Short Fiction - Poul Anderson (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📗

The campus was jammed with townspeople. In the vague pre-dawn light, Arch saw them as a moving river of white, frightened faces. Farmer, merchant, laborer, student, teacher, housewife, they had all receded into a muttering anonymity through which he pushed toward the steps of the hall. The irregular militia was forming ranks there, with Culquhoun’s shaggy form dominating the scene.

“There you are,” he snapped. “Betty, can you help take charge of the women and children and old people? Get them inside⁠—this one building ought to hold them all, with some crowding. Kind of circulate around, keep them calm. We’ll pass out coffee and doughnuts as soon as the Salvation Army bunch can set up a canteen.”

“What’s the plan?” asked a guardsman. To Arch, his voice had a dim dreamlike quality, none of this was real, it couldn’t be.

“I don’t know what those arsonists intend or where they’re bound,” said Culquhoun, “but we’d better be ready to meet them. The traffic through town stopped completely a few hours ago⁠—I think there’s a gang of highwaymen operating.”

“Colin, it can’t be! Plain people like us⁠—”

“Hungry, frightened, angry, desperate, confused people. A mob has nothing to do with the individuals in it, my friend. And one small push is enough to knock down a row of dominoes. Once lawlessness really gets started, a lot of others are driven into it in self-defense.”

They waited. The sun came up, throwing a pale bleak light over the late snow and the naked trees. The canteen handed out a sort of breakfast. Little was said.

At nine-thirty, a boy on a clumsy plowhorse came galloping up toward them. “About a hundred, marching down the highway,” he panted. “They threw a couple shots at me.”

“Stay here,” said Culquhoun. “I’m going down to see if we can’t parley. I’ll want about ten men with me. Volunteers?”

Arch found himself among the first. It didn’t matter much what happened to him, now when the work of his hands was setting aflame homes all across the land. They trudged down the hillside and out toward the viaduct leading south. Culquhoun broke into a deserted house and stationed them in its entrance hall.

Peering out, Arch saw the ragged column moving in. They were all men, unshaven and dirty. A few trucks accompanied them, loaded with a strange mass of plunder, but most were on foot and all were armed.

Culquhoun bound a towel to his rifle barrel and waved it through the front door. After what seemed like a long time, a voice outside said: “Okay, if yuh wanna talk, go ahead.”

“Cover me,” murmured Culquhoun, stepping onto the porch. Looking around his shoulder, Arch made out three of the invaders, with their troop standing in tired, slumped attitudes some yards behind. They didn’t look fiendish, merely worn and hungry.

“Okay, pal,” said the leader. “This is O’Farrell’s bunch, and we’re after food and shelter. What can yuh do for us?”

“Food and shelter?” Culquhoun glanced at the trucks. “You seem to’ve been helping yourselves pretty generously already.”

O’Farrell’s face darkened. “What’d yuh have us do? Starve?”

“You’re from the Boston area, I suppose. You could have stayed there.”

“And been blown off the map!”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” said Culquhoun mildly. “It’s not likely to happen, either. They have organized relief back there, you didn’t have to starve. But no, you panicked and then you turned mean.”

“It’s easy enough for yuh to say so. Yuh’re safe. We’re here after our proper share, that’s all.”

“Your proper share is waiting in Boston,” said Culquhoun with a sudden chill. “Now, if you want to proceed through our town, we’ll let you; but we don’t want you to stay. Not after what you’ve been doing lately.”

O’Farrell snarled and brought up his gun. Arch fired from behind Culquhoun. The leader spun on his heel, crumpled, and sagged with a shriek. Arch felt sick.

His nausea didn’t last. It couldn’t, with the sudden storm of lead which sleeted against the house. Culquhoun sprang back, closing the door. “Out the rear!” he snapped. “We’ll have to fight!”

They retreated up the hill, crouching, zigzagging, shooting at the disorderly mass which milled in slow pursuit. Culquhoun grinned savagely. “Keep drawing ’em on, boys,” he said as he knelt in the slush and snapped a shot. “If they spread through town, we’ll have hell’s own time routing ’em all out⁠—but this way⁠—”

Arch didn’t know if he was hitting anything. He didn’t hear the bullets which must be whining around him⁠—another cliché that just wasn’t true, he thought somewhere in the back of his head. A fight wasn’t something you could oversee and understand. It was cold feet, clinging mud, whirling roaring confusion, it was a nightmare that you couldn’t wake up from.

Then the rest of the Westfield troop were there, circling around to flank the enemy and pumping death. It was a rout⁠—in minutes, the gang had stampeded.

Arch leaned on his rifle and felt vomit rising in his throat. Culquhoun clapped his shoulder. “Ye did richt well, laddie,” he rumbled. “No bad at all.”

“What’s happening?” groaned Arch. “What’s become of the world?”

Culquhoun took out his pipe and began tamping it. “Why, a simple shift of the military balance of power,” he answered. “Once again we have cheap, easily operated weapons which everyone can own and which are the equal of anything it’s practical for a government to use. Last time it was the flintlock musket, right? And we got the American and French Revolutions. This time it’s capacitite.

“So the Soviet dictatorship is doomed. But we’ve got a rough time ahead of us, because there are enough unstable elements in our own society to make trouble. Our traditional organizations just aren’t prepared to handle them when they’re suddenly armed.

“We’ll learn how fast enough, I imagine. There’s going to be order again, if only because the majority of people are decent, hardworking fellows who won’t put up with much more of this sort of thing. But there has to be a transition period,