Earth Abides

All right! If so, he was successfully baited. He felt a sense of irritation, but for more serious reasons, he thought, than because he had been fooled. “Well,” he said to Em, “there they go again—more boxes of cartridges popping off uselessly, and no one left in the world who knows how to make cartridges! And here we are in a country overrun with mountain-lions and wild bulls, and cartridges the only way we have of keeping them under control, and for food we don’t know how to kill cattle or rabbits or quail except by shooting them.”

Em seemed to have nothing to say, and in the pause his mind ranged petulantly over the events of the bonfire itself. That fire had been built up largely out of sawed timber brought from a lumber-yard, interspersed with cartons of toilet paper, which burned beautifully because of the holes through the middle. In addition, boxes of matches had been scattered through the fire because they went up with fine flares, and there had also been cans of alcohol and cleaning-fluid to give further zest. Doubtless, if you had had to buy all those materials with money, the bonfire would have cost ten thousand dollars in the Old Times; now, those materials might be considered even more valuable, because they had come to be completely irreplaceable.

“Don’t worry, dearest,” he heard her say now. “It’s time to go to sleep.”

He settled down beside her, his head close against her breast, seeming as always to draw strength and confidence from her.

“I’m not worrying much, I suppose,” he said. “Maybe I really enjoy all this, feeling a little lugubrious about the future, as if we were living dangerously.”

He lay still for a moment more, and she said nothing, and then he went on with his thinking aloud.

“Do you remember I’ve been saying this a long time now, that we have to live more creatively, not just as scavengers? It’s bad for us, I think, even psychologically. Why, I was saying this way back even at the time when Jack was going to be born.”

“Yes, I remember. You’ve said it a great many times, and yet, some way or other, it still seems easier just to keep on opening cans as long as there are plenty of cans in the grocery stores and warehouses.”

“But the end will come some time. Then, what will people do?”

“Well, I suppose, whatever people there are then—they will just have to solve that problem for themselves…. And, dear, I’ve always wished you wouldn’t worry so much about it. Things would be different if you had a lot of people who were like you, that thought about things a long way off. But all you have are usual people like Ezra and George and me. And we don’t think that way. Darwin—wasn’t that his name?—said that we all came from apes or monkeys or something, and I suppose apes and monkeys and things like that never thought much about the future. If we’d come from bees or ants, we might have planned out things ahead, or even if we had been trained like squirrels to store up nuts for the winter.”

“Yes, maybe. But in the Old Times people thought about the future. Look at the way they built up civilization.”

“And they had Dotty—what was her name?—and Charlie McCarthy, just like Ezra says.” Then suddenly she went off on another tangent. “And about all this scavenging business that worries you so much! Is it so very different from what people used to do? If you want some copper now, you go down to one of the hardware stores, and find a little copper wire, and take that and hammer it up. In the Old Times, they just went and dug some copper out of a hill somewhere. It maybe was copper ore and not just copper, but still they were scavenging in a way, for it was there all the time. And as far as the food goes, they grew it by using up what was stored in the ground, and changing that into wheat. We just take most of our stuff out of what is stored up somewhere else. I don’t know that there’s too much difference!”

The argument stopped him for a moment. Then he rallied. “No, that’s not just right either,” he said. “At least, they were more creative than we are. They were a going concern. They produced what they used as they went along.”

“I’m not too sure about that,” she said. “It seems to me I can remember reading even in cheap things like the Sunday supplements that we were always just at the point of running out of copper or oil, or were exhausting the soil so we wouldn’t have anything to live on in the future.”