Curiously I realized that in all this I had met no other person who was searching for someone else. Every one of them had been, save for the accident of Stephen and his girl friend, snapped clean away from friends or relatives to link him with the past, and was beginning a new life with people who were strangers. Only I, as far as I could see, had promptly formed a new link—and that so briefly that I had scarcely been aware how important it was to me at the time…
Once the decision to abandon the search had been taken, Coker said:
“All right. Then that brings us to thinking about what we are going to do for ourselves.”
“Which means laying in stores against the winter, and just going on as we are. What else should we do?” asked Stephen.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Coker told him. “Maybe it’d be all right for a while—but what happens afterward?”
“If we do run short of stocks—well, there’s plenty more lying around,” said the radioman.
“The Americans will be here before Christmas,” said Stephen’s girl friend.
“Listen,” Coker told her patiently. “Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans—can you do that?”
The girl stared at him.
“But there must be,” she said.
Coker sighed sadly. He turned his attention to the radioman.
“There won’t always be those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. We couldn’t eat up all the stuff that’s there for the taking, not in generations—if it would keep. But it isn’t going to keep. A lot of it is going to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly but quite surely, to drop to pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year, we shall have to grow it ourselves; and it may seem a long way off now, but there’s going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves. There’ll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and there’s no more gas to run them, anyway—when we’ll come right down to nature and bless horses—if we’ve got ’em.
“This is a pause—just a heaven-sent pause—while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause. Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can—if we can—make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.”
He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.
“We can do that—if we will. The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We’ve got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.”
The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.
“Now,” he went on, “from my reading of history, the thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive—by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment. Learning grew up in the cities, and in great institutions—it was the labor of the countryside that supported them. Similarly, we must become big enough to support at very least the leader, the teacher, and the doctor.”