Earth Abides

Or one will rig batteries to a radio-set, and sit with earphones, fingering the dials. “Yes?” he will say sharply. “Be quiet there, all of you!… Surely, surely!… Just at 920!… Someone talking. I heard distinctly, sounded Spanish…. There again!… Now it’s faded!” But there will be no words on the air, only the tricks of the far-off thunderstorms.

“Yes, this is comfortable,” thought Ish, resting in the big chair…. And then suddenly he started! From the street came the noise of two loud reports, and he knew at once that they could be nothing but the backfiring of a large truck! Then, so quickly that he did not seem to take time at all, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, and there was the truck in the middle of the street. It was a fine large truck painted bright red with blue trim, and in large white letters on its side he saw: U.S. GOVT. A man got out of the truck, and though he had been driving it, he was now (quite understandably) wearing a cut-away coat and a high silk hat. The man said nothing, but Ish of course knew that this was the Governor of California. Ish felt himself filled suddenly with an inexpressible happiness. For again there was security and constituted authority and the strength of the many, instead of only the few in the midst of surrounding darkness, and now he, Ish, was no longer a weak and neglected child wandering alone in the vast unfriendly world….

In that bewilderment of happiness too great to be home, he awoke. The insides of his hands were moist, and his heart pounded. As he looked around the familiar room, the happiness faded out like a dying light, and in its place succeeded a woe, equally unutterable.

After another moment the woe too faded out as his conscious controls took over. That intense happiness of the dream, so overwhelming that it had awakened him—he knew now that it had sprung again from that often-repeated dream—“wish fulfillment,” they used to say. How many times throughout these twenty-one years had he dreamed it in some form or other! Not during the first year or two indeed-his sense of loneliness and insecurity had seemed to grow cumulatively with the years, piling up faster than the birth of new children could counteract it.

Yes, today the symbolism had been very plain. It varied, though usually it was plain enough. He felt a little surprised that it so often took the form of the return of the United States Government. In the Old Times he had never considered himself a flag-waving patriot, and he had not thought often about such things as the benefits of citizenship. But no more, indeed, did a person think of the air he breathed, until it was taken away. A sense of the vastness and solidity of the United States of America must have affected the sub-conscious feelings of its citizens, he reflected, much more than most of them had imagined.

By now he had brought his mind back to his actual world. He stirred in the chair. By the position of the sun he judged that he had slept an hour. Again he heard the distant report of the shot-gun from the quail-hunters. He smiled wanly, associating it with the back-firing truck. Anyway-now he would set about getting the others together for the meeting which he had planned for that evening.

Water supplies remained scanty throughout the day, but at least no one suffered from thirst. That evening the older ones, including Robert and Richard who were only sixteen, gathered at Ish’s house at his invitation. Ish found no one very much disturbed. It would be a good idea (this seemed to be the general opinion) to try digging a well near one of the houses, rather than to move to some houses nearer a natural water supply. Yes, they probably would have to watch sanitation carefully under the new arrangements and see that the children were instructed in such matters.

There was no presiding officer. Occasionally someone deferred to Ish to settle a point, but this deference, he realized, might be because he held a faintly recognized natural leadership of intellect or even for no better reason than that he was the host. There was no secretary taking a record of what happened. But then, there were no motions made and no votes taken. As always, it was more a social than a parliamentary gathering. Ish listened to the conversation back and forth.

“Come to think of it, though—how’s anybody know we’d get water in that well?”

“Can’t be a well till you do get water.”

“Well, that hole-in-the-ground then?”

“You got something there!”

“Maybe this would do better…. Run a pipe over to some click or spring, and hitch it onto our old pipes.”

“How about it, George? That sound O.K.?”