Lot’s Daughter

Mr. Jimmon put a finger tenderly against an upper molar. It did not ache yet, but he knew the signs, felt the pain waves still of too high a frequency for translation into sensation. Tomorrow he would be in agony, and for days afterward. Then the pain would go; six months or a year later the gray, porous shell would work loose and drop out. It had happened several times in the six years—Mr. Jimmon was pretty sure it was six years, not seven—since.… Mr. Jimmon didn’t care to finish the sentence, even mentally, for he was a man who shrank from the too-dramatic, the over-romantic. And if you did not stop short you would have to conclude: since the End of Civilization, or since we Fled the Holocaust, or since Man Decided on Suicide. All capitalized. Theatrical, even if accurate.

Should’ve had them all extracted, he thought as he had thought so often. And appendix. Apprehension projected a detailed picture of unendurable pain while Erika stood by helpless to ease him. As he had stood by when.…

But that was natural, in the course of nature, he objected. Bring forth your young in labor; rationalization from observation, transferred to a supernatural command. No prophet ever got a revelation reading: Thou shalt die miserably of an inflamed bowel.

“If you expect to eat, you better get up now.”

Erika’s voice was matter-of-fact, emotionless. She was not nagging him at the moment; she did not condemn his idleness, she stated the incontrovertible. He who doesn’t work won’t eat. In a dead world the cliché was immortally triumphant.

“You hear me, Dad?”

“Heard you,” said Mr. Jimmon.

He tried to shut his ears against the sounds of her moving about, and the boy’s “I want something to eat,” as he shut his eyes to the dawn light. He was not sleepy, not tired even; he just didn’t want to leave his bed. Hadn’t wanted to for the last few days, in fact; his habitual energy and determination seemed to have slipped away. Perhaps it had been gone for a long time.

Certainly the pile of dry grass on which he was lying was no snugly comfortable couch. There were stiff, thick weeds mixed through it, and the grass itself was matted in spots as though it had not been properly dried out. She had been careless in curing it again.

“Heard you,” he repeated.

Long ago he’d decided they dare not keep food anywhere near the shelter lest it attract predators. Each day’s provision must be sought afresh except on the rare occasion when he succeeded in shooting a large animal. They gambled then, gorging; using the meat up faster than they need have, listening for the soft padding or inquisitive snuffle of carnivores.

“Dad!”

Nagging now. “I’m getting another bad tooth,” he stated, staring upward. There was no question; he could see the light coming through the roof in several places. The next rain would sluice in as though there were nothing to stop it. For the hundredth—or five hundredth—time he decided he ought to do something drastic about putting a real roof on the shelter. Have done with the makeshift of branches and thatch and soil. Get boards. Real boards, from the nearest house. Five miles. Ten trips, twenty trips … 100 miles. He was easily capable of walking 100 miles, fifty of them burdened with lumber. But for what? A hundred miles for a tight roof; was it worth it now that all the stuff that could be ruined by rain had already been water-soaked?

“Well. This time I certainly hope you’ll let me knock it out with a nail before you waste weeks moaning about it.”

Mr. Jimmon shook his head silently. He was not afraid of the pain. Or even revolted by the savagery of putting a large nail against the aching tooth and giving it a sharp blow with the hammer. The shudder induced was at pictures of choking to death on the dislodged tooth or the awful realization of a broken jaw.

“It’s the diet,” he muttered. “No bones or gristle. Even crusty bread.”

A hundred miles. If he could jump into the station wagon, explore till he found exactly what he wanted, load up and come back. If. No use dwelling on the tragedy of that immobilization.

“If you ever got up early the way you used to, you might get a deer or a rabbit; they feed at dawn. And if you walked a few miles you could kill a cow again.”

He covered his eyes with his hands. “No cattle left. Either drifted away or just haven’t adapted.”

“More likely somebody’s got them herded.”

Mr. Jimmon sighed; it was the old argument. “Don’t you suppose we’d have seen some sign of this enterprising, mythical character? The one who not only herds cows but rigs up gadgets and has machinery working. And what about the dogs he must have tamed; why haven’t we heard the barking or noticed them sniffing around?”

“You’ve been too busy hiding to notice anything.”

“A smart man hides from savages until the savages kill each other off or until he has some means of subduing them.”

“You have no way of knowing that what you thought was going to happen before we left Malibu has actually happened.”

“I was right about other things; the panic, the crowded highways, the extortion for gasoline, the destruction. Why should I suddenly be wrong?”

“But you don’t know. And you don’t want to find out.”

The fixed notion that there could be numbers going about their business as though It had never happened could become irritating. Probably fostered by concern for the boy; he remembered no such obstinacy on her part before he was born. During those frightening months her need for others had been imperative enough to induce a desperate faith in the existence of survivors. Civilized survivors like themselves trying mightily not to relapse. A faith against all reason.

“Be logical, Erika. Visualize the probabilities. First the destruction of the cities. How many died instantly? Ten million? Twenty million? Thirty million?” He began to feel some relish for the discussion, in displaying his own smooth reasoning even though he was merely repeating what he’d said so often. “Be conservative; say twenty million.”

“That’s only a guess. The radio never gave the figures.”

“It’s a logical guess, and the radio’s reticence is one of the factors in the logic. But the initial destruction was only the beginning. Radiation sickness doesn’t show up right away. And the disease, spread by refugees; epidemics. Filth-borne plagues, polluted water on top of malnutrition. Another thirty million anyway. Fifty million, third of the population, from only primary effects. Then crop failures. Industrial farming couldn’t survive; gasoline shortages, no manpower, breakdown of equipment. Shrinking markets; lack of transportation. In the West, end of irrigation. New malnutrition, second wave of epidemics. Deaths from starvation, from rioting between the late city-folks and the farmers. Murder. Fighting for women. Gang wars. Floods and disasters due to the disappearance of government services, and a third wave of epidemics after them. Your remnant: two or three million, widely scattered in disorganized, roving bands.”

“That’s only the way you see it. People don’t turn into savages overnight just to fit a theory—”

“No.” Mr. Jimmon could not resist the opening. “They’re savages already. Disruption cracks off the surface hiding the savagery underneath.”

She tossed her head. “People have an instinct for cooperation; I bet it’s stronger than the savagery you’re always expecting. Because savagery means less food and comfort in a short time, no matter how it pays off for a moment. People aren’t as stupid as you think they are; they must have organized ways of stopping the epidemics, raised food even if they had to use hoes and horses, done all kinds of things to get started again.”

