10 Analogs Of The Future

Introduction-3

*****

In the yard he glared at Bill’s sporty airboat and snorted. Never catch him up in one of those things. It was sleek, a shiny green, not made of metal as he well knew, but of one of the fortalics that’d chased metal out of most high-strength applications. It looked like a breathless bit of tomorrow against the house beyond.

The house had been stylish and expensive when new. His father had built it to his mother’s plans in the glory days of farming, before food factories and tailored genes. It was made of wood, on a foundation of squared stones, neatly sided and painted white. The shutters were green with a design on them and there was a little of what his father’d called “fiddle-dee-dee work” around the gables; those were the only decorations. Brick chimneys they didn’t need anymore, but he could remember the scent of wood smoke from them. Trees and lilacs in the yard, and a porch, with a porch swing. The house was old enough to be comfortable and homey, but in excellent condition.

On the step he paused. Bill’s wife Fiantha had a shrill voice—city folks seemed to get louder with each generation.

“It’s not as if the land can be made to pay for many more years. And a deal like this doesn’t come along every year.”

“Johnnie wouldn’t want to break his heart,” said John’s Tinette. John and Tinette ran the farm these days, with Howard a junior partner. “Even keeping the house and yard—”

Howard stamped and scraped noisily on the mat and they broke off. When he entered they exchanged glances as transparently as children and changed the subject. The other men appeared presently and a meal was served. Howard as usual was taken by surprise by this. The women hadn’t gone off to the kitchen, and he didn’t know how they’d cooked it.

He decided to jump their guns, and while Tinette was still serving he said, “Been think’ about sellin’ the land again?”

Even John, who knew him, looked startled. “How’d you know?”

“Figures. Only reason the boys come by.”

Bill flushed and Allen looked angry.

“Well, you know the state of affairs. Haven’t had a good profitable year for ten, ‘leven years. How long can we go on like this?”

Not past 2010, he wanted to tell them, but only nodded tersely, swallowed stewed corn.

“Fruit’s a possibility, but I don’t like it any better’n you. It’s a fully developed market, and long ago you warned me against going into a fully developed market. Now, I’m of no mind to sell the land. But this deal with NCI—”

“How long a lease they talkin’ about?”

It was the first show of interest he’d made. “Ten years, with option for another ten.”

“And it’d say that if they didn’t like plastic reeds, they could switch you to some other crop? And you’d have to do just what they say?”

“Yes.” John banged his cup down. “It’s hardly a new proposition! Farmers’ve been raising food for canneries and doin’ it just their way for a hundred years!”

“Mebbe so.” Howard studied it for a few minutes, eating sullenly. He shook his head at last, stubbornly. “Just not my kind o’ farmin’.”

Nobody said anything, though Fiantha’s sigh was comment enough.

It was nice of them to hold the house and yard out of any deal. Oh yeah, not selling the land—that was a crock. Once he’d spent a year farming for NCI, they’d figure it easy to persuade him to sell, at least the boys would. They didn’t realize that the house meant less to him than the fields. The fields were his independence. And even his independence meant less than his way of life.

Which was doomed.

He looked up. “You boys just never understood, not either of you. Should’a been raised on the farm, then you’d know. The place never was nothin’ to you but a summer amusement park. Bein’ a farmer’s more than a job…”

But it was no use; they couldn’t understand. The generations of men of the soil that lay behind him, those of his blood and those others back to the stone age—they’d junk it all like…

“So it all ends with me,” he said bitterly.

They ate in silence till Tinette got up to bring the pies.

“What’s that?” Bill’s head jerked up.

Wind.

“My boat! I want it in the lee of the garage—the wind might get under the wings.”

It would take a tornado to lift the airboat. Electric arcs in those stubby flanges sucked air down from above and blew it out underneath. But Howard jumped up at another thought.

“The beans! The rain’ll knock’em off—specially if there’s hail!” He set off at an old man’s lope.

“Dad! Don’t worry about them—”

“Shag yourself out, boy! It’s a month’s crop!”

“Uncle John? Is it important?”

“No, Fiantha. Few of them will fall; they’re not quite ripe, and they’re designed for Midwestern thunderstorms. Besides, it’s only a month’s crop, out of three or four in the season. Gov’ment insurance’ll cover it. But let him go.”

“It’s getting dark out there!”

John Hampton smiled faintly. “The old man’s not afraid of the dark.”

Howard was hardly conscious of the cloud-shadow dusk. He ran by “Dear John,” the antique gasoline-powered John Deere he’d been so proud to drive as a boy. The modern tractor stood near it. It hummed alive at his thumb against the lock, and he backed it up to the multiharvester in the shed. They coupled like railroad cars and Howard hopped down to set the harvester for probeans.

