A Creed for the Third Millennium (11 page)

It was cold, so she changed into a
glove-tight pure cotton velour track suit, put on thick socks of wool and a pair
of knitted woollen bootees, and warmed her hands over the gas flame as she made
herself a snack of stew and boiled potato, the stew out of a can and the potato
fresh. Eating would warm her up. And then, even though the sun had risen several
hours before, she could go to bed fuelled for sleep.

When the fog came down at the end of
January some aspects of life stopped and some started. Out of its all-pervading
furtiveness it bred furtiveness. Things dripped hollowly. Footsteps came and
went muffled, directionless, threatening. Two people could pass within a yard of
each other and not know they had even passed. Some sighed and some died, each a
kind of giving up the ghost. An infinite weariness, that fog, as if the very air
itself gave up the ghost and sank in upon its own skin and in so doing condensed
enough to make itself visible at last. So much sighed in it, so much died in
it.

Among those who died in it was Harry
Bartholomew, of a gunshot wound in the chest. He was cold, poor Harry, he was
always cold. Perhaps he felt the cold more than others, or perhaps he was
essentially weaker. Certainly if he had had his way he would have been heading
for the Carolinas or Texas or anywhere in the warm south for the winter, but his
wife wouldn't leave her mother, and her mother wouldn't leave Connecticut.
Yankees did not venture south of the Mason-Dixon line for any reason short of a
civil war, said the old lady. So each winter Harry and his wife stayed on in
Connecticut, though Harry's job finished on November 30 and didn't start again
until April Fool's Day. And the cantankerous ungrateful old lady gobbled up
every bit of what precious little warmth the Bartholomews had. Harry's wife saw
to that, and Harry went along because it was the old lady who had the
money.

The result was that Harry became a
criminal of the worst kind.
He burned wood.
His
house was relatively isolated in the middle of its square six-acre block, so on
windy nights he could get away with it fairly easily. Oh, what a difference that
gloriously glowing mass of ignited carbon made!

Their stove dated back to the latter
decades of the last century, when everyone had begun burning wood in the
carefree days before local and state and federal authorities had clamped down
hard. For the trees were going far too fast, and the cold damp air clotted
around the huge increase in carbon particles to form genuine pea-soup fogs. The
fogs kept getting worse. And worse. More and more people burned wood, more and
more power was generated from coal.

At first the smokeless zones were urban
and suburban only. Harry lived in the countryside of middle Connecticut, where
the hills are gentle and rolling and the forests used to be extensive. Then wood
as combustible fuel was completely outlawed; wood must be saved for paper and
construction. And coal was to be conserved for generation of power, production
of gas, manufacture of synthetic materials. Most precious of all, petroleum
consumption was cut back to the barest minimum. The Smokeless Zones became a
single Smokeless Zone affecting every county in the country, north and
south.

People still burned wood clandestinely,
but less and less as time went on; there were plenty of tree-loving
environmentalists to form local vigilante groups, and caught offenders were
punished drastically by the levying of huge fines, plus removal of privileges or
concessions or both. But even knowing all this, still Harry Bartholomew went on
burning wood, terrified, panic-stricken, haunted, incapable of kicking the
habit.

The fogs no longer came down all winter
long, as they used to during the final ten years before the burning of wood and
coal in homes and apartments was completely outlawed, but they still
came down whenever atmospheric conditions were right; the powerhouses, factories
and institutions contributed more than sufficient carbon from their coal burning
to the air when fog conditions were at optimum. And when the fogs did come down,
they were a godsend to people like Harry Bartholomew. He had developed a method
of stealing wood, and it worked.

A string line ran between Harry's house
and the eastern boundary of his property, a low stone wall that cut him off from
his eastern neighbour, Eddie Marcus. Eddie's property was a lot bigger than
Harry's, something over sixteen acres, and it was solid trees because Eddie
didn't farm. In the days before wood burning became so difficult and culpable,
Eddie had lost many trees, but gradually his position as the local vigilante
leader (Eddie was a militant Green Earther, as was his father before him) and
the size of his threats made tree thieves look elsewhere. Until the night Harry
ran his string line to Eddie's boundary wall and hid the big spool to which it
was still attached in a cavity well camouflaged by leaves, as was the played-out
length of string.

