Not This August (Christmas Eve). Cyril M. Kornbluth

say "Yes?" or "What can I do for you?" He never did; he looked and he waited and he never called anybody by name. He wasn't an old-timer as old-timers went in Norton; he had come ten years ago from a grocery in Minnesota, and had used those ten years well. Justin knew he sold hardware, fencing, coal, fuel oil, fertilizer, feed and seed—in short, everything a farmer needed to earn his living—as well as groceries. Justin suspected that he also ran a small private bank which issued loans at illegal rates of interest. He did know that there were farmers who turned pale when Croley looked speculatively at them, and farm wives who cursed him behind his back. He was sixty-five, childless, and married to an ailing, thin woman who spent most of her time in the apartment above the store.

      "Mr. Croley," Gus said, "I might as well get my feed. My wagon's outside the storeroom."

      Croley put out his hand and waited. Gus laid twenty-seven dollars in it, and still the hand was out, waiting. "Coupons?" Gus asked wryly.

      "You heard him," Croley said. (After a moment you figured out that "him" was the President, who had said that civilians were to continue as before, maintaining order.) Gus tore ration coupons out of his "F" book and laid them on the money. The hand was withdrawn and Croley stumped outside to unlock the storeroom door and stand by, watching, as Feinblatt and Justin loaded sacks of feed onto the stake wagon. When the last one went bump on the bed, he relocked the door, turned, and went back into his grocery.

      "Gus," Justin said, "would you mind waiting a minute? I want to see if Croley happens to have a pump rod for me—and then I'd like to bum a ride home from you."

      "Glad to have your company," Feinblatt said, politely abstracted.

      Croley listened to Justin in silence, reached under his counter, and banged a pump rod down in front of his customer. He snapped: "Twelve-fifty without hardware coupon. Three-fifty with."

      The old skunk knew, of course, that Justin had used up his quarterly allotment of hardware coupons to fix his milker. Justin paid, red-faced with anger, and went out to climb alongside Feinblatt on the wagon. Gus clucked at the horses and they moved off.

      Rumble-rumble over the Lehigh tracks and up Straw Hill Road, with Tony and Phony pulling hard on the stiff grade, the wagon wheels crashing into three years of unfixed chuckholes. Halfway up Feinblatt called "Whoa" and fixed the brake. "Rest 'em a little," he said to Justin. "All they get's hay, of course. Feed has to go to the cows. How's your herd?"

      "All right, I guess," Justin said. "I wonder if I can let 'em go now. You want to buy them? I guess I don't get drafted for a road gang now if I stop farming."

      "Think again," Feinblatt said. "My guess is you better stick to exactly what you've been doing. Things are going to keep on this way for a while—maybe quite a while. You know about the postal service in the Civil War?"

      Feinblatt was the local Civil War fanatic; every community seemed to have one. They spent vacations touring the battlefields ecstatically, comparing the ground with the maps. They had particular heroes among the generals and they loved to guess at what would have happened if this successful raid had failed, if that disastrous skirmish had been a triumph.

      "Lincoln called for volunteers," Gus Feinblatt said impressively. "Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. The war was on. And yet for months there was no interruption of the U. S. mail between the two countries. Inertia, you call it. So maybe even if there isn't any war left to fight now, maybe even if the Reds kick the President and Congress out of Underground, D. C., there will still be people on the state and local level to enforce drafting you for labor if you quit farming." He released the brake and clucked to the horses. The bay geldings strained up the hill again.

      "I guess you're right," Justin said reluctantly. "Things won't be squared away for a long while. I guess after things get settled, they replace government people with Reds, if they can find enough." He laughed unpleasantly. "Wait and see what happens to that snake Croley then! If ever there was anybody who qualified in the Commie book as a dirty capitalist exploiter it's our buddy down in Norton."

      Feinblatt shrugged. "He made his bed. When I think my boys were fighting for him——!" He spat over the side of the wagon, his face flushed.

      "What do you hear from them?" Justin hastily asked. He had stopped one in Korea, but was guiltily aware that there was a keener agony of war that he had never known—the father's agony.

      "Card from Daniel last week. Infantry replacement training center in Montana. He was just finishing his basic. We worked out a kind of code, so I know he was hoping they wouldn't ship him South as a rifleman, but he thought they might. He was bucking for 75-millimeter recoilless gunner. It would have kept him on ice for another two weeks. From David not a word since he joined the 270th at El Paso. I don't know, Billy. I just don't know. It's over, sure, they'll come back maybe, but I don't know. . . ."

      There was little more talk from then on. "Here's where I get off," Justin said at last. "My best to Leah." He swung down at his mailbox and limped down the steep hill to his house. May be able to get some decent shoes after things settle down, he thought bitterly. That'll be something.

      It still did not seem real.

      Obviously things were badly disorganized somewhere. The house lights kept going on and off; the phone rang his number now and then, but when he answered there was only the open-circuit hum of a broken line. He couldn't call anybody himself. He had a useless electric clock on the mantel which told him that the electric service was going badly off the beam. He timed the second hand with his watch and discovered that the alternating current delivered to his house was wobbling between 30 and 120 cycles per second instead of flowing at an even 60 per. A bomb at Niagara? Fighting for a power substation somewhere? Engineers quitting their posts in despair?

      But the Eastern Milkshed Administration truck had picked up his milk cans while he was gone. He herded his cows into the barn, belatedly washed the milker and pails, and relieved their full udders once more. God alone knew whether the milk would ever reach (cholera-ridden?) New York City, but the mail would go through, the EMA truck driver would report him if there were no cans to pick up, and the administrative machinery of a nation which was no longer alive would grind him through the gears into a road-mending crew whether it mattered a damn or not.

      Once during the afternoon somebody goofed at the local radio station, which was rebroadcasting the message of capitulation. A woman's voice screamed hysterically: "Rally, Americans! Fight the godless Reds! Fight them in the streets, from behind bushes, house to house——" And then, whoever she was, somebody dragged her away from the mike and said wearily: "We regret the interruption of our service due to circumstances beyond our control." Then, again: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States."

      "My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with a——"

      The current went off again, this time for an hour.

      * * * * *

      There was a calm, slow knock on the door. Through the kitchen window Justin recognized Mister, sometimes The Reverend Mister Sparhawk. Sparhawk happened to be the last man on Earth whom he wanted to see at the moment. He also happened to be a man practically impossible to insult, completely impervious to hints, maddeningly certain of his righteousness.

      Justin sighed and opened the door. "Come on in," he told the lean old man. "Just, for God's sake, don't talk. Find something to eat and go away." He opened his breadbox and retreated into the living room hoping he wouldn't be pursued. Sparhawk was a ref, an Englishman. Justin was sick of refs, and so was everybody. The refs from the Baltic, the Balkans, Germany, France, England, Latin America—he vaguely felt that they ought to have stayed in their countries and been exterminated instead of bothering Americans. English refs were the least obnoxious, they didn't jabber, but Sparhawk——

      The lean old man came into the living room eating bread and cheese. "Buck up, m' boy," Sparhawk said cheerily. "All this is only a Trial, you know. You should regard it as a magnificent opportunity. Here's your chance to play the man, acquire merit, and get a leg up on your next incarnation."

      "Oh, shut up," Justin said.

      "Natural reaction,