As they walked back together, Mrs. Raub said, “Who are the antibiotics for? Not yourself; you look perfectly healthy to me.”
“My little girl is dying,” he said.
She did not waste sympathetic words; there were none left in the world, any more-she merely nodded. “Infectious hepatitis?” she asked. “How’s your water supply? Do you have a chlorinator? If not—”
“No, it’s like strep throat,” he said.
“We heard from the satellite last night that some German drug firms are in operation again, and so if we’re lucky we’ll be seeing German drugs back on the market, at least on the East Coast.”
“You get the satellite?” Excitedly, he said, “Our radio went dead, and our handy is down somewhere near South San Francisco, scavenging for refrigeration parts and won’t be back probably for another month. Tell me; what’s he reading now? The last time we picked him up, it was so darn long ago—he was on Pascal’s Provincial Letters.”
Mrs. Raub said, “Dangerfield is now reading Of Human Bondage.”
“Isn’t that about that fellow who couldn’t shake off that girl he met?” Eldon said. “I think I remember it from the previous time he rea4 it, several years ago. She kept coming back into his life. Didn’t she finally ruin his life, in the end?”
“I don’t know; I’m afraid we didn’t pick it up the previous time.”
“That Dangerfield is really a great disc jockey,” Eldon said, “the best I’ve ever heard even before the Emergency. I mean, we never miss him; we generally get a turnout of two hundred people every night at our fire station. I think one of us could fix that damn radio, but our Committee ruled that we had to let it alone and wait until the handy’s back. If he ever is… the last one disappeared on a scavenging trip.”
Mrs. Raub said, “Now perhaps your community understands the need of standby equipment, which I’ve always said is essential.”
“Could—we send a representative up to listen with your group and report back to us?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Raub said. “But—”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” he agreed. “It’s not—” He gestured. What was it about Dangerfield, sitting up there above them in the satellite as it passed over them each day? Contact with the world… Dangerfield looked down and saw everything, the rebuilding, all the changes both good and bad; he monitored every broadcast, recording and preserving and then playing back, so that through him they were joined.
In his mind, the familiar voice now gone so long from their community—he could summon it still, hear the rich low chuckle, the earnest tones, the intimacy, and never anything phony. No slogans, no Fourth-of-July expostulations, none of the stuff that had gotten them all where they were now.
Once he had heard Dangerfield say, “Want to know the real reason I wasn’t in the war? Why they carefully shot me off into space a little bit in advance? They knew better than to give me a gun… I would have shot an officer.” And he had chuckled, making it a joke; but it was true, what he said, everything he told them was true, even when it was made funny. Dangerfield hadn’t been politically reliable, and yet now he sat up above them passing over their heads year in, year out. And he was a man they believed.
Set on the side of a ridge, the Raub house overlooked West Marin County, with its vegetable fields and irrigation ditches, an occasional goat staked out, and of course the horses; standing at the living room window, Eldon Blaine saw below him, near a farmhouse, a great Percheron which no doubt pulled a plow… pulled, too, an engineless automobile along the road to Sonoma County when it was time to pick up supplies.
He saw now a horse-car moving along the county road; it would have picked him up if Mrs. Raub hadn’t found him first, and he would have soon reached Petaluma.
Down the hillside below him pedaled Mrs. Raub on her way to find him his antibiotics; to his amazement she had left him alone in her house, free to nap everything in sight, and now he turned to see what there was. Chairs, books, in the kitchen, food and even a bottle of wine, clothes in all the closets—he roamed about the house, savoring everything; it was almost like before the war, except that of course the useless electrical appliances had been thrown out long ago.
Through the back windows of the house he saw the green wooden side of a large water-storage tank. The Raubs, he realized, had their own supply of water. Going outside he saw a clear, untainted stream.
At the stream a kind of contraption lurked, like a cart on wheels. He stared at it; extensions from it were busily filling buckets with water. In the center of it sat a man with no arms or legs. The man nodded his head as if conducting music, and the machinery around him responded. It was a phocomelus, Eldon realized, mounted on his phocomobile, his combination cart and manual grippers which served as mechanical substitutes for his missing limbs. What was he doing, stealing the Raubs’ water?
“Hey,” Eldon said.
At once the phocomelus turned his head; his eyes blazed at Eldon in alarm, and then something whacked into Eldon’s middle—he was thrown back, and as he wobbled and struggled to regain his balance he discovered that his arms were pinned at his sides. A wire mesh had whipped out at him from the phocomobile, had fastened in place. The phocomelus’ means of defense.
“Who are you?” the phocomelus said, stammering in his wary eagerness to know. “You don’t live around here; I don’t know you.”
“I’m from Bolinas,” Eldon said. The metal mesh crushed in until he gasped. “I’m the glasses man. Mrs. Raub, she told me to wait here.”
Now the mesh seemed to ease. “I can’t take chances,” the phocomelus said. “I won’t let you go until June Raub comes back.” The buckets once more began dipping in the water; they filled methodically until the tank lashed to the phocomobile was slopping over.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” Eldon asked. “Taking water from the Raubs’ stream?”
“I’ve got a right,” the phocomelus said. “I give back more than I take, to everybody around here.”
“Let me go,” Eldon said. “I’m just trying to get medicine for my kid; she’s dying.”
“‘My kid, she’s dying,’ “ the phocomelus mimicked, picking up the quality of his voice with startling accuracy. He rolled away from the stream, now, closer to Eldon. The ‘mobile gleamed; all its parts were new-looking and shiny. It was one of the best-made mechanical constructions that Eldon Blaine had ever seen.
“Let me go,” Eldon said, “and I’ll give you a pair of glasses free. Any pair I have.”
“My eyes are perfect,” the phocomelus said. “Everything about me is perfect. Parts are missing, but I don’t need them; I can do better without them. I can get down this hill faster than you, for instance.”
“Who built your ‘mobile?” Eldon asked. Surely in seven years it would have become tarnished and partly broken, like everything else.
“I built it,” the phocomelus said.
“How can you build your own ‘mobile? That’s a contradiction.”
“I used to be body-wired. Now I’m brain-wired; I did that myself, too. I’m the handy, up here. Those old extensors the Government built befQre the war—they weren’t even as good as the flesh things, like you have.” The phocomelus grimaced. He had a thin, flexible face, with a sharp nose and extremely white teeth, a face ideal for the emotion which he now showed Eldon Blaine.
“Dangerfield says that the handies are the most valuable people in the world,” Eldon said. “He declared Worldwide Handyman Week, one time we were listening, and he named different handies who were especially well-known. What’s your name? Maybe he mentioned you.”