Lucifer's Hammer

First Week: The Princess

Maureen Jellison stood at the top of the ridge. Warm rain poured over her. Lightning flared in the mountains above. She stepped closer to the deep cleft in the granite knob. The surface was slippery. She smiled slightly, thinking of how her father had told her not to come up here alone even before…

It was difficult to finish that thought. She could not put a name to what had happened. The End of the World sounded trite, and for a little while it wasn’t even true. Not yet. The world hadn’t ended here at the ranch they now called the Stronghold. She couldn’t see into the valley below because of the rain, but she knew what was there. A bustle of activity; inventory of everything — gasoline, cartridges, needles and pins, plastic bags, cooking oil, aspirin, firearms, baby bottles, pots and pans, cement — anything that might help keep them alive through the winter. Al Hardy was going about it systematically, using Maureen and Eileen Hamner and Marie Vance as agents to call on every house in the valley.

“Snoopers. That’s what we are,” Maureen shouted to the wind and the rain. Her voice fell. “And it’s all so damned useless.”

The snooping didn’t bother her. If anything was necessary, if anything could save them, it would be Al Hardy’s careful work. It wasn’t the snooping, or those who tried to hide their possessions. They were fools, but that was a folly that did not disturb her. It was the others; the ones who welcomed her. They believed. They were utterly certain that Senator Jellison would keep them alive, and they were pathetically happy to see his daughter. They didn’t care that she had come to pry and snoop and perhaps take their possessions. They were only too glad to offer everything they had, freely, in exchange for a protection that did not exist.

Some farmers and ranchers had pride and independence. They understood the need for organization, but they weren’t servile about it. But the others — the pathetic refugees who had somehow got past the roadblocks; the city people who owned houses in the valley, who had fled here to avoid Hammerfall, who had no idea what to do next; even rural people whose life-styles depended on feed trucks and refrigerated railroad cars and California weather — for them the Jellisons were “the government” which would care for them, as it always had.

Maureen couldn’t bear the responsibility. She told them lies. She told them they would live, and she knew better. There would be no crops this year, here or anywhere. How long could the loot from flooded stores keep them alive? How many more refugees were there in the San Joaquin basin, and what right did she have to live when the world was dying?

Lightning flared nearby. She did not move. She stood on the bare granite, near the edge. I wanted goals. Now I have them. And it’s too much. Her life didn’t revolve around Washington parties and who was speaking to whom. You couldn’t say that surviving the end of the world was trivial. But it is. If there’s not more to life than just existing, how is it different? It was more comfortable in Washington. It was easier to hide the suffering. That’s the only difference.

She heard footsteps behind her. Someone was coming along the ridgetop. She had no weapons, and she was afraid. She could laugh at that. She stood at the edge of a cliff, on a bare granite knob as lightning flashed, and she was afraid; but it was the first time she had felt fear of an approaching stranger in this valley, and that made it more terrifying. The Hammer had destroyed everything. It had taken her place of refuge. She looked toward the edge and slightly shifted her weight. It would be so easy.

The man came closer. He wore a poncho and a widebrimmed hat, and carried a rifle under the poncho. “Maureen?” he called.

Relief washed over her in waves. There was an edge of hysterical laughter in her voice as she said, “Harvey? What are you doing up here?”

Harvey Randall came to the edge of the rock. He stood uncertainly. She remembered that he was afraid of heights, and she stepped carefully toward him, away from the cleft.

“I’m supposed to be up here,” he said. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.” She summoned up a reserve of strength she hadn’t known she had. “Getting wet, I suppose.” Now that she’d said it she realized it was true. Despite the raincoat, she was soaked. Her low boots were filled with water. The rain was just cool enough to feel clammy on her back where it had come down inside her jacket. “Why are you supposed to be here?”

“Guard duty. I have a shelter over there. Come on, let’s get in out of the wet.”

“All right.” She followed him along the ridge. He didn’t turn back to look at her, and she followed passively.

Fifty yards away were boulders leaning against each other. A crude framework of wood and polyethylene garbage bags had been built under their partial shelter. There was no source of light inside except the afternoon gloom. The furniture was an air mattress and sleeping bag on the floor and a wooden box to sit on. A post had been driven into the ground and pegs stuck into it; from them hung a bugle, a plastic bag of paperback books, binoculars, a canteen and lunch.

“Welcome to the palace,” Harvey said. “Here, get that jacket off and let yourself dry out a bit.” He spoke calmly and naturally, as if there were nothing strange about finding her alone on a bare rock knob in a lightning storm.

The shelter was large; there was room to stand. Harvey shrugged himself out of the rainhat and poncho, then helped her with the jacket. He hung the wet clothes on pegs near the open entrance.

“What are you guarding?” Maureen asked.

“The back way in.” He shrugged. “In this rain it’s not likely that anyone will come or that I’d see them if they did, but we have to get the shelter built.”

“Do you live here?”

“No. We take turns. Me, Tim Hamner, Brad Wagoner and Mark. Sometimes Joanna. We all live down below here. Didn’t you know?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t seen you since we got here,” Harvey said. “I came looking a couple of times, but I got the impression you wouldn’t ever be at home for me. And I wasn’t all that welcome around the big house. Thanks for voting for me, anyway.”

“Voting?”

“The Senator said you’d asked to have me let in.”

“You’re welcome.” That had been easy enough to decide. I don’t sleep with every man I meet. Even if you got terminal guilt and went off to another room, it was nice, and I don’t really regret it. There’s an honest thought. If I thought enough of you to sleep with you, I sure as hell had to save your life, didn’t I?

“Have a seat.” He waved toward the wooden box. “Eventually there’ll be furniture. Nothing else to do up here but work on the place.”

“I don’t see what good you’re doing here,” Maureen said.

“Nor I. But try to explain that to Hardy. The maps show this as a good place for a guard post. When the visibility is more than fifty yards it will be, too, but right now it’s a waste of manpower.”

“We’ve got plenty of manpower,” Maureen said. She sat gingerly on the box and leaned back against the hard boulder. The plastic liner between her back and the boulder was damp from water condensing on its inside surface. “You’re going to have to insulate this,” she said. She ran a finger along the wet plastic.

“All in good time.” He stood nervously in the center of the shelter, finally went over to the air mattress and sat on top of his sleeping bag.

“You think Al’s a fool,” she said.

“No. No, I didn’t say that.” Harvey’s voice was serious. “I suppose I could do some good up here. Even if a raiding party got past me, I’d be an armed man behind them. And any warning I could give would be worth something down there. No, I don’t think Hardy’s a fool. As you say, we’ve got plenty of manpower.”

“Too much,” Maureen said. “Too many people, not enough food.” She didn’t recognize this matter-of-fact man who sat on his sleeping bag and never smiled; who didn’t talk about galactic empires, and didn’t ask why she was up here. This wasn’t the man she’d slept with. She didn’t know who he was. Almost he reminded her of George. He seemed confident. The rifle he’d brought in was leaning against the post, ready to his hand. There were cartridges sewn in loops on his jacket pocket.

In all this world there are two people I’ve slept with, and they’re both strangers. And George doesn’t really count. What you do at fifteen doesn’t count. A hurried, frantic coupling on this hill, not very far from here, and both of us so afraid of what we’d done that we never talked about it again. Afterward we acted as if it had never happened. That doesn’t count.

George, and this man, this stranger. Two strangers. The rest are dead. Johnny Baker must be dead. My ex-husband too. And… There weren’t many more to inventory. People she’d cared for, for a year, for a week, for one night even. They were few, and they had been in Washington. All dead.

Some people are strong in a crisis. Harvey Randall is. I thought I was. Now I know better. “Harvey, I’m scared.” Now why did I say that?

She’d expected him to say something comforting. To be reassuring, as George would be. It would be a lie, but—

She hadn’t expected hysterical laughter. She stared as Harvey Randall giggled, bubbled, laughed insanely. “You’re scared,” he gasped. “Lord God above, you haven’t seen anything to be scared of!” He was shouting at her. “Do you know what it’s like out there? You can’t know. You haven’t been outside this valley.” Visibly he fought for control of himself. She watched fascinated, as he slowly won the struggle for calm. The laughter died away. Then, amazingly, the stranger was sitting there again, as if he hadn’t moved. “Sorry about that,” he said. The phrase was flippantly conventional, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out as a genuine apology.

She stared in horror. “You too? It’s only a big act? All this masculine calm, this—”

“What do you expect?” Harvey asked. “What else can I do? And I really am sorry. Didn’t mean to crack like that…”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t all right,” Harvey said. “The only damned chance we’ve got, any of us has got, is to go on trying to act rationally. And when one of us cracks, it makes it that much harder for the rest. That’s what I’m sorry about. Not that it gets to me, out of the blue sometimes, wham! I’m learning to live with that. But I shouldn’t have let you see it. It can’t make things easier for you—”

“But it does,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to… to say confession.” They sat silently for a moment, listening to the wind and rain, the crackle of thunder in the mountains. “We’ll swap,” Maureen said. “You tell me, I’ll tell you.”

“Is that wise?” he asked. “Look, I haven’t forgotten the last time we met up here on this ridge.”

“I haven’t either.” Her voice was small and thin. She thought he was about to move, to get up, and she spoke quickly. “I don’t know what to do about that. Not yet.”

He sat, unmoving, so that she wasn’t sure that he’d been about to get up after all. “Tell me,” he said.

“No.” She couldn’t quite make out his face. There was a stubble of beard, and the light was very bad in the shelter. Sometimes lightning struck near enough to throw a brilliant flash, eerily green from the color of the plastic bags, but that only blinded her for an instant and she still could not see his expression. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s horrible to me, but it would sound trivial—”

“And what if it does?”

“They hope,” she said. “They come to the house, or I go to theirs, and they believe we can save them. That I can save them. Some of them are crazy. There’s a boy in town, Mayor Seitz’s youngest boy. He’s fifteen, and he wanders around naked in the rain unless his mother brings him in. There are five women whose husbands never came back from a hunting trip. There are old people and children and city people and they all expect us to come up with a miracle — and, Harvey, I just don’t have any miracles, but I have to go on pretending that I do.”

Almost she told him the rest: of her sister Charlotte, sitting alone in her room and staring at the walls with vacant eyes, but then she’d come alive and scream if she couldn’t see the children; of Gina, the black woman from the post office, who’d broken a leg and lay in a ditch until somebody found her and then she died of gas gangrene and nobody could help her; of the three children with typhus that nobody could save; of the others who’d gone mad. They wouldn’t sound trivial. But they were. She could face horror. “I can’t go on giving people false hopes,” she said at last.

“You have to,” Harvey said. “It’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Why?”

He spread his hands in astonishment. “Because it is. Because there are so few of us left.”

“If life wasn’t important before, why should it be now?”

“It is.”

“No. What’s the difference between meaningless survival in Washington and meaningless survival here? None of that means anything.”

“It means something to the others. To the ones who want your miracles.”

“Miracles I don’t have. Why is it important that other people depend on you? Why does that make my life worth living?”

“Sometimes it’s all that does mean anything,” Harvey said. He was very serious. “And then you find there’s more. A lot more. But first you do a job, one that you didn’t really take on, looking out for others. Then after awhile you see that it’s important to live.” He laughed, not with humor but sadness. “I know, Maureen.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you really want to hear it?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Yes, I do.”

“All right.” He told her. She listened to his story: of the preparations before Hammerfall, of his quarrel with Loretta; of his self-doubts and guilt about his brief affair with her, not so much that he had slept with her, but that he had thought about her afterward and compared her with his wife, and how that had made it harder to take Loretta seriously.

He went on, and she heard, but she didn’t really comprehend. “And then finally we were here,” he said. “Safe. Maureen, you can’t know that feeling: to know, really know, that you’ll live another hour; that there may be a whole hour when you won’t see someone you love torn apart like a used rag doll. I wouldn’t want you to understand, not really, but you have to know that much: What your father is building here in this valley is the most important thing in the world. It’s priceless, and it’s worth anything to keep it, to know… to know that somebody, somewhere, has hope. Can feel safe.”

“No! That’s the real horror. It’s all false hope! The end of the world, Harvey! The whole goddam world’s come apart, and we’re promising something that doesn’t exist, won’t happen.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sometimes I think that too. Eileen is down there in the big house, you know. We hear what’s going on.”

“Then what’s the point if we won’t live through the winter?”

He got up and came toward her. She sat very still, and he stood next to her, not touching her, but she knew he was there. “One,” he said. “It’s not hopeless. You must know that. Hardy and your father have done some damned good planning. It takes some luck, but we’ve got a chance. Come on, admit it.”

“Maybe. If we’re lucky. But what if our luck has all run out?”

“Two ” he went on relentlessly. “Suppose it’s all a scam. We’ll all starve this winter. Suppose that. Maureen, it’s still worth it. If we can put off for an hour, if for a lousy hour we can spare somebody feeling the way I did curled up in the back of my car… Maureen, it’s worth dying just to keep one human being from feeling that way. It is. And you can do that. If it takes an act, put on an act. But do it.”

He meant it. Maybe he was acting too, doing what he had told her to do; but he meant it too, or why would he bother? Maybe he was right. Oh, God. Let him be right. Only You aren’t there, are You?

How much do you believe all this, Harvey Randall? How strong is this resolve of yours? Please don’t lose it, because you make me feel it too. I can share it. She looked up at him and said, very gently, “Do you want to make love to me?”

“Yes.” He didn’t move.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve thought about you for months. Because I won’t feel guilt. Because I want someone to be in love with.”

“Those are good reasons.” She stood, and reached for him. She felt his arms go to her shoulders. He held her, not tightly, looking at her. The wet spot on her back was cold now. Almost she drew away, this wasn’t something casual, not like the last time. This would mean something. It had to.

His hands were warm on her back, and he smelled like sweat and work; an honest smell, not something from a spray can. When he bent to kiss her, it was like an electric shock, and she grasped him and held him, burrowing into him, hoping to lose herself.

Presently they lay on the air mattress, on the open sleeping bag. Gently he held her, and she knew it would be good, and after a long time it was.

Later she lay against him and watched the lightning make strange patterns through the green plastic; and she thought of what she’d done.

Do your job. That’s what life is all about, doing one’s job. Harvey hadn’t really said that, that was Albert Camus, The Plague, but it was what Harvey meant. And doing my job includes a lot of things, but I’m not sure it includes Harvey Randall. There’s a paradox. He tells me what I should be living for, and I know damned well I can’t hold onto it by myself, but what would George do if he knew where I was now?

He’d put Harvey on the road.

“What’s the matter?” Harvey asked. His voice came from a long way off.

She turned to him and tried to smile. “Nothing. Everything. I was just thinking.”

“You shivered. Are you cold?”

“No. Harvey… what about your boy? And Marie’s son?”

“They’re up there, somewhere. And I have to go look for them. I’ve been trying to get Hardy to let me, but he’s been too busy to talk to me. I’ll go without permission if I have to, but I’ll ask once more. I’ll try again tomorrow. No. Not tomorrow. There’s something else tomorrow.”

“The Roman place.”

“Yes.”

“You’re in that?”

“Mark and I seem to have drawn the lucky numbers. With Mr. Christopher and his brother. And Al Hardy. And a few others, I guess.”

“Will there be shooting?” Are you going to be killed?

“Maybe. They shot at Harry. They killed that other man, the one from the dude ranch.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.

“Terrified. But it’s got to be done. And when it is, I’ll ask Hardy to let me take Mark up to the mountains.”

She didn’t ask him if he had to go. She knew better than that. “Will you come back?”

“Yes. Do you want me to?”

“Yes. But… but I’m not in love with you.”

“That’s all right,” he said. He chuckled. “After all, we hardly know each other. Will you ever be in love with me?”

“I don’t know.” I don’t dare let myself be. “I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone.” There’s no future in it. There’s no future at all.

“You will,” he said.

“Let’s not talk about it.”

There is rain in the Sahara. Lake Chad fills to overflowing, and engulfs the city of Nguigmi. The Niger and the Volta are in flood, drowning millions who have survived the tsunami. In eastern Nigeria the Ibo tribe rises in rebellion against the central government.

Further to the east the Palestinians and Israelis suddenly realize there are no great powers capable of intervening; this time the war will go to a conclusion. The remants of Israel, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia are on the march. There are no jet planes, and little fuel for tanks. There will be no ammunition resupply, and the war will not end until it is fought with knives.

Second Week: Mountain Men

Water poured from the sky. Harvey Randall was almost past noticing, as he hardly noticed the places where the road was gone. It was automatic to avoid the deepest holes, to walk carefully across the mud that flowed in rivers across the blacktop. It felt good to be moving, to stride up the steep winding road into the High Sierra. There were no cars and no people; only the road. He had food, and a knife, and the target pistol. Not much food, and not much ammunition, but he was lucky to have anything at all.

“Hey, Harv, how about we take a break?” Mark called from behind him.

Harvey kept on walking. Mark shrugged and muttered something under his breath, and shifted the shotgun from his right shoulder to his left. He carried the weapon barrel down under his poncho. The weapon was kept dry, but Mark didn’t believe he was dry anywhere. He’d sweated enough that he might as well not have the poncho. It felt like a steam bath inside the rain gear.

Harvey picked his way across a rivulet of water. So far he hadn’t found anyplace that he couldn’t have taken the TravelAll, and he cursed the Senator and his hardnosed assistant; but he did that silently. If he said anything, Mark would agree, and Mark was in enough trouble with Al Hardy. One of these days Mark would get himself shot, or thrown out of the Senator’s Stronghold, and Harvey Randall would have a decision to make.

Meanwhile he could put all his effort into walking uphill. Step. Pause for a tiny fraction of a second, rear knee locked to catch an instant of rest; weight on the forward foot, swing on another step, another instant of rest… Absently Harvey reached into a belt pouch and took out a chunk of dried meat. Bear. Harvey had never eaten bear before. Now he wondered if he’d ever eat anything else. Well, by evening they’d be a good nine miles from the Stronghold, and anything they shot they could keep and eat for themselves. The Senator’s rules again: no hunting within five miles of his ranch.

It made sense. The game would be needed, later, and no point in scaring it away. All of the Senator’s rules made sense, but they were rules, laid down without discussion, orders issued from the big house with nobody to say no except the Christophers, and they weren’t arguing. Not yet, anyway.

It was George Christopher who’d let Harvey go; Hardy hadn’t wanted to risk it. Not that he cared about Harvey, but the weapons and the food Harvey carried were valuable. But Maureen had talked to Hardy, and then George Christopher had come out and given Harvey the supplies and told him about road conditions.

Not a coincidence. Harvey was sure of that. Christopher had no reason at all to help Harvey Randall — and he’d got into the act the day Maureen talked to Al Hardy and her father about it; the day she’d shown any open friendship with Harvey Randall. That made too much sense to ignore.

It was easy to see what Maureen meant to George Christopher. What did he mean to her? For that matter, what does Harvey Randall mean to Maureen Jellison?

I think I’m falling in love, Harvey whistled to himself. Only… I don’t know what it’s like. Being a faithful — well, very nearly faithful — married man for eighteen years is not much preparation for romance.

Or maybe it is. He had always thought that any two people sufficiently determined to make a go of it would be able to. Now he wondered. What is this love business? He’d have been willing to die for Loretta — but he hadn’t been willing to stay home because she was afraid. He could face that now, but he wasn’t sure what it meant.

Finally it was afternoon, time to start making camp. He let his eyes search the woods around him as he hiked. He felt very alone and vulnerable. Time was, when you went far from trailhead you could count on meeting good people; but that was before Hammerfall. Some would-be robbers had come down from these hills not two days before, and they or others like them could be waiting in ambush anywhere. So far, though, he hadn’t seen anyone, and that was fine with Harvey.

The road led through pine forest, steep hillsides, and there was standing water anyplace level. It wouldn’t be easy to find a good campsite in this rain. A boulder cave, like the one they’d made the sentry shelter out of, would be best. He’d have to be damned careful, though; something or somebody would be making use of any dry spot he could find. Bears, snakes, anything.

There was a skunk in the first place they looked. Harvey passed it by with regret. It would have been a good campsite, two boulders tilted against each other, actually dry ground in there; but the beady eyes and unmistakable odor were invincible. Skunks could carry rabies, too. A skunk bite could be the most dangerous thing up here. There weren’t going to be any Pasteur treatments for rabies, not for a long time…

The next cave held a fox, or perhaps a feral dog. They chased it away. The area under the boulders wasn’t dry, and wasn’t really large enough, but they were able to rig up their ponchos on cut branches so that at least they didn’t have water pouring on their heads.

Now for a fire. Harvey spent the rest of the daylight gathering wood. There was standing deadwood, soaked, but if he split it there was some dry wood at the core. There wasn’t enough for more than an hour of fire, maybe longer if they were careful. When it was completely dark Harvey used some of his precious lighter fluid.

“Wish I had a railroad flare,” Harvey said. He poured lighter fluid carefully onto the base of his tiny stack of dry wood. “You can start a fire in a blizzard with a flare.”

“Fucking Hardy wouldn’t give you one,” Mark said.

“You’d better be careful around him,” Harvey said. He lit a match. The lighter fluid caught, and the fire blinded them for a moment. The wood caught, and even that tiny bit of heat was welcome. “He doesn’t like you.”

“I don’t think he likes anybody,” Mark said. He began to arrange larger pieces of wood near the fire so they’d dry out. “Always smiling, but he doesn’t mean it.” Harvey nodded. Hardy’s smile hadn’t change from before Hammerfall. He was still the politician’s assistant, the man who was friendly with everyone, but now his smile was a threat, not something warm and friendly.

“Jesus,” Mark said.

“Eh?”

“Just thinking about those poor bastards,” Mark said. “Harv, it gave me the willies.”

“Don’t think about it.”

“I had to pull on the rope,” Mark said. “I won’t forget it.”

“Yeah.” There had been four frightened kids in the Roman place. Two boys and two girls, none of them more than twenty. Two were wounded in the fight, when Hardy and Christopher captured them. Then there’d been a shouting match between Hardy and Christopher. George Christopher wanted to shoot all four of them on the spot. Al Hardy argued they ought to be taken back to town. Harvey and Mark had sided with Hardy, and eventually Christopher gave in.

Only, when they got them to town, the Senator and the Mayor held a trial the same afternoon, and by evening all four were hanging in front of the City Hall. George Christopher’s way would have been kinder.

“They killed the Romans and that other chap, the guy from Muchos Nombres,” Harvey said. “What else could we have done with them?”

“Hell, they got what was coming,” Mark said. “It was just all so fucking quick. And the way those girls screamed and cried…” Mark fed the fire again, brooding.

The executions had shocked a number of the townspeople, Harvey thought. But nobody said anything. The Romans had been their friends. Besides, it could be dangerous to argue. Behind Al Hardy’s smiles and perpetual calm and easy manners was the ultimate threat. The road. There was always the road, for those who wouldn’t cooperate, for those who caused too much trouble. The road.

They were almost at the top, the highest point the road would reach, when it was time to make camp on their third day. The rain hadn’t let up, and the higher they climbed, the colder it got. They’d need a fire tonight, which meant that they’d have to take turns tending it.

Harvey was carefully laying out his sticks, and hadn’t yet reached into his pockets for the lighter fluid, when they smelled it.

“Smoke,” Mark said. “A campfire.”

“Yes. Well hidden,” Harvey said.

“It’s got to be close. We’d never smell it from far, not in this rain.”

They probably wouldn’t see it, either. Harvey sat absolutely still, motioning Mark for silence. There was a strong wind blowing from higher up. It had to be carrying the campfire smells. The rain was like a wet curtain, and in the dying light they couldn’t see more than a few yards.

“Let’s go look,” Mark said.

“Yeah. We’ll leave the ponchos. We can’t get any wetter than we are already.”

They moved cautiously uphill, up the road, peering into the gloom.

“Over there,” Mark whispered. “I heard something. A voice.”

Harvey thought he’d heard it too, but it was very faint. They moved in that direction. There wasn’t any point in trying to be quiet. The wind and rain covered most sounds, and their feet squished in the wet leaves and mud of the forest floor.

“Just hold it.”

They stopped dead still. The voice had been a girl’s. Not very old, Harvey thought. She was very close, probably hidden in a thicket just ahead.

“Andy,” she called. “Two visitors.”

“Coming.”

Harvey stood rigid for a moment. It was… “Andy!” he shouted. “Andy, is that you?”

“Yes, sir.” His son came down the trail.

Harvey rushed forward to greet him. “Andy, thank God, you’re all right—”

“Yes, sir. I’m fine. Is Mother… ?”

Harvey felt it clutch him, the memory lying across his soul, the pathetic bundle in the electric blanket. “Raiders,” Harvey said. “Looters killed your mother.”

“Oh.” Andy moved away from his father. A girl came out of the thicket. She held a shotgun. Andy went to her and they stood together. Together.

The boy’s grown up in two weeks, Harvey thought. He saw the way he stood with the girl. Protectively, and very naturally, and it reminded him of the words in the marriage ceremony: “One flesh.” They stood that way, two halves of one person, but so very young. There were wisps of thin hair on Andy’s chin. Not a real beard, just the stubble that Loretta had made him shave because it looked bad, although it was nearly invisible…

“Is Mr. Vance here?” Harvey asked.

“Sure. Come on this way,” Andy said. He turned, and the girl went back to her thicket. She hadn’t said a word. Harvey wondered who she was. His son’s… woman. And he didn’t even know her name, and the boy hadn’t told him. And there was something terribly wrong, but Harvey didn’t know what to do about it.

Gordie Vance was glad to see him. Harvey was even happier to see Gordie. Gordie had built a large shelter, logs and thatched roof that shed rain, and he had dry wood, and there were fish and birds hanging under the shelter. A pot of stew bubbled on the fire.

“Harv! I knew you’d get here. Been waiting,” Gordie said.

Harvey looked puzzled. “How did you expect me to find you?”

“Hell, this is the jump-off place, isn’t it? Where we always parked.”

There wasn’t enough light to be sure, but the place didn’t look any different from any other clearing near the road, and Harvey knew he’d never have recognized it. “I’d have gone right past—”

“You’d have come back when you got to the lodge,” Gordie said. “What’s left of the lodge.”

There were a dozen under the shelter. They were mostly in pairs, sleeping bags zipped together.

Boys and girls. One of each, in pairs. Boy Scouts and…

“Girl Scouts?” Harvey asked.

Gordie nodded. “I’ll tell you about it later. We had some trouble up here last week. It’s okay now. You… you met Janie, didn’t you?”

“The girl with Andy?” Harvey looked around. Andy wasn’t there any longer. He’d led Harvey and Mark to the shelter, and he’d left without saying a word.

“Sure. Janie Somers. She and Andy…” Gordie shrugged.

“I see,” Harvey said, but he didn’t see. Andy was a boy, a child…

At fourteen a Roman boy was given a sword and shield and enrolled in a legion, and could legally become head of a household, a property owner. But that was Rome and this is…

This is the world after Hammerfall. And Andy has a family and he’s an adult.

The other children — weren’t children. They were watching Harvey very closely. Not the way children watch an adult. Suspicion, maybe. But neither anger nor respect nor . … They were children who’d grown up a lot.

And there was a girl in Gordie’s sleeping bag. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

It was dry and warm. Harvey’s clothes hung near the fire, and he sat in Gordie’s sleeping bag, the bag’s luxurious dryness wrapped around him, his feet and legs dry for the first time in days.

The tea was bark, not real tea, but it tasted good, and so had the bowl of stew Gordie served earlier. Mark slept, a smile on his face, very near to the campfire. The others were asleep too, or acted as if they were. Andy and Janie, clinging to each other in their sleeping bag, nestled together; others, Gordie’s boy Bert with another girl. And Stacey, the girl Gordie slept with, was curled against Gordie’s knees, dozing a little.

Old home week in the deep woods.

“Yeah, it got rough at first,” Gordie was saying. “I took the crew back to Soda Springs after we saw the Hammer fall. We rode out the rain and the hurricanes there. Fourth day we started back this way. Hiked four days. When we got here, there were some bikers. They’d found the girls camping up here. Took over.”

“Took over. You mean—”

“Christ, Harvey, you know what I mean. They’d raped one of the kids to death, and the lady who’d brought the kids up got herself killed trying to fight them.”

“Jesus,” Harvey said. “Gordie, you didn’t have any guns—”

“Had a twenty-two pistol,” Gordie said. “Just in case. But it didn’t figure in what happened.”

