Besides, lie had chopped all that firewood. He looked at his calloused hand she had done all that work and, by George, he was going to enjoy the benefits
He was headed out to the hogback to wait for sunset and do an hour’s reading; he glanced at his car as he passed it, thinking that he would like to try the radio. He suppressed the yen; two thirds of his reserve gasoline was gone already just from keeping the battery charged for the radio and here it was only December. He really ought to cut it down to twice a week. But it meant a lot to catch the noon bulletin of Free America and then twiddle the dial a few minutes to see what else he could pick up
But for the past three days Free America had not been on the air solar static maybe, or perhaps just a power failure
But that rumor that President Brandley had been assassinated while it hadn’t come from the Free radio…and it hadn’t been denied by them, either, which was a good sign
Still, it worried him
And that other story that lost Atlantis had pushed up during the quake period and that the Azores were now a little continent almost certainly a hang-over of the “silly season
but it would be nice to hear a follow-up
Rather sheepishly he let his feet carry him to the car
It wasn’t fair to listen when Meade wasn’t around. He warmed it up, slowly spun the dial, once around and back
Not a peep at full gain, nothing but a terrible amount of static. Served him right
He climbed the hogback, sat down on the bench he had dragged up there their “memorial bench,” sacred to the memory of the time Meade had hurt her knees on the gravel sat down and sighed. His lean belly was stuffed with venison and corn fritters; he lacked only tobacco to make him completely happy. The evening cloud colors were spectacularly beautiful and the weather was extremely balmy for December; both, he thought, caused by volcanic dust, with perhaps an assist from atom bombs
Surprising how fast things went to pieces when they started to skid I And surprising how quickly they were going back together, judging by the signs. A curve reaches trough and then starts right back up. World War III was the shortest big war on record forty cities gone, counting Moscow and the other slave cities as well as the American ones and then whoosh! neither side fit to fight. Of course, the fact that both sides had thrown their ICBMs over the pole through the most freakish arctic weather since Peary invented the place had a lot to do with it, he supposed. It was amazing that any of the Russian paratroop transports had gotten through at all
He sighed and pulled the November 1951 copy of the Western Astronomer out of his pocket. Where was he? Oh, yes, Some Notes on the Stability of G-Type Stars with Especial Reference to Sol, by A. G. M. Dynkowski, Lenin Institute, translated by Heinrich Ley, F. R. A. S. Good boy, Ski sound mathematician. Very clever application of harmonic series and tightly reasoned. He started to thumb for his place when he noticed a footnote that he had missed
Dynkowski’s own name carried down to it: “This mono graph was denounced by Pravda as romantic reactionaries shortly after it was published. Professor Dynkowski has been unreported since and must be presumed to be liquidated,
The poor geek! Well, he probably would have been atomized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in
He wondered if they really had gotten all the Russki para troopers? Well, he had killed his quota; if he hadn’t gotten that doe within a quarter mile of the cabin and headed right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot them in the back, the swine! and buried them beyond the woodpile and then it had seemed a shame to skin and eat an innocent deer while those lice got decent burial
Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich