I shook my head at him and my stomach tried to roll into a hard and shrunken ball. I was sick at the sight of him. Here was another one.
“Sir,” he said, “can you tell me what is going on? You’re not a police officer, are you? I don’t care if you are.”
“I’m not a cop,” I told him.
His words were edged with something that was close to hysteria—the voice of a man who had taken about everything he could. A man who had seen his own personal world fall to pieces, bit by bit, a little more each day, and absolutely helpless to do anything about it.
“I’m just a man like you,” I said. “Looking for a stable.” For I’d suddenly recalled what Joy had said about no room in the inn.
It was a screwy thing to say, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“My name,” he said, “is John A. Quinn and I’m a vice-president of an insurance company. My salary is close to forty thou sand, and here I stand without a place to live, without a place for my family to get out of the rain. Except in the car, that is.”
He looked at me. “That’s a laugh,” he said. “Go ahead and laugh.”
“I wouldn’t laugh,” I said. “You couldn’t make me laugh.”
“We sold our house almost a year ago,” Quinn said. “Long-term occupancy. Got a better price for it than I had any hope of getting. We needed a bigger place, you see. The family was growing up. Hated to sell our place. Nice place. Used to it. But we needed room.”
I nodded. It was the same old story.
“Look,” I said, “let’s not stand out here in the rain.”
But it was as if he hadn’t heard me. He felt the need to talk. He was full of talk that needed to get out. Maybe I was the first man he could really talk to, another man like himself, hunting for a shelter.
“We never thought about it,” he said. “We thought it would be simple. With long-term occupancy, we had a lot of time to go out and find the kind of place we wanted. But we never found one. There were ads, of course. But we always were too late. The places had been sold before we even got there. So we tried a builder, and there wasn’t any builder who could promise us a house quicker than two years. I even tried a bribe or two and it did no good. All booked up, they said. There were a lot of them who had a hundred or more houses waiting to be built. That seems incredible, doesn’t it?”
“It surely does,” I said.
“They said if they could get more workmen, they could build for me. But there weren’t any workmen. All of them were busy. All of them had jobs.
“We put off the occupancy date, first thirty days, then sixty, and finally ninety, but there came the day we had to give possession. I offered the purchaser five thousand if he’d cancel the sale, but he wouldn’t do it. Said that he was sorry but that he’d bought the house and that he needed it. Said he’d given me three months longer than had been agreed. And he was right, of course.
“We had nowhere to go. No relatives we Could ask to take us in. None here, at least. We could have sent the kids to some relatives out of town, but we hated to break up the family, and some of the relatives were having troubles of their own. Lots of friends, of course, but you can’t ask Your friends to let you share their house. You can’t even let them know what sort of shape you’re in. There’s such a thing as pride. You keep up the best face that you can and hope it will blow over.
“I tried everything, of course. The hotels and motels were filled up. There were no apartments. I tried to buy a trailer. There was a waiting list. God Almighty, a five- year waiting list.”
“So you are here tonight,” I said.
“Yes,” he told me. “At least it’s off the street and quiet. No passing cars to wake you up. No people walking by. It’s tough. Tough on the wife and kids. We’ve been living in this car for almost a month. We eat in restaurants when we can, but they usually are full up. Mostly we eat at drive- ins or sometimes we buy some stuff and go out into the country and have a picnic. Picnics once were fun, but they aren’t now. Even the kids don’t seem to care for them. We use service stations for sanitary purposes. We do our wash at launderettes. I drive to work each morning; then the wife drives the kids to school. Then she hunts for a place to live until it’s time to pick UP the kids again. Then they all come to the office and pick me up and we look for a place to eat.
“We’ve stood it for a month,” he said. “We can’t take it too much longer. The kids are asking when we’ll have a house again and winter’s coming on. We can’t live in a car when the weather turns cold, when it starts to snow. If we can’t find someplace to live, we’ll have to move to some other city where we can find a house, an apartment, almost anything. I’ll have to give up my job and—”
“It won’t do you any good,” I told him. “There is no place to go. It’s the same all over. It’s like this everywhere.”
“Mister,” said Quinn, desperation pushing his voice to a higher pitch, “tell me what is wrong. What is going on?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, for I couldn’t tell him. It would have only made it worse. Tonight he would be better not to know.
And this, I thought, is the way it is going to be, all over. The world’s population would become nomadic, wandering here and there to try to find that better place when there was no better place. First in family groups, and later, maybe, banding into tribes. Eventually a lot of them would be herded into reservations, or what would amount to reservations, as the only way that existing governments could take care of them. But until the end there would be wanderers, fighting for a roof, scrounging for a scrap of food. To start with, in the first mad rush of anger, they might seize any kind of shelter—their own houses or someone else’s house. At first they would fight for food, would steal it and would hoard it. But the aliens would burn the houses or otherwise destroy them. They would destroy them as their rightful owners and there would be little that could be done about it since it would not be done openly. But the aliens would salve their social conscience because they’d consider it to be legal and the burning would go on. And there was no way to fight back against them, or at least no way that could be found immediately. For you could not fight the Atwoods, you could not battle bowling balls. You could only hate them. They would be hard to catch and they would be hard to kill and they’d have nearby ratholes into another world to which they could retreat.
There would come a time when there were no houses and when there was no food, although Man, perhaps, would linger on in spite of everything. But where there’d been a thousand men there’d now be only one, and when that day arrived the aliens would have won a war that never had been fought. Man would become a skulker on the planet he had owned.
“Mister,” said the man, “I don’t know your name.”
“My name is Graves,” I said.
“All right, Graves, what is the answer? What are we to do?”
“What you should have done from the very first,” I said. “We’re going to break in. You and your family will sleep beneath a roof, have a place to cook, have a bathroom of your own.”
“But breaking in!” he said.
And there it was, I thought. Even in the face of desperation, a man still held regard for the laws of property. You do not steal you don’t break in, you don’t touch a thing that belongs to someone else. And it was this very thing which had brought us where we were. It was these very laws, so revered that we still obeyed them even when they had turned into a trap that would take our birthright from us.
“You need a place for your kids to sleep,” I said. “You need a place to shave.”
“But someone will be around and—”
“If someone comes around,” I said, “and tries to push you out, use a gun on them.”
“I haven’t got a gun,” he said.
“Get one, then,” I told him. “First thing in the morning.”
And I was surprised at how smoothly and how easily I had slipped from a law abiding citizen into another man, quite ready to write another law and stand or fall by it.