This was a new Gordie. Harvey wasn’t sure how, because he made the same jokes, and in some ways he was a lot like the Gordie Vance Harvey had known, but he wasn’t, not really. He wasn’t a man you could imagine as a banker, to begin with. He seemed to belong up here, with a two-week beard, and no gut but not hungry. Comfortable and dry and very much in charge and at ease…

“They were stupid,” Gordie was saying. “Didn’t want to be wet. They’d rigged some tents up, store-bought tents, along with their camper. We’ve still got their gear. Used some of it putting this shelter together.” He waved to indicate the logs-and-boulder structure, a shed roof with walls and fire pit. “They were all inside, even the ones they thought were on guard. So we knocked them in the head.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Gordie said. “Then we cut their throats. Andy killed two.”

Gordie let that sink in for awhile. Harvey sat, motionless, then deliberately looked across the fire to where his son lay sleeping with his… his woman. A woman he’d won by conquest, rescued…

“And after that the girls just hopped into bed with you?” Harvey demanded.

“Ask them. You see how it is,” Gordie said. “We didn’t rape anybody, if that’s what you mean.”

“Only technically,” Harvey said. He wished he hadn’t said it, but the words were out.

Gordie wasn’t angry. He laughed. “Statutory rape. Who’s to enforce that? Who cares, Harvey?”

“I don’t know. The Senator might. Gordie, Marie came with me. She’s at the Senator’s ranch—”

“Marie? I figured she’d be dead,” Gordie said. “She really came looking for Bert, of course. She wouldn’t have cared about me.”

Harvey didn’t say anything. It was true enough.

“She doesn’t really care about Bert either,” Gordie was saying.

“Bullshit. She’s like a tigress. It was all we could do to keep her from coming up with Mark and me.”

“Yeah? Maybe. When she knows he’s safe, she won’t care.” Gordie stared into the fire. “So what happens now?”

“We take you back with us—”

“So the Senator can look at me funny and maybe try enforcing statutory rape laws? So he can split Andy away from his girl?”

“It won’t be that way.”

“Yeah? Get some sleep, Harv. I’ll go change the guard. My turn on watch.”

“I’ll take—”

“No.”

“But—”

“Don’t make me say it, Harvey. Just get some sleep.” Harvey nodded and stretched out in the sleeping bag. Don’t make him say it. Don’t make him say I’m not one of them, they wouldn’t trust me to be on guard for them…

Breakfast was fried fish and several vegetables that Harvey didn’t recognize. It was good. Harvey was just finishin’ when Gordie came over and sat next to him.

“We’ve talked it over, Harv. We’re not going back with you.”

“None of you?” Harvey demanded.

“That’s right. We’re staying together.”

“Gordie, you’re crazy. It’s going to get cold up here. It’ll be snowing in a couple of weeks—”

“We’ll make out,” Gordie said.

“Andy!” Harvey called.

“Yes, sir?”

“You’re coming with me.”

“No, sir.” Andy wasn’t arguing. He wasn’t demanding. He was just saying what would happen. He got up and walked out into the rain. Janie followed closely. She had still not spoken a word to Harvey Randall since she had challenged him on the trail.

“You could stay with us,” Gordie said.

“I’d like that. I’d like it better if Andy asked me,” Harvey said.

“What do you expect?” Gordie asked. “Look, you made your choice. You stayed in the city. You had a job, and you stayed for it and sent Andy up into the hills—”

“Where he’d be safer”

“And alone.”

“He wasn’t alone,” Harvey insisted. “He—”

“Don’t tell me,” Gordie said. “Argue with Andy. Look, we put it to a vote this morning. Nobody objected. You can stay with us.”

“That’s silly. What’s up here?”

“What’s down there?”

“Safety.”

Gordie shrugged. “What’s that worth? Look, man.” Gordie wasn’t quite pleading, because he had nothing to plead. He was straining to make Harvey understand, knowing that Harvey never would. And Gordie didn’t really care, except that he owed this much to his friend. “Look, Harv. If he goes with you, he’s a kid again. Up here he’s second in command—”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever we are. He’s a man up here, Harv. He wouldn’t be, down there. I saw the way you looked at him and Janie. They’re still children to you. Down there you’d make them into children again. You’d make them feel like kids, useless. Well, up here Andy knows he’s not useless. We all depend on him. Up here he’s doing something important, he’s not just a cog in a survival machine.”

“Survival machine.” Yeah, Harvey thought. That’s what we’ve got at the Senator’s Stronghold. A survival machine and a damned good one. “At least it’s a pretty good chance at survival.”

“Sure,” Gordie said. “Think about it, Harvey. The world ends. Hammerfall. Shouldn’t things be different after that?”

“Things are different. Lord God, how different do you want? We just took four kids and strung them up in front of City Hall. We’re busting our balls to stay alive through winter, and it’s a chancy thing, but we’ll make it—”

“And what would we do down there?” Gordie asked.

Harvey thought that one over. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know if Hardy would let that many into the Stronghold. A troop of Boy Scouts, yes; but this warrior band? Maybe they belonged up here: a new breed of mountain dwellers. “Dammit, that’s my son, and he’s coming with me.”

“No, he’s not, Harv. He’s not your anything. He’s his own man, and you haven’t got any way to make him come with you. We’re not going back, Harv. None of us. But you can stay.”

“Stay and be what?”

“Whatever you like.”

The offer wasn’t even tempting. What would he do up here? And who would he be? Harvey got up and lifted his pack. “No. Mark?”

“Yeah, Boss.”

“You coming or staying?”

Mark had been unnaturally quiet since they arrived. “Going back, Harv. Joanna’s down there, and I don’t think she’d care much for this. Me neither. It can get pretty old, camping out all the time. You?”

“Let’s go,” Harvey said. He looked around sadly. There wasn’t anything up here that belonged to Harvey Randall.

The tsunamis have done their work. Around the shores of the Atlantic there is no trace of the works of man. The very shorelines have been changed. The Gulf of Mexico is a third larger than before; Florida is a chain of islands, Chesapeake Bay has become a gulf. Deep bays indent the western coast of Africa.

On land the craters no longer glow visibly but they continue to change the weather. Volcanoes pour out lava and smoke. Hurricanes lash the seas.

Rain falls everywhere. The work of the Hammer is not yet completed.

Fourth Week: The Wanderers

The woods were lovely, dark and deep, but they dripped. Dan Forrester sighed for a warm, dry world now lost, and he kept moving. His five layers of clothing ran water in pulses as he moved. It was no drier under the trees. It was no wetter, either, and not much darker; and here the infrequent snow flurries never got through. Dan did not really expect to live long enough to see the Sun again.

As he walked he munched on a bit of not-quite-spoiled fish. One of his books had told how to tease fish from deep holes in streams, and to Dan’s surprise it had worked. So had the snares he painstakingly set for rabbits. He had never had enough to eat since leaving Tujunga, but he hadn’t starved, and that, he reflected, was something to set him apart from a lot of others.

Four weeks since Hammerfall. Four weeks of moving steadily northward. He had lost his car hours after leaving his home. Two men and their women and children had simply taken it away from him. They had left him his backpack and much of his equipment, because in the first days after Hammerfall people hadn’t known just how bad things were going to be, or maybe they were just decent people whose need was greater than his. They’d said that, anyway. It hardly mattered.

Now, leaner and — he had to admit to himself — healthier than he’d ever been (except for his feet, which had blisters that wouldn’t heal; diabetes interferes with circulation, which was why he could only make a few miles a day), Dan Forrester, Ph.D., astronomer without sight of stars or employer or possibility of employment, hiked on because there wasn’t anything else to do.

The winds were no longer ferocious, except during hurricanes, and those were less frequent. The rain had settled to a steady pattering, or a drizzle, or, sometimes, blessedly, no rain at all. The rain had also turned cool, and sometimes there were snow flurries. Snow in July at four thousand feet elevation. That was much sooner than Dan had expected. The cloud cover over Earth was reflecting back a lot of sunlight, and Earth was cooling. Dan could imagine the beginnings of glaciers in the north. Now they were no more than mountainsides and high valleys covered lightly with snow; but it was snow that would never melt in his lifetime.

After awhile he rested, leaning against a tree, backpack caught on the rough bark so that he was not quite sitting. It took weight off his feet, and it was easier than taking off his pack and lifting it onto his back again. Four weeks, and the beginnings of snow. It would be a very hard winter…

“Don’t move.”

“Right,” said Dan. Where had the voice come from? He moved only his eyes. Dan was used to thinking of himself as harmless, in appearance and in reality, but he was thinner now, and his beard was scraggly, and no one looked harmless in this world of fear. A man in an Army uniform stepped from behind a tree. The rifle in his hands looked light; the hole in the end looked as big as Death.

The man’s eyes flickered left and right. “You alone? You armed? Got any food?”

“Yes, and no, and not much.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me. Spill your pack.” Behind that gun was a very nervous fellow, a man who kept trying to see through the back of his head. His skin was very pale. Surprisingly, the man had almost no beard, only stubble. He had shaved in the past week. Why? Dan wondered.

Dan opened his hip belt and shrugged out of the pack. He upended it. The Army man watched as he opened zippered pockets. “Insulin,” he said, laying out the medical packet. “I’m a diabetic. I carry two,” and he set out the other, and the wrapped book beside them.

“Open it,” the man said, meaning the book. Dan did.

“Where is your food?”

Dan opened a Ziploc plastic bag. The smell was terrible. He handed the fish to the man. “Nothing to preserve it with,” Dan said. “I’m sorry. But I think it’s edible, if you don’t wait too long.”

The man wolfed down the handful of stinking raw fish as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. “What else?” he demanded.

“Chocolate,” Dan said. His voice was full of resignation. It was the last chocolate in the world, and Dan had saved it for days, waiting for something to celebrate. He watched the uniformed man eat it — no ceremony, not savoring it, just eating.

“Open those.” The man pointed to the cooking pots. Dan took the lid off the largest; there was another pot inside it, and a small stove inside that. “No gasoline for the stove,” Dan said. “Don’t know why I go on carrying it, but I do. The pots aren’t much use without something to cook.” Dan tried not to look at the pieces of thin copper wire that had spilled from the pack. Snare wire. Without it Dan Forrester would probably starve.

“I’ll have one of your pots,” the man said.

“Sure. Big or little?”

“Big.”

“Here.”

“Thanks.” The man seemed more relaxed now, although his eyes still darted about and he jumped at slight noises. “Where were you when it all… ?” The man gestured vaguely.

“Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Pasadena. I saw it all. We had live TV pictures from the Hammerlab satellite.”

“All. What does that mean?”

“There were a lot of strikes. Mostly east of here, Europe the Atlantic, but some close, some south of us. So I drove north until I lost my car. Do you know if the San Joaquin Nuclear Plant is working?”

“No. There’s an ocean where the San Joaquin Valley used to be.”

“What about Sacramento?”

“Don’t know.” The man seemed indecisive, but his rifle still looked Dan steadily in the eye. An ounce of pressure and Dan Forrester would not exist. Dan was surprised to learn just how much he cared, just how much he wanted to live, even though he knew he had no real chance, if he lived until winter he’d die then. He estimated that many more than half those who lived until winter would not see the spring.

“We were on a training run,” the man said. “Army. When the trucks went into a ditch, some of us shot the officer and went into business for ourselves. Way Gillings told it, that would be a good idea. I went along. I mean, it was all dead anyway, you know?” The man poured out words in a rush. He needed to justify himself before he killed Dan Forrester. “But then we had to walk and walk and walk and we couldn’t find any food, and — ” The words cut off, suddenly, with a dark shadow of hate that crossed the soldier’s face. Then, “I wish you had more food. I’m taking your jacket.”

“Just like that?”

“Take it off. We didn’t have rain gear.”

“You’re too big. It won’t fit,” Dan said.

“I’ll tough it out somehow.” The bandit was shivering, and of course he was as wet as Dan himself. He wasn’t carrying much fat for insulation, either.

“It’s just a windbreaker. Not waterproof.”

“A windbreaker is fine. I can take it off you, you know.”

Sure, with a hole in it. Or maybe not. A head shot doesn’t put holes in jackets. Dan took off the jacket. He was about to throw it to the bandit when he thought of something. “Watch,” he said. He stuffed the hood into the narrow pocket in the collar and zipped it up. Then he turned the big pocket inside out and stuffed the entire jacket into it. The package was now the size of two fists. Dan zipped it closed and tossed it.

“Huh,” said the bandit.

“Do you know what you’re stealing?” Dan’s bitter sense of loss went deeper than his common sense. “They can’t make the materials anymore. They can’t make the machines to shape it. There was a company in New Jersey, and it made that jacket in five sizes and sold it so cheap you could toss one in your car trunk and forget it for ten years. You didn’t even have to go looking for it. The company hunted you down and sent you thick packets of advertisements. How long will it be before anyone can do that again?”

The man nodded. He began backing into the trees, but stopped. “Don’t go west,” he said. “We killed a man and a woman and ate them. We. I didn’t want anyone else to see how I felt. Next chance I got, I went off on my own. So don’t cry real tears over this jacket. Just be glad there ain’t no dry wood around.” The bandit laughed a funny, painful laugh, turned, and ran.

Dan shook his head. Cannibalism, so soon? But he still had the net undershirt and the T-shirt and a long-sleeved flannel shirt and the sweater. He’d been lucky, and he knew it. Presently he began putting the pack back together. He still had his snare wire, more precious than the jacket. A few feet of thin, strong wire, a spool of strong monofilament — life itself, for a little while. He put on his pack.

Don’t go west. The San Joaquin Nuclear Project was west, but the San Joaquin was filled with water. The plant couldn’t have survived that, and besides, it wasn’t finished. That left Sacramento. Dan called up a mental picture of California. He was in the hills that formed the eastern boundary of the flooded central valley. He’d intended to work his way down to lower ground, where the going wouldn’t be so rough.

But the low ground was to the west. The cannibals were between him and the spreading lake that the San Joaquin had become. Best to go north and stay in the foothills. Dan didn’t expect to live, but he had a violent antipathy to helping the cannibals.

Sergeant Hooker watched the sky as he marched.

The wind acted like a horde of catnip-maddened kittens. It slashed playfully under helmet rims, plucked at sleeves and pant legs, died for an instant, then whipped dust in the eye from a wholly different direction. The clouds, black and pregnant in the underbelly, shifted uneasily, promising violence. It hadn’t rained in hours. Even by post-Hammerfall standards, this weather could do anything.

The doctor marched in sullen silence, pushing himself to keep up. He didn’t have strength left over to run. At least Hooker didn’t have that worry. But he worried about the grumbling behind him. No words reached him, only the flavor of complaint and anger.

He thought: We wouldn’t eat each other, of course. There are limits. We don’t even eat our dead. Yet. Should I have pushed that? There were complaints. I may have to shoot Gillings.

He probably would have shot Gillings there at first, when he came back and found Captain Hora dead and Gillings in charge, but he hadn’t had any ammunition then, and the way Gillings told it they’d set up in business for themselves, they’d be fucking kings now that the Hammer had finished civilization.

That was funny, but Sergeant Hooker wasn’t laughing. In random anger he told the doctor, “If we have to stop again, they’ll eat you.” His own belly rumbled.

“I know. I told you why you get sick,” said the doctor. He was short and harmless-looking, half chipmunk, the resemblance accented by a brush of mustache under his forward-thrusting nose. He was sticking close to Hooker, which was sensible.

“You eat steak rare,” he said. “There aren’t too many diseases you can catch from a steer. You eat pork well done, because pigs carry some diseases men catch too. Parasites and such.” He paused for breath, and to see if Hooker would backhand him to shut up, but Hooker didn’t. “But you can catch anything from a man, except maybe sickle-cell anemia. You’ve lost fifteen men since you turned cannibal—”

“Eight got shot. You saw it.”

“They were too sick to run.”

“Hell, they were the recruits. Didn’t know what they were doing.”

The doctor didn’t say anything for awhile. They trudged on, no sound but panting as they climbed the damp hillside. Eight men shot, four of them recruits. But seven of the Army men had died too, and not from bullets. “We’ve all been sick,” the doctor said. “We’re sick now.” His thoughts made him gag. “God, I wish I hadn’t—”

“You was just as hungry as us. What if you was too weak to walk?” Hooker wondered why he bothered; the doctor’s feelings were nothing to him. Vindictively he hugged his secret to him: When they found a place to settle, then they could lame the doctor, like the cavemen lamed their blacksmiths to keep them from running away. But the need hadn’t come yet.

Somewhere. Somewhere there had to be a place, small enough to defend, big enough to support Hooker’s company. A farm community, with enough people in it to work the land, and enough land to feed everybody. The company could set up there. Good troops had to be worth something. That goddam Gillings! The way he told it they could just walk in and take over. It hadn’t worked out that way.

Too hungry. Too damn many miles coming out of the hills and all the stores looted, all the people run off or barricaded up so even the bazookas and the recoilless wouldn’t make it sure…

Hooker wanted to think about something else. If they’d fought earlier it would have been all right; but no, he let himself get talked out of that, talked into moving on to look for a better place, and by the time they got to it…

“If you’ve got to eat human meat…” The doctor couldn’t leave it alone. He had to talk about it. His face wrinkled and he fought nausea. Hooker hoped it was just in the doctor’s head.

“If you’ve got to eat human meat, the ones you want are the healthy ones, the ones who run the fastest and shoot back the best. The ones you can catch are the sick ones. The meat makes you sick, too. Better you eat diseased cattle than sick men—”

“Shut up, pussy doctor. You know why they died. They died because you’re not a real doctor at all, you’re only a pussy doctor.”

“Sure. First time you catch a real doctor, I’m for the pot.”

“Stick close to me if you want to live that long.”

Cowles had been a gynecologist before Hammerfall. He had left a commercial hunting lodge and driven downslope in the endless rain, and stopped at the border of the new sea that covered the San Joaquin Valley. Hooker’s band had found him there, sitting on the fender of his car in the pouring rain, slack-jawed and fresh out of ideas. If Cowles had not had just enough sense to name his profession, he would have joined the stewpot then.

He had protested at being conscripted into the army, until Hooker told him the true situation.

He was docile enough now. There had been no more mumbling about the rights of the citizen. Hooker didn’t doubt that he did the best he could to save lives. And he marched as fast as the slowest of them — with the stewpot following behind, carried by three men who were still healthy. Gillings was one of them. It gave Hooker an extra measure of safety: Gillings would have to drop the stewpot before he shot Hooker in the back.

Hooker didn’t want to shoot anyone. They’d already lost too many men, to disease, to desertion, to the guns in the valley behind them. Who’d have thought those farmers could put up such a good fight? Against a military outfit with modern weapons?

Only it wasn’t a very good military outfit, and they didn’t have much ammunition, and they hadn’t been very smart about anything. No time to train the recruits. No real discipline among the troops. Everybody edgy, wondering if a real Army patrol was out looking for them, or even a bunch of civilian cops.

There wasn’t any turning back, though, not now. And they couldn’t march faster than the news. What they needed was more recruits, only they couldn’t do much recruiting until they had plenty to eat. Economics could be a terrible enemy. To kill a man for the pot, and gather the fuel and water to make him meat, required a given amount of effort. If the company’s numbers dropped too low, the meat would spoil before it could be eaten. Waste of effort, waste of… murder.

It was small wonder that Hooker felt he was pursued by furies. Nothing had worked right since Hammerfall Day, and that was weeks ago. He’d forgotten exactly how many days, but two troopers kept an independent record, crossing off days on pocket calendar cards; if Sergeant Hooker needed to know precisely he could find out.

He’d learned to delegate other responsibilities too. He had to. As a sergeant he’d done the detail work; now that he was effectively the commanding officer he couldn’t. He didn’t think too much about how good an officer he was. There wasn’t anybody else to do it.

Left. Right. Away from that valley, back south again, where they might find some place to stop, new recruits, something to eat besides…

He studied the clouds and wondered if they were really moving in a counterclockwise whirlpool. The only cover in sight was a house ahead and downslope. He ought to send scouts now. Shelter might be needed. He hoped it was abandoned. And maybe there’d be some canned goods inside. Not bloody likely. “Bascomb! Flash! Cover that farmhouse. See if anybody’s home. If there is, get ’em talking, not shooting.”

“Right, Sarge.” Two troopers, two of the healthy ones, broke from the formation and ran down the hill.

“Talk them to death?” the doctor asked.

“I need recruits, pussy doctor. And we have some stewed meat left, enough to last another day…” Hooker spoke absently. He was still watching Bascomb and Flash as they moved toward the farmhouse, and that weather worried him. It was only just past noon, but the clouds did seem to be moving in a bathtub whirlpool pattern…

Something bright showed in the clouds. It couldn’t be sunlight breaking through. It was only a ruddy pinpoint, moving very fast, almost parallel to the clouds, dipping in and out of their dark underbellies. Hooker cried, “Noooo…”

Doctor Cowles edged away, suspecting madness.

“No,” Hooker said softly, “no, no, no. We can’t take it. Enough is enough, don’t you understand? It has to stop now,” Hooker explained, his eyes on the falling bright point. He couldn’t take it, nobody could take it, if the Hammer should fall again.

His prayer was answered, weirdly, as a parachute bloomed behind the meteorite. Hooker stared, not understanding.

“It’s a spacecraft,” Cowles said. “I’ll be damned. Hooker, it’s a spacecraft. Must be from Hammerlab. Hooker, are you all right?”

“Shut up.” Hooker watched the descending parachute.

Gillings bellowed from behind him. “Hey, Sergeant, what does an astronaut taste like? Like turkey?”

“We’ll never know,” Hooker called, and it was good that his voice was under control; good that only Cowles had seen his face. Cowles wouldn’t talk. “They’re coming down in the valley. Right where those farmers shot the shit out of us yesterday.”

Falling east, blind. Clouds shone fiercely bright beneath the meteorite Soyuz. Here and there were whirlpool patterns, hurricane patterns. North of their path there had been a towering spike of cloud, a mother of hurricanes spinning off little ones, above the hot water that must still cover the Pacific strike. The small window shook with the Soyuz’s vibration, and Johnny Baker’s eyes vibrated in a different pattern. The Soyuz dipped low, dipped in and out of the cloud deck, and in, and the view went from gray-white gradually to gray-dark.

“Could be anything down there,” he reported.

Falling more steeply now. Out of the clouds, but it was still dark below. Land, sea, swamp? It didn’t matter. They were committed. The Soyuz had no fuel, no power, no way to maneuver. They’d stayed up as long as they could, until they were down to their last few pounds of oxygen, the last of their rations; until Hammerlab, with its low electrical power because of the sandblasted solar cells, was almost intolerably hot; until they couldn’t stay in orbit any longer, and had to return to a blasted Earth.

It had seemed appropriate to make mankind’s last space flight last as long as possible. Maybe they’d done some good. They’d been able to pinpoint the strikes and broadcast their locations. They’d seen the rockets rise and fall and the atomic blasts, and that was all over now. The Sino-Russian war went on and on and might last forever, but it wasn’t fought with atomic weapons any longer. They’d seen it all and broadcast what they saw, and somebody heard them. There’d been an acknowledgment from Pretoria, and another from New Zealand, and almost five minutes of conversation with NORAD and Colorado Springs. Not a lot to show for four weeks in orbit past Hammerfall, but they’d have stayed if there’d been nothing. The last of the space travelers.

“Parachute opening,” Pieter said from behind him. Innocuous words, but something in the tone made Johnny brace himself. It was just as well.

“Rough ride,” Rick said from behind his other ear. “Maybe because we’re overloaded.”

“No, it’s always like this,” Leonilla said. “Are your Apollos more comfortable?”

“I never came down in one,” Rick answered. “It must be easier on the nerves. We wear pressure suits.”

“Here there is no room,” Pieter said. “I have told you, we made the design different after that trouble that killed three kosmonauts. We have had no leaks, da?”

“Da.”

The view was clearing, and coming up fast. “I think we are too far south,” Pieter said. “The winds were not predictable.”

“So long as we get down,” Johnny Baker said. He looked down at the solid sheet of water below. “Can we all swim?”

Leonilla chuckled. “Can we all wade? The water doesn’t look deep. In fact…” She stared down at the scene below while the others waited. She was in the chair beside Johnny; Pieter and Rick were in the cramped space behind them. “In fact, we are moving inland. East. I see three — no, four people running from a house.”

“Two hundred meters,” Johnny Baker said. “Get set. We’re coming in. One hundred… fifty… twenty-five…”

Splot! The overburdened Soyuz landed hard. That felt like land. Johnny sighed and let muscles go limp one by one. No more vibration, scream of air, fear of explosive decompression or death by drowning. They were down.

They were all soaked in sweat. It had been a hot ride. “Everybody okay?” Johnny asked.

“Rojj.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Let’s get the hell out,” Rick said.

Johnny didn’t see the hurry; but Rick and Pieter must be hellishly cramped back there. Rick had suggested the arrangement himself, but that wouldn’t make it more comfortable. Johnny fumbled with the unfamiliar locks. They wouldn’t work until he cursed them; then the latch popped open.

“Oops.”

“What is it?” Rick asked. Leonilla craned to look past him.

“Curtain time,” said Johnny. He stood in the hatch and smiled brilliantly into a crowd that bristled with shotguns and rifles. More than a dozen men faced him, and no women. He wasn’t counting, but he saw half a dozen shotguns and a lot of rifles and revolvers, and Jesus! — two Army submachine guns.

He raised his hands. It wasn’t easy to keep them high and still scramble out of the capsule. What were they all so damned nervous about? He moved, rotated, so they could see the U.S. flag on his shoulder. “Don’t shoot, I’m a hero.”

They were not a prepossessing lot. They were half-drowned rats in farm clothes much the worse for total disaster, and their faces were as grim as their guns. There were a couple of bloody bandages in evidence, too. Johnny had a sudden wild impulse to speak in pidgin talk: Me-fella big astronaut, come from same country belong you-fella. He controlled it.

One spoke from the semicircle. He was white-haired and stout — though not as stout as his coveralls; they had all shrunk within their clothes. But his arms were as thick as a wrestler’s. The lightweight machine gun looked fragile in his big hands. “Tell us, Hero, how you come to be in a commie airplane.”

“Spaceship. We’re from Hammerlab. You know about Hammerlab?” (Head belong you-fella him savvy big rocket go up up up in sky long-time not come down?) “Hammerlab was the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission in space. We went up to study the comet.”

“We know.”

“Okay, the Apollo got a hole poked through it. We think it got hit by a snowflake moving at God’s own speed. We had to beg a ride home with the Soviets. In their spaceship. I’m—”

“Johnny Baker! I know him, that’s Johnny Baker.” The voice belonged to a man: thin, limp black hair, slender fingers wrapped around an enormous shotgun. “Hey!”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Johnny, and he was. “Would it hurt if I put my hands down?”

“Go ahead,” said the white-haired spokesman. He was obviously the man in charge, partly by tradition, partly because of bull strength. The submachine gun didn’t hurt his leadership credentials. It hadn’t moved, aimed not quite at Johnny. “Who else is in there?”

“The other astronauts. Two Soviets and another American. It’s crowded in there. They’d like to come out, if… well, if you people can stay calm about it.”

“Nobody excited here,” the spokesman said. “Bring out your friends. I got some questions for them. Like why did the commies come down here?”

“Where could we go? Only one spaceship for the four of us. Leonilla?”

She stepped out, smiling, her hands slightly raised. Johnny announced, “Leonilla Malik. The first woman in space.” It wasn’t strictly true, but it sounded good.

The hard stares softened. The white-haired man lowered his weapon. “I’m Deke Wilson,” he said. “Come on out, miss. Or is it comrade?”

“Whatever you choose,” she said. She scrambled down from the open hatchway and stood blinking at the reflected light off the sheet of water two hundred yards to the west. “My first visit to America. Or outside the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t let me out before.”

“Others coming,” Johnny said. “Pieter…”

Brigadier General Jakov was not smiling. His hands were high and his back was straight, the hammer-and-sickle and CCCP prominent on his shoulder. The farmers were looking wary again. “General Pieter Jakov,” Johnny announced, making the pronunciation very Russian in the hope that nobody would get smart-mouthed about the name. “There’s one more. Rick…”

A couple of the farmers were giving their friends knowing looks.

Rick emerged, also smiling, making certain that the U.S. flag showed.

“Colonel Rick Delanty, U.S. Air Force,” Johnny said.

The farmers were relaxing. A little.

“First black man in space,” Rick said. “And the last, for about a thousand years.” He paused. “We’re all the last.”

