The Genocides

“Damn it, Clay,” Joel Stromberg replied, shaking his head reprovingly (though it might have been just palsy), “if this winter ain’t colder than the winters in the sixties and fifties I’ll eat my hat. It used to be that we’d worry whether we was going to have a white Christmas. And I say it’s the way the lake has gone down causes it.”

“Poppycock!” Clay insisted, not without justice.

Usually no one would have paid any more attention to Clay and Joel than to the wind whining about the spiky Plants outside, but this time Orville intruded: “You know— there may be a reason why it’s getting colder. Carbon dioxide.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” Clay quipped.

“Carbon dioxide is what the Plants—any plants—take in to combine with water when they’re making their own food. It’s also what we—that is, animals—exhale. Since the Plants have come, I suspect that the old balance between the carbon dioxide they take in and the amount we give off has started favoring the Plants. So there’s less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, carbon dioxide is a great absorber of heat. It stores heat from the sun and keeps the air warm. So with less carbon dioxide, there’ll be a lot more cold and snow. That’s just a theory, of course.”

“That’s a hell of a theory!”

“I’ll agree with you there, Clay, since it’s not mine. It’s one of the reasons geologists give for the ice ages.”

Anderson didn’t believe strongly in geology, since so much of it went against the Bible, but if what Orville said about carbon dioxide was true, then the worsening of the winters (and they were worse, no one really doubted it) might well have that for a cause. But true or not, there was something he didn’t like in Orville’s tone, something more than just the know-it-all attitude of the college grad, which Anderson was used to from Buddy. It was as if these little lectures on the wonders of science (and there had been more than a few) had but a single purpose: to lead them to despair.

But he did know more science than anyone else, and Anderson grudgingly respected him for it. If nothing else, he’d stopped Clay and Joel from arguing about the weather, and for that small blessing Anderson could not help but give thanks.

It was not as bad yet as it would become in February and March, but it was very bad: the close quarters, the silly quarrels, the noise, the stench, the abrasion of flesh on flesh and nerve on nerve. It was very bad. It was well nigh intolerable.

Two hundred and fifty people lived in 2,400 square feet, and much of that space was given over to storage. Last winter when there had been almost double the number in the same room, when every day witnessed a new death, every month a new epidemic of the deadly common cold, it had been measurably worse. The more susceptible types-those who couldn’t bear up—had run amok, singing and laughing, into the deceiving warmth of the January thaws; these were gone this year. This year the walls were firmly anchored and tightly woven from the start; this year the rationing was not so desperately tight (though there would be less meat). Yet for all these improvements, it was still an intolerable way to live and everyone knew it.

The thing that Buddy could not stand, the very worst thing, was the presence of so much flesh. All day it rubbed against him, it displayed itself, it stank in his nostrils. And any of the hundred women in the room, even Blossom, would by the simplest gesture, by the tamest word, trigger his lust. Yet for all the good it did him, he might as well have been watching the bloodless phantasms of a movie. There was simply no place, day or night, in the cramped commonroom for sex. His erotic life was limited to such occasions as he could impose upon Maryann to come with him to visit the freezing outhouse by the pig sty. Maryann, in her seventh month and prone at any time to sniffles, seldom accommodated him.

It did not help that, as long as there was daylight in the room, Buddy could look up from whatever he was doing (or more likely—whatever he wasn’t doing) and see, probably no more than twenty feet away, Greta.