“Dozing before the idiot box
When hoofbeats awakened me-
History Channel, three a.m.:
So-called documentary.
Swords and sandals
Maps and blood
Watching the conquests spread and spread
Darius’ name was mud.
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
“Now some will stand out from the mass
In good times or in rage
For King Philip’s son by Olympias
Greece was too small a stage.
Had to spread out ’cross the world-
Couldn’t help himself, I think.
Everywhere his flags unfurled;
He won fantastic ink.
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up thery.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
“I know I live in the here-and-now.
It can’t be helped-that’s true.
But thinking of long-vanished days… Oh, wow!
All the things he got to do!
Lift a bottle with Aristotle,
Start Alexandrias all over the place.
One got a library
Founded by his longtime friend,
Good old Ptolemy!
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Outdoing Julius Caesar’s infantry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!”
“Came Along Too Late” was supposed to end on a wild flourish of cymbals. You couldn’t do those on your person or a tabletop. Justin solved the problem by using a doo-wop shout-“Woo-hoo!”-instead.
Jim Farrell looked from one member of the band to the next. (Biff was probably down at Calvin’s Kitchen. He’d fallen for a brunette who waitressed there. Whether she’d fallen for him was a different question, but he was in there pitching, anyhow.) “These are men of parts,” Farrell said at last, to Dick Barber. “I suspect some of the parts stand in desperate need of repair, but he that is without sin, let him first cast an aspersion at them.”
“Ouch!” Rob said, a noise with more admiration in it than pain. Farrell gave him a tip of the fedora if not a doff. But Rob quickly turned serious again. Here was a real, if unorthodox, politico in front of him. He hadn’t expected to have a chance like that. Since he did, he asked, “What do we do-what can anybody do-about everything the supervolcano’s doing to us?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m completely sorry the government seems to have forgotten about this part of the country. Sometimes being forgotten by the government is the best thing that can happen to you,” Farrell answered.
Rob wasn’t so sure he bought that. He was a liberal more often than not and in most ways. But he turned libertarian, if not reactionary, four times a year: when his estimated-tax payments came due. The band made raw money, with not a dime withheld. Rendering what Uncle Sam and the state demanded hurt more than it would have were he working a nine-to-five like most people.
Farrell hadn’t finished: “But it also seems as though everybody on the far side of the Interstate has forgotten about us. I think-I hope-we can get through one winter like that. When things warm up, if they ever do, we’ll have to see about stocking up for another long, hard, cold stretch next winter. If we can stock up. If there’s anything left to stock up on. It’s not just a Guilford, Maine, problem, you know. It’s worldwide.”
“It’s not so bad in a lot of other places,” Rob said.
“True enough. But it’s worse in some,” Farrell said. “How would you like to be in Salt Lake City or Denver right now?”
“My sister was in Denver. She’s one of the lucky ones-she got out quick. I guess she was lucky. Now she’s stuck in one of those camps in the middle of nowhere,” Rob said. “She can’t stand it, but she’s alive, anyway.”
Vanessa Ferguson commonly acted on the principle that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She didn’t believe in depriving herself of the pleasure ocomplaining. The only trouble was, there were a hell of a lot of squeaky wheels in Camp Constitution. The miserable place had to have a couple of hundred thousand people in it by now, and it was awful. A saint would have hated it. Ordinary people? Vanessa had heard the suicide rate at the camp was ridiculously high, and she believed it. It was much too easy to decide that staying here was a fate worse than death.
The people who ran Camp Constitution were from the government, and they were there to help you… provided you did exactly what they told you to do. If you didn’t, or if you were otherwise unhappy, well, they had Procedures for that.
To get your problem settled, or even noticed, you lined up at the Camp Constitution Administration Building. That only roused further resentment. As far as Vanessa knew, it was the only building in the whole enormous goddamn camp. It was flimsy and rickety and had been run up in a tearing hurry, but still… Federal bureaucrats deserved no less. That was what they and their paymasters in Washington thought, anyhow. Tents and FEMA trailers were for the rabble stuck in the camp 24/7.
You lined up regardless of what it was doing outside. Raining? You lined up. Snowing? Same deal. They did, in their mercy and wisdom, put up an awning that gave some modest protection from the elements. But that was all it gave: some modest protection. The ground under your feet still got gloppy. The weather still got beastly cold. People said it was the worst winter in these parts in they couldn’t remember how long. Everybody blamed it on the supervolcano. Everybody was likely to be right, not that that did anybody any good.
If you didn’t feel like shivering in the muck for however long you needed to see the people with the power to do something about your complaint (if they happened to feel like it), you could turn around and trudge back to your tent through even more of that same muck. The bureaucrats inside the administration building wouldn’t mind. Not one bit, they wouldn’t.
There weren’t nearly enough of them to handle all the people in the camp with problems. That made the line start well before the awning did. It inched forward with glacial slowness. Considering the weather, the comparison struck Vanessa as much too apt. She had a hooded, quilted anorak with a pink-and-purple nylon shell that was at least three sizes too big for her: charity, of a sort. She had long johns, too. More charity. She was cold anyhow.
She was also itchy. There were bedbugs in her tent. There were bedbugs all over Camp Constitution. Somebody’d brought them in, and they’d thrived like mad bastards. Several eradicating campaigns had failed to eradicate. The same was true for head lice, though she didn’t have those-yet. There was talk in Washington of making DDT to fight the vermin at the refugee camps. So far, it was nothing but talk. Vanessa had always thought of herself as a pretty green person, but she would cheerfully have shot a spotted owl to rid herself of her six-legged companions.
A heavyset, bearded man wearing a coat even uglier than hers-and they said the age of miracles had passed! — gave up and stumped away. He muttered a stream of obscenities as he went. Maybe they were what made his breath smoke. More likely, it was just the cold.
The queue moved up to fill the space he’d occupied. “One more we don’t got to wait for,” said the black woman behind Vanessa.
“One more the yahoos up ahead won’t have to deal with,” Vanessa said, pointing to the still far too distant building ahead. “I hate lines, you know?”