Now, on foot, he walked slowly toward San Pablo Avenue. The sun had begun to sink into the lavish, extensive sunset which they had become accustomed to seeing in the years since the Emergency. He scarcely noticed it. Maybe I ought to go into some other business, he said to himself. Small animal traps—it’s a living, but there’s no advancement possible in it. I mean, where can you rise to in a business like that?
The loss of his horse had depressed him; he gazed down at the broken, grass-infested sidewalk as he picked his way along, past the rubble which once had been factories. From a burrow in a vacant lot something with eager eyes noted his passing; something, he surmised gloomily, that ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin.
This, he thought, explains why Hoppy might legitimately have imagined he was seeing the afterlife. These ruins, the smoky, flickering pallor of the sky… the eager eyes still following him as the creature calculated whether it could safely attack him. Bending, he picked up a sharp hunk of concrete and chucked it at the burrow—a dense layer of organic and in-organic material packed tightly, glued in place by some sort of white slime. The creature had emulsified some of the debris lying around, had reformed it into a usable paste. Must be a brilliant animal, he thought. But he did not care. The world could do without the brilliant and deranged life forms exposed to the light of day in the past years.
I’ve evolved, too, he said, turning one last time to face the creature, in case it might scuttle after him from behind. My wits are much clearer than they formerly were; I’m a match for you any time, so give up.
Evidently the creature agreed; it did not even come forth from its burrow.
I’m evolved, he thought, but sentimental. For he genuinely missed the horse. Damn those criminal veterans, he said to himself. They probably swarmed all over Edward the moment we pushed off in the raft. I wish I could get out of town; I wish I could emigrate to the open country where there’s none of this brutal cruelty and hoodlumism. That’s what that psychiatrist did, after the Emergency. Stockstill got right out of the East Bay; I saw him go. He was smart. He did not try to return to his old rut, he did not merely pick up where he left off, as I did.
I mean, he thought, I’m no better off now than I was before the goddam Emergency; I sold TV sets then and now I sell electronic vermin traps. What is the difference? One’s as bad as the other. I’m going downhill, in fact.
To cheer himself he got out one of his remaining special deluxe Gold Label Andrew Gill cigarettes and lit up.
A whole day wasted, he realized, on this wild goose chase to the far side of the Bay. In two hours it would be dark and he would be going to sleep, down in the cat peltlined basement room which Mr. Hardy rented him for a dolhr in silver a month. Of course, he could light his fat lamp; he could burn it for a little while, read a book or part of a book—most of his library consisted of merely sections of books, the remaining portions having been destroyed or lost. Or he could visit old Mr. and Mrs. Hardy and sit in on the evening transmission from the satellite.
After all, he had personally radioed a request to Dangerfield just the other day, from the transmitter out on the mudflats in West Richmond. He had asked for “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” an old-fashioned favorite which he remembered from his childhood. It was not known if Dangerfield had that tune on his miles of tapes, however, so perhaps he was waiting in vain.
As he walked along he sang to himself,
It brought tears to his eyes to remember one of the old songs, from the world the way it was. All gone now, he said to himself. Bluthgelded out of existence, as they say… and what do we have instead, a rat that can play the noseflute, and not even that because the rat got run over.
There was another old favorite, the tune about the man who had the knife; he tried to recall how it had gone. Something about the shark having teeth or pretty teeth. It was too vague; he could not recollect it. His mother had played a record of it for him; a man, with a gravelly voice, had sung it and it was beautiful.
I’ll bet the rat couldn’t play that, he said to himself. Not in a million years. I mean, that’s practically sacred music. Out of our past, our sacred past that no brilliant animal and no funny person can share. The past belongs only to us genuine human beings. I wish (the idea stirred him) that I could do like Hoppy used to do; I wish I could go into a trance, but not see ahead like he did—I want to go back.
If Hoppy’s alive now, can he do that? Has he tried it? I wonder where he is, that preview; that’s what he was, a preview. The first phoce. I’ll bet he did escape with his life. He probably went over to the Chinese when they made that landing up north.
I’d go back, he decided, to that first time I met Jim Fergesson, when I was looking for a job and it was still tough for a Negro to find a job in which he met the public. That was the thing about Fergesson; he didn’t have any prejudice. I remember that day; I had a job selling aluminum pans door to door and then I got the job with the Britannica people but that was also door to door. My god, Stuart realized; my first genuine job was with Jim Fergesson, because you can’t count that door to door stuff.
While he was thinking about Jim Fergesson—who was now dead and gone all these years since the bomb fell– he arrived on San Pablo Avenue with its little shops open here and there, little shacks which sold everything from coat hangers to hay. One of them, not far off, was HARDY’S HOMEOSTATIC VERMIN TRAPS, and he headed in that direction.
As he entered, Mr. Hardy glanced up from his assembly table in the rear; he worked under the white light of an arc lamp, and all around him lay heaps of electronic parts which he had scavenged from every corner Of Northern California. Many had come from the ruins out in Livermore; Mr. Hardy had connections with State officials and they had permitted him to dig there in the restricted deposits.
In former times Dean Hardy had been an engineer for an AM radio station in downtown Oakland; he was a slender, quiet-spoken, elderly man who wore a green sweater and a necktie even now—and a tie was unique, in these times. His hair was gray and curly, and he reminded Stuart of a beardless Santa Claus: he had a droll, dour expression and a roguish sense of humor. Physically, he was small; he weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds. But he had a near-violent temper and Stuart respected him. Hardy was nearly sixty, and in many respects he had become a father-figure to Stuart. Stuart’s actual father, dead since the ‘70s, had been an insurance underwriter, also a quiet man who wore a tie and sweater, but he had not had Hardy’s ferocity, his outbursts; or if he had, Stuart had never witnessed them or had repressed the memory of them.
And, too, Dean Hardy resembled Jim Fergesson.
That more than any other factor had drawn Stuart to him, three years ago. He was conscious of it; he did not deny it or want to deny it. He missed Jim Fergesson and he was drawn to anyone who resembled him.
To Mr. Hardy he said, “They ate my horse.” He seated himself on a chair at the front of the shop.
At once Ella Hardy, his employer’s wife, appeared from the living quarters in the rear; she had been fixing dinner. “You left him?”
“Yes,” he admitted. She, a formidable woman, glared at him with accusing indignation. “I thought he was safe out on the City of Oakland public ferry pier; there’s an official there who—”
“It happens all the time,” Hardy said wearily. “The bastards. It must have been those war vets who hole up down there. Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds. What about the car? You had to leave it, I guess.”