There the spool lay until a fog came. And
when it did, Harry followed the string from his house to the stone wall, stepped
over it, and played out more string. In the interest of speed he had elected to
use a chain saw rather than an axe or a manual saw, relying on the deadening
effect of the fog itself, the long distance between his boundary and Eddie's
house, the fact that of course Eddie's house was well boarded up, and, in the
event he was heard, his ability to make a quick getaway by following his string
line. The chain saw he equipped with extra mufflers and while he used it wound
it in blankets as well; a good mechanic, he had squirrelled a little arsenal of
spare parts away, and painstakingly repaired the damage all this swaddling did
to the chain saw's overheated motor.

For five years he got away with stealing
his neighbour's trees. Of course Eddie discovered the remains of Harry's
depredations, but blamed them upon a man who lived behind him, with whom a feud
had been going on for over twenty years. Congratulating himself upon his
cleverness, Harry watched the hotted-up feud with glee, and cocksurely went on
stealing Eddie Marcus's trees.

At the end of January in the year 2032
the fog came down with most satisfying thickness, coinciding with a thaw that
had become almost unheard of in the midst of winter, a thaw that held promise of
a rare early spring — and plenty more fogs, thought a very happy Harry
Bartholomew.

He had stretched his string in a new
direction, and followed the knots he had tied in it, confidently counting
distance, over the wall, into the thick of Eddie's trees. But Harry's system
failed at last. He ended up too close to Eddie Marcus's house, and the sound of
his chain saw penetrated behind Eddie's sealed windows.

Grabbing the old Smith & Wesson
carbine from above his mantel, Eddie plunged out into the fog. At his trial he
protested that he had only meant to frighten the culprit. He called out a
warning to the invisible tree thief to stand where he was or be shot, heard what
he thought was a slight movement going off to his left, aimed the gun to his
right, and pulled the trigger. Harry died immediately.

The case aroused a lot of mixed feelings
in the state, and received a lot of publicity nationwide. The two trial lawyers
were brilliant, and old foes. The judge was famous for his wit. The jury was
composed of diehard Connecticut Yankees who refused to go south for the winter.
And the public benches were packed with people to whom this case meant much,
people who remained in Connecticut all year round, and suffered the cold dumbly,
and didn't quite understand all the reasons why the government was so
adamantly against wood burning, and now felt an unaccustomed stirring of old,
buried emotions.

'I'm going to Hartford to sit in on the
Marcus trial,' Dr Christian announced to his family after dinner one evening at
the end of February.

James nodded, understanding at once. 'Oh,
half your luck! It will be fascinating.'

'Joshua, it's too cold and too far from
home!' cried Mama, who never liked to see him leave 1047 Oak Street, Holloman,
while winter stalked outside; the memory of Joe's fate terrified her.

'Nonsense!' said Dr Christian,
uncomfortably aware of the reasons for Mama's distress, but knowing that he was
going to Hartford no matter what. 'I must go, Mama. It's cold, yes, but we've
already had one massive thaw, and all the signs say this is going to be a short
winter for once. So I doubt I'm going to run into a blizzard.'

'Hartford is always at least ten degrees
colder than Holloman,' she said stubbornly.

He sighed. 'I must go, Mama!
Feelings are running very high, there
hasn't been a situation in a
long time so likely to air buried resentments about our current anguishes. A
murder trial is highly charged to begin with, and this one in particular is
connected to all the emotions right at the roots of millennial
neurosis.'

'I'd like to come with you,' said James
wistfully.

'Why don't you?'

'Not at this time of year. One is all the
clinic can spare, and we've had a vacation more recently than you, Josh. No, you
go, and tell us all about it when you come back.'

