"Suppose the polar caps melt?"
"Yeah... well, we're pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah's Flood. Maybe it's happening again. Sure as hell, there's not a place on Earth that isn't the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms --"
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
"At least we've got food!" I shouted. "If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!"
"But if the power goes, we can't cook it! And the refrigerator --"
"We'll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs --"
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I'd been stupid; I'd waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease --
Leslie screamed, "We'll have to use the oven!"
Of course. The oven couldn't possibly fall on us.
We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie's thiry-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket.
She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn't trust the rain as a water source;
I couldn't control it.
The sound. Already we'd stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we'd be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom.
Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof.
Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I'd have been doing it anyway. You don't stop planning just because there's no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she'd probably thought of it herself.
The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I'd put all the food in Baggies.
Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.
For some time, I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I'm not sure what I thought about. I didn't sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet. My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I'd been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me.
There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Floods, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare -- if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon -- still warm -- and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe... but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower doors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough...
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now...
Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I'd get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT CHOCOLATE COVERED MANHOLE COVERS?
It was the last party. Otherwise it was only one of many, so many that they merged in the memory. We all knew each other. George had invited around thirty of us, a heterogeneous group, aged from teen to retirement, in dress that varied from hippie to mod to jeans and sneakers to dark suits, and hair that varied from crew cut to shoulder-length.
It was a divorce party.
Granted that it's been done before, still it was done well. George and Dina had planned it a year earlier, to celebrate the night their Decree became Final. The cake was frosted in black, and was surmounted by the usual wax figures, but facing outward from opposite edges of the cake. Jack Keenan donned a minister's reversed collar to officiate. His makeshift sacrament included part of the funniest prayer in literature: the agnostic's prayer from Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. George and Dina kissed with obvious sincerity, for the last time, and everybody clapped like mad.
Afterward I got coffee and a piece of divorce cake and found a flat place to set them. Without a third hand to handle the plastic fork, I was as good as trapped there; and there it was that Tom Findlay found me.
Tom Findlay was all red hair and beard. The beard was full and thick, the hair long enough to tie in back with a rubber band. Once he had gone to a costume party with his hair combed forward over his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and a placard around his neck that read NOT A SHEEP DOG. He generally wore knee-length socks and leather shorts. His legs too were thickly covered with red hair. He spoke in a slow midwestern drawl, and grinned constantly, as if he were watching very funny pictures inside his head.
He was always part of these groups. Once a month he held a BYOB party of his own. He had a tendency to monopolize a conversation; but even those who avoided him on that account had to admit that he gave fair warning. He would walk up to any friend or stranger he found standing alone and open conversation with, "Hey. Would a Muslim vampire be terrified of a copy of the Koran?" Or, "It seems to me that anarchy would be a very unstable form of government, don't you think?" Or, "What about chocolate covered manhole covers?"
That one fell pretty flat, I remember. What can anyone say about chocolate covered manhole covers? Most of Findlay's ideas were at least worth discussing. Vampires, for instance. What significance has the vampire's religion? Or the victim's blood type? Could you hold off a vampire with a sunlamp, or kill him with a stake of grained plastic wood? If a bullet won't kill a vampire, what about a revolver loaded with a blank cartridge and a wooden pencil?
And one night someone had come running in to interrupt the poker game in the other room. "What do you think Findlay just came up with?" And it was a new form of ice skating. You strap blocks of ice to your feet, see, and you skate over a field of razor blades set on edge.