He removed the cowhide that served him as a blanket, with distaste. It stank worse daily. It would soon have to be discarded though it was the closest he had come to tanning leather successfully. “Faith,” he said. “Pure, blind faith. Baseless.”

“We survived, didn’t we? Then there are others.”

“We aren’t herding cattle,” he pointed out. “And we have advantages others lack.”

“Have we? Is that why we live like this?”

“Better to live like this than not at all.” He rose from the mattress. A pair of shorts, already worn frail, had been inexpertly improvised by Erika from the last of his pajamas. When they were gone he would have to suffer the harshness of ill-cured leather to chafe his flesh.

“We don’t have to live like this,” she said flatly. “Somewhere—not too far away, even—people must be living decently.”

“Faith,” he repeated; “faith. Wood on the fire? Don’t want to have to start a new one.”

“There’s wood on the fire,” said Erika. “And hot water.”

The goatskin pants and jacket were as crudely fashioned as the shorts—more so perhaps, since the material was harder to work. The hair had come off in mangy patches; the hide beneath was rough and stiff, not soft and supple as it should have been. Only the sandals came anywhere near being satisfactory. Mr. Jimmon didn’t know what had made their deerskin thongs flexible and free from decay; the hide from which he’d cut them rotted like all the others. They held the soles, made from a tire—the one punctured on the last mile of the trip and left on the spare wheel instead of being repaired at all costs in time or money—firmly and comfortably against his feet, so that he could run, if need be, as easily as in the boots or shoes, now worn out and discarded.

Dressed, he rubbed the back of his hand against his jaw. “Shaving day again,” he muttered.

“I want something to eat,” whined the boy.

“Dad will take care of it,” said Erika. “In good time.”

“Wonder,” reflected Mr. Jimmon. “Would it really be too late to make some sort of calendar? Guess at the date? May or June. And keep it up from now on?”

Erika paused in her activity. (What does she find to keep busy with, he wondered. Women’s work is never done—but what do they do without vacuum cleaners and other labor-saving devices to keep them occupied?) “What would be the good? As soon as we come across people who haven’t gone native we’ll find out the real date.”

He got out the straight-edged razor. Forethought. Safety blades would have long since been blunted into worthlessness. He stropped it tenderly, unskillfully. “What is a ‘real date’? A convention agreed on by civilized communities. What civilized communities are there to agree to conventions?”

“Enough,” she answered. “If we were to look for them.”

“Want something to eat,” repeated the boy.

Razor in hand, Mr. Jimmon walked from the shelter to the flat stones that served as fireplace a few feet beyond. Lifting the blackened kettle off the coals he kicked the fire-eaten boughs together before settling it back in place. He dipped a stiff rag into the hot water, watching it go limp, and swathed it around his jowls.

“Aaaah,” he muttered luxuriously. “Ummmm.”

Soap. Not hard to make; he’d explained the theory to Erika often enough. You rendered fat to tallow and mixed it with sifted wood ashes. There were always plenty of ashes and he did succeed now and then in shooting an animal. Still they had no soap. The decencies of life slipping away. Daren’t let down too far.

He shaved slowly and carefully before the rear-view mirror from the station wagon. The hot water softened the gray and white hairs enough to permit cutting without scalping the skin raw, but it was still painful. “Ought to make soap,” he muttered.

The boy had followed him outside and was watching intently. “Dad,” he said, not asking, just idly stating. Mr. Jimmon felt the obligation to reply but found no ready words. He turned his face slightly away in the direction of the brook delicately winding between the trees. It was normally so shallow that dripping water from it was a nuisance. A little farther upstream was a natural basin; he had intended to dam it ever since they came to the end of their flight here.

He wiped the razor thoroughly dry on the sleeve of his jacket and put it down on the rock. “You going to need this warm water any more?” he called to Erika.

She came to the opening of the shelter, her blonde hair unevenly streaked with sunburn and drawn tightly back from her forehead. The line of her jaw from ear to chin was delicately firm. Caught unexpectedly, Mr. Jimmon looked full at her before dropping his eyes.

The top of a dress of Molly’s was tucked into a pair of Levis, also Molly’s. She was thin—slender was perhaps the better word—but not over-thin, like her mother. On a good diet she might even fill out the slight hollow in her cheeks. Perhaps not; there was an intensity about Erika, emphasized in her eyes that indicated a tendency to sparseness.

Six years, seven years; he couldn’t say to her, How old are you now Erika, twenty, twenty-one? The time had been longer for her than for him, much longer. One of the reasons she clung to the fantasy of civilized survivors. Hopeless, dreary otherwise. And what did he cling to? Daily food-getting. Hanging on.

“What am I supposed to do with it? Do the dishes we didn’t bring along because you wouldn’t burden yourself with things? Wash the clothes we don’t have any more? Mop the dirt floor? Sterilize something?”

He had sterilized the knife with which she’d cut the cord. “All right. All right. I only asked.”

He took up the kettle by the bailer and emptied it. Aluminum, even heavy cast aluminum like this, was going to wear out soon. He remembered how he’d debated between it and the cast iron one. A single mishap with cast iron, one drop on one sharp rock and.… The aluminum, even if it developed a pinhole or two, would still be useful. Despite her unjust taunts about dishes and the dirt floor (how did one go about making concrete if there were no bags of cement to be bought?) he had foreseen intelligently.

Must be close to seven already. If his watch hadn’t stopped permanently. Moisture-proof; return to manufacturer. Hers had lasted nearly a year longer, though it had been little more than an ornament. Its sole function now; she wore it sometimes as jewelry. Her only trinket. (Molly had never been one of those gem-loving women, give her her due.) Remind her not to leave it hanging up in plain sight like that.

Time to eat; was he really hungry? Or habit? If it were possible to eat breakfast now, instead of just the first meal of the day. Real breakfast. Chilled grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center. Cornflakes and cream with sugar. Sugar. Bacon and eggs. Eggs fresh from a domestic hen in a commercial henhouse, not gulls’ like Erika sometimes found. And.…

Six years since the smell of coffee last stung his nostrils. Nevertheless his taste buds responded to the memory and his mouth watered. “Wonder,” he said aloud.

“What?”

She was still standing in the doorway. Opening, really; it couldn’t be called a doorway since it was only the place where he had not built the wall. Before the rains came he must make it into a genuine doorway, perhaps even provide a door of some sort. No real reason to reproach himself for having been too busy to do it before, rather stress what he had accomplished. No need to be ashamed of the shelter’s smallness, meanness, inadequacy; how many other civilized men without training, preparation or experience—or even for that matter, taste for it (he recalled Molly’s contemptuous, “You were never the rugged outdoor type, David”)—could have done as well?