'Are you going to try to talk to Marcus?'
asked Andrew.

'I sure am! If they'll let me, and he's
willing. He probably will be, because I imagine he's
clutching at every straw that comes his way right now.'

'Oh!' said Miriam. 'You think he'll be
convicted.'

'Well, he has to be. It's really a
question of what kind of sentence, isn't it? A matter of degree.'

'Do you think he meant to kill, Josh?'
she asked.

'Until and if I see him, I'd rather not
hazard a guess. I know everyone thinks he did, since he assumed it was the other
guy he was pointing the gun at. That's the trouble with loudmouths. But when the
chips are down — I don't know. I'm not at all sure a man of Marcus's type would
intend to kill unless he was physically surrounded by plenty of moral support in
the shape of his fellow vigilantes. When he went out into that fog to see who
was cutting down his trees, he was very angry, yes, but he was also very alone,
and fog is the kind of substance that damps emotion right down very quickly. I
don't know, Mirry.'

Mary heaved a huge sigh and looked
grumpy. 'Then if you won't take James, I had better come with you,' she said
ungraciously.

Dr Christian shook his head emphatically.
'No. I'm going on my own.'

She subsided, looking even more grumpy;
and it never occurred to any member of her family that she was dying to go —
anywhere!
That her private thoughts and dreams were filled with visions
of herself travelling, travelling, shriven by distance of the pain of unrequited
love, shriven by distance of the tyranny of this suffocating, dedicated family.
Yet if she had looked eager, bounced up and down a bit, clasped her hands in joy
at the prospect of going somewhere, Joshua would undoubtedly have taken her. So
what did that mean? That she didn't really want to go? No! No. It meant that
they were stupid, unperceptive, so unconcerned with the welfare of Mary
Christian that they couldn't be bothered levering up the edge of the facade to
see what lay beneath. So the hell with them. Why should she help them? And yet — oh, to be
free! Free of love, free of this hideous Cyclops-eyed family…

A daily bus covered the forty miles
between Holloman and Hartford, a gruelling journey because of the frequency with
which the bus left the main highway to pick up and set down passengers. No
between-town roads other than proper highways were ploughed in winter, just as
the only in-town roads kept clear were bus routes.

Had the Marcus trial been scheduled a
week earlier, the journey would have been a great deal easier. But the thaw had
come and gone, the snow was piling up again, and the temperature had dropped
below zero Fahrenheit. By the time the bus got to Middletown it was snowing
hard, and it continued to snow all the rest of the way, making the journey
longer and even more miserable.

His credentials had obtained him a room
at a motel only a short walk from the courthouse; like all public hostelries the
motel was allowed to heat its premises to a full sixty degrees Fahrenheit
between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., and to burn a gas imitation of a log fire in its
residents-only dining room. When he came in to eat on that first night he was
surprised to find the room almost full, until he realized that like himself the
other guests were in town to follow the Marcus trial. Journalists mostly, he
supposed; he recognized Maestro Benjamin Steinfeld eating alone at a corner
table, and Mayor Dominic d'Este of Detroit at another table in the company of a
dark-haired, white-skinned woman whose face looked vaguely familiar. As he
passed he bent a puzzled stare at her over his shoulder; to his surprise, she
responded with a small polite smile and bow of cool yet ready acknowledgment.
Not a famous television face, then. He must indeed have met her somewhere, but
where?

The hostess was tired, poor thing, he
could feel it in the bruised molecules of air around her.
So he sat down at the table just behind Mayor d'Este and his companion, and took
the menu the hostess handed him with a specially sweet smile of thanks. And she
received the smile, as people seemed to, he didn't know why, as if he had handed
her a cup of some life-giving elixir. What a magical thing a smile is! he
thought. So why then if one tried to preach the smile as bona fide therapy did
it come out sounding trite and shallow and banal, like a particularly bad
greeting card?