiling. "Hush," she said. "I finally got him to sleep. His chest sounds terrible and he has a fever, but if he sleeps he can't be too bad--for now."

She got up gracefully, managing to swirl the blanket around her without showing, Chesbro hoped, _too_ much. Then he noted that the youngster from the hotel was gawking. He cleared his throat loudly and the kid looked away.

Mrs. Goudeket grunted to her feet. "Fever?" she asked. "Let me." She went to the sleeping old man and felt his forehead. "He's burning up," she announced grimly. "An old man to walk through the rain and then he got his lungs full of gasoline fumes. I suppose it's pneumonia."

They were silent.

"Excuse me," said Mrs. Goudeket. "I'm going downstairs, nobody should follow me until I come back."

Mickey Groff thought: sensible woman. Somebody had to speak up. He stood for a moment over Sam Zehedi. The poor guy had died hard, fighting it; his eyes were ugly and his mouth contorted. His face in the dim light was bluish, the hue of a swimmer's lips when he's been in too long on a cool day.

Groff went to the window. Some time during the night the rain had lightened; it pattered now instead of drumming. There was mist. He struggled with the window and managed to inch it open against the swelling of its frame and old incrustations of paint. Fresh air swept gratifyingly through the storage room--and then he thought of the burgess.

Sharon Froman understood his glance. She threw her blanket over the old man and said, "He'll be all right." She stretched stiffly. "The old woman's taking forever," she said.

Arthur Chesbro said firmly, "Mrs. Chesbro will be the next to go downstairs. To find her clothes and put them on."

Polly Chesbro grinned amiably. "This thing _is_ scratchy," she said.

Groff leaned out and peered through the mist. All he could tell was that there was water below; how much of it the enigmatic surface did not say.

Mrs. Goudeket puffed up the stairs, a big carton in her arms. "Cheese wafers," she announced. "Somebody open them."

Polly glided to the door, sculptural in her improvised robe, and went down the stairs.

McCue, with the appetite of youth and an athlete, tore open the corrugated cardboard and began gobbling wafers from the first carton he came to.

"Manners, Dickie." Sharon Froman smiled. He swallowed his mouthful convulsively and eyed her.

"Help yourself," he said coldly. "You're no cripple."

"Why _Dickie_," she purred. "After all we've _been_ to each other!"

Mrs. Goudeket looked up. "What's this?" she snapped.

Sharon looked amused and said nothing.

"I don't know what she's talking about," McCue said. The tone automatically indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced him for unlawful cohabitation. "I'll talk to you later," Mrs. Goudeket promised grimly.

Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for free--

He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they played their cards right. "Tear their heartstrings out," she urged. "Get editorials; I've got some contacts in New York. You'd be The Man Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro."

"Call me Arthur," he said. "We're going to be working closely together; I can see that. My prestige and your ideas--"

Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. "He'll never make it without penicillin fast," she commented, helped herself to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.

Mickey Groff looked around; nobody was making a move for the stairs. He stepped over the body of Sam Zehedi and went down. First outside into the drizzle, where water was ankle-deep. He attended to his needs and went back into the store. A bottle of pop caught his eye and he was suddenly burning with thirst. He tore off the cap on a wall opener and gulped it down as fast as the stuff would gurgle from the narrow neck; after a queasy moment he ran for the door and made it in time. The pop gushed up again violently. He sat down, swaying, on the wooden step up to the door and retched a couple of times experimentally. He'd have to be careful eating and drinking for a while. He had got a stiff dose of the fumes.

Zehedi's blue-green, well-worn panel truck was just visible down the road in water to the hubcaps, looking bulky and competent. The goddam thing. And there stood the two gas pumps, goddam them too, and if you could only get the pumps to work you could pump gas from their underground tank into the truck and away they'd buzz, getting somehow into town where the old man could be pumped full of penicillin and dosed with oxygen as needed instead of dying like a sick dog in this kennel.

He went wearily upstairs and said, "Next."

Sharon got up and said, "Excuse me, Arthur."

"Keep out of the cash drawer," Mrs. Goudeket said sourly.

"Did you leave anything?" Sharon asked, wide-eyed. Arthur Chesbro laughed a laugh which turned hastily into a cough when Mrs. Goudeket glared his way.

McCue said suddenly, "I think the rain's stopped." They crowded to the window; he was right. The drizzle had ended and the mist was clearing.

"Good," Chesbro said. "They'll be able to get helicopters up. It's only a matter of time now until they spot us."

Groff said, "I don't think the old man can wait."