“Few,” he muttered.

He became conscious of her look. “Are you going to go after food, or stand there talking to yourself? It’s getting to be a habit.”

“Um. Might go after rabbits.”

Her derisive glance was not totally unkind. “That case I’ll go down to ocean and see what I can find.”

He followed her through the unfinished wall. To one side the seats from the station wagon served as beds for her and the boy; his own grass pallet was opposite. From the ingenious concealment of a length of bark fastened to the true wall he drew out the rifle swathed in rags.

“Thought you said rabbits.”

“Mmm.” For a moment, holding one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel, he indulged the fantasy of coming suddenly on a deer and dropping it with a cool shot. Too late in the day, though of course it was always possible to be lucky. He smiled wryly as he replaced the rifle.

“All right.” He reached under the seat and drew out another bundle. He broke open the shotgun. The bore looked clean; he poked a rag through it anyway. The ammunition was concealed in several caches; even if two or three were discovered he wouldn’t be stripped clean. Shells and cartridges were not intermixed; finding a cache of one wouldn’t lead intruders to search for the other weapon. Always one jump ahead of the looters. You had to be.

“We’re going now, Dad.”

“All right. Maybe I’ll get something.” Was he merely obstinate in starting off to hunt when experience had shown the only sure way to get food was from the ocean? He selected six shells, letting his fingers fondle them briefly, putting one in the breech of the shotgun. From still another hiding place he retrieved the briefcase. It had been ancient when he discarded it many years ago, an old-fashioned zipperless impediment with a handle, straps, and cranky lock. How it got packed among articles which had been so carefully chosen was an ironical mystery. Ironical, because the obsolete pouch had proven much more valuable than so much he had then thought essential, like the rain-ruined government pamphlets or the never-planted seeds.

He slipped the rawhide strips attached to the handle over his shoulder, put the other five shells, his knife, and flint in the case, and tied the substitute straps. Man the survivor went forth to hunt dangling a briefcase.

The dull, high fog was chilly. If he knew how to make mortar without cement he could have built a fireplace inside the shelter. Warm. Cozy. Cook in the rain. Shelter, they called it honestly; neither would say it was anything more.

The never-accounted-for pile of logs, all roughly of a size, had arbitrarily determined the site when he and Erika had come upon it at the end of the flight. If either of them had been inclined to superstition (some of his old paternal pride in her warmed fleetingly) they might have taken it as some kind of sign. He had laboriously felled and cut and trimmed an equal number to make the three and a half walls. Neither smooth nor snug nor square. The logs had looked so true it hadn’t seemed possible they could fail to fit neatly together like children’s blocks. But when one was laid on another after the ends were notched to interlock, the unnoticed swellings around the knots, the faint twists and curves, made large uneven gaps.

He’d known what to do: one filled the chinks with moss, and daubed heavy mud in and over the cracks to make a tight surface. Unfortunately the moss always dried up and blew away, the sandy mud refused to cling and dropped off persistently as it was applied. In the end Erika had stuffed in grass; as the logs weathered and shrank she used more grass.

He followed the stream upward for a short distance, then struck eastward between the redwoods. People who used to write stories about what would happen instinctively agreed with Erika, leaping for shock-cushioned fancies. Like living in deserted mansions, enjoying unlimited supplies of canned goods from abandoned markets, banding together with like-minded survivors—one of them was always a reservoir of esoteric knowledge about the economy of the American Indian, agronomic chemistry, textile manufacture—to rebuild civilization. Limited imagination, unable to envisage realities.

After they had arrived (“Any further will be too close to Monterey.…”) and hidden the station wagon, obliterating the tire-marks for the half mile from the highway, they listened daily to the car’s radio. Months earlier he had told them just what was bound to occur after It happened. Molly—he barely stopped himself thinking poor Molly—had been so incredulous, even when they were fighting the rest of the refugee traffic to escape, but the announcer sounded as though he were repeating what Mr. Jimmon had said in their living room. Erika never remembered the accuracy of his predictions now.

The redwoods gave place to live oak, pine and some trees he had not been able to identify. Then the growth ended abruptly on the edge of rolling hills where the grass had barely begun to fade. Had he been wrong in not trying to corral some of the cattle then roaming here? The overwhelming difficulties of catching, herding, penning, caring for them came back to impress him anew. He had done the only feasible thing: shot those he could, one at a time. (Erika’s sneer at pioneers who shot cows was unjust; she ate her share of the meat.) Now they’d disappeared. All.

As Erika thought, into a herd salvaged by someone interested in more than today’s loot and food? The news they listened to so raptly denied the likelihood. The gutted, uninhabitable shell of Los Angeles had become a trap; not only of radiation sickness, but typhoid, meningitis, unnamed plagues—Mr. Jimmon wouldn’t have been surprised if one were cholera—swirled among those not in the first wave of escapers. Following the earlier fugitives they brought their sores and lesions to attack a surrounding population already disorganized and hungry. The attempt to set up dislocation camps ended when the national guardsmen were massacred by the frenzied victims.

The radio had been detailed and explicit about destruction in Europe and Asia. (“Eleven classified bombs destroyed Leningrad last night …” “Nothing remains of Marseilles except …” “While Copenhagen and Bristol were being reduced, Archangel and Warsaw …”) News of disaster at home had to be deduced by grudging hints. Chicago and Detroit were hit the same day; the destruction of New York had gone on interminably. One had to piece the cautious items together to begin to understand.

It must be a couple of years since he’d seen any cattle. Miles away, how many he could only guess, were ranch house, stables, corrals, outbuildings. Beyond them were thousands of other grazing acres. The heroic fictional man (homo gernsbacchae) would have found the house, rounded up the cattle, started all over.

And been a fine target for the first passing looters.

When San Francisco went there had been ways of estimating the extent of the disaster. Normally bare State Highway I suddenly became burdened with southbound traffic. He had been sure their hideout would be invaded and overrun, but motorists apparently thought only of getting as far away as possible. What would they do after another hundred miles, when they came within the radius of devastation made by those escaping from Los Angeles? Turn for the Pacific like lemmings?

The radio could get only one station after that. For perhaps a month they heard from Monterey that disaster was being coped with: it would be no time before complete network service was restored; meanwhile, the civilian population was not to panic or heed enemy-spread rumors. Tabulations of dislocated persons was going on rapidly; lost friends and relatives were being listed; reunion would be sped by calmness and fortitude.