“For awhile. Maybe not that long,” Deke Wilson said. He slipped the submachine gun back on its shoulder strap so that it pointed to the sky There was a subtle change in the way the others held their weapons. Now they were a group of farmers who happened to be carrying guns.

One of the men flashed a mischievous grin. “They made you ride in back?”

“Well, it was the only bus out there,” Rick said.

There were laughs. “Derek, take your boys and get back to the roadblock,” Wilson said. He turned back to Baker. “We’re a little nervous here,” he said. “Some Army mutineers running around the area. Killed an Armenian chap down the road and ate him. Ate him. One of the kids got to us, we had some warning. Ambushed the sons of… we ambushed them. But there’s still a lot of them left. And others, city people, people with rabies…”

“It is that bad?” Leonilla said. “That bad so quickly?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come down,” Rick said.

“There are vital records in the spacecraft.” Pieter Jakov laid a hand possessively on the Soyuz. “They must be preserved. Is there anyplace they can be studied? Any scientists or universities near here?”

The farmers laughed. “Universities? General Baker, look around you. Take a good look,” Deke Wilson said.

John Baker stared at the desolation surrounding him. To the east were rain-drenched hills, some green, most barren. All the low areas were filled with water. The highway that ran north and east looked more like a series of concrete islands than a road.

To the west was a vast inland sea, lapped with waves a foot high, dotted with small brown hills that had become islands. Treetops rose from the water in regular arrays where an orchard was not quite submerged. A few boats moved across this sea. The water was muddy, dark and dangerous, and it stank with dead things. Cattle, and…

The remains of a rag doll bobbed gently with the waves. It floated about thirty yards offshore. Not far from it, perhaps somehow attached to it, were wisps of blonde hair and checkered cloth, not recognizable as the remains of anything human. Deke Wilson followed Baker’s look, then turned away toward the farmhouse standing on the hill above the sea. “Nothing we can do,” he said. His voice was bitter. “We could spend all our time burying them. All of it. And we’d still not get it done.”

It was then that the full horror of Hammerfall struck Johnny Baker. “It doesn’t go clean,” he said.

Wilson frowned a question.

“It isn’t just Bang! and it’s over, civilization’s fallen and we have to rebuild it. There’s the aftermath, and that’s worse than the comet—”

“Damn right,” Wilson said. “You’re goddam lucky, Baker. You missed the worst of it.”

“There is no central government?” Pieter Jakov asked.

“You’re looking at it,” Wilson said. “Bill Appleby there’s a deputy sheriff, but it’s nothing special. We haven’t heard from Sacramento since Hammerfall.”

“But surely someone is organizing, is trying,” Leonilla said.

“Yeah. There’s the Senator’s people,” Wilson said.

“Senator?” John Baker kept his face from showing emotion. He turned away from the terrible inland sea, toward the hills to the east.

“Senator Arthur Jellison,” Deke Wilson said.

“You sound like you don’t like him much,” Rick Delanty said.

“Not exactly. Can’t blame him, but I don’t have to like him.”

“What’s he done?” Baker asked.

“He’s organized,” Wilson said. “That valley of his” — Wilson pointed north and east, toward the foothills of the High Sierra — “is ringed with hills. They’ve got patrols, border guards, and they don’t let anybody in without their say-so. You want help, they’ll send it, but the price is damned high. Feed their troops, and send back more food, oil, ammunition, fertilizer, all the things you can’t get now.”

“If you have oil, I’d think you’d be in good shape,” Rick Delanty said.

Wilson waved expansively. “How do we hold onto this place? No borders. No rock piles to make into fortresses. No time to build. No way to keep refugees from coming in and looting what we haven’t got to yet. You want to lock that thing up? I’d rather not have this many people standing around. There’s work to do. Always work to do.”

“Yes. The records should be safe.” Pieter climbed onto the Soyuz and closed the hatch.

“No electricity,” Johnny Baker said. “What about nuclear plants? The one near Sacramento?”

Wilson shrugged. “Sacto used to be about twenty-five feet above sea level. Things got shifted in the quakes. That plant could be underwater. Maybe not. I just don’t know. There’s better than two hundred and fifty miles of swamp and lake between here and there, and most of the valley’s under deep water. Got that locked up? Let’s go.”

They walked up the hill toward the farmhouse. When they got closer, Baker saw the sandbags and foxholes dug in around the buildings. Women and children worked to add to the fortifications.

Wilson looked thoughtful. “General, you ought to be doing something better than digging foxholes, but I don’t know what it would be.”

Johnny Baker didn’t say anything. He was overwhelmed by what he’d seen and learned. There was no civilization here at all, only desperate farmers trying to hold a few acres of ground.

“We can work,” Rick Delanty said.

“You’ll have to,” Wilson said. “Look, in a few weeks we’ll hear from the Senator. I’ll give word that you’re here. Maybe he’ll want you. Maybe he’ll want you bad enough to think he owes us for sending you. I could use him owing us.”

Fourth Week: The Prophet

There had been a crazy world. It was vivid in Alim Nassor’s memory. Once the honkies had poured bread into the ghettos, bribes to stop riots, and Alim had taken his share. Not just money; there was power, and Alim was known in City Hall, was headed for something bigger.

Then a black Tom was Mayor, and the money stopped, the power vanished. Alim couldn’t stand that. Without money and the symbols you could buy with it, you were nothing, less than the pimps and the pushers and the other garbage that made their living out of the ghettos. He’d lost his power and had to have it back, but then he was caught ripping off a store, and the only way to get off was to pay a bondsman and a lawyer, both honkies. They got him out on bail, and then to pay them he had to rip off another store. Crazy!

Then hundreds of the richest honkies had run for the hills. Doom was coming from the sky! Alim and his brothers had been set to make themselves rich forever. They’d been rich, they’d had truckloads of what the fences paid money for, and then…

Crazy, crazy. Alim Nassor remembered, but it was like a dope dream, the time before the Hammer. He’d done his best to protect the brothers who would listen to him. Four of the six burglary teams had made it through the rain and the quakes and the refugees, all those people! But they’d made it to the cabin near Grapevine. The engine in one of the trucks had a death rattle. They’d stripped it and siphoned off the gas and ditched it. They’d dumped all that electrical stuff, too: TVs, hi-fi’s, radios, the small computer. But they’d kept the telescope and binoculars.

And they’d been all right for awhile. There was a ranch not far from the cabin, and there’d been cattle and some other food, enough to last two dozen brothers a long time. They hadn’t even had to fight for it. The rancher was dead under his collapsed roof, leg broken, and he’d starved or bled to death. But then a lot of honkies with guns came and took it away, and eighteen brothers in three trucks had to take off into a howling rain.

Then things really went to hell. Nothing to eat, no place to go. Nobody wanted blacks. What were they supposed to do, starve?

Alim Nassor sat cross-legged in the rain, half dozing, remembering. There had been a crazy world, with laws drawn up by gibbering idiots, and unbelievable luxuries: hot coffee, steak dinners, dry towels. Alim wore a coat that fit him perfectly: a woman’s mink coat, as wet as any sponge. None of the brothers had anything to say about that. Once again, Alim Nassor had power.

There were feet in his field of view: stolen boots burst at the seams, the soles worn thin by walking. Alim looked up.

Swan was a lightweight who carried all manner of sharp things on his person. He’d looked lean as a dancer, cool and dangerous, when Alim went to him with the burglary proposition. Now he looked half starved and diffident. He said, “Jackie been messing with Cassie again. Cassie don’t like it. I think she told Chick.”

“Shit.” Alim stood up.

“We should kill that Chick,” Swan said.

“Now you listen good.” Alim was dismayed at the lack of force in his voice. He was tired, tired. He leaned close to Swan and spoke low, letting the threat show. “We need Chick. I’d kill Jackie before I killed Chick. And I’d kill you.”

Swan backed up. “Okay, Alim.”

Alim savored that. Swan hadn’t gone for a blade. He’d backed off. Alim still had power. “Chick’s the biggest, strongest brother we got, but that isn’t the reason,” Alim said. “Chick’s a farmer. A farmer, you got that? You want to do this the rest of your life? Man, we were on foot for ten days, did you like that? There’s gotta be a place for us somewhere, but it don’t matter if we can’t farm—”

“Let somebody else do the fucking work,” Swan said.

“And how do you know if they do it right?” Alim demanded. “We…” He was on the verge of letting desperation show. “Where’s Chick?”

“By the fire. And Jackie isn’t.”

“Cassie?”

“With Chick.”

“Good.” Alim walked down toward the fire. It felt good, to know he could turn his back on Swan and nothing was going to happen. Swan needed him. They all needed him. None of the rest could have got them this far, and they all knew it.

The first week after Hammerfall it rained all the time. Then it dwindled off to a drizzle, and that went on and on until nobody could stand it and still it went on. Now, four weeks after the Hammer of God, it drizzled more often than not, and it always rained, hard, at least once every day.

Today it had rained three times, and the drizzle kept on. The rain was hard on everybody. It rasped nerves. It rotted feet in their boots. Everything was hopelessly wet, and people could be killed for a dry place. The drizzle stopped, almost, at midnight. Now everyone was huddled around the fire under a sheet-plastic lean-to. Tomorrow Alim might regret letting them use gas for a fire, but shit, they’d probably run out of road before the truck they’d ripped off in Oil City ran out of gas. Most roads ended at a low spot, underwater, and you had to backtrack for miles to find a way around a stretch only a few dozen yards across. Crazy.

Where the roads did get across low spots there was often a roadblock, farmers with guns.

And they needed a fire. The gasoline had dried out enough wood to make it burn, but it smoked horribly; twenty brothers and five sisters were all crouched in a crescent, upwind they hoped, under a billowing plastic sheet, while the smoke curled around and sometimes sought them out. Alim heard laughter and was glad.

It was bad to have women in a gang like this. Worse to have no women. Alim wondered if he’d made a mistake, but it was too late now. Shit. Alim Nassor’s mistakes could kill them all, and that, if you liked, was power.

They’d come down into the valley with eighteen brothers, no women. The people they’d met had been mostly white, mostly starving, mostly unable to fight. Alim’s band had looted for food and dry places, and killed where they had to. When they met blacks, they recruited. There were damn few blacks this far north, and most were farmers, and some didn’t want to join. That was good for Alim — fewer mouths to feed — and bad for them. Blacks would not be popular where Alim’s band had passed. And as always they moved on. They had found no place they could hold and defend. There were never enough brothers, and always behind them were farmers with guns, the remnants of police forces, survivors with nothing left to live for except killing Alim Nassor’s people…

And now there were five women and twenty men. Four men had died fighting over women. Three had been the husbands; one of the widows had killed herself that same day. Alim was grateful. It had cooled things for awhile.

But not for long. Mabe’s husband had been knifed in his sleep, and now Mabe was sleeping around, but in a strange fashion. Where she went, there were fights. Maybe she was taking revenge. But what could Alim do about it? If he killed her it would have to look like an accident. You can’t kill the only pussy the brothers were getting. Maybe at the right time? If there was another big fight and everybody knew she caused it?

Chick and Cassie were a different problem. They were farmers. Their farm was part of an ocean now, the ocean that had been the San Joaquin Valley. They talked like redneck honkies; they didn’t understand the speech of the city blood. Cassie was willowy, dignified, strong and lovely. Chick was a burly giant who could lift the back end of a car, or pick up a brother like Swan by one ankle and throw him pinwheeling a dozen feet through the air, and he’d done that.

They’d lost two kids under the water.

If the kids had been saved… Alim shook his head. Kids were the last thing this gang needed now! But in another sense… If Cassie had come on as a mother with two kids, maybe the brothers would think more about protecting her, less about getting into her.

They looked up as Alim strode into their midst, and Alim saw smiles. Yeah, the fire had been a good idea. Chick and Cassie were sitting with their arms around one another, staring broodingly into the fire. Alim squatted down before them and said, “Do we want to talk about somethin’?”

Chick shook his big head. Cassie didn’t move.

“You sure?”

Chick said, “Keep your thieves away from my woman.”

“I’m tryin’. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way things are. Anyone special?”

“Jackie. You know that son of a bitch pulled a knife on her?”

“He just showed it to me,” Cassie said, “but it scared me.” “You’re not scared of guns,” Alim said. She had a tremendous revolver, and half a dozen kinds of hand loads, from birdshot to a slug that would stop a bear. Alim had never dreamed a revolver could do so many things at once. “Why knives?”

She just shook her head, and Chick glared.

Alim stood up. “I’ll try to fix it. Where is he?”

“Hiding out.”

Alim nodded and went.

Now, should he just hang around, or try to track Jackie? Hang around. He moved among the brothers and sisters, making himself visible in the firelight. Tomorrow they’d remember.

But time wore on, and the brothers and sisters spilled into the truck in twos and threes. The drizzle was winning out over the fire, and Jackie still hadn’t come in. Alim had already decided where he must be.

To one side was the shoreline they’d been following for a week. Alim had wondered if they ought to strike off into the hills… but for what? The world the honkies built was dead, and somehow they would have to start over. A patch of farm, and a few like Chick and Cassie to show them how to work it, that was what they needed. The farmland was all there, under the water. If the water ever withdrew… But the drizzle went on and on, the fire was almost out, and the freshwater ocean was still there, too dark to see, but still there, with its floating garbage and drowned corpses of cattle and men.

And behind was a single hill, the only place from which Jackie could watch the fire. Alim went up the hill. He moved like a blind man, feeling for branches and pushing them aside, shuffling so as not to break an ankle. Presently he said, “Jackie?”

The voice was close. “Yeah, Alim.”

Alim climbed the rest of the way. Jackie was right at the peak, a man of average size in a coat three sizes too big, with his back turned. Alim said, “Why can’t you leave Cassie alone?”

“I tried.”

“You tryin’ to get me killed?”

“I tried, Alim. I even went to that Mabel She’s got nothin’ but a cunt, that woman, but I went to her, thinkin’ I could ease my mind. She turned me down. Set Swan on me. Said it was his turn. She sleeps with three a night, any prick that asks, but she pushes me off. Me!”

“She wants your head fucked up.” Alim began to see the right way to go. “She likes fights. She don’t know who stuck that knife in James, so she’s gonna get us all to kill each other. She fucks with Elliot and tells Rob she was raped. She don’t spread her legs for you so you’ll fight Chick. If I say so, she’s got six men want my blood. Jackie, what do I do?” Get him to think with his brain now, instead of his click.

“What we need,” Jackie said, “is somethin’ to take the brothers’ minds off women.” He said that as if he thought it was funny and sad at the same time.

“That’d take some doin’.”

“Alim, where we going? What happens to us?”

“Hard to say.” He could talk with Jackie, but he couldn’t tell anybody that he didn’t know what they’d do, where they’d go. And Jackie was smart. Jackie had been big in the Panthers once, political like Alim. They’d worked together, Jackie to stir up the ghetto until Alim got what he wanted from City Hall, then quiet things so it looked like Alim’s doing. Get Jackie thinking, but don’t tell him, don’t tell anybody, that Alim Nassor was scared and wet and miserable and all fucked up and just about out of control…

“Black power’s finished,” Jackie was saying. “Not enough blacks, not enough power.”

“Yeah, I’d got that figured out,” Alim said.

“And there ain’t enough of us,” Jackie continued. “Not enough to hold on anywhere. Chick says it’ll take a couple of acres each to live on. A hundred acres could keep us alive, but it won’t. Not enough of us know farming. Need people to do some of the work. Two acres for each one of them, too. Takes a big spread, and we can’t hold a big spread—”

“We can’t hold a little one,” Alim said.

“Right on. So what we have to do is link up, find a honky outfit we can work with. Politics, not blood.” Jackie was staring off into the night, his voice quiet, but Alim could feel it, Jackie had been brooding about this a long time. “Damn system’s been smashed,” Jackie said. “What we always wanted, system’s gone, got rid of the pigs and City Hall and the rich bastards… and it don’t do us any good at all, ’cause there ain’t enough of us.”

“Shit. I brought out all I could,” Alim said. “You sayin’ I didn’t?”

“New, you did all you could,” Jackie said. “Not your fault it wasn’t enough. Alim, step up here and look down.”

Through the drizzle there was a blur of light. It had to be a campfire, somebody’s campfire, glowing beside the shoreline to the north.

“I see better than you,” Jackie said, “so maybe you don’t see that it’s two fires. Two. How many people does it take before it’s worth making two fires?”

“A lot. Think they saw ours?”

“New. Nobody’s come up this way. And they don’t give a shit whether somebody sees them or not. Think about that.”

Power. That group didn’t have to hide. It had power. “A posse? After us? Naw, we haven’t gone north of here, nobody up that way has any reason to be after us.”

“Maybe this’ll take Chick’s mind off killin’ me,” Jackie said.

“How you gonna distract me? You saw those fires and didn’t come tell me.”

“I had to keep watch. And nobody’s come up here. I watched.”

He’d been scared of Chick. “All right You stay here. You watch. I’ll send Gay back with the binoculars.”

In gray morning light Jackie came down the south side of the hill. Alim already had his people up and their gear stowed, and the brothers stood around waiting with guns uncomfortable in their hands.

Jackie went first to Chick and Cassie. Alim didn’t hear what they said, but Chick had a shotgun in his hand, and he didn’t use it. Then Jackie turned aside and came to report.

“They’re up. And they’re organized. Fifty, sixty, maybe more. Maybe a lot more, they don’t all get to one place at once. There’s women, and a honky that’s half rabbit and he’s wearing what’s left of a business suit and a tie. The rest is Army.”

Jackie waited for that to sink in.

“Army? Aw, shit,” Alim Nassor said.

“Funny thing about them mothers,” Jackie said. “They got Army uniforms and little mean-looking rifles, but they don’t act Army. And there’s others in civvies.”

Alim frowned. Jackie went on: “They got more than the rifles, Alim. They got machine guns, and things like stovepipes—”

“Bazookas,” Alim said.

“Yeah. And a thing about as big as a cannon except two men carry it. They can blow a house apart with those things, I think. I saw ’em on TV once. And I think they’re headin’ north.”

Alim digested that. It meant this group had to have come from the east, since they’d never seen them before. They certainly hadn’t come from the west, out of the lake that covered the San Joaquin.

“Maybe we better follow them,” Swan said. He’d been listening. “They sound like tough mothers.”

“And everything’s picked clean before we get to it,” Alim said. He didn’t want to say much. He didn’t know what to do; it would be better to hear what the others thought before he said anything at all. “I best go up there and have a look.”

He left Swan in charge, with instructions on where to run if the Army outfit moved toward them, and let Jackie lead him up the hill. Shit, he thought he’d had troubles before! Just what he always wanted, to go up against Army guns with a dozen Saturday-night specials and some shotguns. “Now we know,” he said. Jackie looked at him. “Why everybody been hidin’,” Alim said.

No food anywhere. Two days ago they’d taken a raft out to a half-sunken supermarket, and it was already looted. All they could find was weird stuff like canned salmon and anchovies, and not much of that. That Army outfit must have picked it clean.

It was getting lighter when he reached the top of the hill. Jackie motioned and Alim went to his belly and crawled forward through the bushes until he found Gay. Alim’s fur coat was covered with mud from crawling, but those Army guys had to have binoculars too, and they had to be keeping watch or they wouldn’t have lived this long.

The stranger camp was more than a mile away, right down by the shore. There were foxholes and low fortifications around it. Organized. It looked organized. And there were a lot of people, and they sat around fires they didn’t bother to hide, and they had food. Alim counted seven women.

“The women do most of the work,” Gay said. “Them and the rabbit stud in the blue suit. And a lot of them are white, but I counted ten blood, and one’s the sergeant.”

“The sergeant.” Alim digested this, too. “And they do what he tells ’em?”

“They jump when he waves his arms,” Gay said.

“Officers?”

“None I saw. I think the sergeant’s in charge.”

“They done it. Alim, they made it,” Jackie said. “Shit. They really did.”

Alim didn’t say anything. Jackie would explain. After a moment he did. “What we were talking about last night,” Jackie said. His voice was full of excitement. “Not black power, just power. And there’s a lot of ’em, Alim.”

“Not all that many.”

“Maybe they want recruits,” Jackie said.

“You crazy?” Gay snorted. “Join the fuckin’ Army?”

“Shut up.” Alim continued to study the camp through the binoculars. There was orderly activity down there. Garbage carried outside the camp and dumped into holes. Sentries and outposts. Tubs of water over the fire, and everybody washed out their mess kits in hot water. That camp was run like an army, but there was something wrong. It wasn’t all the same, something just wasn’t the way it ought to be.

“Alim, they got what we want,” Jackie said. “Power. Enough guns to do whatever they want. We could join up with them, we could hold anyplace we wanted. Shit, we could do better. That many people, we could take over this whole goddam valley, shit, keep growing, keep recruitin’, we could own the whole fucking state.”

“You been sniffing?” Gay asked.

“Shut up,” Alim said again, and he said it so they knew he meant it. The quick silence was gratifying. Power. And that was the problem: How could Alim Nassor have power if they joined up with that army? “They don’t have no wheels at all?”

“A bike. Big Honda. It went scouting north with two on it. One blood, one honky.”

“In uniform?”

“The honky had on overalls,” Gay said. His tone made it clear he didn’t know what was going on, and didn’t know why Alim wanted to know, either.

“No wheels. We got a truck, and we know where there’s some wheels,” Alim muttered. A farmhouse back down the road. Three trucks, guarded by ten to fifteen men with rifles. Alim had no chance to take it, but this outfit — he shushed the others as the sergeant came into view. Blood all right, a big mother, not all black. Light brown, with a beard. Beard? In the Army? The sergeant wore chevrons, though, and a big pistol on his belt, and he was pointing to people and when he did they got up and did things, brought wood for the fires, washed cooking pots. He wasn’t shouting and he didn’t have to wave his arms and scream. Power. That man had power, and he knew how to use it. Alim studied him closely. Then he looked up and grinned.

“That’s the Hook.”

Gay said, “Huh?” Jackie began to grin.

“It’s the Hook.” Alim treated himself to a whistling sigh of relief. “I know him. We can deal.”

It would take setting up. Alim had to talk to the Hook as an equal, as a commander of men. They had to talk as two men with power. He couldn’t let Hooker know just how bad things were. Alim left Jackie on the hill and went back down to camp. Time to do some shouting and screaming. Time to get those bastards to work.

By noon his camp was organized. It looked good, and it looked like there were more of them than they were. He took Jackie and his brother Harold and went toward the Army camp.

“Shit, I’m scared,” Harold said as they walked toward the shoreline.

“Scared of the Hook?”

“He beat the shit out of me once,” Harold said. “Back in ninth grade.”

“Yeah, and you had it comin’,” Alim said. “Okay, they’ve seen us. Harold, you go in. Leave the rifle here. Go in, hands up, and tell Sergeant Hooker I want to talk to him. And be nice to him, you know? Respectful.”

“You can bet your ass on that,” Harold said. He straightened and walked tall, hands out where they could see they were empty. He tried to whistle.

Alim was aware that there were movements to his right. Hooker had sent men out to flank him. Alim turned and shouted to purely imaginary followers. “Hold it up there, you bastards! This is a peace talk, dig? I’ll skin the first dude that shoots, and you know I’ll do it.” Too much, Alim thought. Like I’m worried they won’t do what I say. But the Army dudes heard me, and it stopped them. And Harold’s in the camp and nobody’s done any shootin’ yet…

And he’s done it, Alim shouted to himself. He’s talking to Hooker, and by God he’s done it. Hook’s comin’ out to meet me. We’re all right, all-fucking-right.

For the first time since Hammerfall, Alim Nassor felt hope and pride.

Two heavy farm trucks ground across the mud flats, taking a tortuous path to the new island in the San Joaquin Sea. They stopped at a supermarket, still half flooded, glass windows scraped of mud by laborious effort. Armed men jumped out and took up positions nearby.

“Let’s go,” Cal White said. He carried Deke Wilson’s submachine gun. White led the way into the drowned building, wading waist-deep in filthy water. The others followed.

Rick Delanty coughed and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell of death was overpowering. He looked for someone to talk to, Pieter or Johnny Baker, but they were at the far end of the column. Although it was their second day at the store, none of the astronauts had got used to the smells.

“If it was up to me, I’d wait another week,” Kevin Murray said. Murray was a short, burly man with long arms. He’d been a feedstore clerk, and was lucky enough to have married a farmer’s sister.

“Wait a week and those Army bastards may be here,” Cal White called from inside. “Hold up a second.” White went on with another man and their only working flashlight, handpumped, and Deke’s submachine gun.

The gun seemed an irrelevant obscenity to Rick. There was too much death all around them. He wasn’t going to say that. Last night Deke had taken in a refugee, a man from southwards with information to trade for a meal: a gang of blacks had been terrorizing the south valley, and now they were linked up with the Army cannibals. It might not be long before they came to Deke Wilson’s turf again.

Poor bastards, Rick thought. He could sympathize: blacks in this shattered world, no status, no place to go, wanted nowhere. Of course they’d join the cannibals. And of course the local survivors were looking strangely at Rick Delanty again…

“Clear. Let’s get at it,” White called from inside. They waded in, a dozen men, three astronauts and nine survivors. A driver brought one of the trucks around so that the headlights shone into the wrecked store. Rick wished they hadn’t. Bodies bobbed in the filthy water. He choked hard and brought the cloth to his face, White had sprinkled a dozen drops of gasoline on it. The sweet sickening smell of gasoline was better than…

Kevin Murray went to a shelf of cans. He lifted a can of corn. It was eaten through with rust. “Gone,” he said. “Damn.”

“Sure wish we had a flashlight,” another farmer said.

A flashlight would help, Rick knew, but some things are better done in gloomy darkness. He pushed rotten remains away from a shelf. Glass jars. Pickles. He called to the others, and they began carrying the pickles out.

“What’s this stuff, Rick?” Kevin Murray asked. He brought another jar.

“Mushrooms.”

Murray shrugged. “Better’n nothing. Thanks. Sure wish I had my glasses back. You ever wonder why I don’t pack a gun? Can’t see as far as the sights.”

Rick tried to concentrate on glasses, but he didn’t know anything about how you might grind lenses. He moved through the aisles, carrying things the others had discovered, searching for more, pushing aside the corpses until even that became routine, but you had to talk about something else… “Cans don’t last long, do they?” Rick said. He stared at rotten canned stew.

“Sardine cans last fine. God knows why. I think somebody’s already been here, there ain’t so much as the last store. We got most of what was here yesterday, anyway.” He looked thoughtfully at old corpses bobbing about him. “Maybe they ate it all. Trapped here…”

Rick didn’t answer. His toes had brushed glass.

They were all working in open-toed sandals taken from the shoe store up the road. They couldn’t work barefoot for fear of broken glass, and why ruin good boots? Now his toes had brushed a cool, smooth curve of glass bottle.

Rick held his breath and submerged. Near floor level he found rows of bottles, lots of them, different shapes. Fiftyfifty it was bottled water, barely worth room aboard the truck; but he picked one up and surfaced.

“Apple juice, by God! Hey, gang, we need hands here!”

They waded down the aisles, Pieter and Johnny and the farmers, all dog-tired and dirty and wet, moving like zombies. Some had strength to smile. Rick and Kevin Murray dipped for the bottles and handed them up, because they were the ones who didn’t carry guns.

White, the man in charge, turned slowly away with two bottles; turned back. “Good, Rick. You did good,” he said, and smiled, and turned slowly away and waded toward the doorway. Rick followed.

Someone yelled.

Rick set his bottles on an empty shelf to give himself speed. That had to be Sohl on sentry duty. But Rick didn’t have a gun!

Sohl yelled again. “No danger; I repeat, no danger, but you guys gotta see this!”

Go back for the bottles? Hell with it. Rick pushed past something he wouldn’t look at (but the floating mass had the feel, the weight of a small dead man or a large dead woman) and waded out into the light.

The parking lot was almost half full of cars, forty or fifty cars abandoned when the rains came. The hot rain must have fallen so fast that car motors were drowned before the customers in the shopping center could decide to move. So the cars had stayed, and many of the customers. The water washed around and in and out of the cars.

Sohl was still at his post on the roof of the supermarket. It would have done him no good to come closer; he was farsighted, and his glasses had been smashed, like Murray’s. He pointed down at what was washing against the side of a Volkswagen bus and called, “Will someone tell me what that is? It ain’t no cow!”

They formed a semicircle around it, their feet braced against the water’s gentle westward current, this same flow that held the strange body against the bus.

