Don’t Be Fuelish

Chapter 1

“It was then I knew I’d had enough, burned my credit card for fuel // Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand // With a one-way ticket to the land of truth and my suitcase in my hand // How I lost my friends I still don’t understand.”

Neil Young, Thrashers

Just like clockwork, Gerald Susanhouse heard the thermostat click off as he was putting his arm into the sleeve of his winter coat. He wasn’t worried. The Susanhouse seniors, his parents, had raised him and his brothers on the world of Lamont, orbiting the Basin Star, for a couple of years. They had been especially poor then, when Gerald was eight up until he turned eleven, and they’d lived in a town called Petoskey, which was bitter cold in the winter. 

Half a century and half a dozen planetary hops later, his permanent residence on the world of Umpqua, orbiting at the galaxy’s edge of the Federation worlds, still couldn’t hold a candle to those Lamont snowstorms.

Ever since the big fuel shortage six years ago, and now with all the fracas over energy, Gerald had taken it to heart. He started making lifestyle changes — baby steps at first, and then bigger steps. Then he started talking to other folks doing the same thing. Waucoma Gorge had a small-but-devoted group of people doing their best not to be fuelish, like those ads they were running on the tube said. 

Gerald capped his thermostat at 60 degrees, even in the winter (although occasionally he’d splurge and dial it up to 65 when it got freezing cold). He started wearing sweaters and cardigans. He bought the clock thermostat at a Sears. 

After realizing the amount of heat he was losing right through the roof, he started to get creative. You could buy insulation from a building hardware store in East Roseport, and he’d put eleven inches of it in the attic of his house. He might have gone insulation-mad that autumn; he wrapped the water heater and the kitchen pipes under the sink, too.

But this coming year, he was going to bite the bullet and replace the fuel-guzzling furnace with a good, old-fashioned wood stove like they’d had in Petoskey, growing up. Gerald remembered he and Mick, his kid brother, would get sent out into the woods to collect firewood all year round, and they’d stack it high on the drafting table in the closed porch to dry it out. Gerald liked the thought of doing that again. It seemed youthful, like an adventure.

“Alright, cool cat,” Gerald said to Emmitt the Cat, who was patrolling the top of the log pile stacked against the living room wall, “you keep this place guarded until I get back. Only one wood run this weekend, I promise.” 

Emmitt had ice-blue eyes and a little pink nose and liked to snooze in the pile of boots and shoes that migrated around the living room and kitchen, ever since the mud room became storage for wood. The cat went prone, flitting his tail against the drawstring of the Venetian blinds that were somewhere back behind all those logs. Emmitt looked at him with skepticism. 

“Hey,” Gerald tsked, “I don’t care if you have fur, this wood stove is going to keep both of us warm. It’s high time you start being grateful.”

Emmitt blinked dispassionately and then turned to stare out the window at the neighbor’s new fence. There was no getting through to that cat. At least he paid his rent on time.

Gerald filed through the mud room and went out the door. He locked the bolt and let the screen door clatter shut, already down the concrete steps to the sidewalk with his hands in his jacket pockets. The day was cold and he could see his breath, but last week’s minimal snowfall had all but melted.

It was a twenty minute drive in the rubber-tire Datsun pickup out into the hills south of town. He only took the truck when he needed to haul something — he knew the m.p.g. wasn’t great. Gerald drove past the chain link gate into the yard of Pallas Mills, a family timber operation he frequented. Now that Bill Pallas was bedridden, his daughter Angie ran the day to day. 

Gerald killed the engine and hopped down from the cab. He headed for the main office.

“Good morning, Angie,” he said, pushing open the office door and setting off the little tinkle bells. Angie was looking at a clipboard and didn’t look up right away. The room smelled of two-hour old black coffee and cigarette smoke, and the linoleum tiles of the office were yellowing and badly chipped in places. The wall was decorated with metal advertisement posters for machine parts, government permits, and a neon Miller High Life clock.

“Good morning, Gerald,” Angie said at last. She was a blonde woman in her mid-forties, wearing a green checkered flannel shirt over a white tee. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she had a mechanical pencil tucked over her ear. “Got bad news,” she said, setting down the clipboard.