Something moved in the grass to his right. A rabbit? Wildcats? The breeze? Standing still, he raised the shotgun level with his hip. There was no further movement. Wariness? Illusion?

Keeping the gun firmly at the ready, he moved one foot ahead of the other. The grass was tall; it was barely possible some large, dangerous animal crouched, waiting to spring. His eyes strained ahead to locate the exact spot, to fire at the betraying sign. He lifted his left foot, set it down silently, lifted the right.

He was thus off balance for a fraction of a second when the largest jackrabbit he’d ever seen bounded out of the grass in frantic hops. Even as he brought the shotgun to his shoulder he knew he couldn’t possibly hit the leaping creature. Stumbling, he willed his finger to relax on the trigger, but it was too late. He fell heavily, sprawling; the gun roared next to his ear, at the same time he felt the briefcase twist and break open.

The grass was not yet dry enough to be brittle; for a long moment he lay where he’d fallen, unwilling to struggle. Another irreplaceable shell wasted, another simple task bungled.

Mr. Jimmon lay quietly, thinking. Civilization, no matter how you defined it, was a delicate, interdependent mechanism. Suppose he had been not an insurance broker but an Admirable Jimmon, the Elizabethan universal man borne out of time: crack shot, first-class woodsman, mechanic, improviser, chemist, physicist, farmer. Would anything have been qualitatively different? Wasn’t it an imperative that all men had to sink to a common level before there could be any new raising? To believe as he had believed, or thought he believed, that it was possible to preserve in himself and Erika—and the boy? that was a nice question—an isolated vestige of decencies, amenities, attitudes, techniques of mid-twentieth century life without a supporting network of goods and services, mines and factories, was a delusion. A remnant of the primitive idea that man could get help from spirits or a watchful god to overcome obstacles, as though man had anything to depend on but mankind. If mankind sank, man sank with it; the variations in depth were insignificant.

He had known all along; they had known it all along. Wendell had asked promptly, “You mean we can steal cars and things?” All collapse was total collapse. Hiding from the looters and rapists—the rebuilders of tomorrow—did not preserve an enclave from a lost world, it merely kept the present one a little more, an infinitesimally little more, brutal than it might have been.

He sighed and picked himself up. Another shell wasted, another step closer to the moment when he would have no shotgun, no weapon at all except the two bows and arrows. Even on the terms he had originally imagined saving himself and Erika he was failing; each wasted shell narrowed the gap between them and other survivors.

The briefcase.… He looked down; it lay on the grass, shoulder strap and jury-straps broken through. He picked it up; the knife and flint were inside, the shells were spilled around.

Four of them. The fifth must have bounced out, it could not be far away. Methodically, tenderly he put everything back in; careful not to move his feet he searched for the missing shell. It must not be lost.

Priceless artifact of brass and copper and paper, lead and gunpowder. A half-wit, an idiot who could no more understand an actuarial table than the second law of thermodynamics or the tactics of the battle of Salamis, could refill the rejected shells with some sort of makeshift (what was gunpowder? saltpeter and …?) and preserve his shorter distance from the bow-and-arrow users that much longer. The half-wit would do it in order to blow out the brains of some other savage who had a hide or a piece of meat or a woman he coveted. Whereas the man who took thought for tomorrow was unable to safeguard the heritage of yesterday.

He squatted on his heels, splaying his fingers through the grass. Give it up? Write off two shells on the jackrabbit? Accept the double, no, triple loss?

“Got to find it.”

Boxes and boxes of shells lined the shelves of hardware stores in a hundred towns and villages. Except that they no longer did. If he had not been forethoughtful, provident, he too might have all the weapons and ammunition he needed for the taking. He had been too quick, too intelligent to survive.

Staring down into the grass, he stared back into the past. The vitality he’d had when he and Molly, Jir, Erika, and Wendell had started off in the station wagon, gaining new force with the sloughing off of Molly and the boys, reaching its peak with the attainment of the hiding place and the almost mystic propriety of the relationship with Erika, had really seemed to change him from man the commuter and taxpayer to man the lair finder, man the dweller maker, man the provider. How long had this impetus lasted? A few months? Less than a year, certainly; it was long gone before Erika found herself with child.

It had begun to fade when Monterey went off the air; perhaps with the final realization that there was no longer any faint hope something would be spared, that he was truly on his own now. What had happened to Monterey? Or, for that matter, to Salinas and Carmel and Fort Ord? There had been no bombing; they were close enough to have seen the flash. Besides, long before actual transmission ceased he’d had the queer feeling that the broadcast was … hollow. A one-man operation perhaps (was that possible?), from a ghost town. A madman pretending that the little city still existed, that people walked its streets, patronized its stores, rode its buses, slept in its beds, docked ships at its wharves. The local news might have been true; it might equally have been fiction. No hint of an exodus was given but no voice other than the announcer’s was heard relaying world news (how did it come in? was it true? its vagueness was equally characteristic of genuineness or falsity) and government directives, some of them recognizably months old. Then one day no call letters were transmitted; there was no scratched record of the anthem, no news, no hearty signing off. Nothing but silence that day. And the next. And the next.

Had the power failed? Or the engineer finally given up his deception—if it was? Or succumbed to illness? Erika impulsively had wanted him to drive the station wagon north and find out. Her childish obstinacy had ignored the adult reasoning; for the first time he saw signs in her of her mother’s blindness to facts. She could not argue with his deduction of the dangers, she merely repeated that they ought to get in the car and see for themselves.

Even when he pointed out that they no longer had a spare tire she perversely turned the situation around: All the more reason; they could find a way of fixing it there. He’d been appalled—no other word fitted—appalled at her unrealistic attitude.

He had not understood how strong her obsession with the idea of a makeshift residuary civilization had grown until he discovered she’d been turning the radio on four or five times a day. “Don’t you realize you’re draining the battery?”

She had answered carelessly, “Oh, we can always start the motor and run it again.”

He’d tried to make her understand, to see the picture whole. About two gallons left in the gas tank. Vital for an emergency; irreplaceable. (On her terms, supposing her daydream were true, he had no money to buy gas; he’d given the entire contents of his wallet, the 200 hundred-dollar bills, to Molly in that final gesture. And since her daydream was illusion there was no gas to be had anyway.)

He had known wry triumph when the battery finally failed and the radio no longer sucked in empty static. The station wagon had become a useless relic. “But we can push it and start the motor that way. Of course if you’d done as I wanted.…”

Push the inert monster over half a mile of trackless, bumpy ground, obstructed with fallen boughs and rotted stumps. Impossible. Difficult even for five or six husky men. Out of the question. “Besides, the tires are soft.”

