So he simply waited, and as he waited, wondered about the ‘copter which flew overhead now and then and about the vague shapes in the street, and more than anything else if he was a horse’s ass or not.
And then, all at once, he thought of something; he remembered what Hoppy Harrington had seen in his vision at Fred’s Fine Foods. Hoppy had seen him, Stuart McConchie, eating rats, but in the excitement and fear of all that had happened since, Stuart had forgotten. This now was what the phoce had seen; this was the vision—not the afterlife at all!
God damn that little crippled freak, Stuart thought to himself as he lay picking his teeth with a piece of wire. He was a fraud; he put something over on us.
Amazing how gullible people are, he said to himself. We believed him, maybe because he’s so peculiarly built anyhow… it seemed more credible with hhn being like he is—or was. He’s probably dead now, buried down in the service department. Well, that’s one good thing this war has done: wiped out all the freaks. But then, he realized, it’s also brewed up a whole new batch of them; there’ll be freaks strutting around for the hext million years. It’ll be Bluthgeld’s paradise; in fact he’s probably quite happy right now—because this was really bomb testing.
Ken stirred and murmured, “Could you be induced to crawl across the street? There’s that corpse there and it might have cigarettes on it.”
Cigarettes, hell, Stuart thought. It probably has a walletful of money. He followed the dying man’s gaze and saw, sure enough, the corpse of a woman lying among the rubble on the far side. His pulse raced, because he could see a bulging handbag still clutched.
In a weary voice Ken said, “Leave the money, Stuart. It’s an obsession with you, a symbold of God knows what.” As Stuart crawled out from the basement Ken raised his voice to call, “A symbol of the opulent society.” He coughed, retched. “And that’s gone now,” he managed to add.
Up yours, Stuart thought as he crawled on across the street to the purse lying there. Sure enough, when he opened it he found a wad of bills, ones and fives and even a twenty. There was also a U-No candy bar in the purse, and he got that, too. But as he crawled back to the basement it occurred to him that the candy bar might be radioactive, so he tossed it away.
“The cigarettes?” Ken asked, when he returned.
“None.” Stuart opened the piliow case, which was buried up to its throat in the dry ash which had filled the basement; he stuffed the bills in with the others and tied the pillow case shut again.
“How about a game of chess?” Ken propped himself up weakly, opened the wooden box of chessmen which he and Stuart had found in the wreckage of the house. Already, he had managed to teach Stuart the rudiments of the game; before the war Stuart had never played.
“Naw,” Stuart said. He was watching, far off in the gray sky, the moving shape of some plane or rocket ship, a cylinder. God, he thought, could it be a bomb? Dismally, he watched it sink lower and lower; he did not even lie down, did not seek to hide as he had done that first time, in the initial few minutes on which so much—their being alive now—had depended. “What’s that?” he asked.
The dying man scrutinized it. “It’s a balloon.”
Not believing him, Stuart said, “It’s the Chinese!”
“It really is a balloon, a little one. What they used to call a blimp, I think. I haven’t seen one since I was a boy.”
“Could the Chinese float across the Pacific in balloons?” Stuart said, imagining thousands of such small gray cigarshaped balloons, each with a platoon of Mongolian-type Chinese peasant soldiers, armed with Czech automatic rifles, clutching handholds, clinging to every fold. “It’s just what you’d expect them to think up from the beginning; they reduce the world to their level, back a couple centuries. Instead of catching up with us—” He broke off, because now he saw that the balloon had on its side a sign in English:
The dying man said cirily, “It’s one of ours.”
“I wonder where they got it,” Stuart said.
“Ingenious,” the dying man said, “isn’t it? I suppose all the gasoline and kerosene are gone by now. Used right up. We’ll be seeing a lot of strange transportation from now on. Or rather, you will.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Stuart said,
“I don’t feel sorry for myself or anyone,” the dying man said as he carefully laid out the chess pieces. “This is a nice set,” he said. “Made in Mexico, I notice. Hand-carved, no doubt… but very fragile.”
“Explain to me again how the bishop moves,” Stuart said.
Overhead, the Hamilton Air Force Base balloon loomed larger as it drifted closer. The two men in the basement bent over their chess board, paying no attention to it. Possibly it was taking pictures. Or possibly it was on a strategic mission; it might have a wailde-talkie aboard and was in contact with the Sixth Army units south of San Francisco. Who knew? Who cared? The balloon drifted by as the dying man advanced his king’s pawn two spaces to open the game.
“The game begins,” the dying man said. And then he added in a low voice, “For you, anyhow, Stuart. A strange, unfamiliar, new game ahead… you can even bet your pillow case of money, if you want.”
Grunting, Stuart pondered his own men and decided to move a rook’s pawn as his opening gambit—and knew, as soon as he had touched it, that it was an idiotic move.
“Can I take it back?” he asked hopefully.
“When you touch a piece you must move it,” Ken said, bringing out one of his knights.
“I don’t think that’s fair; I mean, I’m just learning,” Stuart said. He glared at the dying man, but the sallow face was adamant. “Okay,” he said resignedly, this time moving his king’s pawn, as Ken had done. I’ll watch his moves and do what he does, he decided. That way I’ll be safer.
From the balloon, now directly overhead, bits of white paper scattered, drifted and fluttered down. Stuart and the dying man paused in their game. One of the bits of paper fell near them in the basement and Ken reached out and picked it up. He read it, passed it to Stuart.
“Burlingame!” Stuart said, reading it. It was an appeal for volunteers, for the Army. “They want us to hike from here to Burlingame and be inducted? That’s fifty or sixty miles, all the way down this side of the Bay and around. They’re nuts!”
“They are,” Ken said. “They won’t get a soul.”
“Why hell, I can’t even make it down to LeConte Street to the relief station,” Stuart said. He felt indignant and he glared at the Hamilton Field balloon as it drifted on. They’re not going to get me to join up, he said to himself. Fork that.
“It says,” Ken said, reading the back of the proclamation, “that if you reach Burlingame they guarantee you water, food, cigarettes, anti-plague shots, treatment for radiation burns. How about that? But no girls.”
“Can you get interested in sex?” He was amazed. “Christ, I haven’t felt the slightest urge since the first bomb fell; it’s like the thing dropped off in fear, fell right off.”
“That’s because the diencephalic center of the brain suppresses the sex instinct in the face of danger,” Ken said. “But it’ll return.”
“No,” Stuart said, “because any child born would be a freak; there shouldn’t be any intercourse for say around ten years. They ought to make it a law. I can’t stand the idea of the world populated by freaks because I have had personal experience; one worked at Modern TV Sales with me, or rather in the service department. One was enough. I mean, they ought to hang that Bluthgeld up by his balls for what he did.”
“What Bluthgeld did in the ‘70s,” Ken said, “is insignificant when compared to this.” He indicated the ruins of the basement around them.