“What’s the news?” Gerald asked, leaning against a full filing cabinet.

Gerald was a sixty-something divorced state employee with grey, straight hair that hung down nearly to his shoulders. His nose was long-ish and a bit too large and had a bit of a bump, but he had clear green eyes and a full beard, a decent tan, and he was still in great shape thanks to his daily walks and weekend bike rides. He had played billiards with Angie a couple of times over the years at a local bar in Hood River, but Gerald was never very good at billiards and things had never gone anywhere.

“No scrap wood today,” she said apologetically, “sorry.” 

“Huh,” Gerald said, rubbing his face. “Any idea why not?”

‘Yep,” she said, shrugging and leaning back in her creaky desk chair, “it’s all getting sold to another mill in the Valley now. They’re chipping it and using it for hardboard.” 

“Huh. Since when?”

“Since Tuesday,” she said, “when I met with Doug Baugh.”

Gerald walked over and pulled a chair out from the desk and sat down.

“I see,” he said, “finances a bit tight, Angie?” He glanced at the clipboard but couldn’t read it upside down.

“We’ll make it,” she said, folding her arms, “it’s just been a lean winter so far. We’re counting on it being just a temporary dip. And that early freeze caught us off guard. Trying to cut through a frozen log isn’t a cake walk.”

“I can imagine,” Gerald said.

There was an awkward silence.

“What do you do with all that wood, anyway?” Angie asked after a moment, “Do you do handicrafts or something?”

“Nope,” Gerald said, smiling, “I’m stocking up. I’m replacing my old furnace with a wood stove next month.”

“Ahh,” she said, leaning forward, “you’re one of those conservationists. Always looking to save a kilowatt, right?”

“Just trying to do my part.”

“Well,” she said, standing up, “I wish we could help you out. Hope you don’t freeze without our wood.”

Gerald stood up as well.

“Oh, nah,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve got a couple more options up my sleeve, and a decent supply already.”

“Well, I won’t ask who your other suppliers are. I know a trade secret when I hear one.”

Gerald laughed.

“Ha, yep.”

There was another awkward silence. They both stood there in the office. It seemed like she didn’t actually have anywhere else to be. The High Life clock showed 10:25, but he thought it was a bit later than that.

“Welp,” he said, “I won’t keep you. You take care, Angie. Say hi to your dad for me.”

“Yep,” she said, sitting down with a creak, “we’ll see you around, Gerald.”

Gerald got back in his truck and drove back towards town. On the outskirts, he took a left and drove to the dump. He passed through another chain link fence and parked the car in the lot, headed for the junk pile. David Detwiler, a big guy from the Garden Station who lived on-site in a double-wide, would let Gerald poke around. It used to be Gerald’s second stop, but now with Pallas Mills selling off their unusable wood, he wondered if the dump was maybe his only option.

Detwiler wasn’t around as far as Gerald could tell, but it wasn’t the first time he’d let himself in and just gotten down to business. Even when he did come around while Gerald was sifting through, it didn’t seem to be an issue. He’d just nod and climb the stairs to his double-wide, rubbing his mittened hands together for warmth.

Unlike Pallas Mills, most folks didn’t come out to the dump, especially on a cold Saturday morning, so Gerald had it to himself. He liked to work carefully. The last thing he needed was a rusty nail through the foot. A quick glance showed him that somebody had thrown away a battered credenza, and there was some old table legs and particle board, too. There could be more, with a little digging.

He put on some work gloves and started hauling stuff out. In the end, it wasn’t a bad score of wood, even though the look of stacked table legs and leaned plywood fresh from the dump wasn’t ideal for the living room. He usually kept that stuff in the garage, leaned up against the workshop wall. It was filling up though. He figured he might need to reorganize a bit. 

Gerald hopped into the cab, wood scrap on a tarp in the bed, and felt the engine rumble as he pulled towards the exit.

“Thanks!” he called out to Detwiler, but he wasn’t sure if Detwiler was within earshot to hear him. He went through the gate and hung a left at the T, back towards town.

He pulled up to the house and rolled the garage door up. Inside, on the right, was his workshop, built out of a mix of hardboard and drywall he’d gotten from a old pal. Right now, it was filled with scrap wood, stacked high around the stationary tools inside. On the left, though, was the Studebaker Hawk. 