It was smaller than a man. It was all the colors of decay; the big, drastically bent legs were almost falling off. What was it? It had arms. For a mad moment Rick pictured Hammerfall as the first step in an interstellar invasion, or as part of a program for tourists from other worlds. Those tiny arms the long mouth gaping in death, the Chianti-bottle torso…

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a kangaroo.”

“Well, I never saw a kangaroo like that,” White said with fine contempt.

“It’s a kangaroo.”

“But—”

Rick snapped, “Does your newspaper run pictures of animals two weeks dead? Mine never did. It’s a dead kangaroo, that’s why it looks funny.”

Jacob Vinge had crowded close to the beast. “No pouch,” he said. “Kangaroos have pouches.”

The breeze shifted; the crescent of men opened at one end. “Maybe it’s a male,” Deke Wilson said. “I don’t see balls either. Did kangaroos have… ah, overt genitalia? Oh, this is stupid. Where would it come from? There ain’t any zoo closer than… where?”

Johnny Baker nodded. “Griffith Park Zoo. The quake must have ripped some of the cages apart. No telling how the poor beast got this far north before he drowned or starved. Look close, gentlemen, you’ll never see another…”

Rick stopped listening. He backed out of the arc and looked around him. He wanted to scream.

They had come at dawn yesterday. They had worked all of yesterday and today, and it must be near sunset. None of them had even discussed what must have happened here, yet it was obvious enough. Scores of customers must have been trapped here when the first flash rain drowned their cars. They had waited in the supermarket for the rain to stop, they had waited for rescue; they had waited while the water rose and rose. At the end the electric doors hadn’t worked. Some must have left through the back, to drown in the open.

In the supermarket there were half-empty shelves, and the water floated with corncobs and empty bottles and orange rinds and half-used loaves of bagged bread. They had not died hungry… but they had died, for their corpses floated everywhere in the supermarket and in the flooded parking lot. Scores of bodies. Most were women, but there were men and children, too, bobbing gently among the submerged cars.

“Are you…” Rick whispered. He bowed his head and cleared his throat and shrieked, “Are you all crazy?” They turned, shocked and angry. “If you want to see corpses, look around you! Here,” his hand brushed a stained and rotting flowered dress, “and there,” pointing to a child close enough for Deke to touch, “and there,” to a slack face behind the windshield of the yolks bus itself. “Can you look anywhere without seeing somebody dead? Why are you crowding like jackals around a dead kangaroo?”

“You shut up! Shut up!” Kevin Murray’s fists were balled at his sides, the knuckles white; but he didn’t move, and presently he looked away, and so did the others.

All but Jacob Vinge. His voice held a tremor. “We got used to it. We just got used to it. We had to, goddamm it!”

The current shifted slightly. The kangaroo, if that was what it was, washed around the edge of the bus and began to move away.

The Jeep Wagoneer had once been bright orange with white trim, a luxury station wagon that only incidentally had fourwheel drive and off-road tires. Now it was splashed with brown and green paint in a camouflage pattern. Two men in Army uniform sat in the front seat, rifles held erect between their knees.

Alim Nassor and Sergeant Hooker sat in back. There was little conversation as the car wound through muddy fields and ruined almond groves. When it reached the encampment, sentries saluted, and as the Wagoneer came to a stop the driver and guards jumped out to open the rear doors. Alim nodded thanks to the driver. Hooker did not seem to notice the men. Nassor and Hooker went to a tent at one side of the camp. It was a new tent from a sporting-goods store, green nylon stretched over aluminum poles, and it did not leak. A charcoal hibachi inside kept it warm and dry. A kettle bubbled over the charcoal, and a white girl waited inside to pour hot tea as the two men sat on folding chairs. Hooker nodded dismissal when the tea was poured. The girl left, and the guards took up posts outside well out of earshot.

When the girl was gone, Sergeant Hooker grinned broadly. “Pretty good life, Peanut.”

Nassor’s grin faded at the name. “For God’s sake don’t call me that, man!”

Hooker grinned again. “Okay. Nobody to hear us in here.”

“Yeah, but you might forget.” Alim shuddered. He hadn’t been called “Peanut” since eighth grade, when they studied the life of George Washington Carver, and inevitably the name was settled on George Washington Carver Davis until he obliterated it with fists and a razor blade embedded in a cake of soap…

“Not much out there,” Hooker said. He sipped tea, grateful for the warmth.

“No.” Their scouting expedition had told them nothing they hadn’t expected, except that once there was a break in the rain and they saw snow on the tops of the High Sierra. Snow in August! It had frightened Nassor, although Hooker said it had sometimes snowed in the Sierra before That Day.

They sat uncomfortably despite the hot tea and the warmth of the tent, despite the luxury of being dry, because they had too much to talk about, and neither wanted to begin. They both knew they would have to make choices soon enough. Their camp was too close to the ruins that had been Bakersfield. In the ashes and wreckage of the city there were a lot of people who might get it together, more than enough to come out and finish Nassor and Hooker. They hadn’t got their shit together yet. The survivors lived in small groups, distrustful of each other, fighting over the scraps of food left in supermarkets and warehouses — the scraps that Hooker and Nassor had left.

It came down to this: In combination, Alim and Hooker had enough men and ammunition to fight one good battle. If they won it, they’d have enough for another. If they lost, they were finished. And they’d stripped the country around them. They had to move. But where?

“Goddam rain,” Hooker muttered.

Alim sipped tea and nodded. If only the rain would stop. If Bakersfield dried out there’d be no problem. Wait for a good day with strong winds — there were always strong winds — and burn out the whole goddam city. A hundred fires started a block apart would do it. Fire storm. It would sweep across and leave nothing behind. Bakersfield would no longer be a threat.

And the rains were wearing down. There had been an hour of sunshine the day before. Today the sun was almost breaking through and it wasn’t noon yet, and there was only misty rain.

“We got six days,” Hooker said. “Then we start gettin’ hungry. We get hungry enough, we’ll find somethin’ to eat, but…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Alim shuddered. Sergeant Hooker saw Alim’s expression, and his mouth twisted into a curl of evil contempt. “You’ll join in,” Hooker said.

“I know.” He shuddered again at the memory. Of the farmer Hooker had shot, and the smells of the stew, and the sharing out of portions of the man, everyone in the camp taking a bowl and Hooker damned well seeing that they ate it. The ghastly ritual was what held the group together. Alim had to shoot one of the brothers who wouldn’t eat. And Mabel At least it did that. Their ritual feast let him shoot Mabe and get rid of that troublemakin’ cunt. She wouldn’t eat.

“Funny you never did before,” Hooker said.

Nassor said nothing, his expression not changing. The truth was they’d never even thought of eating people. Not one of them. It was a source of secret pride for Alim. His people weren’t cannibals. Only, of course, they were, because that was the only way Hooker would let them join up…

“Lucky you had that beef jerky.” Hooker couldn’t let it alone, not now, not ever. “You never got hungry enough. Lucky.”

“Lucky? Lucky?” Alim’s explosion startled Hooker. “Lucky my ass!” Alim shouted. “There was a ton of the stuff in that van, and we got maybe two pounds because of that motherfucker!” He looked out through the open doorway of the tent, toward a slim black who stood guard near the fire. “That one. That motherfuckin’ Hannibal.”

Hooker frowned. “That why you make him do all the work? He lose you some food?”

Alim was wild with remembered rage and pain. “Food. And liquor. Listen, we could smell it, it just about drove us crazy. You see the burns on Gay? We thought he was gonna die, and all of us got burned trying to-”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

“Yeah, you don’t know.” Alim reached behind him to a footlocker and took out a bottle. Cheap whiskey from a drugstore. Thank God California had everything in drugstores. “We got together,” Alim said. “Me and my people and some others. Back then, back when we didn’t think…” He couldn’t finish that sentence. “Before. All the honkies—”

Sergeant Hooker calmly leaned across the table and slapped Alim’s face. Hard. Alim’s hand went to his holster, but stopped. “Thanks,” he said.

Hooker nodded. “Tell the story.”

“The white people, the rich ones in Bel Air, about half of ’em took off. Left their places. Left ’em empty. We took in trucks, and we went through those houses…” He paused, a delighted smile playing on his lips as he thought of it. “And we were rich. That watch I gave you. And this ring.” He held the cat’s-eye to catch the light. “TVs, hi-fi, Persian rugs, real Persian, the kind the fences pay twenty big ones for. All kinds of fuckin’ shit, Hook. We were rich.”

Hooker nodded. Okay, he’d done worse. It still made him uncomfortable. Hooker had been a soldier. He could have been sent to Bel Air to shoot motherfucking looters. Crazy world.

“And we found a stash,” Alim said. “Coke, hash oil, weed, nothing but the best. I took it away before my dudes could start lighting up right there.”

Hooker drank whiskey. “Get it all?”

“Don’t be so fuckin’ smart. No, I did not get it all. I wasn’t even tryin’, Hook, I just wanted to make the point, if they used on the spot I’d take it off them. Hell, that was then, you know, there were cops on patrol all over—”

“Yeah.”

“So it happened. The goddam Hammer. We got out, fire trails, roads, anything, we got out, headin’ for Grapevine, and the truck starts wheezin’. We were out on one of the trails, tryin’ to stay off the freeways, you know? So we come up on top of a rise and see this van coming behind us. Bright blue van, with four bikes, everybody with shotguns and rifles, like a stagecoach in the movies with the army ridin’ escort—”

“Sure,” Hooker said. He poured more whiskey. In a few minutes they’d have to talk for real, but it was nice to be dry, have a drink, not think about where they’d have to go now.

“We set it up real good,” Alim said. “Got ahead of the van far enough, used a chain saw to drop a tree just as the van comes through a narrow place, and man, you should have seen it! Those bikes stopped and my studs wasn’t more than five feet from ’em. Come out from the trees shootin’. Used a lot of bullets, but shit, with those pistols we had… Anyway, it was perfect. Knocked the bikes over, never touched one of the bikes at all. There’s the van stopped, and the driver’s got his hands on the wheel where we can see, nice and easy, and the van’s not even touched, Hook, not even a scratch on that pretty blue paint.

“And did I get all that coke we found in Bel Air? No I did not. That motherfuckin’ Hannibal was sniffing all along, and it was good stuff, you know, real, not the shit he used to get, but he sniffs two, three lines at a time. And those dudes are just openin’ up that van, comin’ out nice and easy, and Hannibal decides he’s the last of the Mau Mau! He comes whooping up to the van with a Molotov cocktail! Shit, he threw that gasoline bomb right in the van, right inside.”

“Aw, shit.” Hooker shook his head, thinking about it. “Good stuff in the van?”

“Good? Good? Hook, you won’t believe what was in that fuckin’ van! That motherfucker went up like… Iike…”

“Gasoline.”

“Yeah, a lot like that.” Alim tried to laugh, but he couldn’t. “The guys inside the van caught on fire and come out screamin’, and a couple of the bastards have guns. I got to give ’em credit, clothes all burnin’ up they’re still shootin’ at us, and we shoot back, and by the time that was over the whole van’s on fire, can’t get near it.

“Bottles start exploding in the truck. Oh, man, Hook, the smells were enough to drive you out of your gourd! Here we’re starvin’, nothin’ to eat, and out comes cookin’ meat smells. And more. Scotch, brandy, fruity smells like those lick-kewers that nobody ever has the bread for, chocolate, raisins, apples — shit, Hook, that van was just stuffed with food and liquor! Food. Meat, not somebody in the truck, beef—”

Alim stopped suddenly. He looked sideways at Hooker. Hooker didn’t have to say anything.

“Yeah. Anyway, something blew then, and out comes this package of beef jerky, still wrapped up in tinfoil and plastic bags, not burned, no gasoline on it, couple of pounds of beef jerky. Gay runs into the truck and comes out with two bottles, only we had to let him drink one of ’em to kill the pain, and when he really started feelin’ it we’d drunk the other. Shit.

“But a couple of the studs on the bikes were still alive and they told us what they had in that truck. Everything Guns. food, every kind of liquor ever made, European stuff, can you imagine what it must be worth now? Europe can be on the fuckin’ Moon for all we’ll ever see from there again. There was a ton of beef jerky, and fatty stuff that tasted even worse only who cares when you’re starving? And soup, and potatoes, and freeze-dried mountain food — shit, those dudes had waited until the Hammer came and looted all the places where they’d seen people gettin’ ready.”

“Smarter than you were,” Hooker said.

Alim shrugged. “Maybe. I didn’t think that fuckin’ comet would hit. Did you?”

“No.” If I had, Hooker thought. If I had, I’d never have been out in that truck, we’d have had a lot more ammo… shit, why did I go off and leave the captain alone back there?

“…and bottles of gasoline,” Alim was saying. “Big help, right? We could smell it, all of it, food burnin~, gasoline exploding, clothes burning, those motherfuckers must have really thought the glaciers were coming, and if they were right,” Nassor screamed, “then that motherfuckin’ Hannibal is goin’ across them bare-ass, because I’ll be wearing his clothes over mine!”

“What happened to the bikes?” Hooker asked. He didn’t bother asking about their riders.

“Got burned up. Fuckin’ truck kept blowin’, more gasoline in there. Spread all over. Shit, Hooker, that fire was so fuckin’ hot that it got the trees burnin’! In the middle of that rain, water comin’ down like a bathtub of warm shit and even the trees get to burning! We saved their shotguns, though.”

“That’s good. Too bad about the other stuff.”

“Yeah.”

They were safe, for a while, and just about everybody, even the slaves, was dry and warm and had almost enough to eat. They didn’t want to think about leaving, or where they’d go, and they’d put off talking about it before, and they put it off now, but they wouldn’t be able to put it off much longer.

“AIim! Sergeant!”

It was Jackie. There were others yelling too. Alim and Hooker ran out of the tent. “What is it?”

“Corporal of the guard, post number four!” someone yelled.

“Let’s go!” Hooker waved troops to their perimeter positions, then went off toward the yelling sentry.

“Be not afraid, my brothers!” someone called from out in the misty rain. “I bring you peace and blessing.”

“Shit fire,” Sergeant Hooker said. He peered out into the mist.

An apparition materialized. A man with long white hair and long white beard, and a raincoat that looked something like a gown or a ghost’s winding sheet. There were other figures in the gloom behind the man.

“Hold it right there or we shoot!” Hooker yelled.

“Peace be with you, brothers,” the man called. He turned back toward those who were following him. “Be not afraid. Stay here, and I will talk with these angels of the Lord.”

“A crazy,” Hooker said. “Lot of crazies!” He’d seen plenty of them before. He cocked the submachine gun. No point in letting the old goon get too close.

But the man walked in steadily, not afraid at all, facing Hooker’s gun and not afraid of it, and certainly there wasn’t any threat in his eyes. “You need not fear me,” the man said.

“What do you want?” Hooker demanded.

“To talk with you. To bring you the message of the Lord God of Hosts.”

“Aw, fuck that shit,” Hooker said. His finger tightened on the trigger, but now the old man was too close. Two of Hooker’s own people were near enough to the line of fire that Hooker didn’t want to risk it. And the man looked harmless enough. Maybe there’d be some fun in this. And what could it hurt to let him come in? “The rest of you stay out there,” Hooker yelled. “Gillings, get a squad and check them out.”

“Right,” Gillings called.

The white-haired man strode to the campfire as if he owned it. He looked into the stewpot and at the others around the fire. “Rejoice,” he said. “Your sins are forgiven.”

“Now just what do you want?” Hooker demanded. “And don’t give me crap about angels and the Lord. Angels.” Hooker snorted.

“But you can be angels,” the man said. “You were saved from the holocaust. The Hammer of God has fallen upon this wicked world, and you have been spared. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Who are you?” Alim Nassor demanded.

“I am the Reverend Henry Armitage,” the man said. “A prophet. I know, I know. At the moment I do not look much like a prophet of God. But I am, just the same.”

Alim thought Armitage looked very much like a prophet, with his beard and white hair, and that long flowing raincoat, and glittering eyes.

“I know who you are, my brothers,” Armitage said. “I know what you have done, and I know it is not easy in your hearts. You have done all manner of sins. You have eaten forbidden foods. But the Lord of Hosts will forgive you, for He has spared you to work His will. You are to be His angels, and to you nothing shall be forbidden!”

“You’re crazy,” Hooker said.

“Am I?” Armitage chuckled. “Am I? Then you can listen for amusement. Surely a madman cannot harm you, and perhaps I will say something funny.”

Alim felt Jackie come up alongside him. “He’s good that one,” Jackie said. “Notice how he’s got the sisters listening? And us, too.”

Alim shrugged. There was a compelling quality about the man’s voice, and the way he kept shifting, from that preachy jive to just talk, that was good. Just when you thought he was nuts, he’d talk like anybody else.

“What is this mission God has for us?” Jackie called.

“The Hammer of God has fallen to destroy an evil world,” Armitage said. “An evil world. God gave us this Earth, and the fruits thereof, and we filled it with corruption. We divided mankind into nations, and within nations we divided men into rich and poor, black and white, and created ghettos for our brothers. ‘And if any man has this world’s goods and sees his brother in want, and shares not with his brother, that man hath no life.’ The Lord gave this world’s goods and those who had them knew Him not. They piled bricks upon bricks, they built their fancy houses and palaces, they covered the Earth with the belch and stink of their factories, until the Earth itself was a stench in the nostrils of God!”

“Amen,” someone shouted.

“And so His Hammer came to punish the wicked,” Armitage said. “It fell, and the wicked died.”

“We’re not dead,” Alim Nassor said.

“And yet you were wicked,” Armitage answered. “But we were all wicked, all of us! The Lord God Jehovah held us in the hollow of His hand. He judged us and found us wanting. And yet we live. Why? Why has He spared us?”

Alim was silent now. He wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. This crazy old bastard! Nuts, truly cracked, but yet—

“He has spared us to do His work,” Armitage said. “To complete His work. I did not understand! In my pride I believed that I knew. In my pride I believed that I saw the Day of Judgment coming in the morning of the Hammer. And so it was, but not as I believed. The scripture says no man knoweth the day and the hour of Judgment! And yet we have been judged. I thought upon this, after the Hammer fell. I had thought to see the angels of the Lord come to this Earth, to see the King himself come in glory. Vain! Vain pride! But now I know the truth. He has spared me, He has spared you, to work His will, to complete His work, and only when that work is done shall He come in glory.

“Join me! Become angels of the Lord and do His work! For the pride of man knoweth no end. Even now, my brothers, even now there are those who would bring back the evils the Lord God has destroyed. There are those who will build those stinking factories again, yea, who will restore Babylon. But it shall not be, for the Lord has His angels, and you shall be among them! Join me.”

Alim poured whiskey into Hooker’s cup. “You believe any of that jive?” he asked. Outside the tent Henry Armitage was still preaching.

“He sure do have a voice,” Hooker said. “Two hours, and he ain’t slowin’ yet.”

“You believe?” Alim asked again.

Hooker shrugged. “Look, if I was a religious man — which I ain’t — I’d say he talkin’ sense. He do know his Bible.”

“Yeah.” Alim sipped whiskey. Angels of the Lord! He was no goddam angel, and he knew it. But the old son of a bitch kept twitching memories. Of storefront churches and prayer meetings, phrases that Alim heard when he was a kid. And it bothered him. Why the hell were they still alive? He leaned out the tent flap. “Jackie,” he called.

“Right.” Jackie came in and took a seat.

Jackie was all right. Jackie hadn’t had any problems with Chick for a long time. He’d found a white girl, and she seemed to like Jackie a lot, and Jackie was pretty sharp now.

“What about that preacher man?” Alim asked.

Jackie waved both hands. “He makin’ more sense than you think.”

“How’s that?” Hooker asked.

“Well, some ways he’s right,” Jackie said. “Cities. Rich people. Way they treated us. He’s not sayin’ anything the Panthers didn’t say. And dammit, that Hammer did end all that shit. We got the revolution, handed right to us, and what are we doin’? We sittin’ around doin’ nothin’, goin’ nowhere.”

“Shee-it, Jackie,” Alim said. “You lettin’ that hon — ” He bit the word off before Sergeant Hooker could react. ” — that white preacher get to you?”

“He is white,” Jackie said. “And I wouldn’t be the onliest one. You remember Jerry Owen?”

Alim frowned. “Yeah.”

“He out there. With the others that come with the preacher man.”

Sergeant Hooker grunted. “You mean that SLA cat?”

“Wasn’t SLA,” Jackie said. “Another outfit.”

“New Brotherhood Liberation Army,” Alim Nassor said.

“Yeah, all right,” Hooker said. “Called hisself a general… Hooker snorted contempt. He didn’t like people who gave themselves military titles they hadn’t earned. He was, by God, Sergeant Hooker, and he’d been a real sergeant in a real army.

“Where the hell he been?” Alim demanded. “FBI, every pig outfit in the country wanted him.”

Jackie shrugged. “Hidin’ out, not far from here, valley up near Porterville. Hid out with a hippie commune.”

“And now he’s with the preacher man?” Hooker demanded. “He believe that stuff?”

Jackie shrugged again. “He say he do. Course, he always was into environmentalism. Maybe he just thinks he’s found a good thing, ’cause the Reverend Henry Armitage has got hisself a big followin’ that do believe. A big followin’. And — he’s a white man, and he preaches that blood don’t matter, and those believers of his, they believe that too. You think about that, Sergeant Hooker. You think about that real good. I don’t know if Henry Armitage is the prophet of God or crazy as a hoot owl, but I tell you this, there ain’t going to be many big outfits left that’ll let us be leaders.”

“And Armitage—”

“Says you are the chief angel of the Lord,” Jackie said. “He say your sins are forgiven, you and all of us, we’re forgiven and we got to do God’s work, with you as Chief Angel.”

Sergeant Hooker stared at them, wondering if they were falling under the spell of that ranting preacher, wondering if the preacher meant what he was saying. Hooker had never been a superstitious man, but he knew Captain Hora used to take the chaplains seriously. So did some of the other officers, ones that Hooker had admired. And… dammit, Hooker thought, dammit, I don’t know where we’re going, and I don’t know what we ought to do, and I do wonder if there’s any reason for anything, if there’s a reason we stayed alive.

He thought of the people they’d killed and eaten, and thought there had to be a purpose to it all. There had to be a reason. Armitage said there was a reason, that it was all right, all the things they’d done to stay alive…

That was attractive. To think there’d been a purpose to it all.

“And he say I’m his chief angel?” Hooker demanded.

“Yeah, Sarge,” Jackie said. “Didn’t you listen to him?”

“Not really.” Hooker stood. “But I’m sure as hell going to listen to him now.”

Sixth Week: The High Justice

Alvin Hardy made a final check. Everything was ready. The library, the great book-lined room where the Senator held court, had been arranged and everything was in its place. Al went to tell the Senator.

Jellison was in the front room. He didn’t look well. There was nothing Al could put his finger on, but the boss looked tired, overworked. Of course he was. Everyone worked too hard. But the Senator had kept long hours in Washington, and he’d never looked this bad.

“All set,” Hardy said.

“Right. Start,” Jellison ordered.

Al went outside. It wasn’t raining. There was bright sunshine. Sometimes there were two hours of sunshine a day. The air was clear, and Hardy could see the snow on the peaks of the High Sierra. Snow in August. It seemed to be down to the six-thousand-foot level yesterday; today it was lower, after last night’s storm. The snow was inexorably creeping toward the Stronghold.

But we’re getting ready for it, Hardy thought. From the porch of the big house he could see a dozen greenhouses, wood frames covered with plastic drop cloths found in a hardware store, each greenhouse covered with a web of nylon cord to keep the thin plastic from billowing in the wind. They wouldn’t last more than one season, Al thought, but it’s one season we’re worried about.

The area around the house was a beehive of activity. Men pushed wheelbarrows of manure which was shoveled into pits in the greenhouses. As it rotted it would give off heat, keeping the greenhouses warm in winter — they hoped. People would sleep in them, too, adding their own body heat to the rotting manure and grass clippings, anything to keep the growing plants warm enough, which seemed silly today, in bright August sunshine — except that already there was a tinge of cold to the air, as breezes came down from the mountains.

And a lot of it was going to be wasted effort. They weren’t used to hurricanes and tornadoes here in the valley, and no matter how hard they tried to place the greenhouses where they’d be sheltered from high winds, yet get enough sunshine, some of them would be blown down. “We’re doing all we can,” Hardy muttered. There was always more to do, and there were always things they hadn’t thought of until too late, but it might be enough. It would be close, but they were going to live.

“That’s the good news,” Hardy said to himself. “Now for the bad.”

A ragged group stood near the porch. Farmers with petitions. Refugees who’d managed to get inside the Stronghold and wanted to plead for permanent status and had managed to talk Al — or Maureen, or Charlotte — into getting them an appointment with the Senator. Another group stood well apart from the petitioners. Armed farmhands, guarding prisoners. Only two prisoners today.

Al Hardy waved them all inside. They took their places in chairs set well away from the Senator’s desk. They left their weapons outside the room, all but Al Hardy and the ranchers Al knew were trustworthy. Al would have liked to search everyone who came to see the Senator, and one day he’d do that. It would cause too much trouble just now. Which meant that two men with rifles, men Al completely trusted, stood in the next room and stared through small holes hidden among the bookshelves, rifles ready. Waste of good manpower, Al thought. And for what? Who cared what the others thought? Anybody in his right mind would know it was important to protect the Senator.

When they were all seated, Al went back to the living room. “Okay,” he said. Then he went quickly to the kitchen.

It was George Christopher himself today. One of the Christopher clan always attended. The others would go in and take the seat reserved for the Christopher representative, and stand when the Senator came into the room, but not George. George went in with the Senator. Not quite as an equal, but not as someone who’d stand up when the Senator came in…

Al Hardy didn’t speak to George. He didn’t have to. The ritual was well established now. George followed Al out into the hall, his bull neck flaming red… well, not really, Al admitted, but it ought to have been. George fell in with the Senator and they walked in together, just after Al. Everyone stood; Al didn’t have to say anything, which pleased him. He liked things to run the way they ought to, precisely, smoothly, without it seeming that Al Hardy had to do anything at all.

Al went to his own desk. The papers were spread there. Across from Al’s desk was an empty seat. It was reserved for the Mayor, but he never came anymore. Got tired of the farce, Al thought. Hardy couldn’t blame the man. At first these trials were held in City Hall, which lent credibility to the pretense that the Mayor and the Chief of Police were important, but now that the Senator had given up wasting time going into town…

“You may begin,” Jellison said.

The first part was easy. Rewards first. Two of Stretch Tallifsen’s kids had devised a new kind of rat trap and caught three dozen of the little marauders, as well as a dozen ground squirrels. There were weekly prizes for the best rat catchers: some of the last candy bars in the world.

Hardy looked at his papers. Then he grimaced. The next case was going to be tougher. “Peter Bonar. Hoarding,” Al said.

Bonar stood. He was about thirty, maybe a little older. Thin blond beard. Bonar’s eyes were dulled. Hunger, probably.

“Hoarding, eh?” Senator Jellison said. “Hoarding what?”

“All kinds of stuff, Senator. Four hundred pounds of chicken feed. Twenty bushels of seed corn. Batteries. Two cases of rifle cartridges. Probably other stuff that I don’t know about.”

Jellison looked grim. “You do it?” he demanded.

Bonar didn’t answer.

“Did he?” Jellison asked Hardy.

“Yes, sir.”

“Any point in a trial?” Jellison asked. He looked directly at Bonar. “Well?”

“Hell, he’s got no call to come out and search my place! He had no warrant!”

Jellison laughed.

“What beats me is how the hell they found out.”

Al Hardy knew that. He had agents everywhere. Hardy spent a lot of time talking to people, and it wasn’t hard. You catch someone and don’t turn him in, send him out looking, and pretty soon you get more information.

“That all you’re worried about?” Jellison demanded. “How we found out?”

“It’s my feed,” Bonar said. “All that stuff is mine. We found it, my wife and I. Found it and carried it in, in my truck, and what the hell right do you have to it? My stuff on my land.”

“Got any chickens?” Jellison asked.

“Yeah.”

“How many?” When Bonar didn’t answer, Jellison looked to the others in the room. “Well?”

“Maybe a few, Senator,” one of those waiting said. She was a forty-year-old woman who looked sixty. “Four or five hens and a rooster.”

“You don’t need any four hundred pounds of feed,” Jellison said reasonably.

“It’s my feed,” Bonar insisted.

“And seed corn. Here we’ll have people starve so we can keep enough seed corn to get in a crop next year, and you’ve got twenty bushels hidden away. That’s murder, Bonar. Murder.”