Her answer had been to pump all four with the hand pump. He felt both admiration and irritation; perseverance in a stupid cause. Naturally they couldn’t budge the wagon over the first hump (he had not held back an ounce of effort, even knowing the futility of it). She had not been stopped by the failure; somewhere she’d heard of starting a car by jacking up a rear wheel and spinning it while in gear.

For months it had stayed petrified in that canine position. He had given up as soon as he realized it wouldn’t work, but she spent hours vainly twirling. It was a long time before her thrice-daily attempts became daily, and the daily weekly. If he remembered, her pregnancy was well advanced before she gave up entirely.

“No salvation by mechanical means,” he muttered. Only by dogged reliance on his own will. That was why he couldn’t give up the search for the shotgun shell. It was not only priceless in itself; it was a symbol of his determination to resist reduction to the primitive level as long as possible.

What had he expected? The swiftly built prototypical cabin, the dammed stream, the planted vegetable garden, slowly extending, the ownerless herds coaxed into control and redomesticity, the masterly defense against marauders, discovery of others rejected by barbarism, the joining of forces—couples and young children only, no single males in any circumstances—under his leadership which couldn’t help but be acknowledged after his single-handed mastering of obstacles, the final triumph when the group as last emerged from hiding and established themselves openly in an abandoned village or town? Romantic.

His fingers touched the ridge base of a shell. Lucky, was his first thought; incredibly, unbelievably lucky. To find the shell which might have hopped and rolled anywhere. Not the needle in the haystack, perhaps, but the shell in the grass.

Not luck. There wasn’t any. Persistence.

His finger found the hole in the shell’s mouth. The used one rejected from the gun.

Mr. Jimmon sat down on the grass. This was no absolute tragedy, no cause for final despair. Two shells had been wasted instead of one. The toll of fruitless pursuit had been doubled. He still had—how many? Enough for a careful year yet, perhaps. Not despair; discouragement.

He had been foolish and adventurous to start out so late after game; it had been a gesture to show—himself or Erika—that he was the Admirable Jimmon after all. Pride goeth before an empty belly.

What was the difference between x shells and x-1 shells? Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? “Put it down to experience,” he muttered, tucking the disabled briefcase under one arm and the shotgun under the other.

Back at the stream he paused judicially. This was one job he had no doubts about. By moving the soft dirt—it would be better to make some sort of reinforcement of brush and stones on the downstream face first—he could build up his dam on either side of the flow to the required height and thickness before interfering with the course itself. Deepening to one side above the upstream face would give him a shallow reservoir where the water could be diverted while he feverishly plugged the bottom of the outlet. Then he could keep ahead of the rising level until the dam was high as he wanted it.

It was a good project; he’d put it off no longer. Begin at dawn tomorrow, jumping up without admonition, hurrying eagerly. When the dam was finished he’d make the shelter into a proper cabin. They would sink no further; from now on, no matter how slightly, their progress would be upward. Recivilization.

His ears, adjusted to the accustomed noises, the insects’ scraping, the whir and call of birds, the frogs’ croak, the distant surf, the brook’s purl, caught the sounds of Erika and the boy. He would say nothing of his determination. Match her fantasy of survivors with the reality of their own survival.

Instead of stepping gingerly from stone to stone, he leaped across the stream and walked briskly toward the shelter. Erika had a good fire going and was settling the kettle on top of it. Blacken it worse. Told her often enough about waiting for the coals.

“Did you get anything, Dad?”

Something not quite right in her voice. The question should have been put sharply in a faintly contemptuous tone, with shadings or irritation and tolerance. Not with an undercurrent of … what? Non-recognition bothered him momentarily.

“Nhnh-nhnh.” He put away the shotgun carefully. “Straps broke on the briefcase again,” he called over his shoulder, taking out the shells, knife and flint. “Try to sew it stronger this time, ay?”

“If I get a chance. Brought back some abalone for you.”

If she didn’t leave the undersized ones alone there soon won’t be any at all. Have to go way out; dive for them. I couldn’t. Univalves; all muscle to hold the half shell to rocks. Expand outward, opening to suck in food; knife slips, fingers caught, the shell clamps back against the rock self-protectively; drowned.

Complaint and fear threaded through his gratefulness. Dutiful daughter; I have nourished my father. Lenore? Electra? Erika’s breasts were small; did this have anything to do with the boy’s poor start? Think not; Molly had never been able to nurse for long. Pediatricians; supplementary feedings; formulas. Erika had had to; no choice.

He accepted the saucer-like shells, noting with surprised pleasure that she cooked them for him. He drew in the meaty smell, scooped the rubbery flesh out and chewed thoughtfully. Better pounded; not so essential in these immature.… Careful my tooth; not that side.

“’M going fishing right away,” he announced, mouth full.

“Why?”

Startled, he paused in his chewing. “Why?” It was a pointless question. Why am I going fishing. To catch fish. “Duty to provide,” he mumbled jocularly.

She stuck a testing finger into the kettle. “Duty,” she echoed thoughtfully, withdrawing the kettle from the fire. She knelt, letting her hair fall forward into the water. Both Mr. Jimmon and the boy watched.

She sopped and wrung, dipped again; cupped her hands and poured the water over her scalp, rubbing it in. Over and over. How can she expect to get her hair clean without soap, thought Mr. Jimmon; and what for? Same reason I shave; preserve the amenities. Still. Odd thing to do in the middle of the day.

She rose to her feet and began massaging the loose strands between her palms. “Duty,” she said; “why?”

“Ay?” For a moment he didn’t understand the connection. “Oh. Responsibility. Biological. Social.”

She held a handful of dripping hair up and away from her face to peer at him. “And Mom?” she asked levelly. “Wendell, Jir and Mom?”

Impulse. The impulse at the exact moment of opportunity at the end of a day when inhibitions are relaxed. He could never have forced Molly and the boys out of the car, could never have driven off with a startled Erika beside him if he had had to state anything, justify himself, argue. He could not have done it if they had even been in sight, if their knowledge of his betrayal and abandonment had been coincidental with the act instead of delayed till after accomplishment.

What was the relevance of all this now? If Erika didn’t know these things how could he possibly communicate them to her? Certainly there was no way in which he could recreate, even if he wanted to, the peculiar emotional atmosphere of that day of escape.

It was not arraignment which astonished him so much as the “Mom.” From the electric moment of awareness in the station wagon, Erika had spoken aloofly of “Mother.” This sudden reversion to the locution of childhood must mean … what? Guilt had become so pervasive a word in the books Molly used to read it had no meaning at all.

