“Sorry,” George said, “I don’t want to sell. You better go directly to Mr. Gill; you can find him during the day at his shop. It’s here in Point Reyes Station but of course he gets all around; he has a horse-drawn VW minibus.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” Mr. Barnes said. He put his nickel away, very carefully.
“Do you intend to board the ferry?” the Oakland official asked. “If not, I wish you’d move your car, because it’s blocking the gate.”
“Sure,” Stuart McConchie said. He got back into his car, flicked the reins that made Edward Prince of Wales, his horse, begin pulling. Edward pulled, and the engineless 1975 Pontiac passed back through the gate and out onto the pier.
The Bay, choppy and blue, lay on both sides, and Stuart watched through the windshield as a gull swopped to seize some edible from the pilings. Fishing lines, too… men catching their evening meals. Several of the men wore the remains of Army uniforms. Veterans who perhaps lived beneath the pier. Stuart drove on.
If only he could afford to telephone San Francisco. But the underwater cable was out again, and the lines had to go all the way down to San Jose and up the other side, along the peninsula, and by the time the call reached San Francisco it would cost him five dollars in silver money. So, except for a rich person, that was out of the question; he had to wait the two hours until the ferry left… but could he stand to wait that long?
He was after something important.
He had heard a rumor that a huge Soviet guided missile had been found, one which had failed to go off; it lay buried in the ground near Belmont, and a farmer had discovered it while plowing. The farmer was selling it off in the form of individual parts, of which there were thousands in the guidance system alone. The farmer wanted a penny a part, your choice. And Stuart, in his line of work, needed many such parts. But so did lots of other people. So it was first come, first serve; unless he got across the Bay to Belmont fairly soon, it would be too late—there would be no electronic parts left for him and his business.
He sold (another man made them) small electronic traps. Vermin had mutated and now could avoid or repel the ordinary passive trap, no matter how complicated. The cats in particular had become different, and Mr. Hardy built a superior cat trap, even better than his rat and dog traps.
It was theorized by some that in the years since the war cats had developed a language. At night people heard them mewing to one another in the dankness, a stilted, brisk series of gruff sounds unlike any of the old noises. And the cats ganged together in little packs and—this much at least was certain—collected food for the times ahead. It was these caches of food, cleverly stored and hidden, which had first alarmed people, much more so than the new noises. But in any case the cats, as well as the rats and dogs, were dangerous. They killed and ate small children almost at will—or at least so one heard. And of course wherever possible, they themselves were caught and eaten in return. Dogs, in particular, if stuffed with rice, were considered delicious; the little local Berkeley newspaper which came out once a week, the Berkeley Tribune, had recipes for dog soup, dog stew, even dog pudding.
Meditating about dog pudding made Stuart realize how hungry he was. It seemed to him that he had not stopped being hungry since the first bomb fell; his last really adequate meal had been the lunch at Fred’s Fine Foods that day he had run into the phoce doing his phony vision-act. And where, he wondered suddenly, was that little phoce now? He hadn’t thought of him in years.
Now, of course, one saw many phoces, and almost all of them on their ‘mobiles, exactly as Hoppy had been, placed dead center each in his own little universe, like an armless, legless god. The sight still repelled Stuart, but there were so many repellent sights these days… it was one of many and certainly not the worst. What he objected to the most, he had decided, was the sight of symbiotics ambling along the street: several people fused together at some pert of their anatomy, sharing common organs. It was a sort of Bluthgeld elaboration of the old Siamese twins… but these were not limited to two. He had seen as many as six joined. And the fusions had occurred—not in the womb—but shortly afterward. It saved the lives of imperfects, those born lacking vital organs, requiring a symbiotic relationship in order to survive. One pancreas now served several people… it was a biological triumph. But in Stuart’s view, the imperfects should simply have been allowed to die.
On the surface of the Bay to his right a legless veteran propelled himself out onto the water aboard a raft, rowing himself toward a pile of debris that was undoubtedly a sunken ship. On the hulk a number of fishing lines could be seen; they belonged to the veteran and he was in the process of checking them. Watching the raft go, Stuart wondered if it could reach the San Francisco side. He could offer the man fifty cents for a one-way trip; why not? Stuart got out of his car and walked to the edge of the water.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Come here.” From his pocket he got a penny; he tossed it down onto the pier and the veteran saw it, heard it. At once he spun the raft about and came paddling rapidly back, straining to make speed, his face streaked with perspiration. He grinned up at Stuart, cupping his ear.
“Fish?” he called. “I don’t have one yet today, but maybe later. Or how about a small shark? Guaranteed safe.” He held up the battered Geiger counter which he had connected to his waist by a length of rope—in case it fell from the raft or someone tried to steal it, Stuart realized.
“No,” Stuart said, squatting down at the edge of the pier. “I want to get over to San Francisco; I’ll pay you a quarter for one way.”
“But I got to leave my lines to do that,” the veteran said, his smile fading. “I got to collect them all or somebody’d steal them while r was gone.”
“Thirty-five cents,” Stuart said.
In the end they agreed, at a price of forty cents. Stuart locked the legs of Edward Prince of Wales together so no one could steal him, and presently he was out on the Bay, bobbing up and down aboard the veteran’s raft, being rowed to San Francisco.
“What field are you in?” the veteran asked him. “You’re not a tax collector, are you?” He eyed him calmly.
“Naw,” Stuart said. “I’m a small trap man.”
“Listen, my friend,” the veteran said, “I got a pet rat lives under the pilings with me? He’s smart; he can play the flute. I’m not putting you under an illusion, it’s true. I made a little wooden flute and he plays it, through his nose… it’s practically an Asiatic nose-flute like they have in India. Well, I did have him, but the other day he got run over. I saw the whole thing happen; I couldn’t go get him or nothing. He ran across the pier to get something, maybe a piece of cloth… he has this bed I made for him but he gets—I mean he got—cold all the time because when they mutated, this particular line, they lost their hair.”
“I’ve seen those,” Stuart said, thinking how well the hairless brown rat evaded even Mr. Handy’s electronic vermin trap. “Actually I believe what you said,” he said. “I know rats pretty well. But they’re nothing compared to those little striped gray-brown tabby cats… I’ll bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.”
“True,” the veteran said. “But he was an artist. You ought to have heard him play; I used to get a crowd at night, after we were finished with the fishing. I tried to teach him the Bach Chaconne in D.”
“I caught one of those tabby cats once,” Stuart said, “that I kept for a month until it escaped. It could make little sharp-pointed things out of tin can lids. It bent them or something; I never did see., how it did it, but they were wicked.”
The veteran, rowing, said, “What’s it like south of San Francisco these days? I can’t come up on land.” He indicated the lower part of his body. “I stay on the raft. There’s a little trap door, when I have to go to the bathroom. What I need is to find a dead phoce sometime and get his cart. They call them phocomobiles.”