“Hey—”

“You know the rules. You make a find, you report it. Hell, we won’t take it all. We don’t discourage enterprise. But you sure as hell report it so we can plan.”

“And you grab half. Or more.”

“Sure. Hell, there’s no point in talk,” Jellison said. “Anybody want to speak for him?” There was silence. “Al?”

Hardy shrugged. “He’s got a wife and two kids, ages eleven and thirteen.”

“That complicates things,” Jellison said’ “Anybody want to speak up for them?… No?” There was an edge to his voice now.

“Hey, you can’t… what the hell, Betty don’t figure in this!”

“She knew it was there,” Jellison said.

“Well, the kids—”

“Yeah. The kids.”

“Second offense, Senator,” Hardy said. “Gasoline last time.” “My gasoline on my land—”

“You talk a lot,” Jellison said. “Too damned much. Hoarding. Last time we let you off easy. Goddammit, there’s only one way to convince people I mean what I say! George, you got anything to say?”

“No,” Christopher said.

“The road,” Jellison said. “By noon today. I’ll leave it to Hardy to decide what you can take with you. Peter Bonar, you’re for the road.”

“Jesus, you got no right to throw me off my own land!” Bonar shouted. “You leave me alone, we’ll leave you alone! We don’t need anything from you—”

“The hell you say,” George Christopher shouted. “You already took our help! Food, greenhouses, we even gave you gasoline while you were holding out on us. The gasoline we gave you ran the truck that got that stuff for you!”

“I think Brother Varley will look after the kids,” one of the women said. “Mrs. Bonar too, if she can stay.”

“She’ll come with me!” Bonar shouted. “And the kids tool You got no right to take my kids away from me!”

Jellison sighed. Bonar was trying for sympathy, gambling that they wouldn’t send his wife and kids out on the road, and since they couldn’t take the kids away from Bonar… Could he? Jellison wondered. And leave a festering sore inside the Stronghold? The kids would hate everyone here. And besides, family responsibility was important. “As you will,” Jellison said. “Let them go with him, Al.”

“Jesus, have mercy,” Bonar yelled. “Please! For God’s sake—”

Jellison sounded very tired when he said, “See to it, Al. Please. And we’ll discuss who can be settled on that farm.”

“Yes, sir.” The boss hates this, Hardy thought. But what can he do? We can’t jail people. We can’t even feed what we have.

“You rotten bastard!” Peter Bonar shouted. “You fat son of a bitch, I’ll see you in hell!”

“Take him out,” Al Hardy ordered. Two of the armed ranch-hands pushed Bonar out. The farmer was still cursing when he left. Hardy thought he heard blows when they got to the hall. He wasn’t sure, but the curses stopped abruptly. “I’ll see to the sentence, sir,” Hardy said.

“Thank you. Next?”

“Mrs. Darden. Her son arrived. From Los Angeles. Wants to stay.”

Senator Jellison saw the tight line that formed where George Christopher’s mouth had been. The Senator sat straight in his high-backed chair and he looked alert. Inside he felt tired, and defeated, but he couldn’t give up. Not until next fall, he thought. Next fall I can rest. There’ll be a good harvest next fall. There has to be. One more year, it’s all I ask. Please, Lord.

At least this next one is simple. Old lady, no one to look after her, relative arrives. Her son is one of us, and George can’t say different. That’s in the rules.

I wonder if we can feed him through the winter?

The Senator looked at the old lady, and he knew that whatever happened to her son, she would not survive until spring, and Arthur Jellison hated her for what she would eat before she died.

Ninth Week: The Organization Man

Harvey Randall had never worked so hard in his life. The field was filled with rocks, and they had to be moved. Some could be picked up and carried by one, or two, or a dozen men. Others had to be split apart with sledges. Then the pieces were carried away to be built into low stone walls.

The crisscross pattern of low walls in New England and Southern Europe had always seemed charming and handsome. Until now Harvey Randall hadn’t realized just how much human misery each of those walls represented. They weren’t built to be pretty, or to mark boundaries, or even to keep cattle and swine out of the fields. They were there because it was too much work to haul those stones completely out of the fields, and the fields had to be cleared.

Most of the pastureland would be plowed for crops. Any crops, anything they had to plant. Barley, onions, wild grains that grew in ditches along the sides of the roads, anything at all. Seeds were scarce — and worse, there was the decision to be made: plant for later, or eat it now?

“Like a goddam prison,” Mark grumbled.

Harvey swung the sledge. It rang against the steel wedge, and the rock split nicely. That felt good, and Harvey almost forgot the rumbling in his stomach. Heavy work, and not enough to eat; how long could they keep it up? The Senator’s people had worked out diet schedules, so many calories for so many hours of heavy work, and all the books said they had figured correctly, but Harvey’s stomach didn’t think so.

“Making little ones out of big ones,” Mark said. “A hell of a job for an associate producer.” He grabbed an end of the piece they’d split off the rock as Harvey lifted the other end. They worked well together, no need for talk. They carried the rock to the wall. Harvey ran a practiced eye along the wall and pointed. The rock fit perfectly into the place he’d selected. Then they went for another.

They stood idle for a few seconds, and Harvey looked across the field where a dozen others were splitting and carrying rocks to the low wall. It could have been a scene from hundreds of years before. “John Adams,” Harvey said.

“Eh?” Mark made encouraging noises. Stories made the work go easier.

“Our second President of the United States.” Harvey forced the wedge into a tiny crack in the rock. “He went to Harvard. His father sold a field they called ‘The Stony Acres’ to get up the tuition. Adams would rather be a lawyer than clear the stones out.”

“Smart man,” Mark said. He held the wedge in place as Harvey lifted the sledge. “Not much left of Harvard now.”

“No.” Harvard was gone, and Braintree, Massachusetts, was gone, and the United States of America was gone, along with most of England. Would kids learn history now? But they have to, Harvey thought. One day we’ll dig out of this and there’ll be a time when it’s important whether we have a king or a president, and we’ll have to do it right this time so we can get off this goddam planet before another Hammer falls. Someday we’ll be able to afford history. Until then we’ll think of England the way they used to think of Atlantis…

“Hey,” Mark said. “Look at that.”

Harvey turned in time to see Alice Cox jump the big stallion over one of the low walls. She moved with the horse as a part of him, and again the impression of a centaur was very strong. It reminded Harvey of the first time he’d come to this ranch, a lifetime ago, a time when he could stand at the top of the big snailhead rock and at night talk about interstellar empires.

That had been a long time ago in another world. But this one wasn’t so bad. They were clearing the fields, and they controlled their boundaries. No one was raped or murdered here, and if there wasn’t as much to eat as Harvey would have liked, there was enough. Breaking rocks and building walls was hard work, but it was honest work. There weren’t endless conferences on unimportant matters. There weren’t deliberate frustrations, traffic jams, newspapers full of crime stories. This new and simpler world had its compensations.

Alice Cox trotted up to them. “Senator wants to see you up at the big house, Mr. Randall.”

“Good.” Harvey gratefully carried the sledge over to the wall and left it for someone else to use. He squinted up at the sun to estimate how much daylight was left, then called to Mark. “You may as well go on back,” he said. “You can put in the rest of the day on the cabin.”

“Right.” Mark waved cheerfully and started up the hill toward the small house where Harvey, the Hamners, Mark and Joanna, and all four Wagoners lived. It was crowded, and they were building on extra rooms, but it was shelter, and there was enough to eat. It was survival.

Harvey went the other way, downhill toward the Senator’s stone ranch house. It had additions built onto it, too. In one of them Jellison kept the Stronghold’s armory: spare rifles, cartridges, two field-artillery pieces (but no ammunition) that had been part of a National Guard training center before it was flooded out, hand-loading equipment to reload shotgun shells and rifle cartridges, loot recovered from a gunsmith’s shop in Porterville. The dies had been underwater and were rusty, but they still worked. Powder and primers had been sealed in tins that hadn’t yet rusted through when they were recovered, although that had been a near thing too.

In another annex the Senator’s son-in-law sat with a telegraph and radio. The telegraph at present ran only to the roadblock on the county road, and there was nothing coming in on the radio, but they had hopes of extending the telegraph lines. Besides, it gave Jack Turner something to do. He wasn’t good for a lot else, and he did know Morse code. He might as well be a telephone orderly, Harvey thought. Turner’s only attempt to supervise a ranch project had been a disaster, with the men finally going to the Senator and demanding Turner’s replacement…

Turner hailed him as he went past. “Hey, Randalll”

“Hello, Jack. What’s new?”

“We’ve got another President. A Hector Shorey of Colorado Springs. He proclaims martial law.”

Jack Turner seemed to think that was funny, and so did Harvey. He said, “Everybody always proclaims martial law.”

“Littman didn’t.”

“Yeah, I liked Emperor Pro Tem Charles Avery Littman. Even if he was getting most of his material out of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus.’ The others were too damn serious.”

“Shorey’s group sounds serious enough. I got some good recordings through the static.”

“Hold the fort, Jack,” Harvey said, and he went on. Four Presidents now, he thought. Littman was just a ham radio operator, and half mad. But Colorado Springs… that was near Denver, a mile above sea level. That could be for real.

The big front room was crowded. This was no ordinary meeting. The Senator sat near the fireplace in the big leather armchair that reminded Harvey of a throne — and was probably meant to. Maureen sat on one side, and Al Hardy on the other, heiress and chief of staff.

Mayor Seitz and the police chief were there; and Steve Cox, Jellison’s ranch foreman, the man now responsible for most of the agriculture in the valley; and half a dozen others who spoke for the valley people. And of course George Christopher, alone in one corner, with only one vote, though it counted for as much as the rest together except for Maureen’s.

Harvey smiled at Maureen. He got a quick impersonal smile and nod, nobody home, and he pulled his eyes away fast.

Bloody hell! She wore two faces, and so did he. Maureen had been up to see him in the hut at the top of the ridge several times when Harvey had night guard duty. She’d met him at other times and places, too, but always very privately. It was always the same. They talked of the future, but never of their future, because she wouldn’t. They made love with care and tenderness, as if they might never meet again; they made love, but never promises. She seemed to draw strength from him, as he knew he did from her; but never in public. It was as if Maureen had an armed, jealous, invisible husband. In public she barely knew him.

But in public she treated George Christopher no differently. She was a bit more friendly, but still cold. He wasn’t her invisible husband… was he? Was she different with him when they were alone? Harvey couldn’t know.

These thoughts ran through his head before an old reflex pushed them down below conscious thought. He didn’t have time for them. Harvey Randall wanted something, and these were the men who could refuse him. It was a familiar situation.

“Come in, Harvey.” Senator Jellison had not lost the warm smile that had won him elections. “We can start now. Thank you all for coming. I thought it might be wise to get a full report on how things are here.”

“Any reason for doing it now?” George Christopher asked.

Jellison’s smile didn’t falter. “Yes, George. Several. We have word from the telegraph that Deke Wilson’s coming in for a visit. Brought some visitors, too.”

“There’s news from Outside?” Mayor Seitz asked.

“Some,” Jellison said. “Al, would you begin, please?”

Hardy took papers from his briefcase and began to read. How many acres cleared of rocks, and how much they’d be able to plant in winter wheat. Livestock inventory. Weapons, and equipment. Most of the people in the room looked bored before Hardy finished. “The upshot is,” Hardy said, “that we’ll make it through the winter. With luck.”

That got their interest.

“It’ll be close,” Hardy warned. “We’ll get damned hungry before spring. But we’ve got a chance. We’ve even got medical supplies — not enough, but some — and Doc Valdemar’s clinic is set up and running.” Hardy paused for a moment. “Now for the bad news. Harvey Randall’s people have been looking over the dams and powerhouses above here. They can’t get them working again. Too much washed out. And out of the lists of stuff the engineering people have asked for, we don’t have a quarter of the supplies. It’ll be a while before we rebuild much of a civilization here.”

“Hell, we’re civilized,” Police Chief Hartman said. “Almost no crime, and we’ll have enough to eat, and we’ve got a doctor and a clinic and most of us have plumbing. What more do we need?”

“Electricity would be nice,” Harvey Randall said.

“Sure, but we can live without it,” Chief Hartman said. “Goddam. We can live till spring.”

And Harvey felt his joy. The journey to the Stronghold had been a terrible time: the end of the world passing in endless agony… and goddam! Listen to us now, talking like it isn’t enough just to be alive! I could have been turned away, sent down the road…

“I think I would express thanks in a more positive way,” Reverend Varley said. “We should be singing hosannas.” The minister’s expression was grim, in contrast to his words. “Of course the cost has been high. Perhaps, Chief, you have said it correctly after all—”

Senator Jellison cleared his throat to get their attention. The room fell silent.

“There’s a bit more news,” Jellison said. “We have a new claimant to the office of President of the United States. Hector Shorey.”

“Who the devil is Hector Shorey?” George Christopher demanded.

“Speaker of the House. Newly selected by the party caucus. I don’t even remember the House taking a formal vote. Still, his claim is the best we’ve heard, and the Colorado Springs government at least talks like it’s still in charge of the country.”

“I could do that myself,” Christopher said.

The Senator laughed. “No, George, you couldn’t. I could.”

“Who cares?” George Christopher was belligerent. “They can’t help us and they can’t jail us. They’d have to fight their way through all the other United States Governments, and even then they can’t get to us. Why do we give a damn what they say?”

Al Hardy said, “I point out that Colorado Springs probably has the largest military detachment surviving in this part of the world. The cadets at the Academy. The NORAD — North American Air Defense — command under Cheyenne Mountain. Ent Air Force Base. And at least a regiment of mountain troops.”

“They still can’t get to us,” Christopher insisted. “Understand, I’ve nothing against getting the United States going again. But I want to know the cost. Will they tell us to pay taxes?”

Jellison nodded. “Good question.” He looked around him. “Whatever happens, it can wait till spring, can’t it? Either we’ll be out of the woods by then, or we’ll be dead. Al says we won’t be dead.”

There were nods and murmurs of agreement.

“Now,” Jellison said. “I asked Harvey to come to this meeting because he has a proposal. Harvey has asked for another expedition Outside, to get more equipment that we’ll need for next spring.” He held up a paper that Harvey recognized as a list he and Brad Wagoner and Tim Hamner had prepared. “Mostly things we won’t need before spring.”

“But perishable, Senator,” Harvey said. “Electrical tools, transistors, components, electric motors… a lot of things that might still be useful even though they’ve been underwater. By spring they won’t be.”

“We lost four good men the last time we went Outside,” George Christopher said. “It’s bad out there.”

“Because we didn’t take enough men,” Harvey answered.

“We need to go in force. A big column won’t be attacked.” He was proud of his control: He didn’t think anyone would guess from his voice how the thought of going out of this valley terrified him. He glanced at Maureen. She knew. She wasn’t looking at him, but she knew.

“And will use a lot of gasoline,” AI Hardy said. “As well as throw work schedules off. And you still might have to fight.”

“Well, we take enough men, it might not be so bad,” George Christopher said. “But I’m not going out with just a couple of trucks anymore. Harvey’s right. If we go, we go with a lot of people. Ten trucks, fifty to a hundred men.”

“I suppose we have to think of these things,” Reverend Varley said. His voice was wistful and sad.

“Yes, sir.” Christopher was determined. “Reverend, I want peace as much as you do, but I don’t know how to get it. Don’t forget Deke’s neighbors. The ones that got eaten.”

Reverend Varley shuddered. “I hadn’t,” he said.

There was a pause, and Harvey jumped in. “Tim’s worked with the phone book and maps,” he said. “We’ve located a scuba shop. It shouldn’t be under more than ten feet of water. We could dive in there and get the scuba gear—”

“What are you going to use for air?” Steve Cox demanded.

“We can build a compressor,” Harvey said. “That’s not hard to design.”

“Might not be hard to design, but without electricity it’s going to be hard to build,” Joe Henderson said. He had owned the filling station in town, and was now helping Ray Christopher set up a blacksmith and mechanic shop.

“Let me name some other things we need,” Harvey said. “Machine tools. Lathes, drill presses, all kinds of tools, and we’ve located most of them — on the map, that is. And we’ll need them, one day.”

Henderson smiled wistfully. “I could sure use some good tools,” he said.

“Generator wire,” Harvey continued. “Bearings. Spare parts for our transport vehicles. Electrical wire.”

“Stop,” Henderson said. “I give up. Let’s go out.”

“Al, could we spare fifty men for a week?” Jellison asked.

Hardy looked unhappy. “Eileen?” he called. She came in from another room. “Get me those manpower trade-offs, please.”

“Right.” She flashed Harvey one of her sunburst smiles before she left. Eileen Hancock Hamner had been wrong: Good administrators were needed even after Hammerfall. Al Hardy often told the Senator that she was the most useful person in the Stronghold. Strong backs, farmers, riflemen, even mechanics and engineers weren’t so hard to find; but someone who could coordinate all that effort was worth her weight in gold.

Or in black pepper. Hardy scowled. He didn’t like this expedition; it was an unnecessary risk. If Randall had his way… Was Randall still chasing the blue van and the men who had murdered his wife? At least he’d stopped talking about it…

“While she’s getting that,” Chief Hartman said, “let me put in a nickel’s worth. We can spare fifty men for a week if nobody comes after us while they’re gone. Fifty men and rifles is a big part of our strength, Senator. I’d like to be sure nobody’s going to attack us before I go along with sending that many out at once.”

“I can go along with that,” Mayor Seitz said. “And maybe we send a patrol out through Trouble Pass before we go. Just to see if anybody’s coming that way.”

“Harry’s due back from a sweep in a day or so,” Senator Jellison said. “And Deke’s coming within the hour. We’ll find out what things are like Outside before we make any final decisions. George, you got anything to say about this?”

Christopher shook his head. “Either way suits me. If things aren’t too bad out there, if there’s nobody just waiting for us to send out a big party so they can jump us, then sure, we can go.” He fell silent and stared at the wall, and they all knew what he was thinking. George Christopher didn’t want to know what went on Outside. No one else did either. It just made things harder, to know of the chaos and death and starvation a few miles away while they were safe in their valley.

Eileen came back with papers. Hardy studied them for awhile. “It all depends on what you find,” he said. “We need more fields cleared. We haven’t got enough land cleared to plant all the winter seed. On the other hand, if you can find more materials to make greenhouses out of, we won’t need so much land planted for the winter. Same for fertilizer and animal feed, if you can get those. Then there’s the gasoline. …”

It was gasoline and man-hours against a return that could only be guessed at. So they guessed, and they talked it around, and presently Senator Jellison said, “Harvey, you’re proposing that we take a risk. Granted it’s a risk with a high payoff, and we don’t lose much, but it’s still a risk — and at the moment we don’t need risks to stay alive.”

“Yes, that’s about the size of it,” Harvey said. “I think it’s worth it, but I can’t guarantee it.” He stopped for a moment and looked around the room. He liked these people. Even George Christopher was an honest man and a good one to have on your side if there was trouble. “Look, if it was left to me I’d stay here forever. You can’t imagine how good it felt to get into this valley, to feel safe after what we saw in Los Angeles. If I had my druthers I’d never leave this valley again. But — we do have to look ahead. Hardy says we’ll get through the winter, and if he says so, we will. But after winter there’s spring, and the winter after that, and more years — years and years — and maybe it’s worth some effort right now to make those future years easier.”

“Sure, provided it don’t cost so much there aren’t any more years,” Mayor Seitz said. He laughed. “You know, I was talking to that lady head doctor. Doc Ruth says it’s a ‘survivor syndrome.’ Everybody who lives through Hammerfall gets changed by it. Some go completely nuts, and life isn’t worth a damn to them, they’ll do anything. But most get like us, so cautious we jump at our shadows. I know I’m that way. I don’t want to take any chances at all. Still, Harvey’s got a point. There is a lot of stuff out there we could use. Maybe we’ll even find Harv’s—”

“Blue van!” cried at least four men, and Hardy winced. Randall might have stopped talking about the blue van, but nobody else had. Black pepper, spices, beef jerky, pemmican, canned soup and canned ham, coffee, liquor and liqueurs and a partridge in a pear tree, everything you could dream of and all measured in ton lots. Machine tools, hah! If Hardy could read the minds of fifty men as they set out on this fool expedition, he knew what he would find: fifty images of a blue van, just behind their eyes.

Presently Senator Jellison ended the meeting. “It’s obvious we can’t decide anything until Deke gets here to tell us what things are like out there. Let’s wait for him.”

“I’ll see if Mrs. Cox has the tea,” Al Hardy said. “Harvey, would you help me a minute, please?”

“Sure.” Harvey went out to the kitchen. Al Hardy was waiting for him.

“Actually,” Hardy said, “Mrs. Cox knows what to do. I wanted a word with you. In the library, please.” He turned and led the way.

Now what? Harvey wondered. It was obvious Hardy didn’t care for the salvage expedition, but wasn’t this something more? When Al Hardy ushered him into the big room and then closed the door, Harvey felt a familiar fear.

Al Hardy liked things neat.

There was an admiral Harvey had interviewed, years ago. Harvey had been struck by the man’s desk. It was absolutely symmetrical: the blotter precisely centered, the identical IN and OUT baskets on either side, inkwell in the middle with a pen on either side… everything but the pencil the admiral was using to gesture. Harvey looked it over; and then he aimed the camera exactly down the middle of the desk, and he put the pencil right in front of him, in line with his tie tack.

And the admiral loved it!

“Sit down, please,” Hardy said. The assistant reached into a drawer of the Senator’s big desk and took out a bottle of bourbon. “Drink?”

“Thanks.” Now Harvey was definitely worried. Al Hardy held almost as much power as the Senator; he executed the Senator’s commands. And Hardy liked things neat. He precisely matched the network executives who would order Randall to cut the man-in-the-street crap and use motivational research; who would have found their jobs much easier if all men had been created not just equal but identical.

Could it be a problem with Mark? And if so, could Harvey save him again? Mark had almost got himself thrown out of the Stronghold: Hardy hadn’t appreciated Mark’s sign proclaiming the Stronghold “Senator Jellison’s Trading Post and Provisional Government”; neither had George Christopher. They hadn’t cared for the wasted paint, either.

Maybe it wasn’t Mark. If Al Hardy decided that Harvey Randall was upsetting his neat patterns… the Stronghold couldn’t survive without Hardy’s mania for organization. The road was always there, and nobody ever forgot it. Harvey shifted nervously in the hard chair.

Al Hardy sat across from him, pointedly not taking the big chair behind the desk. No one but the Senator would ever sit there if Al Hardy had any choice in the matter. He waved toward the big desk with its litter of paper. Maps, with penciled lines showing the current shore of the San Joaquin Sea; manpower assignments; inventories of food and equipment, anything they could locate, and another list of needed items they didn’t have; planting schedules; work details; all the paper work associated with keeping too many people alive in a world suddenly turned hostile. “Think all that’s worth anything?” Al asked.

“It’s worth a lot,” Harvey said. “Organization. That’s all that keeps us alive.”

“Glad you think so.” Hardy raised his glass. “What shall we drink to?”

Harvey waved toward the empty chair behind the desk. “To the duke of Silver Valley.”

Al Hardy nodded. “I’ll drink to that. Skoal.”

“Prosit.”

“He is a duke, you know,” Hardy said. “With the high, middle and low justice.”

That knot of fear in Harvey’s stomach began to grow.

“Tell me, Harvey, if he dies tomorrow, what becomes of us?” Hardy asked.

“Jesus. I don’t even want to think about it.” The question had startled Harvey Randall. “But there’s not much chance of that—”

“There’s every chance,” Hardy said. “I’m telling you a secret, of course. If you let it get out, or let him know I’ve told you, it won’t be pleasant.”

“So why tell me? And what’s wrong with him?”

“Heart,” Al said. “Bethesda people told him to take it easy. He was going to retire after this term, if he lived that long.”

“That bad?”

“Bad enough. He could last two years, or he could die in an hour. More likely a year than an hour, but there’s a chance of either.”

“Jesus… but why tell me?”

Hardy didn’t answer, not directly. “You said it yourself, organization is the key to survival. Without the Senator there’d have been no organization. Can you think of anyone who could govern here if he died tomorrow?”

“No. Not now…”

“How about Colorado?” Hardy asked.

Harvey Randall laughed. “You heard them in there. Colorado can’t keep us alive. But I know who would take over.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Hardy shook his head. “It wouldn’t work. Two reasons. One, I’m not a local. They don’t know me, and they take my orders only because they’re his orders. Okay, in time I could get around that. But there’s a better reason. I’m not the right man.”

“You seem to do all right.”

“No. I wanted his seat in the Senate, and he’d have arranged that for me when he retired. I would have been a good Senator, I think. But not a good President. Harvey, a couple of weeks ago I had to go up to the Bonar place and evict his wife and two children. They cried and screamed and told me I was as much as killing them, and they were right, but I did it. Was that the right thing to do? I don’t know, and yet I do know. I know because he ordered it, and what he orders is right.”

“That’s a strange—”

“Character deficiency,” Hardy said. “I could go into my childhood in the Catholic orphanage, but you don’t want to hear my life story. Take it from me. I do best when I’ve got someone else to lean on, somebody else to be the final authority. The Old Man knows that. There’s not a chance in the world that he’d designate me as his successor.”

“So what will you do, when…”

“I’ll be chief of staff to whomever Senator Jellison designates. If he hasn’t designated anyone, then to whoever I think will be able to carry on his work. This valley is his life work, you know. He’s saved us all. Without him it would be like Outside here.”

Harvey nodded. “I expect you’re right.” And I like it here, he thought. It’s safe, and I want to be safe. “What has all this got to do with me?”

“You’re ruining things,” Hardy said. “You know how.”

Harvey Randall’s teeth clenched.

“If he dies tomorrow…” Hardy said. “If he does, the only person who could take over would be George Christopher. No, before you ask. I will not like being his chief of staff. But I’ll do it, because nobody else could hold this valley. And I’ll see that everyone knows that George is the Senator’s chosen heir. The wedding won’t trail the funeral by more than a day.”

“She wouldn’t marry George Christopher!”

“Yes, she will. If it means the difference between success and ruining everything the Senator has tried to build, she’ll do it.”

“You’re saying that whoever marries Maureen ends up in charge of the Stronghold… ?”

“No,” Hardy said. He shook his head sadly. “Not anybody. You couldn’t, for example. You aren’t local. Nobody would take orders from you. Oh, some would, if you were the Senator’s heir. But not enough. You haven’t been here long enough.” A1 paused for a moment. “It wouldn’t work for me, either.”

Harvey turned to stare at the younger man. “You’re in love with her,” he said musingly.

Hardy shrugged. “I think enough of her that I don’t want to kill her. Which is what I would be doing if I married her. Anything that disorganizes this valley, that splits it into factions, will kill everyone here. We’ll be a pushover for the first group that wants to come in — and, Harvey, there are enemies Outside. Worse ones than you think.”

“You’ve heard something that wasn’t told at the meeting?”

“You’ll find out from Deke when he comes,” Al said. He reached for the bottle and poured more bourbon into both their glasses. “Stay away from her, Harvey. I know she’s lonely, and I know how you feel about her, but stay away from her. All you can do is kill her, and ruin everything her father has built.”

“Now damn you, I—”

“It does no good to shout at me or be angry with me.” Hardy’s voice was calm and determined. “You know I’m right. She must marry whoever will be the new duke. Otherwise, Jack Turner will try to assert his rights, and I will have to kill him. Otherwise, there will be factions who will try to take power because they will believe they have as much right as anyone does. The only possible chance for a peaceful transfer of power is to appeal to loyalty to the Senator’s memory. Maureen can do that. No one else can. But she cannot control everyone. Together, Maureen and George will be able to.”

Finally Hardy’s icy calm broke, just slightly. His hand trembled. “Do you think you are making things any easier for her? She knows what she must do. Why do you think she will see you secretly, but will not marry you?” Hardy got up. “We’ve been long enough. We should join the others.”

Harvey drained his glass, but did not get up yet.

“I have tried to be friendly,” Hardy said. “The Senator thinks highly of you. He likes the work you have done, and he likes your ideas. I think if he had a free choice he might… That doesn’t matter. He does not have a free choice, and now I’ve told you.” Hardy went out before Randall could say anything.

Harvey sat staring at the empty glass. Finally he stood and threw it to the carpet. “Shill” he said. “Goddammit to hell.”

When the meeting adjourned, Maureen went outside. There was a fine mist, so fine that she hardly noticed. No one bothered with mist. Visibility was good, several miles, and she could see the snow in the High Sierra, and lower. There was snow on Cow Mountain to the south, and that wasn’t quite five thousand feet high. There would be snow in the valley soon.