Chesbro spread his hands eloquently. "What can we do?"

"Pack him in on our backs," Groff said.

Chesbro said soothingly, "I don't think that'd be practical, Mickey. We're all exhausted, we've all had a touch of gas poisoning. We know more or less where we are and we know which way the town is, but we don't know what lies between us and the town. We may just circle around until we drop from exhaustion. There's a better chance of us being spotted if we stay in this place."

"We're three able-bodied men," Groff said, his temper rising. "We can take turns. A helicopter's just as likely to spot us on a road as it is to spot us here. Chesbro, _I'd_ like to sit here and wait to be rescued too; _I_ don't have a yen to go sloshing through the water with Starkman on my back either. But I don't think he can wait. We've got to do everything we can."

"I've got my manuscript to carry," Sharon said apologetically.

"We'll _do_ everything we can," Chesbro said reasonably. "But what's the sense of endangering all of us uselessly? The trip wouldn't be good for him. And the women--my wife isn't strong, Mickey, she shouldn't be subjected to--"

"Arthur," said his wife. "Shut up."

She smiled pleasantly at the gathering. "Who's going to be the first to pack him?"

* * * * *

Naturally that's me, of course, Dick McCue thought sourly, sliding in the mud. I'm an athlete, so they figure I'm Superman or somebody. He missed his footing and nearly fell. They might just as well have carried him pickaback as on this door, wrenched out of the upper rooms.... From behind him Mickey Groff called: "Time for you to take over, Chesbro."

McCue relinquished his end of the improvised stretcher to Artie Chesbro. His arms felt wrenched out of their sockets, and they had covered five hundred yards, at the most.

The rain hadn't really stopped, not quite. There was still water to be wrung out of the scudding stratus, and it came down in little bursts of droplets. Polly Chesbro stumbled along beside the sick man, trying to keep the rain off him when it came, ready with a smile when his eyes jolted open and, for a moment, he stared wonderingly about him.

It was going to be a long trip. They had had to skirt around a sort of contour line instead of following the road. Polly wondered briefly if there would come a point where the road dipped down into the streaming water, and there wasn't any useful hill handy. She didn't know this road at all; had seen Hebertown only once or twice before last night; had only the vaguest impression of what the terrain might be like. For that matter, none of them knew much about the country they were hiking across. On this Day, her mind inscribed in a crabbed hand, our Party suffered the Loss of Its two Aboriginals, reposing our Destiny to the care of the Greatest Guide of All.

Mickey Groff was remembering the Ligurian coast of Italy. The American bombers had smashed it flat from Anzio to Genoa, and Groff had thought proudly, a little selfishly, that no such destruction could ever come to his own country. But this was as bad, at least as bad. They had come across few houses, but there were ominous objects sailing down stream that once had been houses and barns and all the other structures man builds and his enemies sweep away. He tried to reconstruct the terrain as it must have been before the flood, but there was a rightness about the broad sheets of water that made it impossible. They were there; they must always have been there. Why did people build their homes down near the water, anyhow? Was a burbling brook in the back yard worth having if suddenly, unpredictably, it could destroy your home?

He wondered if the War Department was able to look itself in the face that morning, remembering the careful charts the colonels had shown him that called for dispersal, concealment, removal of such essential industries as his own. Suppose, they had said gravely, New York should take a bomb; you'd be out of commission; you must move out of the city to where you can be safe, since the production of your shop is of great importance to the country's defense. And they had showed him the maps, marked "Secret," of the instrument plants in Connecticut, the explosives factories in the Delaware valley, the electronics laboratories along the Jersey streams.

Two-forty-eight, two-forty-nine, two-fifty. "All right, Dick," he told the golf pro, "you can take over for a while." He surrendered the back end of the stretcher and looked around.

"Wait a minute!" he ordered sharply. "What's that up there?"

There was a private dirt road slanting down toward them, and something was moving. They all set up a waving and bellowing, and a group of horsemen appeared on the rim of the highway and came toward them, three or four of them, picking their way through the mud.

"The United States Cavalry," said Polly Chesbro clearly, "is charging to the rescue."

* * * * *

Two of the riders were men in chaps and sombreros and the third was a thirteen-year-old girl. They goggled unbelievingly at the litter bearers. They were from a dude ranch up in the hills, and they were on their way to Hebertown to complain because their lights and phone were off.

"Jesus! We knew there was some rain last night, but we never had any idea--" The cowboys stared at each other.

"How about giving us a hand?" Mickey Groff requested. "This man's in bad shape. If we don't get him to a doctor I don't think he'll make it."

