Norvell nodded. Like practically everybody else he was a member of the Reformed Rationalist Church of the Inchoate Principle, but hell had been mentioned in sermons now and then.
"Well, if a man who said that hell is a perpetual holiday was right, then this is it. Belly Rave, mister. Belly Rave."
Norvell nodded again. It made sense; he could see how it would make irresistible, unarguable sense, after the ten-thousandth sampling of each menu. The crone would try—anything. Being a crone; being an old woman with no talents and no hopes. Those who could do anything, anything at all, would try anything. Anything at all.
It gave him a clue to the enigma named Shep. He said comprehendingly, "So she has her restaurant, and you have your art, and—"
The giant turned on him, picked him up by the lapels and shook him like a kitten.
"You little louse," Shep growled shakily between the broken teeth. "You fool! What do you know? Listen to me, little louse! If you ever say, or hint, or think that I'm just piddling around to kill the time, I'll snap you in two!" He slammed Norvell down on the pavement so hard his arches ached, he stood glaring at Norvell, arms akimbo.
Strangely, Norvell was not frightened. In a clear, intuitive flash he realized that he had said the unspeakable, that the offense was terribly his.
He managed to say, very sincerely, "I'm sorry, Shep."
His knees were shaking and his heart was pounding, but it was only adrenalin. With an unclouded mind he knew what torment had driven this placid hulk to rage: Incessant, relentless, nagging self-doubt. Where leisure is compulsory, how do you tell the burning drive to create from its sterile twin, named "puttering?" You can't. Posterity can; but only posterity. And you won't be there to know. And the self-doubt must remain forever unresolved, forever choked down and forever rising again.
And when, unexpectedly, it leaps forth it burns like acid.
Norvell told the big man steadily, "I won't say that again. I won't even think it. Not because you scared me, but because I know it isn't true." He hesitated. "I—I used to think I was a kind of artist myself. I know what you go through."
Shep grumbled, "Bligh, you're just beginning to find out what you go through—but I'm sorry I blew my top."
"Forget it." They walked on.
Shep said at last, "Here's where we get some more supplies." The place was one of the inevitable picture-window, fieldstone-chimney ruins, but with a fenced-in yard. The gate had a lock on it. Shep kicked the gate down, tearing out the hinges and the staples of the hasp.
Norvell said, "Hey!"
"We do this my way. Hey, Stearns!"
Stearns was a grim, gray man. He threaded his way to them around stacks of plastic fittings, guttering, and miscellaneous. "Hello, Shep," he said flatly. "What do you want?"
Shep said, "I don't have my notebook with me, but I guess I'll remember it all. You hijacked repair materials that a couple of friends of mine got through legitimate black-market channels. I want them back. With interest."
"Still on the protection kick, Shep?" the man asked. His voice was ugly. "If you had any sense you'd come in with me."
"I don't work for anybody, Stearns. I do favors for a few friends, they do favors for me. Trot out your team, Titan of Industry."
Shep, so lightning-fast to resent the slur himself, was insensitive enough to use it on others. With the same results.
Stearns's face went pasty with rage and Norvell knew what was coming next—unless he moved fast. "Stearns!" he yelled, and used the moment's delay to draw the pistol that Virginia had ordered him to carry. Stearns's hand stopped at his lapel and slowly, unwillingly, dropped to his side.
Shep gave Norvell a quick, approving glance. "Trot out your team, Stearns," he ordered.
Stearns didn't look away from the gun in Norvell's hand. "Chris! Willie!" he yelled. "Get the truck."
The truck was a two-wheeler stake job with one starved-looking teen-ager pulling between poles and another pushing against a canvas breast-band. Walking Stearns before him, Shep ordered him to pick up this or that article of building material and put it on the track. He filled the truck, topped the load with a rusty pick and shovel from a tool shed, and told Chris and Willie, "Roll it, kids. It won't be far."
Norvell didn't pocket his gun until they had put three blocks between themselves and Stearns's final malevolent glare.
There were two stops before they headed for Norvell's home. At each of them a part of the supplies were unloaded, to the tearful thanks of sober-looking citizens who had thought them gone forever, and with them the months of accumulation, gambling, and wangling that had earned them in the first place.
Norvell, eyeing the heaving, panting teen-agers, suggested uneasily, "Let's give them a hand with the truck."
But Shep shook his head. "We might get jumped. Our job is convoying."
There was no trouble. The kids rolled the cart to the door of Norvell's house and unloaded the firewood and building materials, stacking them neatly on the shredded broadloom that covered the floor of the sunken living room.
Virginia cast an appraising eye over the neat heaps, weighing, planning. "No tar paper, linoleum, anything like that?"
Shep guffawed. "No diamonds, either," he told her. "You think your roof is the only one that leaks? You're lucky— you got two finished floors. Let the top one get soaked. You'll be all right down here."
"Cack," she said. Norvell winced. "If you can't get tar paper, see if you can find something else to make shingles out of. Sheet tin will do."
"So will the roof off a G.M.L," Shep said sourly, but he made a note. He tossed a couple of rations to the waiting kids, who took them and pushed their empty truck away. He said, "Anything else?"
Virginia, suddenly a hostess, said, "Oh, I suppose not. Care for a drink?"
Norvell, for politeness' sake, took a sip of the bottle Virginia produced—"Ration-jack," she called it; got by trading firewood with the evil-eyed octogenarian in the house next door. He didn't like it. The ration-jack tasted like the chewy fruit bars he had enjoyed until then, when he found them in his ration pack; but the taste was overlaid with the bite of forty-proof alcohol. Beer was what he really liked. They didn't seem to have beer in Belly Rave.
Shep and Virginia were talking; Norvell let the conversation drift past him. He sat back, bone-weary. Physical weariness was a new thing to Norvie Bligh. He had never had it as a child, never had it at General Recreations.
Why was it that doing nothing involved physical labor, and doing actual creative, productive work—running a Field Day, for instance—involved only the work of the mind? Norvie admitted it to himself: Already he was taking on the coloration of Belly Rave. Like its other discouraged, hopeless inhabitants, he was living for the day and ignoring the morrow. Rations and a place to sleep. Perhaps it would not be long, he told himself wonderingly, before he would be one of the simians queueing up at Monmouth Stadium.
Unless he found something to do. But what was there to do? Work on the house? The essentials were done; the bars were up, the trash was carted out into the street, where by and by it would slump into a featureless heap like all the other middens along the road. The less urgent things to do couldn't be done. You couldn't fix the lesser roof leaks—no shingles. You couldn't fix the stairs—no materials; no tools. And no skill.
He said excitedly, oblivious of the fact that he was interrupting, "Virginia! How about starting a garden? A couple of fruit trees—orange, maybe. A few rows of—"