Coming out of the shed to climb onto the tractor, he looked at the sky for the first time. It was still light where the clouds had not hidden it, and he was treated to an awesome vision: the wide pale sky, the massive black clouds lowering upon him, rushing out of the west; the trees lashing in the wind and showing the undersides of their leaves; already an occasional flash of lightning in the clouds.

It was the face of his old enemy, but he paused a moment to savor the sheer spectacle of it.

Then he advanced the exciter, the carbon-14 and strontium-90 atoms began to die at a faster rate within the tractor’s can, and power came humming forth. The tractor skimmed for the fields through the watery light. Howard hit the headlights as they turned into the first row.

The harvester swung arms out and began to comb the beans from the bushes; he drove between the close-set rows rather than straddling them. A stream of white flowed into the cart. They’d have to be dried after the rain, but no problem.

The clouds came on like the end of the world and the wind lashed around the cab. He closed the side windows and the noise subsided. The tractor charged, humming down the row at a run through air that smelled of rain.

The land can’t be made to pay for many more years, Fiantha had said.

How long can we go on like this? John had said.

Howard’s eyes stung and the row blurred ahead of him.

Bein’ a farmer’s more than a job, he’d argued. But the hard facts ignored him.

The world doesn’t need farmers any more, Jimmy had said.

Jimmy’d been like another son to him—and now he too was ready to sell out. Again Howard felt the pain around his old heart.

One dazzling blaze of lightning lit the field white and the rain was on him like a giant’s foot. Howard flinched at the rage and the roar. The rain instantly turned his windshield opaque white. As he hit the wipers he heard the rustle and grind of the bushes and knew he’d veered into the row.

Swearing, he tried to back, and the harvester got cross-wise. He didn’t have adequate lights back there and he swore again. The front tires skidded as the rain lashed down on the sloping field. Growling a little in irritation and haste, Howard swung down, snatching a flashlight loose and aiming it aft to see just what kind of predicament the harvester had gotten itself into.

It wasn’t supposed to happen, but the deadman switch was an irritation—you often had to stand up to see what you were doing—and Howard had disconnected it. Now the tractor began to creep forward. It couldn’t move fast without someone to advance the exciter, but it would attempt to hold this speed.

Alarmed, Howard jerked away from the tall wheel rolling slowly toward him. Between the rain in his eyes and the mud underfoot, he slipped. He hit his head against the frame and stars shot through his vision. Then he was down, his head under the tractor, his feet under the bean bushes, and the flashlight pointing offside. The wheel was advancing toward his midriff and chest and he jerked up, hit his head on the frame again, and subsided.

What flashed before his eyes was not his whole life, but the simple fact that he couldn’t escape. He was floundering around in the mud, he was old and stiff in the joints, and though the tractor was moving slowly, it was too close. It’d walk up over his belly and chest and down his shoulder, maybe missing his head, but surely stopping his heart, modern medicine or no. And behind it was the harvester’s narrower wheel to finish the job.

Well…so be it.

Relaxing, he took his last deep breath, let it out slowly. The wheel buried the flashlight in mud and he closed his eyes.

After eight or nine seconds he opened them.

The wheel had rolled up to him and stopped. The tractor didn’t say anything; it was not one of these newfangled ones that could talk. But it was smart enough not to run over him.

Howard lay and looked up at it, mud soaking him, and debated whether to get up or not. But the damn thing probably had an alarm built into it and would like as not begin yelling for help if he lay here too long.

He eased out from under and sat up, conscious of the mud, the rain. He hit the big driver with his fist. “Damn a world where a man can’t even die with dignity!”

He sat there for a while, wiping off mud and pondering his choices. It was nearly intolerable to get back into the cab, muddied as he was, but it was the least undignified thing he could do. There was mud on his head.

“Should’ve retired long ago,” he said vindictively, pulling himself to a stand beside the tractor. It quivered and backed ten centimeters like a live thing, having him so near its wheel. “Let them worry about feeding themselves, they’re so smart!”

He kicked the driver and it backed again.

*****

It was dark and the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle when he had the last of the beans in the bins. Howard stomped into the house, ignoring Tinette’s gasp at his muddy clothing; she could guess he’d fallen. He looked at them sullenly.

“Before you start another round of argument, let me tell you here and now that I’ll never permit the land to be sold. Never! So if the only reason you can find to come out here is to git me to sell, you don’t need to come back ever again! Hear?”

Startled by this assault, Allen said stoutly, “It’s not the only reason, but never mind that—leasing isn’t the same as selling—”

“It’s as good as, when they run the land! Besides, you were just usin’ that as an excuse—next thing you know, you’d’ve been around again urging us to sell. Right?”

Bill had the grace to nod reluctantly; Allen flushed in acknowledgement. Fiantha swelled with anger, but had better sense than to intervene in an argument between men—that surprised Howard.