She shivered slightly in the cold wind, but she wasn’t tempted to go inside and get warmer clothing. Inside she’d have to see Harvey Randall again, and look away. She didn’t want to see anyone or speak to anyone, but she smiled pleasantly as Alice Cox rode by on her big stallion. Then she felt, rather than heard, someone come up behind her. She turned, slowly. afraid of whom she’d see.

“Cold,” Reverend Varley said. “You should get a jacket.”

“I’m all right.” She turned to walk away from him, and saw the Sierra again. Harvey’s boy was up in those mountains. Travelers said the scouts were doing well there. She turned back again. “They tell me you can be trusted,” she said.

“I hope so.” When she didn’t say anything else, he added, “Listening to people’s troubles is my main business here.”

“I thought you were in the praying business.” She said it cynically, not knowing why she wanted to hurt him.

“I am, but it’s not a business.”

“No.” It wasn’t. Tom Varley pulled his own weight. He could claim a larger share than what he took from his own dairy herd; and many of the valley people gave him part of their own rations, which he distributed. He never said how. George thought he was feeding outsiders, but George wouldn’t say anything to Tom Varley. George was afraid of him. Priests and magicians are feared in primitive societies… “I wish this were really the Day of Judgment,” she blurted.

“Why?”

“Because then it would mean something. There’s no meaning to any of this. And don’t tell me about God’s will and His unfathomable reasons.”

“I won’t if you say you don’t want to hear it. But are you sure?”

“Yes. I tried that. It doesn’t work. I can’t believe in a God who did this! And there’s just no purpose, no reason for anything.” She pointed to the snow in the mountains. “Winter will be here. Soon. And we’ll live through it, some of us. And another after that. And another. Why bother?” She couldn’t stand looking at him. His collie-dog eyes were filled with concern and sympathy, and she knew that was what she had wanted from him, but now it was unbearable. She turned and walked away quickly.

He followed. “Maureen.” She went on, toward the driveway, but he kept pace with her. “Please.”

“What?” She turned to face him. “What can you say? What can I say? It’s all true.”

“Most of us want to live,” he said.

“Yes. I wish I knew why.”

“You do know. You want to live too.”

“Not like this.”

“Things aren’t so bad—”

“You don’t understand. I thought I’d found something. Life consists of doing one’s job. I could believe that. I really could. But I don’t have a job. I am thoroughly and utterly useless.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. It always was true. Even before… before. I was just existing. Sometimes I could be happy being a part of someone else’s life. I could fool myself, but that wasn’t any good either, not really. I was just drifting along, and I didn’t see much point in it, but it wasn’t too bad. Not then. But the Hammer came and took even that way. It took everything away.”

“But you’re needed here,” Varley said. “Many of these people depend on you. They need you—”

She laughed. “For what? Al Hardy and Eileen do the work. Dad makes the decisions. And Maureen?” She laughed again. “Maureen makes people unhappy, Maureen has fits of black depression that spread like the plague. Maureen sneaks around to see her lover and then destroys the poor son of a bitch by not speaking to him in public because she’s afraid she’ll get him killed, but Maureen doesn’t even have the guts to stop fucking. How’s that for worse than useless?”

There was no reaction to her language, and she was ashamed of herself for trying to… to what? It didn’t matter.

“Isn’t it true that you do care for something?” Varley asked. “This lover. He is someone whose life you want to share.”

Her smile was bitter. “Don’t you understand? I don’t know! And I’m afraid to find out. I want to be in love, but I don’t think I can be, and I’m afraid even that’s gone. And I can’t find out because my job is to be the crown princess. Maybe I ought to marry George and be done with it.”

This time he did react. He seemed surprised. “George Christopher is your lover?”

“Good God, no! He’s the one who’ll do the killing.”

“I doubt that. George is a pretty good man.”

“I wish… I’d like to be sure of that. Then I could find out. I could find out if I can still love anyone. And I want to know, I want to know if the Hammer took that, too. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken to you. There’s nothing you can do.”

“I can listen. And I can tell you that I see a purpose to life. This vast universe wasn’t created for nothing. And it was created. It didn’t just happen.”

“Did the Hammer just happen?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Then why?”

Varley shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps to shock a Washington socialite enough to make her take a strong look at her life. Maybe only that. For you.”

“That’s crazy. You don’t believe that.”

“I believe it has a purpose, but that purpose will be different for each of us.”

“We’d better go in. I’m freezing.” She turned and walked rapidly past him to the stone ranch house. I’ll see Harvey tonight, she thought. And I’ll tell him. Everything. I have to. I can’t stand this any longer.

Journey’s End

Ding!

The kitchen timer went off, and Tim Hamner put down his book and picked up the binoculars. He had two sets of binoculars in the guard shack: the very powerful day glasses he now carried, and a much larger night glass that didn’t magnify so much, but gathered a lot of light. They’d have been perfect field-viewing astronomical glasses, except that there were always clouds and Tim rarely saw the stars.

The hut had been vastly improved. Now there was insulation, and more wood frame; it could even be heated. It contained a bed, a chair, a table and some bookshelves — and a rifle rack at the door. Tim slung the Winchester 30/06 over his shoulder on the way out, and only momentarily felt amusement at the thought: Tim Hamner, playboy and amateur astronomer, armed to the teeth as he ventured forth to search out the ungodly!

He climbed up onto the boulder. A tree grew next to it. From any distance away he’d be invisible in the foliage. When he reached the top he braced himself against the tree and began his careful scan of the terrain below him.

Trouble Pass appeared on no maps. It was Harvey Randall’s name for the low spot in the ridges surrounding the Stronghold. Trouble Pass was the most likely route for any one invading on foot, and Tim scanned it first. He’d looked into it no more than fifteen minutes before; the timer was set for fifteen-minute intervals on the theory that nobody, on foot or horseback, could get over the pass and out of sight in less than fifteen minutes.

There was nobody there. There never was, these days. In the first weeks, walkers had tried to come in that way, and they’d be spotted, and Tim would use the bugle to sound an alarm; ranchers on horseback would go out to meet the intruders and turn them away. Now the pass was always clear. Still, it had to be watched.

Tim spotted two deer and a coyote, five jackrabbits and a lot of birds. Meat, if hunters could be spared. Nothing else in the pass. He swept the glasses on around, over the tops of the skylines and along the barren hillsides. It wasn’t too different from looking for comets: You remember what things ought to look like, and search for anything different. Tim knew every rock on the hillsides by now. There was one shaped like a miniature Easter Island statue, and another that looked like a Cadillac. Nothing was on the hillsides that shouldn’t be there.

He turned and looked down into the valley behind, and grinned again at his good fortune: better to be a guard on top of the ridge than down there breaking up rocks. “I expect the guards at San Quentin thought that, too,” Tim said aloud. He’d taken to talking to himself lately.

The Stronghold looked good. Secure, safe, with greenhouses, and grazing herds and flocks; and there was going to be enough to eat. “I am one lucky son of a bitch,” Tim said.

It came to him, as it often did, that he was far luckier than he deserved. He had Eileen, and he had friends. He had a secure place to sleep, and enough to eat. He had work to do, although his first scheme, to rebuild the dams above the Stronghold, hadn’t worked out — no fault of his. He and Brad Wagoner had worked out new ways to generate electricity — always assuming they could get Outside and find the wire and bearings and other tools and equipment they’d need.

And books. Tim had a whole list of books that he wished for. He’d owned nearly all of them, back in a time that he barely remembered, a time when all he had to do if he wanted anything was to let someone know it, and let money do the rest. When he thought about books and how easy it had been to get them, his thoughts sometimes strayed further, to hot towels and the sauna and swimming pool, Tanqueray gin and Irish coffee and clean clothes whenever he wanted them… But those times were hard to remember. They were times before Eileen, and she was worth a lot. If it took the end of the world to bring them together, then maybe it was worth it.

Tim was sad only when he thought of life Outside, when he remembered the dead baby and the police and nurses working at the Burbank hospital. Those memories of driving past helpless people sometimes rose to haunt him, and he couldn’t help wondering why he’d survived — more than survived; lived to find security and a lot more happiness than he’d ever expected…

Movement caught his eye. A truck was coming up the road. It was full of men, and Tim almost leaped down into the hut to call a warning. The air was clear of lightning except for the constant flashes up in the High Sierra; the little CB radio would work, but he wasn’t supposed to use it more than necessary. It was damned tough hauling batteries up and down this hill, and it took precious gasoline to recharge them. He let the impulse pass. The truck had a way to go, there was time to examine it through the binoculars.

He didn’t doubt that it was Deke Wilson’s truck. He looked anyway. A single truck could carry considerable firepower, and a single such mistake could cost a score of lives and put the poor stuttering sentry back on the road without his balls.

It looked like Deke’s truck, more crowded than usual; the truck bed was jammed with standing men. You wouldn’t crowd an attack force together like that. One was a woman. …

Those four: Why did they leap to the eye like that? One was a woman, and one was black, and two were white men. But the four seemed clumped together as if… as if in mutual distaste for the mortals around them. No, they didn’t look like mortals. Tim shifted his elbows on the rock and studied elusively familiar faces through the binoculars…

But the truck was coming too close. Tim sprinted for the hut. He was picking up the microphone when he remembered.

“Yeah?”

“Deke Wilson’s here, three minutes,” said Tim, “and he’s got the astronauts with him, the astronauts from Hammerlab! All four! Chet, you won’t believe them. They look like gods. They look like they never went through the end of the world at all.”

Faces. Dozens of faces, all white, all staring up at them in the truck. They were all talking at once, and Rick Delanty heard only snatches of conversation. “Russians.” “Astronauts, it’s really them.” When he got down from the truck they crowded around, hanging back a bit to avoid crushing the men from space, staring, smiling. Men and women, and they weren’t starving. Their eyes did not have the haunted look that Rick had got used to at Deke Wilson’s place. These people had seen only a part of Hell.

They were mostly middle-aged, and their clothes showed signs of hard work and not much washing. The men tended to be large, the women plain, or was it only that they were dressed for work? At Deke Wilson’s farm the women had dressed like men and worked like men. Here there was a difference. In this valley women were different from men. It wasn’t like the world before Hammerfall. It wasn’t that obvious, and if Rick hadn’t been weeks with Deke Wilson he would have reflected on how things had changed since the Hammer; now, he noticed the similarities. This valley was as different from Wilson’s fortified camp as…

Rick had no more time to reflect on it. There were introductions, and they were ushered up onto the big porch of the stone ranch house. Rick would have known who was in charge even if he hadn’t recognized Senator Jellison: The Senator was not as large as the big, burly men, but everyone made room for him, waited for him to speak first; and his smile made them all feel welcome, even Pieter and Leonilla, who had been dreading this meeting.

More people were coming, some downhill from the fields, others up the drive. The word must have spread fast. Rick looked for Johnny Baker, and saw him, but Baker wasn’t noticing Rick Delanty or anyone else. He was standing in front of a slim girl, tall, red hair, flannel shirt and work trousers. He gripped both her hands, and they devoured each other with their eyes.

“I was sure you were dead,” Baker said. “I just… I never even asked Deke. I was afraid to. I’m glad you lived.”

“I’m glad you lived, too,” she said. Odd, Rick thought: From the sorrow on their faces, you would have thought they were attending each other’s funeral. It was obvious to Rick, and to everyone else: They had been lovers.

And some of the men didn’t like that at all! Trouble building there… Rick again had no time to reflect on. it. The crowd was pressing around, everyone speaking at once. One of the big men turned from watching Johnny and his woman and spoke to Rick. “Are we at war with the Russians?” he demanded.

“No,” Rick said. “What’s left of Russia and what’s left of the United States are allies. Against China. But you can forget about all that, the war’s long over. Between the Hammer and the Soviet missiles, and we think maybe some of our own, there won’t be anything left of China that can fight back.”

“Allies.” The big man was bewildered. “Okay. I guess.”

Rick grinned at him. “The thing is, if we ever get to Russia we’ll find nothing but glaciers. But if we go to China we’ll find Russians, and they’ll remember us as allies. See?”

The man scowled and walked away, exactly as if Rick had been putting him on.

Rick Delanty fell into the old routine. He was used to speaking at gatherings, keeping the words simple and the imagery vivid, explaining without condescending. There were plenty of questions. They wanted to know what it was like in space. How long did it take to get used to free fall? Rick was surprised at how many had watched their TV broadcasts from Hammerlab and remembered Rick’s impromptu zero-G ballet performance. How did they move? Eat? Drink? Patch a meteor strike? Couldn’t that raw sunlight burn your eyes out? Did they wear dark glasses all the time?

He learned the names. The young girl was Alice Cox, the woman with the tray of hot coffee — real coffee! — was her mother, the burly men with the challenging stance were both Christophers, and so was the one who’d wanted to know about the war, only that one had gone inside with Deke Wilson and Johnny Baker, leaving Mrs. Cox to be hostess. There was a man introduced as “Mayor” and another whom everyone called “Chief,” but there was something subtle Rick didn’t understand, because the Christophers, with no title, seemed to have higher status. All the men seemed big, and they were all armed. Was he already so used to the half-starved look of Deke Wilson’s band?

“The Senator says we can spare some light,” Mrs. Cox announced after one of her trips inside. “You can talk to the astronauts after it’s too dark to work. And maybe we’ll have a party Sunday.”

There were murmurs of agreement, and goodbyes, and the crowd melted away. Mrs. Cox took them inside, and brought more coffee into the living room. The perfect hostess, and Rick found himself relaxing for the first time since they had landed. At Deke Wilson’s there had been coffee, but not much, and it was consumed hurriedly by men about to go on guard duty. No one sat relaxed in a parlor, and the coffee certainly wasn’t served in china cups.

“I’m sorry there’s nobody around to keep you company,” Mrs. Cox said. “Everyone’s got work to do. They’ll be back tonight, and then they’ll talk your head off.”

“It is not important,” Pieter said. “We thank you for the welcome.” He and Leonilla sat together, apart from Rick. “I hope we are not keeping you from your duties.”

“Well, I’ve got dinner to cook,” Mrs. Cox said. “If you want anything, just call me.” She left them alone, pointedly setting down the coffeepot. “Better drink that before it gets cold,” she said. “I can’t promise there’ll be any more for awhile.”

“Thank you,” Leonilla said. “You are all so kind to us…”

“No more than you deserve, I’m sure,” Mrs. Cox answered, and then she was gone.

“So. We have found a government,” Pieter said. “Where is General Baker?”

Rick shrugged. “Back there somewhere with Deke and the Senator and some of the others. Big conference.”

“To which we were not invited,” Jakov said. “I understand why Leonilla and I are not needed, but why are you out here?”

“I thought about that,” Rick said. “But they all left pretty quick. You know what Deke’s got to tell them. And somebody had to stay out there and talk to the crowd. I took it as a compliment.”

“I hope you are right,” Jakov said.

Leonilla nodded agreement. “This is the first time I have felt safe since we landed. I think they like us. Surely they do not care that Rick is black?”

“I can usually tell,” Rick said. “No. But there was something strange. Did you notice? After they found out about the war, all they wanted to know about was space. Nobody, nobody at all, asked about what was happening to the Earth.”

“Yes. But soon we will have to tell them,” Pieter said.

“I wish we could avoid that,” Leonilla said. “But yes, we will have to.”

They fell silent. Rick got up and poured the last of the coffee. From back in the kitchen there were sounds of activity, and outside they could see men carrying rocks, others plowing fields. Hard work, and it was certain that there’d be plenty for all of them, even Leonilla. Rick hoped so. He realized that he had been silently praying that there would be work, something to do, something to make him feel useful again, and to forget Houston and El Lago and the tsunami…

But for the moment he’d been given a hero’s welcome, and so had Leonilla and Pieter, and they were safe, surrounded by armed men who didn’t want to kill them.

He heard a low buzz of voices from somewhere at the back of the house. That would be the Senator and Johnny Baker and Deke Wilson and the Senator’s trusted staff, planning… what? Our lives, Rick thought. Was the Senator’s daughter there, too? Rick remembered how she and Johnny had looked at each other, their voices inaudible, their noses almost touching, no thought of anyone around them. How would that affect the Senator’s decisions?

It struck Rick that the Senator might like it fine. Johnny Baker was an Air Force general. If Colorado Springs had the power they claimed, that could be important.

“How many men here?” Pieter said. The question startled Rick from his reverie. “I estimate several hundred,” Pieter was saying. “And many weapons. Do you think that is enough?”

Rick shrugged. He’d been thinking of the far future, weeks, months ahead, and had almost managed to forget why they had come to the Senator’s Stronghold just now. “It’s got to be,” Rick said, and now he felt it too, the tension that Pieter and Leonilla had brought with them. It had never occurred to Rick that the Senator wouldn’t have enough strength. He’d been so sure that somewhere there were civilized men and women, real safety and civilization and order… .

And maybe there wasn’t any. Anywhere. Rick shuddered slightly, but he kept his smile in place, and the three of them sat in the paneled room, waiting and hoping.

“They call themselves the New Brotherhood Army,” said Deke. He looked around him — at Harvey Randall and Al Hardy and General Johnny Baker, George Christopher, who sat far to one side of the room, and Senator Jellison in his judge’s chair — and his eyes were haunted. He drank from his glass, and waited a minute while the whiskey worked its ancient magic, and said in a firmer voice, “They also claim to be the legal government of California.”

“By what authority?” Al Hardy demanded.

“Well, their proclamation was signed by the Lieutenant Governor. ‘Acting Governor,’ he calls himself now.”

Hardy frowned. “The Honorable James Wade Montross?”

“That’s the name,” Deke said. “Could I have some more of that whiskey?”

Hardy looked to the Senator, got a nod and refilled Deke’s glass. “Montross,” Al said musingly. “So The Screwball survived.” He looked to the others and added quickly, “An insider’s joke. In politics we usually have nicknames for people. The Loser. Grin and Bear It. Montross got tagged as The Screwball.”

“Screwball or not, he’s given me seven days to join his government,” Deke said. “Otherwise his New Brotherhood Army will take the whole place by force.” The farmer opened his Army-surplus field jacket and took a paper from an inner pocket. The paper was mimeographed, but the lettering was hand-drawn, in fine calligraphy. He handed it to Al Hardy, who glanced at it, then gave it to Senator Jellison.

“That’s Montross’s signature,” Hardy said. “I’m sure of it.”

Jellison nodded. “We can treat the signature as genuine.” He looked up to include everyone in the conversation. “The Lieutenant Governor proclaims a state of emergency and asserts what amounts to supreme authority within California,” he said.

George Christopher growled, a harsh grating sound. “Over us, too?”

“Everyone,” Jellison said. “He mentions the Colorado Springs announcement, too. Do you know anything about that, General Baker?”

Johnny Baker nodded. He sat next to Harvey Randall, but he didn’t seem to be part of the group in the room. The old gods have returned, Harvey thought. For the moment, anyway. How long will they be gods? Harvey had seen Baker with Maureen, and hated it.

“We caught a broadcast out of Colorado Springs,” Baker said. “I’m sure it was genuine. It was in the name of the Speaker of the House—”

“A senile idiot,” Al Hardy said.

“—who is acting as President,” the astronaut continued. “His chief of staff seems to be a brevet lieutenant general named Fox. I think that’s Byron Fox, and if it is, I know him. One of the professors at the Academy. Good man.”

George Christopher had been quietly fuming. Now he spoke, his voice low and full of anger. “Montross. That son of a bitch. He was around here a couple of years ago trying to organize the pickers. Came right onto my land! I couldn’t even throw the trespassing bastard off. He had fifty state cops with him.”

“I’d say Jimmy Montross has quite a lot of legal power,” Senator Jellison said. “He is the highest-ranking civil officer in California. Assuming the Governor’s dead, and he probably is.”

“Sacramento’s gone, then?” Johnny Baker asked.

Al Hardy nodded. “As far as we can tell, that area’s all underwater. Harry took a sweep north and west a couple of weeks ago and met somebody who’d talked to people who tried to get to Sacramento. All they found was more of the San Joaquin Sea.”

“Damn,” Baker said. “Then the nuclear power plant’s gone.”

“Yes. Sorry,” Hardy said.

“Deke, you’re not going to knuckle under to this goddam Montross, are you?” George Christopher demanded.

“I came here to ask for help,” Wilson said. “They can whip us. That army of his is big.”

“How big?” Al Hardy asked.

“Big.”

“Something puzzles me,” Senator Jellison said. “Deke, are you certain that the cannibal band you fought is part of this outfit that Montross is associated with?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“Now don’t get upset.” The Senator’s famous charm was suddenly evident. “It just surprised me, that’s all. Montross was a screwball, but he wasn’t crazy. Or stupid, for that matter. He championed the underdog—”

There was a growl from Christopher.

“—or so he claimed,” Jellison continued smoothly. “But I wouldn’t have thought he’d be friendly with cannibals.”

“Maybe they’re holding him prisoner,” Al Hardy suggested.

Jellison nodded. “The point I was about to make. In which case he has no legal authority at all.”

“Legal, shmegal, what do I do?” Deke Wilson asked. “I can’t fight him. Will you people help me? I don’t want to give in to them—”

“Don’t blame you,” Christopher said.

“It’s not just the cannibals,” Deke said. “They may give that up if they can get… other food. But some of those messengers!”

“How big a party did they send?” Hardy asked.

“About two hundred camped down the road from us,” Deke said. “They sent in a dozen. All armed. General Baker saw them. A captain of state police—”

“No shit?” Christopher exclaimed. “State cops with the cannibals?”

“Well, he wore the uniform,” Deke said. “And some guy who’d been an official in Los Angeles, a black man. And others. Most of them were okay, but two were… hell, they were weird!” He looked to Baker and got a nod of agreement.

“Really weird,” Deke continued. “Acted like they were on dope. The eyes looked like that, wide, you know, and they wouldn’t look straight at you. And they talked about the angels of the Lord. ‘The angels have sent us to deliver this message.’ ”

“How did the others react to that?” Harvey Randall asked.

“Like nothing happened. Like it was normal to talk about the angels sending them. And when I asked what the hell that meant, they just turned and left. ‘You have the message.’ That’s all they’d say.”

“And you said there were two hundred camped near you?” Al Hardy asked. “How near? Where?”

“Not far. South, down the road,” Deke said. “Why?”

“Harry went out your way,” Hardy said. “He’s not overdue, he doesn’t keep any exact schedule, but we’ve been expecting him.”

“He never got to my place,” Deke said.

“Do you think this outfit has done anything to Harry?” Jellison asked.

Deke shrugged. “Senator, I don’t know what to make of those people. They claim to have a lot more troops than the ones they let us see, and I believe it. We don’t see traders anymore. No refugees. It’s like there’s nobody out there except you and the New Brotherhood.”

“Angels,” Al Hardy said. “It doesn’t make much sense.”

Not neat, Harvey Randall thought. Not neat at all, and it disturbs Al. “I met Montross a few times,” Harvey said. “He didn’t seem crazy to me. He was hyped up on the subject of environmentalism. Spray cans destroying the ozone, that kind of thing. Maybe the Hammer drove him over the edge.”

“He may be crazy, he may be a prisoner, anything could be,” Deke Wilson said. “But there’s two hundred men camped down the road, I’d bet they’ve got five hundred more, and I don’t know what the hell to do.”

“No. I don’t suppose you do,” the Senator said. He paused for thought, and no one interrupted him. Presently he said, “Well. Six more days. Deke, I was going to make you an offer. You could bring your women and children and injured here, and your part would be to salvage things for us. Tools, electronics, that sort of thing, starting with scuba gear you could use to dive for—”

“Where does that leave us time to fight the New Brotherhood Army, Senator?”

Jellison sighed. “It doesn’t, of course. And I don’t suppose that Governor Montross — or whoever is controlling him — will be interested in sharing your salvage with us. It sounds as if he intends to take control of the whole state.”

“Including our valley,” George Christopher said.

“Yes, I expect so,” Jellison said. “Well. Two governments we’ve discovered today. Colorado Springs, and the New Brotherhood Army. Plus the possibility of angels.”

“So what the hell do I do?” Deke demanded.

“Be patient. We don’t know enough,” Jellison said. “Let’s get some more data. General Baker, what can you tell us about the rest of the United States? The rest of the world for that matter?”

Johnny Baker nodded and leaned back to organize his thoughts. “We never did have much for communications,” he said. “We lost Houston right after Hammerfall. Colonel Delanty’s family was killed in that, by the way. I’d go easy on asking him about Texas.”

Baker was pleased to see that the others still had enough sensitivity to show sympathy for Rick. From what he had seen out there, most of the world couldn’t find tears to shed for a few individuals. There was too much death. “My Russian friends also lost their families,” Johnny said. “The war started less than an hour after the Hammer struck. China hit Russia. Russia hit China. A few of our missile bases launched at China, too.”

“Jesus,” Al Hardy said. “Harvey, have you got anything that would measure radiation?”

“No.”

They all looked alarmed. Harvey nodded agreement. “We’re right in the fallout pattern,” he said. “But I don’t know what we should do about it.”

“Is there anything we can do about it?” Hardy asked.

“I think it’s safe,” Johnny Baker said. “Rain settles fallout. And there’s plenty of rain. The whole world looks like a big ball of cotton. We hardly ever saw the ground after the Hammer fell.”

“You mentioned communications,” Jellison prompted.

“Yes. Sorry. Well, we talked to Colorado Springs, but it was very short, not much more than exchanging IDs. We got a SAC base, once. In Montana. They hadn’t any communications with anyone. And that’s all in the U.S.” He paused to let that sink in.

“As for the rest of the world, South Africa and Australia are probably in good shape. We don’t know about Latin America. None of us knew enough Spanish, and when we did get contact with somebody down there, it didn’t last long. We got some commercial radio broadcasts, though, and as near as we can make out they’re having a revolution a week in Venezuela, and the rest of the continent’s got political problems too.”

Jellison nodded. “Hardly surprising. And of course their most important cities were on the coasts. I don’t suppose you know how high the tsunamis got in the Southern Hemisphere?”

“No, sir, but I’d guess they were big,” Johnny Baker said. “The one that hit North Africa was over five hundred meters high. We saw that, just before the clouds covered everything. Five hundred meters of water sweeping across Morocco…” He shuddered. “Europe’s gone. Completely. Oh, and all the volcanoes in Central and South America let go. The smoke came right up through the clouds. The whole Ring of Fire has let go. You’ve got volcanoes east of you, somewhere out in Nevada, I think, and up north of here Mount Lassen and Mount Hood and maybe Rainier, a lot of them in northern California and Oregon and Washington.”

He went on, and as he spoke they realized just how alone they were. The Imperial Valley of California: gone, with a Hammerstrike in the Sea of Cortez that sent, had to have sent, waves washing clear up to the Joshua Tree National Monument in the mountains west of Los Angeles. Scratch Palm Springs and Palm Desert and Indio and Twentynine Palms, forget about the valley of the Colorado River.

“And something must have hit in Lake Huron,’-’ Baker said. “We saw the usual spiral pattern of cloud with a hole in the center, just before everything turned white.”

“Is there anything left of this country outside Colorado?” Al Hardy asked.

“Don’t know again,” Baker said. “With all that rain, I’d think the Midwest is drowned out — no crops, no transportation, lots of people starving—”

“And killing each other for what’s left,” Al Hardy said. He looked at each of the others in turn, and they all nodded agreement: The Stronghold was lucky. More than luck, because they had the Senator, and they had order, a tiny island of safety in a world that had very nearly been killed.

Why us? Harvey Randall wondered. Johnny Baker’s report hadn’t surprised him, not really. He had thought it out long before. There was the matter of no radio communications. True, the constant static made it unlikely they’d receive messages, but there ought to be something, once in awhile, and there almost never was, which had to mean that nobody was broadcasting, not with any real power, not constantly.

But it was different to know they were one of the few pockets of survivors.

What had happened to the world? A revolution a week in Latin America. Maybe that was the answer everywhere. What the Hammer and the Sino-Soviet war hadn’t done, people were busily doing to themselves.

Al Hardy broke the silence. “It doesn’t look as if the U.S. Cavalry will come charging over the hill to rescue us.”

Deke Wilson’s laugh was bitter. “The Army’s turned cannibal. What we saw of it, anyway.”

“We’ll have to fight,” George Christopher said. “That goddam Montross—”

“George, you can’t be sure he’s in charge,” Al Hardy said.

