Free Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth

you’re the first salesman I’ve seen here in three years?”
    “That’s what they all say. Bee-Jay’s an enterprising outfit. We got the first A-440 passes in the state. Say, are you by any chance a friend of Rawson’s?”
    Justin knew then who he was. “I know him,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t take the pipe if I can’t use it right away. Seen Rawson lately?”
    “I heard he was somewhere around here. He didn’t happen to leave anything for me, did he?”
    “Just a minute.” He went to the barn aware that this was the moment of decision. There was no reason why Rawson and Betsy couldn’t be framing him. There was no reason why Gribble couldn’t be a planted witness for corroboration. The heavy package was behind the bale of hay where he had put it in darkness. He couldn’t possibly know whether Gribble had found it and replaced it or not. And now, picking it up, carrying it, handing it silently to the man in the truck, he had completed his treason to the North American People’s Democratic Republic. He had received, harbored, and transmitted fissionable material. His head was in the noose from that moment on.
    He felt all the better for it.
    “Good old Rawson,” the Bee-Jay man chuckled, hefting the package. “Well, Mr. Justin, I’ll try to pass by again—with a pump.”
    “Do that,” Justin said steadily. “And if you ever feel any need to call on me, do it. I’m available. For anything.”
    The man smiled blandly. The starting motor cranked and strained for fifteen seconds before the engine caught and the little truck lurched off down the road. Justin followed it with his eyes until it was over the next crest and out of sight.
    He turned to find Gribble staring at him from the corner of the barn. Justin wasn’t frightened; the time for that was past. He realized that he would feel physical fear before long while he waited in some schoolhouse cellar for the MVD to come clumping in with truncheons and methodically reduce him to a blob of pain, shrieking confessions on demand. But he did not fear the fear to come.
    He told Gribble easily: “The first salesman in three years. He had some pipe but he didn’t have a pump. Maybe by spring, he said. I guess things are picking up all around.”
    “Yes,” Gribble said vaguely, his eyes full of tears.
    They worked steadily through the morning and afternoon. Gribble spent two hours on the milk cooler, which had been grunting, gurgling, and creaking for a month, on the verge of a breakdown. Whatever else he was besides—quoter of Molière, Pentagon colonel—he was unquestionably an able refrigeration mechanic and bench hand. He serviced the motor and coils, disassembled the pump, cut new gaskets from a discarded inner tube, filed a new cam from scrap metal and installed it. The cooler whispered happily and the red line of the thermometer dropped well below the danger mark for the first time that summer. He showed Justin his work, dimly proud, and then joined him in cultivating the knee-high field corn until it was time to haul water from the spring again. They had a late supper at three-thirty: a dubious piece of boiled salt pork, potatoes from the barrel in the cellar, milk. It was then that Gribble asked whether Justin happened to have anything to drink.
    “Some local brandy,” Justin said, wondering. The little man was tightening up again. If you were an artist you saw him as taut cords vibrating in the shape of a human body. He had seemed almost happy and slack when he showed Justin the cooler…
    “Could I please—?”
    Justin got the carelessly hidden bottle of Mr. Konreid’s popskull. Gribble methodically poured himself half a tumblerful, not bothering to rinse his glass of its skim of rich milk. Methodically he drank it down, his Adam’s apple working. “Rotten stuff,” he said after a long pause. Justin was about to be offended when he somehow realized that Gribble didn’t mean his liquor in particular. “I was partly tanked