“I dunno,” Stuart said. “I feel strange. It upset me to come back and find Edward eaten.” He roamed about the shop. Our relationship, he thought, is different with animals now. It’s much closer; there isn’t the great gap between us and them that there was. “Over on the other side of the Bay I saw something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “A flying animal like a bat but not a bat. More like a weasel, very skinny and long, with a big head. They call them tommies because they’re always gliding up against windows and looking in, like peeping toms.”
Hardy said, “It’s a squirrel. I’ve seen them.” He leaned back in his chair, loosened his necktie. “They evolved from the squirrels in Golden Gate Park.” He yawned. “I once had a scheme for them … they could be useful—in theory, at least—as message carriers. They can glide or fly or whatever they do for amounts up to a mile. But they’re too feral. I gave it up after catching one.” He held up his right hand. “Look at the scar, there on my thumb. That’s from a torn.”
“This man I talked to said they taste good. Like old-time chicken. They sell them at stalls in downtown San Francisco; you see old ladies selling them cooked for a quarter apiece, still hot, very fresh.”
“Don’t try one,” Hardy said. “Many of them are toxic. It has to do with their diet.”
“Hardy,” Stuart said suddenly, “I want to get out of the city and out into the country.”
His employer regarded him.
“It’s too brutal here,” Stuart said.
“It’s brutal everywhere.”
“Not so much if you get away from town, really far away, say fifty to a hundred miles.”
“But then it’s hard to make a living.”
“Do you sell any traps in the country?” Stuart asked.
“No,” Hardy said.
“Why not?”
“Vermin live in towns, where there’s ruins. You know that. Stuart, you’re a woolgatherer. The country is sterile; you’d miss the flow of ideas that you have here in the city. Nothing happens; they just farm and listen to the satellite. Anyhow, you’re apt to run into the old race prejudice against Negroes, out in the country; they’ve reverted to the old patterns.” Once more he put on his glasses, turned his arc light back on and resumed the assembling of the trap before him. “It’s one of the greatest myths that ever existed, the superiority of the country. I know you’d be back here in a week.”
“I’d like to take a line of traps say out around Napa,” Stuart persisted. “Maybe up to the St. Helena Valley. Maybe I could trade them for wine; they grow grapes up there, I understand, like they used to.”
“But it doesn’t taste the same,” Hardy said. “The ground is altered. The wine is—“ He gestured. “You’d have to taste it, I can’t tell you, but it’s really awful. Foul.”
They were both silent, then.
“They drink it, though,” Stuart said. “I’ve seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks.”
“Of course, because people will drink anything they can get their hands on now. So do you, so do I.” Mr. Hardy raised his head and regarded Stuart. “You know who has liquor? I mean the genuine thing; you can’t tell if it’s prewar that he’s dug up or new that he’s made.”
“Nobody in the Bay Area.”
Hardy said, “Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert.”
“I don’t believe it.” He sucked in his breath, fully alert, now.
“Oh, he doesn’t produce much of it. I’ve only seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it.” Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. “You would have liked it.”
“How much does he want for it?” He tried to sound casual.
“More than you have to pay.”
“And—it tastes like the real thing? The pre-war?”
Hardy laughed and returned to his trap-assembling. “That’s right.”
I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest … walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy, snow-white hair, imported monocle—I can picture him. He probably drives a Jaguar, converted of course now to wood, but still a great, powerful Mark XVI Saloon.
Seeing the expression on Stuart’s face, Hardy leaned toward him. “I can tell you what else he sells.”
“English brier pipes?”
“Yes, that, too.” Hardy lowered his voice. “Girly photos. In artistic poses—you know.”
“Aw, Christ,” Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. “I don’t believe it.”
“God’s truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They’re worth a fortune, of course. I’ve heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1962 Playboy calendar; that’s supposed to have happened somewhere back East, in Nevada, somewhere like that.” Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space, his vermin trap forgotten.
“Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the service department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed.
Hardy nodded in a resigned way.
“Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere,” Stuart said. “And he came onto a entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions? He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”
“Right,” Hardy said, nodding.
“I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Japan, but they’re no good.”
“I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”
“Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation, and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”
Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where; maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out-of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”
“Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”
After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—“
“But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—“
“I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”
Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me.
Hardy grunted, frowning.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” Stuart said, “but I want to grow. I have to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten yeas ago, and that’s not good enough.”
Scratching his nose, Hardy said, “What did you have in mind?”
“Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”
“Just one potato?”
“I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’re all those freak animals and funny people here in the city.”
Hardy said, “Maybe you could locate an intelligent bean.”
“I’m not joking about this,” Stuart said quietly.
They faced each other, neither speaking.
“It’s a service to humanity,” Hardy said at last, “to make homeostatic vermin traps that destroy mutated cats and dogs and rats and squirrels. I think you’re acting infantile. Maybe your horse being eaten while you were over in South San Francisco—“
Entering the room, Ella Hardy said, “Dinner is ready, and I’d like to serve it while it’s hot. It’s baked cod-head and rice and it took me three hours standing in line down at Eastshore Freeway to get the cod-head.”
The two men rose to their feet. “You’ll eat with us?” Hardy asked Stuart.
At the thought of the baked fish head, Stuart’s mouth watered. He could not say no and he nodded, following after Mrs. Hardy toward the little combination living room and kitchen in the rear of the building. It had been a month since be had tasted fish; there were almost none left in the Bay any longer—most of the schools had been wiped out and had never returned. And those that were caught were often ,radioactive. But it did not matter; people had become able to eat them anyhow. People could eat almost anything; their lives depended on it.