Carefully he said, “Survival would have been impossible. I also owed a duty to you and to myself.” For a strange moment he felt it was the man of eight years back talking; D.A. Jimmon who had a home in Malibu and an office on Spring Street. “Besides,” he added weakly, “I gave her all our money. Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Money you thought would never buy anything again,” she commented neutrally, working vigorously on her hair.

“And still think. Know, in fact. That’s not the point. Molly could never see that I might possibly be right; she was convinced it had and would always have value.”

She divided her still-damp hair with quick, sure motions and began braiding one side. “They would have been quite impossible,” she admitted dispassionately. “But that isn’t the point either. If you hadn’t been ruthless—”

“Unsentimental,” corrected Mr. Jimmon.

“Unsentimental, then. You had to be, in order to survive.”

“For us to survive.” But he was pleased with her understanding.

She finished braiding one side and started on the other. He waited for her to continue. She took both braids and wound them around her head, tying them with a bit of torn blue cotton. “I don’t see.…” he began at last, puzzled.

“Take the boy along with you, will you?”

“What?” he asked, more confused than before.

“Fishing. Didn’t you say you were going fishing right away?”

“Oh. Yes. But.…” He looked at the empty abalone shell in his hand, turned it over and inspected without seeing the delicately stitched row of blow holes. “You want me to take him along?”

She’d never asked him before. Have to carry the boy at least part of the way. Nuisance. But she was right, of course. Have to begin teaching him.

He rose. “Well. All right.”

“Don’t want to go back fishing.”

“But we weren’t fishing before, dear. Just looking for shellfish and stranded crabs. Dad’ll take you really fishing.”

“Don’t want to go.”

Undersized for four. If he was four. What standard did he have for comparison? Faded memories of Jir and Wendell and children seen-unseen on the street. Boy was probably exactly average. Even his health, considering the diet. Sickly was only a revulsion, or a wish he might have been sturdier, brighter than most. The nineteenth-century folktales opposed to historical knowledge. Ptolemies and Incas. Or didn’t the Incas? Think they did.

Erika put her arms around the boy and kissed him. None of the Jimmons was demonstrative. “Go with Dad,” she said. “I want you to.”

“Come on,” suggested Mr. Jimmon, not unkindly. “Come on if you’re coming.”

“He needs eggs,” said Erika; “milk really, but there’s no milk. And greens; the dandelions are pretty well gone now, but there’s other stuff around here. You can tell by chewing on them raw if they’re good to eat. And warm covers at night.”

“You haven’t done badly with him, Erika,” said Mr. Jimmon. “Fact is, I’d say you’d done very well.”

Lack of the briefcase was a nuisance. He would have to take knife, flint-and-steel and string in his other hand; forget extra gut, hooks, sinkers.

“Come on,” he repeated; “carry you piggyback.”

The arms around his neck seemed frail; certainly his weight was light. If I could have gentled a cow the milk would have made all the difference. Perhaps even now—was that what she was getting at? Maybe when the dam was finished. The cattle might not have strayed too far or learned too great a wariness.

“Luck, Dad,” Erika called out, with the same strange undertone in her voice. “Don’t let him get cold.”

“Mm.” He was partly choked by the boy’s clutch.

He jogged thoughtfully downhill. Despite his efforts and warnings a definite path had been worn from the shelter to the highway. He would have to conceal it again as best he could, with pine needles and debris. Speak to her again of the seriousness of exposing themselves so. If only he could regain communication with her.

“Don’t want to.”

“All right,” he agreed absently. A strange smell drifted under his nostrils. Familiar, but not smelled recently. Acrid, faint, almost sweet; not a skunk, far off though. “You don’t have to. Just watch me catch fish for us all.”

“Don’t want to watch.”

Annoying little.… No wonder Erika wanted to fob him off for the afternoon. He tried to adjust the boy’s position on his back to make carrying a little easier, but his filled hands thwarted the attempt. “Try not to pull back against my neck,” he urged.

Even before he stepped out from between the trees into the thick brush smothering what had once been the shoulders and ditches of the highway, he knew something was wrong. Was the unfamiliar familiar smell stronger here? “Shsh; quiet,” he whispered.

“Don’t—”

“Shsh!” he hissed.

He waited silently to see if the foreign presence, if that was what it was, would betray itself before he went forward into the open. Imagination? Hunch? Worth going back for the rifle?

“I—”

“Shsh, I told you. Mean it.”

The trees were as they should be: forbearing, imperturbable, unindicative. Whatever was wrong—if indeed there was anything wrong and his startle had not been completely unwarranted—had not touched the redwoods.

Nor the brush, he thought as he pushed his way through it, deliberately avoiding the path Erika had carelessly trampled. The upstart growth was arrogant. “No one been here,” he muttered under his breath.

“What you say, Dad?”

“Shsh, shsh. Quiet.”

“But.…”

“Be qui—”

It was the road itself which told everything. Even before he stepped out on its surface, before he read what was so plain to see, Mr. Jimmon felt the contraction of dread in his chest.

The highway was not as he had known it six years earlier when he had grunted to Erika, sleepy and awed, “Guess this is the place.” It was no longer a clean strip of nearly white concrete worm-patterned with black tar. Leaves and sand had blown across it steadily in the ceaseless wind from the ocean, to be caught and held at the near edge, building back a dune to snare the earth that was stamped and filtered into it by the rain. The compound was not disturbed; the concrete was buried now, anchored under ever-accumulating topsoil on which sparse grass and undernourished plants grew thinly but stubbornly, their taproots stunted by the slab below. The highway was still clearly defined, but no longer as what it was; now it was only a sick swath through the vigorous brush and woods.

But the swath was not as it had been yesterday and the day before and last week and last year. The track of the interloper was plain and bold to see, insolently plowed through the soft detritus, imperiously proclaiming its roughshod advance on the vulnerable mass.

He put a foot on the violated surface. The signs were plain, too plain. The ultimate meaning was obscure, obscure as the fate they represented, but the immediate story was crystal clear.

Without a doubt the plump-to-plump U marks, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, were the tire treads of a jeep. They impressed themselves on the thin soil; man’s insignia on top of nature’s futile try at blotting out man’s insignia.

The jeep with treads still thick enough to leave so firmly a distinguishing mark, was—what? Not, certainly, utter disorganization. Not after six years. Whoever rode that jeep might be a marauder and pillager, but as between them (or him) and Mr. Jimmon, it was the jeep which represented civilization and Mr. Jimmon savagery.

