He licked his lips.
It was seldom one had a chance like this—a chance to strike back lustily and still be legally defensive.
He got up quickly and walked to the rear of the basement, where he found the heavy flexible mesh. He carried out three rolls of it and a loop of heavy wire to hang it on. He’d have to use some trees to stretch out the wire. He really should use some padding to protect the trees against abrasion by the wire, but he didn’t have the time.
Working swiftly, he strung the wire, hung the mesh upon it, pegged the bottom of the mesh tight against the ground, tied the ends of it in with the auxiliary fence.
He was waiting at the gates when the truck pulled up. He used the control box to open the gates and the truck came through. Hennessey got out.
“Outside is swarming with Punks,” he told Max. “What is going on?”
“I got troubles,” said Max.
Hennessey went around to the back of the truck and lowered the tail gate. Three large boxes, with mesh inserts, rested on the truck bed.
“They’re in there?” asked Max.
Hennessey nodded. “I’ll give you a hand with them.”
Between them they lugged the boxes to the mesh curtain, rigged behind the oak.
“I left one place unpegged,” said Max. “We can push the boxes under.”
“I’ll unlock the lids first,” said Hennessey. “We can reach through with the pole and lift the lids if they are unlocked. Then use the pole again to tip the boxes over.”
They slid the boxes underneath the curtain, one by one. Hennessey went back to the truck to get the pole. Max pegged down the gap.
“Can you give me a bit of light?” asked Hennessey. “I know the Punks are waiting out there. But probably they’d not notice just a squirt of it. They might think you were making just a regular inspection of the grounds.”
Max flashed the light and Hennessey, working with the pole thrust through the mesh, flipped back the lids. Carefully, he tipped the boxes over. A dry slithering and frantic threshing sounds came out of the dark.
“They’ll be nasty customers,” said Hennessey. “They’ll be stirred up and angry. They’ll do a lot of circulating, trying to get settled for the night and that way, they’ll get spread out. Most of them are big ones. Not many of the small kinds.”
He put the pole over his shoulder and the two walked back to the truck.
Max put out his hand and the two men shook.
“Thanks a lot, John.”
“Glad to do it, Max. Common cause, you know. Wish I could stay around …”
“You have a place of your own to watch.”
They shook hands once again and Hennessey climbed into the cab.
“You better make it fast the first mile or so,” said Max. “Our Punks may be laying for you. They might have recognized you.”
“With the bumpers and the power I have,” said Hennessey, “I can get through anything.”
“And watch out for the cops. They’d raise hell if they knew we were helping back and forth.”
“I’ll keep an eye for them.”
Max opened the gates and the truck backed out, straightened in the road and swiftly shot ahead.
Max listened until it was out of hearing, then checked to see that the gates were locked.
Back in the basement he threw the switch that fed current into the auxiliary fence—and now into the mesh as well.
He sighed with some contentment and climbed the stairs out to the yard.
A sudden flash of light lit up the grounds. He spun swiftly around, then cursed softly at himself. It was only a bird hitting the fence in flight. It happened all the time. He was getting jittery and there was no need of it. Everything was under control—reasonably so.
He climbed a piece of sloping ground and stood behind the oak. Staring into the darkness, it seemed to him that he could see shadowy forms out beyond the fence.
They were gathering out there and they would come swarming in as soon as the tree went down, smashing the fences. Undoubtedly they planned to use the tree as a bridge over the surging current that still would flow in the smashed-down fence.
Maybe it was taking too much of a chance, he thought. Maybe he should have used the guy-wires on the tree. That way there would have been no chance at all. But, likewise, there would have been no opportunity.
They might get through, he thought, but he’d almost bet against it.
He stood there, listening to the angry rustling of a hundred rattlesnakes, touchy and confused, in the area beyond the mesh.
The sound was a most satisfying thing.
He moved away, to be out of the line of blast when the bomb exploded, and waited for the day of truce to end.
Unsilent Spring
Clifford D. Simak and Richard S. Simak
Originally published in 1976 in the anthology Stellar Science Fiction Stories 2, which was edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey, this is one of only two published stories in which Clifford Simak worked with a coauthor. This time, his coauthor was his son, a chemist who at one time worked for the U.S. government. The title of the story is, of course, a reference to Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s well-known book that controversially warned about environmental pollution and disinformation campaigns allegedly spread by certain industries, and ultimately led to the banning of the pesticide known as DDT (although Carson never actually called for that action), and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Robert Abbott was a well-known man, so Dr. Arthur Benton had saved two hours for him in the middle of an afternoon of an ordinarily busy day. When Abbott had phoned ten days before, he had insisted that his visit was important.
Benton, watching the clock as the hour approached and trying to hurry Abby Clawson, who regarded a visit to a doctor’s office as a social occasion, wondered once again what could be so important as to bring Abbott to this little Pennsylvania town. Abbott was a medical writer with two best sellers to his credit, one a book on cancer and the other an expose of faddy dieting. The doctors he consulted were important people, eminent medical researchers or lofty specialists; and Benton knew, with a twinge of honest envy, he was neither eminent nor lofty. He was just an old fuddy-duddy country doctor—a pusher of pills, a dispenser of liniments and salves, a setter of broken legs and arms, a wrapper-on of bandages, a deliverer of babies—who never had written a learned paper, conducted a research program, or been involved in medical studies, and who never would. He had not, in more than thirty years, done a single thing or uttered a single word that could be of the slightest interest to a man like Robert Abbott.
He had been wondering ever since the phone call why in the world Abbott should want to talk with him; and over the past few days he had evolved an elaborate theory that there were two Dr. Arthur Bentons and Abbott had confused him with the other Benton. He had been so haunted by the idea that he had looked through a medical directory in search of the other Arthur Benton. Although he had not found him, the idea still clung to his mind, for it seemed the only explanation.