“Who cares? If he’s not, it’s worse, it’s the fucking cannibals. We’ll have to fight sooner or later, we may as well do it while we’ve got Deke’s people on our side.”

“I’ll go for that,” Deke Wilson said. “Unless…”

“Unless what?” Christopher asked, his voice suddenly suspicious.

Wilson spread his hands. Harvey couldn’t help noticing. Wilson had been a big man, who was now two sizes too small for his body and clothes. And he was scared.

“Unless you’ll let us in,” Wilson said. “We can hold that gang off. You’ve got hills to defend. I don’t. All I’ve got is what I can build, no ridgelines, no natural boundaries, nothing. But in here we can hold the bastards off until they starve to death. Maybe we can help that along. Go on raids and burn out what they’ve stored up.”

“That’s obscene,” Harvey Randall said. “Aren’t there enough people starving without burning crops and food? Jesus! All over the world, what the Hammer didn’t get, we’re doing to ourselves! Does it have to happen here, too?”

“We couldn’t feed all of your people for the winter, Deke,” Al Hardy said. “Sorry, but I know. The margin’s just too thin. We can’t do it.”

“We don’t know enough, not yet,” Jellison said. “Maybe it’s possible to come to terms with the New Brotherhood.”

“Bullshit,” George Christopher said.

“It is not bullshit,” Harvey Randall said. “I knew Montross, and dammit, he is not crazy, he is not a cannibal, and he is not an evil man even if he did come onto your land and try to help the farm workers organize a union—”

“That will do,” Jellison said. He was very firm about it. “George, I suggest that we wait for Harry. We have to know more about conditions out there. I gather that Deke knows almost nothing he hasn’t told us. Harvey, have you time to help, or do you have other work?” Jellison’s tone made it plain that Harvey Randall wouldn’t be needed in the library just now.

“If you can spare me, there are a few things…” Harvey got up and went to the door. He almost chuckled when he heard George Christopher coming behind him.

“I’ll see the maps when they’re done,” Christopher was saying. “I have some work too. Nice to meet you, General Baker.” He followed Harvey out. “Just a minute.”

Harvey walked slowly, wondering what would happen now. The Senator had obviously been unhappy about Harvey’s outburst. As well he might have been, Harvey thought. And he tried to separate us, and it didn’t work…

“So what do we do now?” Christopher was saying.

Harvey shrugged. “We just don’t know enough. Besides, we do have a few days. Maybe if we went out with Deke we could come up with enough fertilizer and greenhouse materials to keep all of Deke’s people going through the winter—”

“That wasn’t what I was talking about,” Christopher said. “We’re going to have to fight those damned cannibals, and we may as well do it before they get any stronger. Take every gun and every man big enough to carry one and go out there and get it the hell over with. I don’t want to spend the winter looking over my shoulder. When somebody scares you there’s only one thing to do, knock him down and stomp on him until he can’t hurt you anymore.”

Or run like hell. Or talk a lot, Harvey thought, but he didn’t say anything.

“I used to get nervous about you and Maureen,” George said.

“I want her too,” Harv said. He stopped short of the closed kitchen door and stood facing Christopher in the narrow hallway. “If you knock me down and stomp on me a lot, we’re all going to be terribly embarrassed. Your move.”

“Not yet. When you get me mad enough, you’ll be for the road. Right now we’ve both got a problem.”

“Yah. I noticed that too,” said Harvey. “Are you going to put him on the road?”

“Don’t be stupid. He’s a hero. Come on outside.” Christopher led the way through the kitchen. There was no one there at the moment. They went out into the dusk.

“Look, Randall,” Christopher said. “You don’t like me much.”

“No. I expect it’s mutual.”

Christopher shrugged. “I got nothing against you. I don’t think you’ll shoot me in the back or slug me when I’m not looking—”

“Thanks.”

“And unless you do, you can’t lick me. Question is, suppose she decides to marry General Baker. What’ll you do about that?”

“Cry a lot.”

“Look, I’m trying to be polite,” Christopher said.

“Well, what do you want me to say?” Harvey asked. “If she marries Baker, she marries Baker, that’s all.”

“And you’ll leave her alone? Not sneak around seeing her?”

“Why the hell would I do that?” Harvey demanded.

“Look, you think I’m some kind of bumpkin fool, don’t you?” Christopher said. “And maybe I am, the way you see things. I lived out here before I had to. Went to church. Minded my own business. No swinging parties, no girl friend in every city to go see on expense accounts…”

Harvey laughed. “I didn’t live that way,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many playboys.”

“Yeah? Look, Randall, I’m a cornball, I guess, but I happen to think that if a man’s married, he stays at home. Now I never got married. Engaged once, but it didn’t work, and then I found out Maureen got her divorce, and while I wasn’t exactly just waiting for her — I knew better than to think she’d want to come live in this valley again or that I could live in Washington — I never found anybody. Then this happened. Now she has to live here. Maybe she could live with me. We would have married, once, only it didn’t quite work, we were too young…”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I’ve got something to say. Dammit, Randall, if I ever do get married, I’ll stay married. Yeah, and I’ll be faithful to my wife, too. Maybe Baker will be. You sure as hell wouldn’t.”

“Now what the hell… ?”

“I know what goes on in this valley, Randall. I knew before the goddam comet hit us and I know now. So you just leave Maureen alone. You’re not the kind of man she needs.”

“Why not? And who appointed you the guardian of public morals?”

“I did. And you’re not good enough for her. You sleep around. All right, it was with her. I don’t like that, but I had no claim on her. Not then. But you were a married man, Randall. What the hell was Maureen to you? Another one to add to your scorecard? Look, I’m getting myself upset, and I didn’t want that. But you leave her alone. I’m telling you, leave her be.” He turned and walked away before Harvey could say anything else.

Harvey Randall stood in shock, and barely restrained himself from running after the big rancher. I ought to be mad, he thought. I ought to hate the bastard…

But he didn’t. Instead he felt a wild impulse to run and catch up and explain that it hadn’t been that way at all, that Harvey Randall thought about marriage the same way George Christopher did, and all right, so he and Maureen had…

Had what? Harvey wondered. Maybe Christopher was right. But Loretta never knew, and she wasn’t harmed, and neither was Maureen, and it’s all a pile of excuses because you knew damned well what you were doing.

Instead he went into the living room to talk with the other astronauts.

Exile’s Story

“Hot water to soak your feet in,” said Harry. “Cooked food. A change of clothes. And, man, they need you, and they’ll know it.”

“I’ll make it,” Dan Forrester puffed. “I feel light… as a feather without… that pack. And they’ve got sheep?” He’d been afraid to look at his feet, these last few days, but in a while he wouldn’t need them. They’d served him well. As for his insulin stock, well, he’d had to increase the dosage; it must be deteriorating. “Have they got a working refrigerator?”

“Refrigerator, no. Sheep, yes. We’ll have to deal with that right away. Won’t be long now, that’s the roadblock ahead.”

Their companion, striding ahead of them on the deserted road with Dan Forrester’s backpack riding lightly on his hips, stopped suddenly and glanced back.

“You’re with me,” Harry said. “It’ll be all right.” Hugo Beck nodded, but he waited for Dan and Harry to catch up. He was afraid, and it showed.

There was a sign fifty yards from the log barricade. It said:

DANGER! YOU ARE ENTERING GUARDED LAND. GO NO FURTHER. IF YOU HAVE BUSINESS HERE, WALK SLOWLY TO THE BARRICADE AND STAND STILL. THERE WILL BE NO WARNING SHOTS FIRED. KEEP YOUR HANDS IN PLAIN SIGHT AT ALL TIMES.

Under it was another, in Spanish, and beyond that a large death’s head with the universal traffic symbol for “Do not enter.”

“Strange welcome mat,” Dan Forrester said.

Rotation of work: Mark Czescu was enjoying his day of guard duty while someone else made little rocks out of big ones. It wasn’t always fun, though. Earlier there had been a family on bicycles who had won their way through the San Joaquin and had tales of cannibals and worse, and Mark hadn’t much enjoyed turning them away. He’d shown them the road north, where there was a fishing camp that was just hanging on to life.

Four people. The Stronghold could feed four more — but which four? If these, why not more? The decision was right, take in no one without special reasons, but it didn’t make it any easier to look a man in the eye and send him up the road.

Mark sat behind a screen of logs and brush where he could watch without being seen. His partners watched him. One of these days Bart Christopher was going to be slow, and they’d lose the front man at the gate…

There were three figures coming up the road, and Mark came out when he recognized the remnants of a gray U.S. Postal Service uniform. He hailed Harry joyfully, but his smile had vanished when the three trudged up to the barrier. He was looking at Hugo Beck when he said, “Happy Trash Day, Harry.”

“I brought him,” Harry said. He said it belligerently. “You know the rules, he’s got my safe conduct. And this is Dr. Dan Forrester—”

“Hi, Doc,” Mark said. “You and your damned Hot Fudge Sundae.”

Forrester managed the ghost of a smile.

“He’s got a book,” Harry said. “He’s got a lot of books, but this one he brought with him. Show him, Dan.”

It was drizzling lightly. Dan didn’t open the tape seals. Mark read the title through four layers of Baggies: The Way Things Work, Volume II.

“Volume One is in a safe place,” Dan said. “With four thousand other books on how to put a civilization together.”

Mark shrugged. He was pretty sure they’d want Dan Forrester up at the Stronghold anyway. But it would be nice to know what other gifts Forrester had available. “What kind of books?”

“The 1911 Britannica,” Forrester said. “An 1894 book of formulae for such things as soap, with a whole section on how to brew beer starting with barley grains. The Beekeeper’s Manual. Veterinary handbooks. Instructor’s lab manuals starting with basic inorganic chemistry and running up through organic synthesis. I’ve got those for 1930 equipment as well as modern. The Amateur Radio Handbook. Farmer’s Almanac. The Rubber Handbook. Peters’s Pour Yourself a House, and two books on how to make Portland cement. The Compleat Gunsmith and a set of Army field manuals on infantry-weapon maintenance. The maintenance manuals for most cars and trucks. Wheeler’s Home Repairs. Three books on hydroponic gardening. A complete set of—”

“Whoa!” Mark cried. “Enter, O Prince. Welcome back, Harry, they’re getting worried about you up at the big house. Put your hands on the rail, Hugo, Spread your legs. You carrying heat?”

“You saw me unload the pistol,” Hugo said. “It’s in the waistband. And the kitchen knife. I need that for eating.”

“We’ll just put those in the bag,” Mark said. “You probably won’t be eating here. I won’t say goodbye, Hugo. I’ll see you on the way out.”

“Up your nose.”

Mark shrugged. “What happened to your truck, Harry?”

“They took it.”

“Somebody took your truck? Did you tell them who you were?” Mark was incredulous. “Hell, this means war. They were wondering whether to take a big force Outside. Now they’ll have to.”

“Maybe.” Harry didn’t seem as pleased as Mark thought he would.

Dan Forrester cleared his throat. “Mark, did Charlie Sharps get here all right? There would have been a couple of dozen people with him.”

“Was he coming here?”

“Yes. Senator Jellison’s ranch.”

“We never saw him.” Mark looked embarrassed. So did Harry. It must be common enough to them, Dan thought sadly: Someone never got somewhere, and the only question was, would the survivor make a scene?

Harry broke an uncomfortable silence.

“I’ve got a message for the Senator, and Dr. Forrester isn’t walking so good. Have you got transportation?”

Mark looked thoughtful. “Guess we’d better telegraph that request in,” he said. “Wait here. Watch the road for me, Harry, I’ll be right back.” Mark spread both hands wide and waved from his waist, making it look casual like a shrug so that Hugo Beck wouldn’t figure out that he was signaling, then went off into the bushes.

Dan Forrester watched with interest. He’d read his Kipling. He wondered if Hugo Beck had.

The sun was falling behind the mountains; golden light and violent reds showed beneath the edges of the cloud cover. Sunrises and sunsets had been spectacular since Hammerfall, and, Dan Forrester knew, they would be for a long time. When Tamboura blew up in 1814, the dust it sent into the sky kept sunsets brilliant for two years; and that was only one volcano.

Dan Forrester sat in the cab of the truck with the taciturn driver. Harry and Hugo Beck were in back under a tarpaulin. There was no other traffic on the road, and Forrester appreciated the compliment they’d paid him. Or was it for Harry? Perhaps both together were worth the gasoline when neither alone would have been. They drove through a light drizzle, and the truck heater felt good on Dan’s feet and legs.

There were no dead bodies. It was the first thing Dan noticed: nothing dead to be seen. The houses looked like houses, with someone living in every one of them. A few had sandbagged defenses, but there were many that had no signs of defenses at all. Strange, almost weird, that there should be a place where people felt safe enough to have glass windows without shutters.

And he saw two flocks of sheep, as well as horses and cattle. He saw signs of organized activity everywhere — newly cleared fields, some being plowed with teams of horses (no tractors that he could see), others still in process of clearing with men working to carry boulders and pile them into stone walls. The men generally had weapons on their belts, but not all of them were armed. By the time they came to the large driveway up to the big stone house, it had sunk in: For a few minutes, possibly for as much as a whole day, Dan Forrester was safe. He could count on living until dawn.

It was a strange feeling.

There were men waiting for them on the porch. They waved Dan Forrester on into the house without speaking to him. George Christopher jerked his thumb at Harry. “They need you inside,” he said.

“In a minute.” Harry helped Hugo Beck get down from the truck, then lifted off Forrester’s backpack. When he turned, George had his shotgun pointed at Hugo’s midsection.

“I brought him,” Harry said. “You must have heard that on the telegraph.”

“We heard about Dr. Forrester. Not this creep. Beck, you were put on the road. I sent you out myself. Didn’t I remember to say ‘Don’t come back’? I’m sure I did.”

“He’s with me,” Harry repeated.

“Harry, have you lost your mind? This scummy little thief isn’t worth—”

“George, if I have to start going around Christopher territory, the Senator will no doubt tell you any news he thinks you should hear.”

“Don’t push it,” George said; but the shotgun moved slightly, so it wasn’t pointed at anyone. “Why?”

“You can put him back on the road if you like,” Harry said. “But I think you should listen to him first.”

Christopher thought about it for a moment. Then he shrugged. “They’re waiting inside. Let’s go.”

Hugo Beck stood before his judges. “I came bringing information,” he said, too softly.

His judges were few. Deke Wilson, Al Hardy, George Christopher. And the others. It struck Harry as it had the rest: The astronauts looked like gods. Harry recognized Baker from his photograph on the cover of Time, and it wasn’t hard to know who the others were. The lovely woman who didn’t speak must be the Soviet kosmonaut. Harry burned to talk to her. Meanwhile, there were other things to be said.

“Do you know what you’re doing, Harry?” Al Hardy asked. His tone made it a sincere question, as if he were half certain that Harry had lost his mind. “You’re the information service. Not Beck.”

“I know,” Harry said. “I thought you should have this firsthand. It’s a little hard to believe.”

“And that I can believe,” George Christopher said.

“Don’t I get a seat?” Harry asked. Hardy waved him toward a chair and Harry settled back, wishing that Hugo would show more backbone. His behavior reflected on Harry. This reception wasn’t what Harry was used to, and it was Beck that caused it. No china cups and coffee. No shot of whiskey.

The balance of power was life and death at the Stronghold. One played the game well or stayed out of it. Harry tried to stay out of it, enjoy his utility without getting involved in local politics. This time he’d had to play. Had he seriously offended Christopher? And did he give a damn? It was strange, how Harry’s macho instincts had kicked in after Hammerfall.

“We put him on the road,” George Christopher was saying. “Him and that Jerry Owen, on my orders. Hell, even the Shire threw them out, and those scummy jerks tried to live by stealing off the rest of us, and Owen tried teaching communism to my ranch-hands! Beck comes back in over my dead body.”

There was a chuckle from the back of the room, from either Leonilla Malik or Pieter Jakov. No one paid any attention. There was nothing humorous in the situation, and Harry wondered if he’d gone too far. “While you’re discussing Hugo Beck, Dr. Forrester is about dead on his feet,” Harry said. “Can you do something for him, or does it depend on getting Beck settled first?”

Al Hardy didn’t look away from the center of the room, where Christopher was glaring at Beck. “Eileen,” he called. “Take Dr. Forrester out to the kitchen and take care of him.”

“Right.” Eileen came in; she must have been standing in the hall. She led Dan Forrester out. The astrophysicist followed woodenly, clearly about to pass out from exhaustion.

Hugo Beck licked his thick lips. “I’ll settle for a meal,” Hugo said, sweating. “H-hell, I’d settle for a stale soda cracker. I just want to know you’re still here.”

That earned him puzzled looks. “We’re here,” said Al Hardy. “Have you got information or not? I haven’t wakened the Senator yet, and he wants to talk to Harry.”

Hugo gulped. “I’ve been with the bandits. The New Brotherhood Army.”

“Son of a bitch,” Deke Wilson said.

“How long?” Al Hardy demanded. He was suddenly alert. “Did you learn anything?”

“Or,” Christopher asked, “did you just run the first chance you got?”

“I learned enough to want my damn brain wiped clean,” Hugo said, and Harry nodded; it was the strict truth.

“Maybe you’d better tell us,” Hardy said. He turned toward the kitchen. “Alice, get us a glass of water.”

He’s got their attention, Harry thought. Now, goddammit, talk like a man!

“There are over a thousand of them,” Hugo said. He watched Deke Wilson flinch at that. “Maybe ten percent are women, maybe more. It doesn’t matter much. Most of the women are armed. I couldn’t tell who was really in charge. It seems to be a committee. Other than that, they’re pretty well organized, but God, they’re madder than hatters” This crazy preacher is one of the leaders—”

Deke Wilson broke in. “Preacher? Did they give up cannibalism, then?”

Hugo swallowed and shook his head. “No. The Angels of the Lord have not given up cannibalism.”

“I’d better get the Senator.” Al Hardy left the room. Alice Cox came in with a glass of water, and looked around uncertainly.

“Just put it down on the table,” George Christopher said. “Hugo, you may as well wait to tell your story.”

Hugo said, “I told you why I left the Shire. My own land. Mine, dammit! They were giving me twice the work of anyone else. After Hammerfall they said their claim on the land was as good as anybody’s, right? All of us equals, just the way I set it up. Well, every damned one of them had to prove he was my equal some way, now they all had the chance.”

Nobody answered.

“All I want is work and a place to sleep,” Hugo said. He looked around the room. What he saw was not good: Christopher’s contempt for a man who couldn’t handle his own hands; Deke Wilson afraid to listen, afraid not to; Eileen standing at the door, the spacewoman in her chair, both taking it all in and giving nothing back; Harry looking sour and wondering if he should have brought Hugo after all; Mayor Seitz…

The Mayor stood up suddenly and swung a chair into place. Hugo dropped into it, hard. “Thanks,” he whispered. The Mayor silently handed Hugo the glass of water and went back to his own place.

Leonilla spoke softly to Pieter. The room was still and everyone heard the fluid syllables. They looked at her, and she translated. “A meeting of the Presidium,” she said. “At least it is as I imagine such meetings must have been. Excuse me.”

George Christopher frowned, then took a chair. They waited a few moments longer, and Al Hardy came in leading the Senator. He stopped in the doorway and spoke down the hall. “Alice, could you ride up for Randall? And Mr. Hamner, I think. Better take horses for them.”

Senator Jellison wore carpet slippers and a dressing gown over slacks and white shirt, his gray-white hair only partially combed. He came into the room and nodded to everyone, then looked at Harry. “Welcome back,” he said. “We were getting worried about you. Al, why hasn’t anyone brought Harry a cup of tea?”

“I’ll see to it,” Hardy said.

“Thank you.” Jellison went to his high-backed chair and sat. “Sorry to keep you waiting. They like me to take a nap in the afternoon. Mr. Beck, has anyone made you any promises?”

“Just Harry.” The gift of a chair had restored some of Hugo’s composure. “I get to leave here alive. That’s all.”

“All right. Tell your story.”

Hugo nodded. “You put Jerry Owen and me on the road, remember? Jerry was mad enough to kill. He talked about… well, revenge, about the seeds of rebellion he’d planted in your men, Mr. Christopher.”

George smiled broadly. “They damn near kicked him to death.”

“Right, Jerry couldn’t move very fast, and I didn’t want to go on alone. It was spooky out there. Somebody shot at us once, no warning, just zing! and we ran like hell. We went south because that’s the way the road faced, and Jerry wasn’t in shape to climb up into the Sierra. Neither was I. We walked all day and most of the night, and I don’t know how far we got because all we had was an old Union Oil map and everything’s changed now. Jerry found some grain growing by the side of the road. It looked like weeds, but he said we could eat it, and the next day we managed a fire and cooked it. It’s good.”

“Okay, we don’t need the story of every meal you scrounged,” Christopher growled.

“Sorry. The next part’s important, though. Jerry was telling me weird things. Did you know he was wanted by the FBI and everyone else too? He was a general — in the” — Hugo paused — “New Brotherhood Liberation Army.” Hugo paused to let it sink in.

“New Brotherhood,” Al Hardy mused. “I guess that does fit.”

“I think so,” Hugo said. “Anyway, he was using the Shire as a hideout. He kept his mouth shut and we never knew, until after Hammerfall. We were probably in Mr. Wilson’s territory, and I was thinking about ditching Jerry. Being slowed down didn’t bother me, but how was I going to join Mr. Wilson’s crew if Jerry wanted to start a people’s revolution? If I’d seen so much as a lighted window I’d have been gone, and Jerry’d never have known where.

“But we didn’t see anything much. A truck once, but it didn’t stop. And barricaded farmhouses, where they set the dogs on us if we tried to get close. So we kept going south and getting hungrier, and about the third or fourth day we saw this scraggly-looking bunch of people. Every one of them looked like he’d lost his last chance, but there were at least fifty of them, and they didn’t look like they were starving.

“I was thinking about running, but Jerry walked right up to them. He called to me to come on with him, but they didn’t look like any outfit I wanted to join. I thought it might be the cannibals Harry told us about, but they didn’t look dangerous, they just looked finished.”

“No Army uniforms? No guns?” Deke Wilson asked.

“I didn’t get close enough to see what weapons they had, but there sure as hell weren’t any Army uniforms,” Hugo Beck said.

“Then that wasn’t the New Brotherhood Army—”

“Just listen,” Harry interrupted. “He’s not finished yet.”

Eileen came in with a tray. “Here’s your tea, Harry.” She poured a cup and set it on the table next to the mailman. “And yours, Senator.”

Beck looked at Harry’s tea, then sipped at his glass of water. “Well, Jerry went in with that outfit, and I split. I figured I’d seen the last of him, and I could get back up to Mr. Wilson’s turf again. Instead I ran into an old lady and her daughter. They lived in a little house in the middle of an almond grove, and they didn’t have any guns. Nobody’d bothered them because they lived way off the road, and they hadn’t been out since Hammerfall. The girl was seventeen, and she wasn’t in good shape. She had fever, bad, probably from the water. I took care of them.” Hugo Beck said it defiantly. “And I earned my keep, too.”

“What did you live on?” Mayor Seitz asked.

“Almonds, mostly. Some canned stuff the old lady had put up. And a couple of bushels of potatoes.”

“What happened to them?” George Christopher demanded.

“I’m coming to that.” Hugo Beck shuddered. “I stayed there three weeks. Cheryl was pretty sick, but I made them boil all the water, and she came out of it. She was looking pretty good, when — ” Beck broke off, and visibly fought for self-control. There were tears in his eyes. “I really got to like her.” He broke off again. Everyone waited.

“We couldn’t go anywhere because of Mrs. Horne. Cheryl’s grandmother. Mrs. Horne kept telling us to light out, leave before somebody found us, but we couldn’t do that.” Beck shrugged. “So they found us. First a jeep went by. It didn’t stop, but the people in it looked tough. We thought we’d make a run for it, but we hadn’t got a mile when a truck came up to the house, and people got out of it looking for us. I guess they tracked us, because it wasn’t long after that about ten people with guns came and grabbed us. They didn’t talk to us at all. They just threw Cheryl and me in the truck and drove. I think some of the others moved into the house with Mrs. Home. From what happened afterwards I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t waste a place like that. And I’m sure now they killed her, but we didn’t know that.

“They took us a few miles in the truck. It was dark by the time we got there. They had campfires. Three or four anyway. I kept asking what was going to happen to us, and they kept telling me to shut up. Finally one of them told me with his fist, and I didn’t say anything else. When we got to the camp they threw us in with a couple of dozen other people. There were others with guns all around.

“Some of the people in with us were hurt, covered with blood. Gunshot wounds, stab wounds, broken bones…” Hugo shuddered again. “We were glad we didn’t resist. Two of the hurt ones died while we were waiting. There was barbed wire all around us, and three guys with machine guns watching, and all these other people with guns were running around.”

“Uniforms?” Deke Wilson asked.

“Some. One of the guys with a machine gun. A black man with corporal’s stripes.” Hugo seemed reluctant to talk now. The words came slowly, with effort.

Al Hardy looked a question at the Senator. He got a nod and turned to Eileen, who stood in the doorway. He tilted his head toward the study, and she left, walking quickly so she wouldn’t miss the story.

“Cheryl and I got the prisoners to talking,” Hugo Beck said. “There’d been a war, and these lost. They were farmers, they had a setup like Mr. Wilson’s, I think, a bunch of neighbors trying to be left alone.”

“Where was this?” Deke Wilson asked.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They’re not there anymore,” Hugo said.

Eileen came in with a half-full glass. She took it to Hugo Beck. “Here.”

He drank, looked startled, and drank again, downing half of it. “Thank you. Oh, God, thank you.” The whiskey helped his voice, but it didn’t change the haunted look he gave them. “Then the preacher came,” Hugo said. “He came up to the barbed wire and started in. Listen, I was so scared I don’t remember everything he said. His name was Henry Armitage, and we were in the hands of the Angels of the Lord. He kept talking, sometimes just talk like anybody sometimes in a singsong voice with a lot of ‘my brethren’ and ‘ye people of God, hear and believe.’ We’d all been spared, he said. We’d lived through the end of the world, and we had a purpose in this life. We had to complete the Lord’s work. The Hammer of God had fallen, and the people of God had a holy mission. The part I really listened to was when he told us we could join up or we could die. If we joined we’d get to shoot the ones who didn’t join, and then—”

“Just a minute.” George Christopher’s voice was a mixture of interest and incredulity. “Henry Armitage was a preacher on the radio. I used to listen to him. He was a good man. Now you say he’s crazy?”

Hugo had trouble looking Christopher in the eye, but his voice was firm enough. “Mr. Christopher, he’s so far around the bend that he can’t see the bend from there. Listen, people, you know there were people driven nuts by Hammerfall. Armitage had more reason than most.”

“He made sense. He always made sense. All right, go on. What drove him nuts, and why would he tell you about it?”

“Why, it was part of his speech! He told us how he knew the Hammer of God was bringing an end to the world. He warned the world as best he could — radio, television, newspaper—”

“That part’s straight,” George said.

“And on the last day he took fifty good friends, not just members of his congregation, but friends, and his family, up to the top of a mountain to watch. They saw three of the strikes. They went through that weird rain that started with pellets of hot mud and ended like Noah’s Flood, and Armitage waited for the angels.

“None of us laughed when he said that. But then it wasn’t just the prisoners listening, a lot of the… Angels of the Lord, they call themselves, were circled around listening. Every so often they’d shout, ‘Amen!’ and wave their guns at us. We didn’t dare laugh.

“Armitage waited for the angels to come for his flock. They never came. By and by they went downhill again, looking for safety.

“They went along the shore of the San Joaquin Sea, and everywhere they saw corpses. Some of Armitage’s friends lost hope and died. He was in despair. They found all kinds of horrors, places where the cannibals had been. Some of them got sick, a couple got shot when they tried to go up to a half-submerged school—”

“Get on with it,” said the Senator.

“Yessir, I’m trying. The next part’s hazy. All this time Armitage was trying to figure out where the hell all the angels had gone — so to speak. Somewhere in his wanderings he got it. Also, Jerry Owen fits in somehow.”

“Owen?”

“Yes. This was the group he’d joined. According to Jerry, it was him who put new life into Armitage. I don’t know if any of that’s true. I do know that just after Jerry hooked up with him, Armitage ran into the cannibal band and now it’s calling itself the New Brotherhood Army, and it’s led by the Angels of the Lord.”

“And Jerry Owen is their general?” George Christopher said. He seemed to think that was funny.