“Why you don’t go on, huh, Dad?”

“Mmmm,” answered Mr. Jimmon perfunctorily.

Warily he moved forward. Neanderthaler sniffing the spoor of Cro-Magnon. Friday astonished by the print of Crusoe. What was implicitly engraved on the dirt? A jeep, yes; but what else? Who? Man or woman? Three or four men? Men of good will, seeking their fellows? Or fleeing from them? What was the personal history of the jeep’s occupants? What had they been six years ago, and for the six years past? Were they reconcilers or destroyers?

Mr. Stanley, I believe. Believe what? Believe anything.

Out of nowhere into nothing. Was it? No question the tracks were not quite in the center of what had once been a highway, premier numbered, paved, celebrated, maintained and budgeted for by the sovereign state of California. By ever so slight a deviation, but consistently, quite as though it were done by habit rather than intent, the tracks bore to the west side.

West side. Rule of the road, except in the unlikely event the jeep driver was an Englishman or New Zealander inexplicably traveling an unpopular American highway, meant west was the right side. The jeep came from the north and was heading south. Logic.

Still cautiously, as though the tracks themselves could suddenly materialize the vehicle and its occupants, he moved across the road and peered at the surface. Abruptly he spoke over his shoulder at the boy. “Were these marks here when you and Erika came home?”

“Huh?”

Patiently he repeated the question.

“I want to go home now.”

Had she warned him to reveal nothing? Would he have understood? It was a disadvantage not to be able to see the child’s face—but could he have divined anything from it anyway? And if she had wanted him not to come down here? Was the boy intelligent enough for deception?

He trod delicately along the road’s edge; the ground was not quite soft enough to show her footprints. Besides, if she had seen the tracks and not wanted him to know she could easily have avoided walking on them. Why should he suspect her of hiding anything?

The ill-concealed excitement. The novel request to take the boy along.

Why? He would have expected her to rush back with the news, exultant. It must seem she had been right about survivors, he wrong; why didn’t she triumph? Or supposing she had second thoughts of the intruders’ goodwill, wouldn’t she yet have wanted to tell him of their existence?

He stepped high over the impressions. Could they have been made after she returned? Not only was such pat timing highly doubtful, it left her elation unaccounted for. Nor was it reasonable to think the tracks had been made before she’d gone down to the ocean that morning; no one would drive a road so long unused for the first time at night. Logic said the jeep must have passed on its southward way while Erika searched the rocks for shellfish.

Had its occupants seen her? There was no indication from the tire marks of a stop and start. He could take it for granted their existence was still concealed; unless the jeep returned it might remain so.

He smothered the impulse to turn back. If she had suppressed a knowledge, mention would only harden whatever curious reaction she might have had. And if, improbably, she did not know of the jeep’s passage, nothing was to be gained by telling her. Yet.

There was no further point in staring down at the tracks. Reluctantly he faced away from them and walked through the thin cover which ended in sand-rooted pine and cypress. “Have to let you down now,” he said over his shoulder; “hold on to my hand going between these rocks and we’ll be all right.”

“Can’t.”

“‘Can’t’? Why can’t you?”

“You got your fishing rod in your hand.”

Mr. Jimmon shifted the rod into the hand already encumbered by knife and flint and took the boy’s free one. Jir—David Alonzo Jimmon, junior—would be twenty-three now.

The tide was low and still going out. Spume gurgled in the spongy rocks; subduedly now, explosively at high tide. “You sit down here,” he directed, putting his gear in a safe place, “and watch.”

Carefully he picked his way over the craggy strand to an exposed point where the water alternately sucked and smashed at clusters of dark, dripping mussels. A long slimy tail of green seaweed puffed and dwindled like wet wool. Mr. Jimmon selected a promising hump of large shells, down low, and pulled. The Pacific, resenting the impudence, covered them promptly and wet him to his knees. The boy laughed.

He went back and got his knife. As the next wave receded he stabbed, sawed and hacked at the tough fibers to which the mussels clung. After several more wettings he succeeded, panting, in retrieving a good-sized clump. Retreating, he opened the largest shell, cut a piece of the soft orange meat and gently worked it on his hook. He adjusted the float, and going forward, cast out as best he could with the light sinker and dangling line. The float bobbed some ten feet out.

Stepping back to where the boy was playing with a tiny fiddler crab in a rocky tidepool, he gently reeled out line. The float moved erratically seaward. Glancing over his shoulder he confirmed his certainty that this spot was invisible from any part of the road.

Currents tugged moodily at the rod’s tip, nodding it gravely, twitching it, pulling it slowly down and letting it slowly come back. The degree of civilization in man was inversely proportionate to his preoccupation with the business of getting food. For him it was an all-day chore, and an unavoidably direct one: he could perform no act—like writing insurance or welding aluminum—which could eventually be translated into calories. His relation with what he ate was always intimate.

For the jeep riders it must be immediate too; their removal from his savage status was made clear when you considered how little time they must have to spend food-getting. They were the sportsmen who could spot game and bring it down as they sped along; they were the lords of survival who could find the still intact stores of canned goods and gorge voluptuously on such rare delicacies as solid-pack tomatoes or evaporated milk.

The tug on the rod was suddenly sharp; the tip bent, the float bobbed back, moved in a swift arc. Mr. Jimmon pulled enough to set the hook and reeled in steadily, faintly excited by the struggle. “Bass,” he grunted with satisfaction.

“Oooh, big fish,” said the boy as the line, having been drawn in till the float came against the eye, was flipped overhead with a gray and brown calico writhing on the hook. He laid the rod down precisely, detached the fish, left it flopping on the rocks, baited the hook again, cast, played the float seaward, caught the rod between his knees, took up the fish under the gills, scaled it despite its throes, gutted and cleaned it, cut off the head and threw the offal into the water.

“Think you could do that?”

“Don’t want to.”

Mr. Jimmon pulled in another bass, slightly smaller, and threaded both on his string. Then he lost his bait. The tide was turning now; the float no longer eased its way outward but bobbed back and forth close to the spot where the cast had taken it. “But I have to get another fish,” he explained. “One for you and one for me and one Erika.”

“Don’t want fish. I want to go home.”

Home, thought Mr. Jimmon; these are the standards of the rising generation. Must do something about fixing up shelter. Jeep drivers can occupy luxury hotels—spiderwebs and neglect-yellowed sheets included. Those not radioactive or preempted by other jeep drivers. Which is the way to civilization? Unless Erika is right and jeep drivers are just looking for recruits to utopia. Jeep eat jeep.

