Harry Slencik was driving his old red pickup out the Grizzly Creek road, coming back from Bozeman with another ten cases of coffee for the hoard, when he saw the light flickering down on the creek in a brushy area just below Ben Chamberlain’s place. It was almost seven in the evening, and daylight was failing rapidly.
Harry pulled his pickup over, snapped out his lights and peered through the brush. A campfire — he could see somebody moving. Too late for hunters, the season was over. There was an old logging road that went in to the creek a short way back, and he thought he’d seen fresh tire tracks …
Harry pulled his shotgun off the gun rack and stepped down to the road. He loaded a shell into the chamber of the gun with a loud clack and pushed two more into the magazine. Then he walked back to the logging road. His flashlight picked up the tire tracks; a little farther on it glinted on the side of a small camper backed into the brush. Wyoming plates, and Harry made the connection. Someplace down there — was it Laramie? — had been hit real bad with plague, just about wiped out the town. This could be somebody that got out of there.
Up ahead a campfire was flaring, throwing mottled yellow light through the brush. For a moment he thought he heard a woman’s voice. Then he stepped into the open along the creek, shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. He pushed his ten-gallon hat back on his head and cleared his throat.
A man was leaning over tending the fire. He leaped back and turned to face Harry. Behind him a woman sat on a rock clutching an old Pendleton shirt around her shoulders; she was shivering in the chill evening air. Beside her, two small children were wrapped in sleeping bags with just their noses sticking out. Harry saw no weapon, and relaxed his grip on the shotgun a little. “Nice evening,” he said.
The man by the fire nodded. “Yeah.” There was a long pause. “We were, ah, just fixing up a little supper. Ran out of bottled gas for the stove in the camper. You probably saw it sittin’ there, back in the brush.” He paused again. “Care to join us?”
“No, the wife’ll have something ready when I get home, up the road a bit.” Harry studied the people closely. The man was about thirty-five, Harry judged, short and stocky, solidly built, with a pointed nose and a shock of black hair over his eyes. The woman might have been pretty once; right now she looked utterly exhausted, dull-eyed and pallid. They both looked cold and hungry and tired,-but otherwise healthy enough. “You just come up from Wyoming?” Harry said.
“Yeah. From Casper, before the trouble hit there.”
“That’s right, I heard about Casper. Laramie too. Both of them damned near wiped out.”
“True, but Laramie got it first. Some people must have brought it up from Colorado. We got nervous a month or so ago, figured Casper was going to be next — just about any town could get hit — so we stuffed everything we could into the camper and got out of there.”
“Just been roughin’ it ever since, huh?” Harry said.
“You might say that.” The man tossed more driftwood onto the fire.
“Well, better not plan to stick around here,” Harry said. “Cook up your supper, sure, but when you finish that, you’d better move on.”
“Wouldn’t hurt to let us sleep a few hours, would it?”
“I don’t think we’d like that. Makes the wife kind of nervous.”
The man glanced at the woman behind him. “You own this land?” he asked Harry.
“Me and a few neighbors. We didn’t like the looks of Bozeman too much, and we’ve got a pretty good chunk of land between us up here along the creek, so we kinda went together on it. We figure we can make out.”
“It’s a nice place.”
“Right. No sick people around. Plan to keep it that way, too, so we can’t welcome strangers.”
“I see.” The man gave a bitter laugh. “Especially strangers that just came up from Casper, where everybody dropped dead last week. Look, I already told you — we got out of there three weeks before it hit. We had no contact at all — ”
“Well, better safe than sorry.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point.” The man pulled a grill out of a pack sitting nearby, carefully set it up over the fire, supported by rocks on either side. “By the way, I’m Dan Potter. This is my wife Ellen.”
Harry nodded, but he didn’t move forward to shake hands. “Harry Slencik,” he said.
The man regarded him gravely. “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Slencik, how long do you people plan to stay out here? Just this fall? Going back to town for the winter? Or next spring?”
Harry shook his head. “We’re not so damned sure there’s going to be any town left to go back to,” he said. “Nor any country left, either, for that matter. So this is where we are, and this is where we’re stayin’.”
“Sort of an independent Freehold kind of thing,” Potter said.
“You could call it that.”
“I guess there’s a whole lot of them popping up, here and there. People get together, pool their land and resources, everybody contributes something important, like that. I suppose you plan to be, um, sort of self-sustaining.”
