She said seriously, "You mustn't think that the Great Science is one
of these crackpot cultist affairs. I know gematry has a bad name, but
you'd be astonished at the great minds that have worked on it. Fermat,
Bachet--back as far as Diophantos, in fact. Why, if you'd just--oh,
please, Mickey." She touched his arm as he started to move. "I'll stop.
This isn't the time to talk about important things."
"Important."
"This," she said, "is a time for shallow, surfacy affairs, a time
when distractions come crowding in and cannot be ignored. One such
distraction is that Mr. Starkman is dying and needs oxygen."
"I have an idea," he said. "Come on."
There was a boy of fourteen standing by with a handkerchief tied around
his left arm, an improvised brassard. "Son," Groff said, "do you go to
the junior high?"
"Yes."
"The burgess, Mr. Starkman, needs oxygen and they can't get at the
firehouse tanks. It occurred to me that there might be some in the
school--those little tanks they call lecture bottles that they use for
demonstrations in chemistry classes."
"I haven't taken chem yet, mister, I don't know," the boy said
unhappily.
"Are there any teachers here?"
"Yes sir! Mr. Holtz the math teacher's making the coffee back there."
Groff approached Holtz, a small, harried man. Holtz listened and said:
"Not in the junior high, no. No lecture demonstrations, just recitation
and lab. But the senior high across the river would have some. My
good friend Mr. Anderson lectures there and he believes in making it
spectacular. Yes; they would have lecture flasks. I'd guide you there
if I weren't assigned. Perhaps you can find somebody--"
Groff decided he would not. These people were working at top capacity
now. He could do the job on his own.
Groff and Polly picked their way through the silt to the river bank. A
rowboat manned by two husky youngsters with the improvised brassards
was unloading a weeping woman and a silent child.
"Get to the school," one of them told her in an important, basically
uncertain voice. "They'll take care of you there. They've got nurses
and everything."
She walked off clutching the child's hand, still weeping.
The kids looked after her, round-eyed. They told Groff: "That's Mrs.
Vostek. Her husband drowned. We just found her sitting on her porch
crying. Maybe she's gone crazy."
"Can you get us across the river? We want to get into the high school
and look for oxygen bottles. The sick cases need it."
"That's what we're here for, mister!"
Good kids....
On the other bank, perilously attained, the kids pointed Groff and
Polly in the right direction and took aboard two grim brassarded men
who carried a limp, moaning girl of ten between them.
The other side of the river was the older part of town; the inevitable
slum had grown up there. Here in the streets and on the steps they saw
drunken men and women with blank despair in their eyes tilting bottles
skyward. One of them drained his bottle and yelled: "To hell with it!"
and hurled the empty through the plate-glass window of a silt-choked
little magazine-and-candy store. A man, not young, sitting in the store
came charging out with a sawed-off ball bat in his hands, swinging.
"You cheap rotten bum!" he yelled. "Things aren't bad enough, you have
to make them worse!"
While the drunk stared stupidly, Groff rushed between them and caught
the wrists of the man with the bat. "Easy," he said. "For God's sake,
you'll kill him with that thing."
The drunk came to life. "Let him kill," he yelled. "What's the damn
difference now? No job, no house, no furniture. Let him kill!" But he
reeled off down the street while Groff held the furious man.
"Stupid bastard," the proprietor swore. "I'll give him bottles.
Three-fifty he owes me, I'll give him bottles!" Then the fight suddenly
evaporated out of him. Groff let go and they walked on, looking back to
see him shamble into his store again and sit down with the bat across
his knees.
They passed a bar, and there was no nonsense about that. Two men who
looked like brothers stood grimly at the door. Each had a shotgun over
his arm. When Groff and Polly walked by they shifted the guns a little
and said nothing.
A corner grocery had become a sort of involuntary relief station. There
was a long unruly line leading to the door. The grocer stood there;
behind him in the store his wife was bringing up canned goods, bottled
pop, everything. The grocer, sweating and afraid, was handing out the
food and drink to the sullen people as they passed.
"Please," he was saying, "I haven't got time to write this down. Please
remember what you take and come around and settle when things clear up."
After a fashion he was avoiding the sack of his store.
The high school was an old red brick building, smaller than the new
junior high across the river. Groff marched up the steps and tried the
door. "Bloody hell," he said. "Locked, of course."