Their leader was a black woman in her early twenties, probably one of the only people left alive with a high school education (she had skipped four grades by “testing out”). Her name was Indira Twelve. She liked Ahmed because he was black, and Sam Wasserman because he was brilliant, and the rest of us she tolerated in a friendly but weary way. With the other black people in her group—six of the thirteen—she spoke an impenetrable patois, oddly slurred and clipped, with curious rhyming substitutions for some words (“gland” for “man” and “fright” for “white”), but with the rest of us she used standard English with icy clarity and a professorial vocabulary.
They had made a kind of camp inside the terminal building. At one end they’d broken out a bank of windows for ventilation, and had a fire going. The fire was ringed with sleeping pallets and knapsacks. There was a pile of wood and yellowed newspapers for fuel.
We sat around the fire and she offered us a drink from an improbably large jug of bourbon. I declined, explaining that we’d been advised not to take any local food or drink.
“Typical bureaucratic half-logic,” she said. “Nothing could live in this stuff.” She measured out drinks for her companions (probably glad that it didn’t have to go around), and things slowly got more relaxed.
There were logistical problems to be hammered out. The spaceport was sixty kilometers from their bomb-shelter home base, and we had several tonnes of supplies to move out there. Richards and Rocky and a couple of groundhogs went out to the parking lot to try to find a working floater compatible with the fuel cells we’d brought.
I spread out my worksheet timetable and went over it with Indira. We were going to wait three weeks before planting anything, in case of a late frost, but there was plenty to do in the meantime. We had to take an inventory of their agricultural equipment and either scavenge or improvise what was missing. There was a lot of technique to be taught before a single seedling went in the ground, and a lot of plowing and hoeing. The doctors had a two-week program of tests and inoculations set up, and it was obvious that the dentist had his work cut out for him—the children born after the war had never been vaccinated against caries, and some had already lost permanent teeth.
Assuming we would find a working floater, the plan was to leave five people aboard the Mercedes as guards, rotating at least weekly. The pilot agreed to stay with the ship permanently, since under some circumstances the only defense would be to take off. Sara O’Brien was a qualified pilot but admitted that, under the circumstances, she’d rather not try to land it; we might lose more than a couple of rabbits.
Rocky and Richards came back with the good news that not only had they found a floater, but it was a big one, a school bus. They looked a little gray, though. I later found out that the bus had been full of small skeletons.
We loaded a supply of food onto the floater and took everybody home. Some of them were fascinated by flying; some, predictably, were terrified. The going was a little bumpy at first. Friedman was the only one of us who’d ever flown a large floater, and he was out of practice. (That was the first of many rather important things I’d over-looked. I hadn’t thought to select for floater experience. When I was on Earth before, Jeff had let me take the stick now and then, and it was really quite simple—except for the matters of taking off and landing, which he had always done himself.)
Their base of operations was a YMCA building in Tarrytown, which had functioned as a civil defense repository. The CD part was in the basement, damp and midnight black. We went in with the first bright light it had seen in eight years, and were treated to a festival of rats and cockroaches. The roaches scuttled away to hide, but some of the rats stood their ground, studying us. We tried to ignore them while taking inventory. I was rattled by the fauna, but probably less upset than Suzanne and Harry, who had never been to Earth before and so had limited experience with bugs and rodents. They were game about it, but by the time we had finished our lists they were both shivering and sweating. It was good to get back into light.
They had enough food to last through summer. By then they’d be eating food from the garden, barring catastrophe. We decided to turn the Y’s baseball diamond into a garden, since it had plenty of sun and was fenced. Once food started coming up the place would need a twenty-four-hour armed guard.
In the matter of armaments they were a little short: two shotguns with four shells each. Unlike Jeff’s Florida, New York had outlawed private gun ownership decades before the war. I reluctantly put a high priority on finding a source of weapons and ammunition. I checked with New New and found that the nearest state where guns had been legal was Connecticut. Indira overheard the conversation and told me there was a National Guard armory in the next town south, with a vault they hadn’t been able to crack. Friedman said he’d take some explosives to it.
Wearing the mask and gloves got uncomfortable very fast. I asked Galina, who was an immunologist, whether they were all that effective. After all, we couldn’t help having some exposure to the environment. We couldn’t go back to the ship every time we had to eat or eliminate. (Though the idea didn’t seem too unreasonable after I got my first whiff of their latrine facility.) She said it probably was a good idea, for the groundhogs’ protection as well as our own, to minimize skin-to-skin contact and sharing one another’s exhalations. It was like an exaggerated sickbed procedure; neither ineffective nor an absolute guarantee.
Rocky turned out to have an invaluable primitive skilclass="underline" carpentry. I should have considered that lumber was as ubiquitous here as foamsteel was at home. Nobody but Rocky and Friedman knew which end of a hammer to apply to the nail. Rocky offered to give a class for the kids every morning. I decided I’d take it too—and wasn’t too surprised when Sara and Maria and Ingred and Suzanne made the same decision. Rocky was just a kid himself, but the instinct he aroused in us was not exactly maternal.
Does gravity make you horny?
Friedman got into the armory vault and came back with an embarrassment of riches: four busloads of weapons, enough to wage a small war. He couldn’t leave anything there, of course, once the vault was open. So we filled the basement up with lasers, mortars, rifles, mines, ammunition, grenades, pistols, rockets. Didn’t scare the rats away.
One thing that would be handy once we had enough power to use it was a neurotangler field. We could bury a wire around the compound that would effectively keep any vertebrate outside. Approaching it caused mental confusion and (at least in humans) a painful sense of unfocused anguish, depression. Friedman had been exposed to it once in his training, and said the memory of it still woke him up some nights.
A few of the weapons could be put to nonviolent purpose. We dismantled all but two of the lasers for their powerful fuel cells. The vibroblade bayonets sliced through wood like a warm knife through margarine, though there was no way of telling how long they would stay charged. The mines, “shaped charges,” could be used upside down for digging holes, but we decided not to set any off, to avoid attracting attention. For the same reason Friedman demonstrated the weapons without ammunition, and had the children practice that way. Later he would take them a few at a time to practice actual shooting, a safe twenty or thirty kilometers away. The children practically sali-vated at the prospect.
We had a long list of construction supplies, hardware, and so forth, that we had to accumulate before rebuilding could start in earnest. It was a good excuse to go into the city. Indira hadn’t been downtown in five or six years. When she’d been there as a child it was almost deserted, no food left, but they had seen two other bands of scavengers at safe distances.