“You got the idea,” Harry said. “Completely self-sustaining.”
“So you’ll have gardens and grain and hayfields, run some stock, that sort of thing.” Potter was watching Harry closely. “Lot of work to be done.”
“Three or four of us got pretty good backs,” Harry said. “We’ll manage.”
“I didn’t mean just strong backs,” Potter said. He chewed on his lower lip for a minute. “Pretty dry country around here. You’re going to have to irrigate to grow anything.”
“We know that. We’ve got the pumps and pipes all set up.”
“Gasoline pumps, I suppose?”
“No way. Electric.”
“So what do you do when the power goes off?”
Harry laughed. “We’re way ahead of you, man. We’ve got two big gasoline generators, turn out enough power to light up this whole valley.”
“Well, that’s great, you’re all set up.” Potter dipped a pot into the creek, set it on the grill and began cutting up potatoes into it. “So what do you do when the gas runs out? Way things are going, one day the man ain’t going to bring any more, sure as God made little apples.”
Harry stirred uneasily. “So maybe we convert the generator to steam and burn wood,” he said. “But that’s a long time ahead. Hell, we can haul the water by hand then if we have to.”
“For irrigation? Great system. They’ve been doing that in India for four thousand years. And look at India. And you’ve got to irrigate how many acres?”
“About sixty.”
“Wow.” Dan Potter pursed his lips, threw some beef bones into the pot and started stirring. Suddenly he turned to Harry. “Listen, Mr. Slencik, let me talk straight out for a minute. We’re none of us sick, or anything, but I’m sure as hell in trouble. I need someplace to go. I’ve got a wife and two kids here and they’re getting hungry and we’re about to the end of our rope. We can’t keep moving on much longer. But I know we can’t just come and freeload someplace, either. If I want a place to stay, I’ve got to be able to earn my keep, right?”
“That figures.”
“Okay, now let me tell you something. I can give you people something you need, if you can let us stick around.”
Harry tipped his hat back. “You can give us four more mouths to feed, all right. Why do we need that?”
“Because you’re going to be stone dead for irrigation water to feed anybody by next spring, and that’s going to be the end of your little Freehold, unless you find a way around it.”
“We could have some problems. We know that. So what can you do about it?”
“Maybe a whole lot. When we first drove in here today, I walked up the road to the dead end. I saw what you’ve got going here. I saw how much water you were going to need. I also took a rough guess at the drop in the creek through your land, and I knew right then I could solve your water problem for you.”
Harry Slencik frowned. “Like how, exactly?”
“Falling water is energy,” Potter said. He pointed to the creek. “See that pool out there? See that big rock at the edge with the water running over it and dropping into the next pool? Go stick your hand in the stream down below that rock. Go ahead, try it.”
Harry walked over to the creek and reached down below the rock. The water struck his outstretched palm, spreading his fingers and splashing all over.
“Feel it push?” Potter said. “That water’s heavy, and when it’s running downhill naturally like that, you can use the weight. Listen to me: I can build you a ramjet pump on this creek that won’t take any outside power whatever to run, just the energy of the falling water. No electricity, no gasoline — ever. It’ll deliver enough to irrigate your sixty acres till your back teeth are floating, push water uphill if you want, put it exactly where you want it when you want it, and never cost a penny. I can engineer a whole system of pipes and valves and ditches for you, and then I can maintain it, so you’ve always got water — including all the household water you can use. And I can build it so it won’t ever freeze up, too.”
Harry stared at the man for a long while. “You never told me your line of work, Dan.”
“Engineering,” Dan Potter said. “Hydraulic engineering. I can’t make dandelions grow, but I can sure build water systems, and when I build ‘em, they work. You want references, you’re out of luck, but I can show you what I can do quick enough.”
“And you could build that kind of a system here?”
“No sweat.”
“I suppose you’d need a lot of materials.”
“A little plastic pipe. Some two-by-sixes. Couple of hardware-store valves. A good set of tools to work with. Beyond that, I could improvise a whole lot of it.” Potter checked his dinner, decided it was ready to eat. His wife was getting out plates and cups. “Of course, you might just want to take your chances with those gas generators.”
Harry set his hat squarely on his head and sat down on a rock. “Go ahead and eat,” he said. “Maybe when you finish we can drive up to the place and talk a little bit.”