“Yes, I understand it, poppa. I won’t ever do it again. Never again.” .
“I hope you won’t. Now, start for the barn, Saul. Go ahead.” Plunkett slid his heavy leather belt from its loops.
“Elliot! Don’t you think he understands the horrible thing? A beating won’t make it any clearer.”
He paused behind the weeping boy trudging to the barn. “It won’t make it any clearer, but it will teach him the lesson another way. All seven of us are going to be in that cellar three minutes after the alarm, if I have to wear this strap clear down to the buckle!”
When Plunkett later clumped into the kitchen with his heavy farm boots, he stopped and sighed.
Ann was feeding Dinah. With her eyes on the baby, she asked, “No supper for him, Elliot?”
“No supper.” He sighed again. “It does take it out of a man.”
“Especially you. Not many men would become a farmer at thirty-five. Not many men would sink every last penny into an underground fort and powerhouse, just for insurance. But you’re right.”
“I only wish,” he said restlessly, “that I could work out some way of getting Nancy’s heifer into the cellar. And if eggs stay high one more month I can build the tunnel to the generator. Then, there’s the well. Only one well, even if it’s enclosed—”
“And when we came out here seven years ago—” She rose to him at last and rubbed her lips gently against his thick blue shirt. “We only had a piece of ground. Now, we have three chicken houses, a thousand broilers, and I can’t keep track of how many layers and breeders.”
She stopped as his body tightened and he gripped her shoulders.
“Ann, Ann\ If you think like that, you’ll act like that! How can I expect the children to—Ann, what we have-all we have—is a five-room cellar, concrete-lined, which we can seal in a few seconds, an enclosed well from a fairly deep underground stream, a windmill generator for power and a sunken oil-burner-driven generator for emergencies. We have supplies to carry us through, geiger counters to detect radiation and lead-lined suits to move about in—afterwards. I’ve told you again and again that these things are our lifeboat, and the farm is just a sinking ship.”
“Of course, darling.” Plunkett’s teeth ground together, then parted helplessly as his wife went back to feeding Dinah, the baby.
“You’re perfectly right. Swallow now, Dinah. Why, that last bulletin from the Survivors Club would make anybody think.”
He had been quoting from the October Survivor, and Ann had recognized it. Well? At least they were doing something—seeking out nooks and feverishly building crannies—pooling their various ingenuities in an attempt to haul themselves and their families through the military years of the Atomic Age.
The familiar green cover of the mimeographed magazine was very noticeable on the kitchen table. He flipped the sheets to the thumb-smudged article on page five and shook his head.
“Imagine!” he said loudly. “The poor fools agreeing with the government again on the safety factor. Six minutes! How can they—an organization like the Survivors Club making that their official opinion! Why freeze, freeze alone ....”
“They’re ridiculous,” Ann murmured, scraping the bottom of the bowl.
“All right, we have automatic detectors. But human beings still have to look at the radar scope, or we’d be diving underground every time there’s a meteor shower.”
He strode along a huge table, beating a fist rhythmically into one hand. “They won’t be so sure, at first. Who wants to risk his rank by giving the nationwide signal that makes everyone in the country pull ground over his head, that makes our own projectile sites set to buzz? Finally, they are certain: they freeze for a moment. Meanwhile, the rockets are zooming down—how fast, we don’t know. The men unfreeze, they trip each other up, they tangle frantically. Then, they press the button; then, the nationwide signal starts our radio alarms.”
Plunkett turned to his wife, spread earnest, quivering arms. “And then, Ann, we freeze when we hear it! At last, we start for the cellar. Who knows, who can dare to say, how much has been cut off the margin of safety by that time? No, if they claim that six minutes is the safety factor, we’ll give half of it to the alarm system. Three minutes for us.”
“One more spoonful,” Ann urged Dinah. “Just one more. Down it goes!”
Josephine Dawkins and Herbie were cleaning the feed trolley in the shed at the near end of the chicken house.
“All done, pop,” the boy grinned at his father. “And the eggs taken care of. When does Mr. Whiting pick ’em up?”
“Nine o’clock. Did you finish feeding the hens in the last house?”
“I said all done, didn’t I?” Herbie asked with adolescent impatience. “When I say a thing, I mean it.”
“Good. You kids better get at your books. Hey, stop that! Education will be very important, afterwards. You never know what will be useful. And maybe only your mother and I to teach you.”
“Gee,” Herbie nodded at Josephine. “Think of that.”
She pulled at her jumper where it was very tight over newly swelling breasts and patted her blonde braided hair. “What about my mother and father, Mr. Plunkett? Won’t they be—be—”
“Naw!” Herbie laughed the loud, country laugh he’d been practicing lately. “They’re dead-enders. They won’t pull through. They live in the City, don’t they? They’ll just be some—”
“Herbie!”
“—some foam on a mushroom-shaped cloud,” he finished, utterly entranced by the image. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, as he looked from his angry father to the quivering girl. He went on in a studiously reasonable voice. “But it’s the truth, anyway. That’s why they sent you and Lester here. I guess I’ll marry you—afterwards. And you ought to get in the habit of calling him pop. Because that’s the way it’ll be.”
Josephine squeezed her eyes shut, kicked the shed door open, and ran out. “I hate you, Herbie Plunkett,” she wept. “You’re a beast!”
Herbie grimaced at his father—women, women, women!—and ran after her. “Hey, Jo! Listen!”
The trouble was, Plunkett thought worriedly as he carried the emergency bulbs for the hydroponic garden into the cellar—the trouble was that Herbie had learned through constant reiteration the one thing: survival came before all else, and amenities were merely amenities.
Strength and self-sufficiency—Plunkett had worked out the virtues his children needed years ago, sitting in air-conditioned offices and totting corporation balances with one eye always on the calendar.
“Still,” Plunkett muttered, “still—Herbie shouldn’t—” He shook his head.
He inspected the incubators near the long steaming tables of the hydroponic garden. A tray about ready to hatch. They’d have to start assembling eggs to replace it in the morning. He paused in the third room, filled a gap in the bookshelves.
“Hope Josephine steadies the boy in his schoolwork. If he fails that next exam, they’ll make me send him to town regularly. Now there’s an aspect of survival I can hit Herbie with.”
He realized he’d been talking to himself, a habit he’d been combating futilely for more than a month. Stuffy talk, too. He was becoming like those people who left tracts on trolley cars.
“Have to start watching myself,” he commented. “Dammit, again!”