The cowboys scratched their heads for a while, and finally Mickey Groff showed them how to sling the stretcher between two of the horses. "Hold them tight and walk them slow," he ordered, putting a cowboy at the head of each horse. "The ladies can take turns riding the other horse, I guess."

But he got no customers for that; Mrs. Goudeket was scandalized, and the young girl was too excited, and Polly Chesbro wouldn't get that far from the sick man. Finally Artie Chesbro said off-handedly, "Hell, no sense in _wasting_ the horse." He was in the saddle before anybody could object.

It didn't make things good, but it made them better. Mickey Groff, walking ahead, reasoned that he had disposed his forces well. According to the cowboys, they had a good three miles to go on the road--_if_ they could follow the road even approximately. An hour and a half--double it because of the weather--maybe double it again, he thought worriedly, if there were too many detours. He looked back at the motionless figure between the horses. That was stretching it, but there was a chance the old man might hang on that long.

Maybe the cowboys' first idea--slinging the old man across a saddle bow and galloping away--was the right one after all. But no; they had to stick together, at least until they found out if the road would take them all the way. And besides, thought Mickey Groff, aware of his limitations but also aware that he had succeeded to the command of the party, you have to make up your mind and stick to it.

The girl came prancing up beside him. "You look like a good guy," she commented. "Here."

He took the bottle from her; it was a pocket-sized half-pint of whiskey. It was like a gift from God. He took two measured swallows and put the cap back on; he could feel it biting in his throat, invading the back of his nose, spreading warmly through his chest.

"God bless you," he told the girl sincerely.

"Sure. But don't tell on Charley, will you? I knew he had it, but if Mrs. Koontz ever finds out she'll pulverize him." He started to hand the bottle back to her. "No, you keep it. You might want some more, and if Charley gets his hands on it again, good-by whiskey."

"Thanks." He slipped it into his pocket; then, remembering the rest of the party, turned and glanced at them. McCue was plodding along head down; Chesbro was glaring at him; Mrs. Goudeket was watching but she caught his eye, smiled faintly and shook her head. Good enough, thought Mickey Groff; we'll save what's left. He tried to remember what the current position was on giving liquor to old men dying of pneumonia. If it looks bad enough, he decided, we'll try giving him a shot; otherwise better not.

The girl was chattering: "Won't the old lady plotz when she hears about all this? That joker on the horse back there says he thinks the whole town's washed away."

"I doubt it."

The girl was disappointed. "Well," she said, "I bet there's going to be plenty of excitement in Hebertown, anyway. I always wanted to be a nurse--you know, not in a hospital, a Red Cross nurse or something like that, going away in the wars and all like that. My sister was a nurse's aide, only they wouldn't let me in because I was too young."

"Eh? Nurse?" He glanced at her quickly. "Know anything about pneumonia cases?"

"Sure. Penicillin, keep them warm, bed rest--"

"That's enough. Thanks." It had been a hope, but looking at her killed hope.

They plodded on and came to a blacktop. "I know where we are," one of the phony cowboys said. "Straight on in to Hebertown, two miles. It's a ridge road; it ought to be clear sailing."

A car was buzzing in the distance; frantically they flagged it down as it closed up on them. It was a late-model suburban with a New York plate in the rear, man and wife in the front seat, three kids rioting in the back. They all looked very strange to Mickey Groff, and he realized at last what the strangeness consisted of. They were clean, fed and rested.

"What do you want?" the man asked from behind the wheel, a little nervously.

_What did they want._ Penicillin. Beds. Warmth. Coffee.

"Take us into town, will you?" Mickey Groff said wearily.

The man hit the lock button on his door and cranked the window up a little. "It's only a little way on," he said evasively. "We aren't going any place special, we just heard about it on the radio and thought we'd come and see what was up--"

He hit the gas and the car zoomed on.

"Sightseers," Mrs. Goudeket said, wide-eyed. "God in Heaven, sightseers."

Mrs. Chesbro was swearing.

Arthur Chesbro was swearing and trying to remember what the license-plate numerals were.

After a while they trudged on, there being nothing else to do.

A helicopter came from the west as they marched, dipped low above them and hovered for a moment while they yelled and waved. The pilot pointed back into the body of the chopper with big exaggerated gestures after they had pointed at the burgess on his litter. Then he buzzed on eastward.

Mickey Groff said: "I guess he was telling us he was full up." He rubbed his back for a moment. "Maybe he meant he'll be back for us." But he didn't really think so, and the helicopter didn't come back their way.