“Well―” said Alvah.
“And about New York, I appreciate that. But the Cities are done for, Alvah. In ten years there won’t be one left. They’re finished.”
ALVAH stiffened. “That’s the most ridiculous―”
“Is it? Then why are you here?”
“Well, we’re in a crisis period now, but we’ve come through them before. You can’t―”
“This crisis of yours started a long while ago. If I remember, it was around 1927 that Muller first changed the genes in fruit flies with X-ray bombardment. That was the first step―over a hundred years before you were even born. Then came colchicine and the electron microscope and microsurgery, all in the next thirty years. But the day biological engineering really grew up―1962, Jenkins’ and Scripture’s gene charts and techniques―the Cities began to go. Little by little, people drifted out to the land again, raising the new crops, growing the new animals.
“The big Cities cannibalized the little ones, like an insect eating its own body when its food supply runs out. Now that’s gone as far as it can, and you think it’s just another crisis, but it isn’t. It’s the end.”
Alvah heard a chill echo of Wytak’s words: “Rome tell. Babylon tell. The same thing can happen to New York …”
He said, “What am I supposed to be, the rat that leaves the sinking ship?”
She sighed. “Alvah, you got a better brain than that.
“You don’t have to think in metaphors or slogans, like a moron. I’m not asking you to join the winning side. That doesn’t matter. In a few years there won’t be but one side, no matter which way you jump.”
“What do you want then?” he asked.
She looked dispirited. “Nothing, I guess. Let’s go home.”
IT was a series of little things after that. There was the time he and Beej, out walking in the cool of the morning, stopped to rest at an isolated house that turned out to be occupied by George Allister of the Coffin clan, the shy little man who’d tried to show Alvah how to make his marks the day he landed.
George, Alvah believed ― and questioning of Beej afterward confirmed it―was about as low on the social scale as a Muckfoot could get. But he was his own master. He had a wife and three children and neat fields, with his own animals grazing in them. His house was big and cool and clean. He poured them lemonade ―which Alvah wistfully had to decline―from a sweating peacock-blue pitcher, while sitting at his ease on the broad front porch.
There were no servants among the Muckfeet. Alvah remembered an ancient fear of his, something that had cropped up in the old days every time he got seriously interested in a girl―that his children, if any, might relapse into the labor-pool category from which he had risen or―it was hard to say which would be worse ―into the servants’ estate.
He went back from that outing very silent and thoughtful.
There was the time, a few days later, when Beej was working, and Alvah, at loose ends, wandered into a room in the laboratory building where two of Bither’s assistants, girls he knew by sight, were sitting with two large, leathery-woody, pod-shaped boxes open on the bench between them.
Being hungry for company and preoccupied with himself at the same time, he didn’t notice what should have been obvious, that the girls were busy at something private and personal. Even when they closed the boxes between them, he wasn’t warned. “What’s this?” he said cheerfully. “Can I see?”
They glanced at each other uncertainly. “These is our bride boxes,” said the brunette. “We don’t usual show them to singletons―”
They exchanged another glance.
“He’s spoke for anyhow,” said the redhead, with an enigmatic look at Alvah.
They opened the boxes. Inside each was a multitude of tiny compartments, each with a bit of something wrapped in cloth or paper tissue. The brunette chose one of the largest and unwrapped it with exaggerated care ― an amorphous reddish-brown lump.
“Houseplant,” she said, and wrapped it up again.
The redhead showed him a vial full of minuscule white spheres. “Weaver eggs. Two hundred of them. That’s a lot, but I like more curtains and things than most.”
“Wait a minute,” said Alvah, perplexed. “What does a houseplant do?”
“Grow a house, of course,” the brunette said. She held up another vial full of eggs. “Scavengers.”
The redhead had a translucent sac with dark specks in it. “Utility trees.”
“Garbage converter.”
“This grows into a bed and these is chairbushes.”
And so on, interminably, while the girls’ eyes glittered and their cheeks flushed with enthusiasm.
THE boxes, Alvah gathered, contained the germs of everything that would be needed to set up a Muckfoot household ― beginning with the house itself. A thought struck him: “Does Beej have one of these outfits?”
Wide-eyed stares from both girls. “Well, of course!”
Alvah shifted uncomfortably. “Funny, she never mentioned it.”
The girls exchanged another of those enigmatic glances and said nothing. Alvah, for some reason, grew more uncomfortable still. He tried once more. “What about the man―doesn’t he have to put up anything?”
Yes, the man was expected to supply all the brutes and the seeds for outbuildings and all the crops except the bride’s kitchengarden. Everything in and around the home was her province, everything outside was his.
“Oh,” said Alvah.
“But if a young fellow don’t have all that through no fault of his own, his clan put up for him and let him pay back when he able.”
“Ah,” said Alvah and turned to make his escape.
The redhead called after him, “You thought any about what clan you like to get adopted into, Alvah?”
“Uh, no,” said Alvah. “I don’t think―”
“You talk to Doc Bither. He a elder of the Steins. Mighty good clan!”
Alvah bolted.
Then there was the Shakespeare business. It began in his third week in the Sticks, when he was already carrying a fleshy Muckfoot vegetable around with him―a radnip, B. J. called it. He hadn’t had the nerve yet to bite into it, but he knew the time was coming when he would. Beej came to him and said, “Alvah, the Rinaldos’ drama group is doing Hamlet next Saturday, and they’re short a Polonius. Do you think you could study it up by then?”
“What’s Hamlet? And who’s Polonius?”
She got the bird out of the library for him and he listened to the play, which turned out to be an archaic version of The Manager of Copenhagen. The text was nothing like the modernized abridgment he was used to, or the Muckfeet’s slovenly speech either. It was full of words like down-gyved and unkennel. It was three-quarters incomprehensible until he began to get the hang of it, but it had a curious power. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, and so on and so on. It rumbled, but it rumbled well.
POLONIUS, however, was the character Alvah knew as Paul Arnson, an inconsequential old man who only existed in the play to foul up the love affair between the principals and got killed in the third act. Alvah ventured to suggest that he might be of more use as Hamlet, but the director, a dry little man with a surprising boom to his voice, stubbornly insisted that all he needed was a Polonius―and seemed to intimate, without actually saying so, that Alvah was a dim prospect even for that.