“Just one more,” he said.

The tide began coming in more swiftly. Reluctantly he wound up his line, removed the float, lowered the leader and cast out again for bottom fish. If nothing else he might get a small shovel-nose, whose tail made good eating, boiled.

“Good eating?” he repeated aloud. “I’m damned sick of fish. All kinds.”

“What you say, Dad?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

If the briefcase hadn’t broken he’d have brought along a heavier sinker. This one was far too light; he could feel it rolling and tumbling over the bottom with each swell. Bait probably gone by now too; ought to pull up and put on gristle. Fish didn’t care so much for it, but it stayed on.

He wound up slowly; the line grew taut. Angrily he gave slack, hoping the ebb would pull the sinker or the hook out of whatever it was caught on. He gave lots of slack, then reeled in gently, steadily. Again the line tightened.

The impulse to jerk, to try and snap it loose was almost irresistible, but as with the shotgun shells the thought of the diminishing store made him unnaturally prudent. (The jeep riders could be extravagant; the solitary Eskimo had to cherish his solitary possession.) If he had not cast out from a point there might have been a way of getting to seaward of the snagged tackle.

A roller smashed against the rocks and the spray stung his face. If he didn’t get it loose soon it would be hopelessly caught. Or the line would fray through. He gave ample slack, hoping the big wave’s backwash might take the sinker with it. But when he reeled up, the line was still tight.

“Another one gone,” he mourned. He let the line out for a last time, allowed it to lie limp in the foam, reeled in steadily against the ebb. The line pulled, he pulled. Then he wound up the broken line, shorn of leader, hook and sinker.

“Come on, we’ll go home.”

He gathered his knife, flint-and-steel, float, the two bass and the clump of mussels. Steamed, they were tasty enough.

“Piggyback. I want to ride home piggyback.”

“All right,” said Mr. Jimmon wearily. “Climb on.”

When the lead sinkers were all gone he could use nuts from the station wagon. They should last his lifetime if he could get them off; before then his lines would be rotted through. He had been provident and thought of the future, but apparently he’d not thought far enough.

One could almost sink into believing in some malicious design. The final irresponsibility of shifting cause and effect onto the shoulders of devils or gods. The retreat from payment for mistakes or rewards for intelligence. The Lord is my shepherd because I have the brains of a sheep.

He trudged over the rocks and sand, the boy heavy and wearisome now. Nearing the highway he paused, watchful, like a dog scenting. No alien sights or sounds disturbed him. The faint smell of gasoline—was it his imagination? The parallel ruts lay stolid, unchurned; there were no other following or coming back.

Stepping across them again he peered southward. Savior or destroyer? Mystery was danger; knowledge, the old cliché had it, was power. The presence of the tracks resolved nothing; neither Erika nor he had been proven finally right or wrong. But whatever the character of the jeep’s occupants, crude or gentle, sage or bumpkin, they portended no good to him. They represented a line of development in which he had no place.

Suddenly his depression lifted, Cro-Magnon had not fathered modern man after all. There was survival and there were the blind alleys of evolution. There was no guarantee that by the standards which ultimately counted the jeep represented superiority and he inferiority. Or more aptly, fitness and unfitness. Tomorrow he would work on the dam. When that was finished he would make the shelter into a genuine cabin. The boy was four; soon he could be taught to read. For that matter there was much he could teach Erika.

He had been supine; he acknowledged it freely. But from now on things would be different. Perhaps he had needed the shock of the jeep to shake him back into struggling. Force himself to learn to do things for which he had no talent.

He took even more care than usual to avoid the scuffed path. Once the dam was built he could utilize the small clear patches for cultivation. Though the seeds were ruined he might still search out domesticated plants gone wild and coax them back.

He had known the looters and ravishers would come; it was to avoid them he had the station wagon packed and waiting against the day of necessity. But wasn’t it true he had also foretold, dimly perhaps, the jeep and the way of life represented by the jeep? He had built no mammoth concrete shelter underground, nor had he tried to find refuge on some remote Pacific island. His had been the middle, sensible course, as befitted a survivor and the prototype of survivors.

In time, might it not even be possible that the mutual reserve and distrust which had grown up between him and Erika would dissolve? That they were man and woman was far less important than that they were father and daughter.

She was not outside the shelter, nor was the fire going. “Erika,” he called, hoping she had already mended the briefcase. “Erika?”

“Erika,” echoed the boy.

Mr. Jimmon eased him down from his back; put the fish and mussels next to the fireplace. He laid his rod beside the stream, unreeling all of the line that had been dampened, washing the salt water off carefully. Then he looped it loosely over the bushes to dry. Only then did he go inside. “Erika?”

He took a handful of the dry moss kept in reserve and went back to the fireplace. Careless of her to let it go out that way, knowing from experience how long it took to make a new one. On the fourth try a spark struck from the flint-and-steel made a filament of moss glow; he blew it quickly into flame and fed it slowly with crisp pine needles. A quick start for once.

When the fire was established he added small brush and laid on three medium-sized boughs. He scooped up a small quantity of water into the bottom of the kettle and dumped in the mussels. Then he set the two bass as close to the fire as he could without danger of them scorching.

“The hunter home from the hill,” he muttered, returning to the shelter. Her watch was gone from its accustomed place. Now why would she.… The briefcase lay on the ground, unmended.

The boy came in and stood beside him. “I’m hungry now. Where’s Erika?”

“In a minute,” he answered; “in a minute.”

“Hungry,” repeated the boy.

Reluctantly Mr. Jimmon began his search. Rifle and shotgun were intact in their hiding places. So was the other fishing rod, something no one bent on robbery would have missed. And the two steel bows. He hesitated before looking further.

The revolver’s cache was empty, and three separate repositories for its cartridges had been cleaned out. There was no possibility of doubting. There really never had been. Duty. Pity in her voice under the elation. Ruthlessness-unsentimentality.

Mr. Jimmon spoke gently. “Come on, Eric. There’s a fish for you and one for me; by the time they’re gone the mussels will be done.”

It was the first time, so far as he could remember, that he’d called or even thought of the boy by name. Needs eggs and greens; warm covers at night.

“Where’s Erika? I want Erika.”

“I’m afraid Erika has gone away for a while,” said Mr. Jimmon soothingly. “Looking for something. You and I will have to make out as best we can without her. Come on now Eric, eat your fish; tomorrow we’ll look for gulls’ eggs. And there might be berries not too far away.”

Mr. Jimmon regarded his own fish with distaste. His tooth had finally begun to ache. Badly.