It was a passion project; he’d built it up from bones over the past ten years, though it had been drivable after about three. The Hawk was a two-tone, wedgewood blue and arctic white coupe, high-finned, with round headlights and a silver front grill. It was a hybrid, or a trident, as they called them; so it was roadworthy on hover-jets for local driving, it could fly on the highway, or be full-tilt on the interstar routes. 

He would fly the Hawk to Evergreen and Threebear, the other main worlds in the Pacifica system, primarily for work. The Bureau would compensate him for mileage, which was nice of them. 

He’d also done a couple little leisure trips, years ago — once to Evergreen and the San Juans, and once all the way out to the Emperor Chain Asteroids. He’d picked up the Hula bobble on the dash from there.

It was a shame that, seeing the Hawk, most people immediately thought gas guzzler. Gerald had actually done a lot of work to the engine and souped the car up with the latest parts, at least as far as the guts were concerned. 

But truthfully, it was still a bit of a cruiser, and the bill at the fuel station was a bit steeper than it’d take to fill a little Concord economy car, or a Pacer. But it was as economical as you could get for what it was. A sensible cruiser, he figured.

Gerald unloaded the wood scraps from the back of the Datsun and piled them carefully behind the Studebaker Hawk in the garage, leaning them up against the workshop wall. He closed the garage door again and locked it and parked the Datsun on the street. 

He went inside the house. Emmitt the Cat was on top of the refrigerator.

“Careful,” Gerald said, “you’re gonna knock something off there.” He tossed his keys down on the kitchen table and began unlacing his boots, standing on one foot with a hand on the chair. He could see his breath inside the house.

“Go curl up with blankets or something,” Gerald said. “Well, I don’t know — maybe it’s warmer or something closer to the ceiling. Not really any practical way for me to get up there and find that out for myself. Maybe you’re brighter than you look, cat.”   

Emmitt looked self-satisfied from the top of the fridge.

Gerald cracked open a cheap beer and started to make himself some lunch. He had the rest of the weekend to himself — a daunting prospect that normally involved several neighborhood walks, bike rides, bottles of beer, and craft projects; and a lot of trips to scavenge and chop wood at Pallas Mills. Seemed like that would all be in the past now. He’d have to come up with some other way to spend his time. 

But it was just as well, he figured, finishing a sip of beer and spreading mustard on some bread. Necessity was the mother of invention, after all. The thermostat clicked on, right on schedule.

“Where the eagle glides, descending, there’s an ancient river bending // Through the timeless gorge of changes where sleeplessness awaits.”

Neil Young, Thrashers

Gerald woke up on Monday morning before it was light out. His bed was covered with heavy blankets, so he took a deep breath in the bleary haze of being freshly awake and braced himself to get out of bed. When he did, it was cold.

He padded into the bathroom and started to get ready for the work week. The fluorescent light over the sink mirror plinked and flickered on. He showered in under five minutes, starting with warm water and then cooling it down after he finished washing his hair. He toweled off and stood in front of the mirror for a moment looking at his face, then combed his hair and brushed his teeth.

Emmitt was up-and-at-‘em when he came back into the bedroom, walking on top of the dresser. Gerald got dressed, choosing his khakis and a pale blue button-down shirt, with a green pullover. He laced up his leather shoes. He pulled on a brown corduroy jacket lined with sherpa wool.

He ate a breakfast of shredded wheat with milk, a couple of sausages, and some applesauce; he washed the dishes right then with soap and cold water and put them on the rack to dry. Then he fed Emmitt some premium kibble. Meanwhile, Gerald grabbed the messenger bag he’d prepared the night before and did a once-over of the things he’d be bringing with him.

After the cat finished his meal, Gerald patted him on his little head.

“You be good now,” he said, “Keep the house in good order, all that. I’ll be back tonight and we’ll have some dinner.”

Emmitt scanned the house for threats. He seemed satisfied after a moment and settled into his perch on the shoe pile.

