England and Ireland, apparently, were nearly deserted. Most of northern Europe also was a wasteland because of a brief ice age that had come with some of the time changes and covered most of that continent with an ice sheet from the Arctic Circle as far south as the middle of France. This ice sheet was now gone; but the human life that was left was now all below the former ice line. Stretching around the Mediterranean and into the north of Africa were essentially nothing more than scattered, single family households. The rest of Africa, like South America, was largely non-communicating, from which Bill assumed that those areas had been pretty well depopulated by the time storm also.
Russia, India and the whole Oriental area had also been hard hit. As a result they appeared to have fallen back into a sort of peaceful medieval, agricultural condition, with small villages scattered sparsely across the immensity of land. Australia and New Zealand had lost almost all of their cities, but had a surprising number of families surviving pretty much as they always had in the interior and on the rest of that island continent. However, these people, although articulate and largely supplied with their own radios, were so widely scattered that they were also, in effect, no more than individual families living in isolation.
Bill had made a large map on one wall of the rambling, continually building structure that my group had come to call the summer palace. The place was a strange construction, being composed partly of lumber, partly of native rocks cemented together, and partly of cement blocks trucked in from a half-obliterated town thirty miles away, that had owned a cement block factory. The palace had poured concrete floors and bare walls for the most part; but Bill had been a good enough architect to see that it was adequately wired and equipped with ductwork, not only for heating, but for summer air conditioning. I think that I had been conscious of the existence of his map in it, during my nonparticipating period; but I had never looked at the map with any degree of interest until the Old Man cracked me out of my shell. Now that I did, I found myself marveling that what was left of the world could have gotten its scattered parts back into contact with each other in such a short time.
I discovered something else, as a byproduct of reawakening to what was going on around me. This was that our new world was a world hungry for news, and I myself was a piece of that news. By this time, all the people on earth who had radio receivers knew who it was who had brought the local effects of the time storm into balance. They knew what I looked like, who my lieutenants were, and what our local situation here was. I was, I discovered, regarded as a sort of combination of Einstein and Napoleon—and the planet’s number one celebrity. This attention might ordinarily have given me a large opinion of myself. However, under the circumstances, it had a hollow ring to it. It was rather like being crowned King of the Earth on the stage of the empty Hollywood Bowl, while an audience of five sat in the middle of the front row seats and applauded energetically. After discovering what it was like, I put my position in the world-wide, public eye out of my mind and concentrated on matters close to home.
It was curious that I, who had once believed that I could never endure to be married, now had two wives. Of course, legally, I was married to neither one of them; but wives they were in every practical sense of the word, and particularly in the eyes of the community surrounding us. Marie and Ellen—I would have bet anyone that if there were ever two women likely not to get on with each other at all, it would be those two. Marie was talkative, conventional and probably—she had never told me her age—older than I was. The girl was certainly still well under twenty, close-mouthed to an almost abnormal degree, and recognized no convention or rules but her own. What the two of them could have in common was beyond me. I puzzled over it from time to time but never succeeded in getting an answer.
But they joined forces magnificently when it came to lining up in opposition to me. One of the typical examples of this appeared directly after I had come back to my senses and rejoined the world of the living. All the time that I had been more or less out of my head, they had taken care of me as if I had been three years old. Now that I had my ordinary wits back, rather than just getting back to normal ways, they both apparently decided, without a word, that I should get it through my head that my days of being waited upon were over.
This would have been all right if they had merely returned to the normal pattern of affairs that had existed before we got the time storm forced into balance. But they now moved as far in the direction of leaving me to my own devices as they had gone previously in watching over me. In fact, the whole matter went to what I considered ridiculous limits.
For example, during the time I had been obsessed with my inner problems, I had been, except for rare intervals, as sexless as a eunuch. When I came back to myself, of course, that changed. The day the Old Man helped me break me loose, I found myself waiting for the evening and the hours of privacy in the motorhome. I had never been one to want more than one woman in my bed at a time; and I was not at all sure whether it was the girl or Marie I wanted that night. But I definitely knew that I wanted one or the other. I gave them time to get settled first; but when I came to the motorhome, Ellen was nowhere to be seen and Marie was a mound under covers on her own bed, her back towards me.
I blew gently into her ear to wake her up and get her to turn toward me. She came to, but not satisfactorily.
“Not tonight,” she murmured sleepily, and pulled the blanket up to where it almost covered her head.
Annoyed, I left the motorhome and went out to look for Ellen. I found her after some search, in a sleeping bag at the foot of a tree, with her rifle leaning up against it in arm’s reach. The rebuff from Marie had taken some of the rosy glow off my feelings. I poked the sleeping bag and her eyes opened.
“What are you doing out here?” I said.
“Sleeping,” she said. “Goodnight.”
She closed her eyes and pulled her head down into the sleeping bag.
Angry, and not a little hurt, I wandered off. Was this all the two of them cared for me after all? Here I was back to normalcy and neither one seemed to give a damn. It was almost as if they had preferred me as the mindless near-idiot I had been for the past eighteen months.
I went back into the motorhome, opened the cupboards that held our bottled goods and took out a bottle of sour mash bourbon. I made myself a solitary campfire off into the woods, at the edge of the clearing holding the motorhome and the half-finished shape of the summer palace, and set out to get myself drunk by way of solitary celebration. But it did not work. I got thickheaded without feeling any better and finally gave up, going back to the motorhome and falling into my own lonely bunk without bothering to do much more than take off my boots.
If that was all they cared for how it had been with me this past year and a half, I thought resentfully as I dropped off.
It was not until late the next morning, when I woke up to a dry mouth, a headache and the sunlight streaming through the windows of the motorhome, that it occurred to me to think how it might have been for them too. If I had been essentially without a woman all that time, they had been essentially without a man. Or had they? That was a question I found I really didn’t want to consider, although I made a mental note to find the answer sometime later. (I never did find out as a matter of fact.) I got up, washed, shaved, changed clothes and went out.
Not only had they forsaken my bed, there was no sign of any breakfast made for me. Not that I was incapable of cooking for myself, but I had gotten used to having the spoon all but put in my mouth, and I felt the transition to the present state of neglect to be unnecessarily harsh and abrupt. However, the motorhome refrigerator, run from the standby oil generator outside it, had cold juice, eggs and canned sausage. I made myself a pretty decent meal, scrupulously washed up after myself—just to rub their noses in the fact that I could be independent too—and went outside to see what was going on.