“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood.
“Stranger asking directions.”
“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child.
“I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”
“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back. “Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”
“Thanks.”
“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”
“I understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic tasting but wonderfully cool.
I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.
At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.
Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.
“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”
“Indeed you should have … save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that. ”
She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.
Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.
Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.
“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are. just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”
“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.
“No, no … not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else…”
“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.”
“That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.
“Why don’t you children go down there tonight … show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”
“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”
“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”
“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”
“No problem. Mrs. Potter — April — and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”
We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag but on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.
“A little crowded in here, with Two,” Richard said. “Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”
He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”
“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training. “Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve caliber tumblers — where the hell did you get it?”
“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart. Clean, too clean.
“Has it ever been used?”
“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”
I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.
“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”
I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away. Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.
“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”
He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”
“All right, what’s a jumper?”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they are. Murderers, too, sometimes.
“They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.
“Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road … we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”
“Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”
“There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”
Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.
It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.
Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.
Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.
We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.
I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”