Gerald went out the front door and locked it behind him. He went to the garage, where he set the messenger bag on the driveway and rolled up the door. Climbing into the Studebaker Hawk, he turned the key in the ignition and heard the engine thrum to life. He pulled it out onto the short driveway and popped out quickly to close the garage behind him as the headlights cast across the quiet street.

He wove his way out of Waucoma Gorge in the dark, turning through neighborhoods until he reached the riverside. He heard the sounds of the early risers — a lot of restless dogs, but also those who commuted to far off places. He’d be journeying alongside some of them to Roseport.

At the edge of town he caught the on-ramp and streaked up into the dark, misty sky above the river, following the bobbing white road dots that led onto the highway. He came up to speed and settled into highway altitude. Cruising over the gorge, he thought about the week ahead of him. 

Gerald worked for the government, for a branch that primarily dealt with land management. Even though the capital of the Federation was multiple stars away in the Quat (or, the Federal Quaternary System, which comprised the Basin Star, the Tidewater Star, New Albion, and the Gulf Star, as well as Garden Station) much of the land on the outer worlds was owned and managed by the Federation directly. It was a distinctly outer worlds setup.

His Bureau managed those lands on behalf of all the people of the Federation, including those locals on-world who utilized the natural environment for all kinds of things — mining, timber, livestock grazing, recreation, and on and on.

Gerald liked his job. He’d worked his way up within the government, served as a manager for several different branches of it, but he enjoyed working for the Bureau more than the others. The Bureau was a liaison between the natural lands of these beautiful outer worlds and the people who lived in and around them. They were stewards always, protectors sometimes, and tour guides many other times, pointing people to the wealth of diverse natural resources there at hand, just around the bend. 

The Bureau was occasionally controversial, as all government can sometimes be. Gerald generally preferred to avoid that kind of conflict. His department dealt primarily with the storage and cataloguing of land survey records — boundary markers, geological features, “whose mining claim is this?” kind of questions. Although things sometimes came to a point of contention, as boundaries often can, his work usually dealt with conflicts that happened a century ago, recorded on paper for posterity and put in a filing cabinet. 

Gerald did understand the passion on both sides, though. It was hard to know what news was true regarding the fuel shortage. Regardless, he just wanted to do his part. But he knew folks didn’t always see it that way.

The floating skybuoys over the Gorge glowed with incandescent orange in the morning darkness, glinting on the river water a hundred feet below. The surrounding traffic started off sparse, but after a while, more vehicles swept up onto the highway and drove alongside him, and he heard the low hum of the engines. Below the horizon, the sun began to warm the sky with light. The hills whisked by, blurred by the speed of traffic, and the power poles and wind turbines came like staccato silhouettes against the new sunrise.

The flatlands of Roseport came into sight before too long. First he saw the little spaceport, which was used for training space pilots and running flights in-atmo on Umpqua. Then came a swath of suburban residences, and then the great industrial sea of North Gresham, and then more suburbs, stretching on for miles. He saw Signal Mountain there to the south. As he wound his way through Laurelhurst, he saw the city skyline, glowing pale orange and green and red, glinting in the winter morning sunrise. As he passed through the Lloyd District, he flew past his old exit, which led to the old Bureau headquarters down below. It was now some kind of other state office, or perhaps abandoned. He hadn’t visited since they’d moved.

He flew over the Camas River and came down at the Morrison Transfer Station, threading the Studebaker Hawk into the skyway of higher traffic that formed a super-lattice above the urban city streets below for pedestrians and rubber-tire vehicles. 

Gerald saw his building on the left, a massive, recently-finished building made in a brutalist, concrete style. He turned and flew into the upper parkade, scanning his badge at the kiosk and driving into the echoing concrete colonnades that spiraled up and up until he found a spot. 

Gerald pulled the Studebaker Hawk into a parking space and killed the engine, settling the car gently to the pavement. He pocketed his keys and made for the elevator, checking his watch to discover he was early by fifteen minutes, as he’d intended. He had a meeting with Tim Hanson, the associate director, to talk about a new project the Bureau was beginning. Hanson had said it would be a big change for everyone, which made Gerald wonder what exactly the project would entail.

He entered the elevator and pressed the button to descend to their floor. After a moment, it rattled and began its descent, twenty floors down to the Bureau.