"Oh, look now—"
"Mister, I live in Brooklyn. I don't get home till after dark, and the police cordons don't go closer than six blocks to my place. I've had to shoot twice already in the past couple months."
"Bandits?"
"In gangs, mister. If I could work somewhere closer to home, I'd be off like a shot."
Arch set down his cup. Suddenly he didn't want any more coffee. My God, he thought, am I responsible for that?
A smaller plane carried them to Boston, where they caught a bus for Westfield. The driver had an automatic rifle by his seat. Arch huddled into himself, waiting for he knew not what; but the trip was uneventful.
The town didn't seem to have changed much. Most of the cars were converted, but it didn't show externally. The drug store still flashed neon at a drowsy sidewalk, the Carnegie library waited rather wistfully for someone to come in, the dress shop had the same old dummies in the window. Elizabeth pointed at them. "Look," she said. "See those clothes?"
"They're dresses," said Arch moodily. "What about them?"
"No style change in six months, that's all," said Elizabeth. "It gives me the creeps."
They walked along streets banked with dirty, half-melted snow, under a leaden sky and a small whimpering wind. Their house had not changed when they entered, someone had been in to dust and it looked like the home they remembered. Arch sank tiredly into his old armchair and accepted a drink. He studied the newspaper he'd bought at the depot. Screaming headlines announced revolt in Russia—mass uprisings in the Siberian prison camps—announcements from the Copenhagen office of the Ukrainian nationalist movement—It all seemed very far away. The fact that there were no new dress styles was somehow closer and more eerie.