“No, sir. I don’t know what he is. He’s some kind of leader, but I don’t think he’s all that important. Let me tell this please. I have to tell somebody.” He lifted the whiskey glass and stared at it. “This is what Armitage told the cannibals, and this is what he told us.”

Hugo gave himself time to think by finishing the whiskey. Hugo was doing fine, Harry thought; he was not going to disgrace Harry.

“’The work of Hammerfall is not finished,’” said Hugo. “’God never intended to make an end of mankind. It is God’s intent that civilization be destroyed, so that man can live again as God intended. In the sweat of his brow he shall eat his bread. No longer shall he pollute the earth and the sea and the air with the garbage of an industrial civilization that leads him further and further from God’s way. Certain of us were spared to finish the work done by the Hammer of God.’

“And these who were spared for that work are the Angels of the Lord. They can do no wrong. Murder and cannibalism are something they do when they must, and it doesn’t stain their souls. Armitage urged us to join the Angels.

“Now a couple of hundred people were waving machine guns and shotguns and cleavers and butcher knives, and this one girl was waving a fork, I swear it, the kind of twopronged fork that comes with a carving set — and all that was pretty convincing. But Armitage was convincing. Mr. Christopher, you’ve heard him, he can be damned convincing.” Christopher was silent.

“And the others were shouting ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Amen,’ and by God there was Jerry out there, waving a hatchet and shouting with the rest of them! Jerry had bought it, all of it, I could see it in his eyes. He looked at me like he’d never met me before, like I hadn’t let him live on my place for months.”

The Senator looked up from his thronelike chair. He’d been listening with half-closed eyes. Now he said, “Just a minute, Hugo. Didn’t you found the Shire with just this in mind? Natural living, everything organic and self-sufficient, no dominance games and no pollution. Wasn’t that just what you were after? Because it sounds like this Armitage wants the same things.”

The suggestion startled Hugo Beck. “Oh, no, sir. No. I just about had enough of that before Hammerfall, and afterward… Senator, we’d never realized just how much modern stuff we had. Hey, we had two microwave ovens! And that goddam windmill never made enough electricity to keep batteries charged, much less run the microwaves, and after the Hamner hit, it blew over in the hurricane! We tried growing the garden with no sprays, just organic fertilizer, and it wasn’t humans that ate most of that crop, it was bugs! After that I wanted to spray, but we didn’t, and every damned day somebody had to sit there in the dirt picking bugs off the lettuces. And we had the truck, and a rototiller, and a power mower. We had a hi-fi and Galadriel’s record collection and strobe lights and electric guitars. We had a dishwasher and a clothes dryer, and we hung the clothes out to dry because it saved gas. Oh, sure, we washed clothes by hand sometimes, too, but there was always some special occasion when we didn’t want to bother.

“And aspirin, and needles and pins, and a sewing machine, and a big cast-iron stove made in Maine for God’s sake…”

“I take it you did not agree with Armitage, then,” Senator Jellison said.

“No. But I kept my mouth shut and watched Jerry. He seemed important, and I figured if he could join up and get his own hatchet, so could I. Cheryl and I talked about it, in whispers, because they didn’t put up with any of us interrupting Armitage, and we agreed, we’d join up. I mean, what choice did we have? So we joined. As a matter of fact, all of us joined. That time. Two backed down later, at the last—”

It seemed that Hugo’s throat closed on him. His haunted gaze roamed about the room and found no sympathy. All in a rush he said, “First we have to kill the ones who won’t join. We’d have been given knives for that, I think, but I don’t know because everybody joined. Then we’d stew them. That we did, because four prisoners were dead from gunshot wounds. A rabbity little guy told us we couldn’t use two of them because they didn’t look healthy enough. Only the healthy ones! I talked to him later, and…” Hugo blinked.

“Never mind. There were two big stewpots. We had to do the butchering. Cheryl kept getting sick. I had to help her. They gave us knives, and we cut those people up, and this rabbity doctor inspected everything before it went into the pot. I saw one woman pick up a butcher knife and stand there looking at this… bottom half of a dead man, and then she threw up, and then she ran at a guard and they shot her and the rabbity man looked her over and then we butchered her, too.

“And all the time the… stew… was cooking, Armitage kept preaching. He could go for hours without stopping. All the Angels said that was a miraculous sign, that a man his age could preach without getting tired. He kept shouting that nothing was forbidden to the Angels of the Lord, that our sins were forgiven, and then it was time, and we ate and one guy got through the butchering all right, but he couldn’t eat, and they made us hold him down and cut his throat.”

Hugo ran out of breath, and the room was silent.

“And you ate,” Senator Jellison said.

“I ate.”

“You didn’t really think you could stay here after that?” George Christopher spoke almost in kindness.

Harry was looking at the women. Eileen was composed, but Harry had not seen her eyes meet Hugo’s, not once. But the Soviet kosmonaut was staring at him in naked horror. Harry remembered the way his sister had stared at an enormous spider crawling in the bathtub she had been about to fill. The woman’s eyes were wide, and she seemed to be forcing herself back in her chair. She couldn’t turn away.

“Now, notice! The typical capitalist shows certain predictable tendencies under stress, of which murder and cannibalism—”

Harry hoped to God nobody looked his way. Nobody else was fighting an urge to laugh. And if it had been Harry up there in front of the table, Harry would have been under the table.

“No. Not really,” said Hugo, “not here, not anywhere. That’s their power. Once you’ve eaten human meat, where can you go? You’re one of them then, with the crazy preacher to tell you it’s all right. You’re an Angel of the Lord. You can do no wrong, except if you run, and then you’re an apostate.” His voice dropped and became toneless. “It’s their power, and it works. Cheryl wouldn’t leave with me. She was going to turn me in. She was, she really was. So I killed her. It was the only way I could get out, and I killed her, and… and I wish I hadn’t had to, but what could I do?”

“How long were you with them?” Al Hardy said.

“About three weeks. We had another war, and we got more prisoners. It went the same as before, only now I was outside the wire carrying a pistol and shouting hallelujah. We moved north again, toward Mr. Wilson’s place, and when I saw Harry I didn’t dare speak to him. But when they let him go—”

“They let you go?” Senator Jellison said.

“Yes, sir. But they took my truck,” Harry said. “I have a message for you, from the Angels of the Lord. That’s why they let me go. When they caught me I told them I was your mailman, that I was under your protection, and I showed them that letter you wrote. They laughed, but then Jerry Owen said—”

“Owen again,” Christopher said. “I knew we should have killed him.”

“No, sir, I don’t think you should have,” Harry said. “If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

“So Owen is one of the leaders,” Al Hardy said.

Harry shrugged. “They listen to him. But he doesn’t give any orders, or at least I never saw him give any. But he said I’d be the perfect one to bring you a message, and I’ve got it here. I’d got a couple of miles along the road when Hugo caught up to me, and after he told me what it was like back there I thought you ought to hear that before you read the letter they sent.”

“Yes. You’ve done well, Harry,” Jellison said. “Well, George? It was on your orders that Beck was expelled.”

Christopher looked stunned by all that he’d heard. “Twenty-four hours? Let him stay overnight, and give him three meals fit for a man to eat.”

“I think we ought to read that message before we decide anything,” AI Hardy said. “And there’s a lot more information we need. Hugo, what’s their strength? You said a thousand. How good is that estimate?”

“It’s what Jerry Owen said Sergeant Hooker had told him. I think it’s about right. But they’ve got more. They’ve got Bakersfield. It isn’t organized yet, but they own it, and their people are sifting through what’s left of the city, looking for weapons. And recruits.”

“So there’s more than a thousand?”

“Yes, I think so, but maybe not all armed. And maybe not recruited all the way. They will be.”

“So they could possibly double that strength after they have an… initiation ceremony,” Hardy said. “We’re in trouble. You mentioned Sergeant Hooker. Who is he?”

Beck shrugged. “He’s as close to a leader as anyone they have. A big black Army man, Army uniform anyway. There are generals and like that, but Sergeant Hooker outranks them all. I didn’t see him much. He has his own tent, and when he goes anywhere they drive him in a car with plenty of bodyguards. And Armitage always talks polite to him, as polite as he ever is to anybody.”

“A black man,” George Christopher said. He looked around at Rick Delanty, who had sat silently during Beck’s story. Then he looked hurriedly away.

“There are other black leaders,” Beck said. “They spend a lot of time with Hooker. And you never say anything bad about blacks, or chicanos, or anybody else. First couple of days they just slap you for it, like if a black man says ‘honky’ or a white dude says ‘rigger,’ but if you don’t learn fast they figure you’re not really converted…”

“Don’t mind me,” Rick Delanty said. “I’ve got all the equality I ever wanted.”

Harvey Randall and Tim Hamner came into the room. They brought folding chairs from the library. Eileen went to Tim and whispered hurriedly, and everyone tried to ignore the growing horror on Hamner’s face. Alice Cox brought in lighted kerosene lamps. Their cheery yellow glow seemed out of place. “Shall I light a fire, Senator?” Alice asked.

“Please. Hugo, did you see their arsenal?”

“Yes, sir. There were a lot of guns. Machine guns, and some cannon, and mortars—”

“I need details,” Al Hardy said. “We all do, and things are getting busy around here. It might take more than one day to get all the useful information he has. Mr. Christopher, could you reconsider?”

Christopher looked as if he were going to be ill. “I don’t want him here. He can’t stay here.”

Hardy shrugged. “And the Governor? Hugo, what do you know about Lieutenant Governor Montross?”

“Nothing, except he’s there,” Hugo said. “He stays in officer country, and when he goes anywhere there’s a lot of bodyguards. Like Sergeant Hooker. The Governor never did talk to us, but we got messages in his name sometimes.”

“But who’s in control of this group?” Hardy demanded.

“I don’t know! I think it’s a committee. I never got to talk to the top bosses — mine was a black woman named Cassie, and she was big, and she was mean, and did she ever believe! The real bosses were Armitage, and Sergeant Hooker. The Governor, maybe. A black city man named Alim Nassor—”

“Alim Nassor? I know him,” Randall said. “We did an interview with him once. A natural leader. Very powerful in the Watts area.”

Eileen left Tim and went to kneel next to Randall. As she whispered, Harry watched with curiosity. Could a TV reporter be shocked? Yes. Definitely. And scared shitless, if Harry was any judge. He wasn’t the only one. Deke Wilson had been looking sicker and sicker. It wasn’t surprising that Deke’s territory had been smaller every time Harry went down there. And now the New Brotherhood was at Deke’s main area.

George looked disgusted. Finally he said, “I want to throw up every time I look at him. Senator, how much whiskey do you have left? I’ll trade you a pint of my cheap stuff for one stiff drink right now.”

“The trade isn’t needed,” Jellison said. “Eileen, would you bring a bottle, please? I think we could all use a drink. And I gather there’s more news. Harry, you mentioned a letter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps I should read it while we all have a drink.”

Harry got up and went to the Senator’s chair. He took an envelope from an inner pocket and gave it to Jellison. The Senator opened it carefully and took out several sheets of paper. They were handwritten by someone who’d used a broad-nib pen, someone with excellent handwriting. Harry wanted very badly to see what that letter said, but he went back to his seat.

Eileen brought in a full bottle of Old Fedcal and poured for everyone. No one refused. She filled Hugo Beck’s glass and he gulped it eagerly.

And he’ll stay drunk the rest of his life if he can find booze, Harry thought.

“Are they starving or just hungry?” Christopher asked.

“Not even hungry,” Hugo said. “Their doctor — the rabbity guy — says they find enough vitamin pills, and I ate well myself.” He saw their faces close up and cried, “No! I only ate human meat twice! At the rituals! Most of what they fed us came from supermarkets, but there were some animals, too. They don’t need cannibalism. They only do it when there’s new recruits. It’s a ritual.”

“A damn useful ritual,” said Harvey Randall. Heads turned toward him. “Look at Hugo. They’ve circumcised his soul. It’s a mark on him that anyone can recognize. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it, Hugo?”

Hugo nodded.

“Suppose I told you it isn’t visible at all?” Hugo looked puzzled. Harvey said, “Right. You know it’s there.”

“Some of them like the taste,” Hugo whispered, but they heard him.

Deke Wilson spoke in a voice filled with terror. “And I’m next! They’re coming for me in four days!”

“Perhaps we can stall them.” Jellison looked up from the letter. “This is an interesting document. There is a proclamation of authority by Acting Governor Montross. Then there is a letter to me, inviting me to discuss the terms under which my organization can be integrated into his own. It’s politely worded, but quite peremptory, and although he doesn’t threaten us directly, there is discussion of unfortunate incidents in which various groups refused to recognize his authority, and had to be treated as rebels.” Jellison shrugged. “But there’s no mention of cannibals or Angels of the Lord.”

“You don’t mean… don’t you believe me, Senator?” Hugo Beck asked in despair.

“I believe you,” Jellison said. “We all do.” He looked around the room and got nods from the others. “Incidentally, this gives us two weeks, and mentions Deke’s White River area as well as our own. That may be simply to get Deke off his guard, but it may also mean they’ve delayed their attack—”

“I think they won’t fight you just yet,” Hugo Beck said. “They’d just found out about… another place. I think they’ll go there first.”

“Where?” Hardy demanded.

Visibly, Hugo considered trying to bargain, and decided against it. “The San Joaquin Nuclear Project. They just found out the plant’s still operating. It set them crazy.”

Johnny Baker spoke for the first time. “I didn’t know there was a nuclear plant in the San Joaquin Valley.”

“It wasn’t on line yet,” Harvey Randall said. “It’s still under construction. I think they got it to the testing stage before Hammerfall. There wasn’t much publicity, because of the environmentalists.”

The kosmonauts spoke in excited Russian. Baker and Delanty joined in, speaking much more slowly. Then Baker said, “We were looking for an operating power plant. We thought Sacramento might have survived. Where is this San Joaquin plant? We’ve got to save it.”

“Save it?” George Christopher’s face was gray. “Can we save ourselves? Dammit, I don’t believe it! How could that cannibal army grow so fast?”

“Mohammed,” Harvey Randall said.

“What?”

“When Mohammed began he had five followers. In four months he controlled Arabia. In a couple of years he controlled half the world. And the New Brotherhood has the same kind of growth incentive.”

Mayor Seitz shook his head. “Senator… I just don’t know. Can we stop that outfit? Maybe we ought to head for the High Sierra while we’ve got the chance.”

There was a long silence.

The Magician

Dan Forrester dozed in front of the woodburning kitchen stove. His feet had been washed and bandaged. He’d taken a shot of insulin, hoping that it was still good, fearing that it wasn’t. It was very hard to stay awake.

Maureen Jellison and Mrs. Cox fussed over him, bringing him clean clothes — dry clothes! — and pouring him hot tea. It was very pleasant to sit and feel safe. He could hear voices from the other room. Dan tried to follow the conversation, but he kept falling asleep, then jerking himself awake.

Dan Forrester had spent his life working out the rules of the universe. He had never tried to personalize it. Yet when the Hammer fell, a small bright core of anger had burned in Dan Forrester.

He had forgotten that anger, the anger he felt when he first learned what it meant to be a diabetic. The rules of the universe had never favored diabetics. Dan had long since accepted that. Methodically he set out to survive anyway.

Every day he was still alive. Tired to death, hiding from cannibals, hungrier every day, fully aware of what was happening to his insulin and to his feet, he had kept moving. The steady warmth of anger had never relaxed… but something within him had relaxed now. Physical comfort and the comfort of friendship let him remember that he was tired, and ill, and his feet had turned to broken wood. He fought it because of what he could hear from the next room:

Cannibals. New Brotherhood Army. An ultimatum for the Senator. Thousand men… they’ve taken Bakersfield, could double their numbers… Dan Forrester sighed deeply. He looked up at Maureen. “It sounds like a war is coming. Is there a paint store here?”

She frowned down at him. Others had gone mad after less than Dan Forrester had faced. “Paint store?”

“Yes.”

“I think so. There was a Standard Brands at the edge of Porterville. It was flooded, I think.”

Dan tried to discipline his thoughts. “Perhaps they kept things in plastic bags. What about fertilizer? You have that? Ammonia, for instance. They use it for—”

“I know what they use it for,” Maureen said. “Yes, we have some. Not enough for the crops.”

Forrester sighed again. “It may not get to the crops. Or maybe we can use it where we’ll be able to grow crops later. Were there many swimming pools? A swimming-pool supply store?”

“Yes, there was one of those. It’s underwater now—”

“How deep?”

She looked at him sharply. He looked terrible, but his eyes were quite sane. He knew what he was asking. “I don’t know. It will be on Al Hardy’s maps. Is it important?”

“I think so — ” He stopped abruptly. He was listening. In the other room they were talking about a nuclear power plant. Forrester stood up. He had to hold onto the chair. “Would you help me go in there, please?” His voice was apologetic, but somehow there was no way to refuse him. “Oh — one more thing. A filling station. I’ll need some drums of grease solvent.”

Maureen, mystified, helped Forrester down the hall toward the living room. “I don’t know. We have a filling station here, but it was very small. There were bigger ones in Porterville, of course, but they were under the dam and were flooded pretty badly. Why? What can you make with all that?”

Forrester had reached the living room and went in hanging on Maureen’s arm. Johnny Baker stopped talking and stared at him. So did the others. “Sorry to interrupt,” Forrester said. He looked around helplessly for a chair.

Mayor Seitz was nearest to him and got up from the couch. He went back to the library for a folding chair while Forrester took the Mayor’s place on the couch. Forrester blinked rapidly at the others. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Did someone ask where the San Joaquin Nuclear Plant is?”

“Yes,” Al Hardy said. “I know it was out there somewhere, but hell, it has to be underwater. It was right in the middle of the valley. It can’t be working—”

“It was on Buttonwillow Ridge,” Forrester said. “I looked on a map, and that’s about forty feet higher than the land around it. But I thought it would be flooded too, and I wasn’t able to get down to the edge of the San Joaquin Sea because of the cannibals.”

Hardy looked thoughtful. Eileen Hamner hurried out and came back with a map. She spread it out on the floor in front of the Senator and he and Hardy stared at it.

Maureen Jellison went across the room and sat on the floor near Johnny Baker. Their hands sought each other and clasped involuntarily.

“We have that area about fifty feet underwater,” Al Hardy announced. “Hugo, are you sure the plant’s operating?”

“The Angels think so. As I said, it set them wild.”

“Why?” Christopher asked.

“It’s a Holy War,” Hugo Beck said. “The Angels of the Lord exist only to destroy the forbidden works of man. What’s left of industry. I watched them tear into what was left of a coal-powered station. They didn’t use guns or dynamite. They swarmed over it with axes and clubs and hands. It was already wrecked, you understand. It had been flooded. But when they got through, you couldn’t tell what it had been. And all the time Armitage was shouting at them to do the work of the Lord!

“He preaches every night, same theme. Destroy the works of man. Then three days ago — I think it was three days…” Hugo counted on his fingers. “Yeah. Three days ago they heard that nuclear plant was still going. I thought Armitage would burst a blood vessel! From that moment on it was constant: Destroy that Citadel of Satan. Look, nuclear power! Kind of the epitome of everything the Angels hate, you know? It even had Jerry Owen excited. He used to talk about how they might save a few things. Hydroelectric plants, maybe, if they could be rebuilt without hurting the Earth. But he hated nuclear power plants before Hammerfall.”

“Do they destroy all technology?” Al Hardy asked.

Hugo Beck shook his head. “Sergeant Hooker and his people kept anything they think they can use, anything that might have military value. But they were all agreed, they didn’t want that nuclear plant in the valley. Jerry Owen talked about how he knew ways to wreck it.”

“We can’t let them do that,” Dan Forrester said. He leaned forward and spoke intently. He had forgotten where he was, the long tramp northward, possibly even Hammerfall itself. “We have to save the power plant. We can rebuild a civilization if we have electricity.”

“He’s right,” Rick Delanty said. “It’s important—”

“It’s important that we stay alive, too,” Senator Jellison said. “But we have heard that the New Brotherhood has over a thousand troops, possibly many more. We can put five hundred in the field, and many of them will not be well armed. Few have any training. We will be lucky to save this valley.”

“Dad,” Maureen said. “I think Dr. Forrester has some ideas about that. He asked me about… Dan, why did you want to know about grease solvents and swimming-pool supply shops? What were you thinking about?”

Dan Forrester sighed again. “Maybe I shouldn’t suggest it. I had an idea, but you may not like it.”

“For God’s sake, man,” Al Hardy said. “If you know something that can help us, say it! What?”

“Well, you’ve probably already thought of it,” Forrester said.

“Goddamm — ” Christopher began.

Senator Jellison held up his hand. “Dr. Forrester, believe me, you won’t offend us. Please, what did you have in mind?”

Forrester shrugged. “Mustard gas. Thermite bombs. Napalm. And I think we can make nerve gas, but I’m not sure.”

There was a long silence, then Senator Jellison said, low and under his breath but everybody heard, “I will be dipped in shit.”

The Expedition

Tim Hamner ate his dinner while Eileen packed clothing into a makeshift backpack. There was a strong chill wind coming down from the slopes of the Sierra. It blew wispy sleet past the cabin, but failed to find any chinks. Eileen’s tiny kerosene lamp gave off a warm glow, and the stove kept the kitchen warm and dry. Tim was relaxed for the moment. He stared into the vent opening of the stove, watching the tiny blue flames curl and rise. “Trouble rather the tiger in his lair,” he said.

Eileen looked up. “What?”

“From the introduction of a science fiction story by Gordon Dickson. I don’t know if it’s a real quote or something Dickson made up. It went, ‘Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger.’ ”

“Can he really do it?” Eileen asked.

“Forrester? He’s a magician. If Forrester says he can make napalm and bombs and mustard gas, he can do it.” Tim sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to. I was brought up to hate poison gas. Of course, I don’t suppose it matters whether it’s gas or a bullet; dead is dead.” He reached for his rifle, then took an oily rag from a bag on the table and began wiping the barrel.

“Do you have to go?” Eileen demanded.

“We agreed not to talk about it,” Tim said.

“I don’t care what we agreed. I don’t want you to go… I-”

“I don’t like the idea much myself,” Tim said. “But what can we do? Forrester insisted. He’ll stay here and make terrible weapons to defend the Stronghold if we send reinforcements to the power plant.” Tim shook his head in admiration. “He’s the only man in the world who could blackmail both the Senator and George Christopher. You wouldn’t think he’d have the nerve, with all those apologies and eye blinking and everything, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to say one word more about weapons until they promised.”

“But why you?” Eileen demanded. She packed a newly knitted pair of socks. The wool had been carded from dog fur.

“What else am I good for?” Hamner asked. “You know better than me. You helped Hardy work up the schedules. I can’t farm, I’m not as good an engineer as Brad, I don’t ride horses well so I can’t go with Christopher’s Paul Revere troop… I may as well be part of the suicide squad.”

“For God’s sake don’t talk like that.” She left off the packing and came over to stand beside him.

He patted her belly. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back if I have to swim.” He laughed. “Or pull our famous Flying Dutchman act and drive over the water again. I intend to see our son or possibly daughter. Or twins? You already look somewhat like an inverted question mark.” Dammit, he was babbling, the fear was showing through.

“Tim…”

“Don’t make it harder, Eileen.”

“No. Well, you’re all packed.”

Tim punched the button on his watch. “We have an hour before we leave,” he said. He stood and grabbed her. “Gotcha.”

“Tim…”

“Ye-ess?”

Whatever she had been about to say, she said instead, “Did you get our reservations at the Savoy?”

“They were all booked up. I found someplace closer.”

“Goody.”

There were a dozen of them, led by Johnny Baker. Three of Deke Wilson’s ranchers. Jack Ross, a Christopher brother-in-law. Tim wasn’t surprised to see Mark Czescu and Hugo Beck among the volunteers. He recognized most of the others as valley ranchers, but one man, middle-aged and far too small for his clothes, was a stranger. Tim went over to him and introduced himself.

“Jason Gillcuddy,” the man said. “I saw your TV programs. Glad to meet you.”

“Gillcuddy. I’ve heard that name. Where?”

Jason smiled. “From my books, maybe? More likely you heard it here. Harry and I are both married to Donna, used to be Donna Adams. Her mother raised pluperfect hell about that.”

“Oh.” Tim followed Gillcuddy’s look to Harry and a slim girl, blonde, not more than nineteen, standing near Eileen. He pitched his backpack into the truck. The rifle was slung over his shoulder. “How long?” he asked.

“They’re waiting for something,” Jason said. “I don’t know what. No point in standing here. See you.” Jason went over to Harry and the girl. She embraced Gillcuddy while Harry stood watching.

Wonder what Hardy thinks of that? Tim thought. He likes everything neat. And what does it make Jason and Harry? Brothers-in-law? Husbands-in-law? The arrangement made sense, with Harry out on his rounds for weeks at a time. Someone had to work the Chicken Ranch while Harry was out. Tim found Eileen with Maureen Jellison. “My comet sure plays games with cultural patterns,” he said. He inclined his head toward Harry and Jason and Donna.

Eileen took his hand and held tightly.

“Hi, Maureen,” Tim said. “Where’s General Baker?”

“He’ll be out in a moment.”

Eileen and Maureen and Donna, they all had the same look. Tim had an impulse to laugh, but he didn’t. They looked exactly like the women in the old John Wayne movies, when the cavalry troop was about to ride out through the gates. Had they seen the movies, or had John Ford captured a truth?

A light truck drove up, and two ranch-hands jumped down. Chief Hartman got out of the cab. “Easy with that,” Hartman said. He looked around, then came over to Tim and Maureen. “Where’s the General?” he asked.

“Inside.”

“Okay. Best more than one knows anyway. Mr. Hamner, come look. We brought your radio gear.” He pointed to the boxes that the ranchers were loading in with the expedition baggage. “The set runs off a car battery. That other box contains a beam antenna. You get that to the highest place you can find, and point it at us. From the power plant that’s twenty degrees magnetic. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to hear you. We’ll listen from five minutes to until five minutes after each hour. Channel thirteen. And assume the New Brotherhood’s listening in. You got all that?”

“Yes.” Tim repeated the instructions.

Johnny Baker came out of the house. He carried a rifle and wore a pistol on his belt. Maureen went to him and held him possessively.

There certainly were a lot of grim faces showing tonight. Tim decided that looking nonchalant was a waste of effort. Mark Czescu looked indecently cheerful; but that fit. Tim had heard him asking Harry the Mailman, in all innocence, “What are we calling this, the War of Harry’s Truck?” Mark didn’t know why they were fighting, and didn’t care.

Hugo Beck was grimmer than the rest. If the Angels got their hands on the apostate, he’d have reason… but maybe he had reason now. Nobody was going near him. Poor bastard.

“What the hell are we waiting on?” Jack Ross demanded. He was built like a Christopher, a massive, choleric man. There were three fingers missing from his left hand and a scar that ran clear to his elbow, the result of an argument with a harvesting machine. His fine blond mustache was nearly invisible, a mere token.

“The scouts,” Baker said. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Rick Delanty seemed in a foul mood. He went to Baker, ignoring the others standing by. “Johnny, I want to go with you.”

“No.”

“Dammit—”

“I’ve explained before,” Baker said. He took Delanty off to one side. Tim could barely hear their voices. He strained to catch it, eavesdropping or no. “We can’t risk all of the last astronauts,” Baker said. “We can’t leave one Russian here alone, and Russians wouldn’t be any use anyway. This is a diplomatic mission. They might not be welcome.”

“Fine. Leave them here and take me.”

“And who watches out for them, Rick? They’re our friends, and we promised. ‘Visit our home,’ we said. ‘You’ll have a native guide,’ we said. You saw the way some of these farmers reacted. Russians are not popular just now.”

“Neither are blacks.”

“But you are. You’re a space hero here! Rick, we promised them, and we came down in their capsule.”

“Fine. You stay. I’ll go. Dammit, Johnny, that power plant is important.”

“I know that. Now, just remember where we’re going, and tell me what anyone will think if he sees a black man’s face from a distance. You can’t play ambassador. Shut up and soldier, Colonel Delanty.”

Rick was silent for a moment. Finally: “Yes, sir. I’d file a protest, but I don’t know the Inspector General’s address.”

Baker clapped Delanty on the shoulder, then came back to Tim. If he’d caught him eavesdropping, he didn’t mention it. “They want you inside,” he said.

Hamner blinked. “Right.” He went up to the ranch house, still holding Eileen’s hand. The swelling of her pregnancy was just beginning to show, but it threw her balance off, so that she stumbled and had to brace herself against his arm.

Jellison, Hardy and Dan Forrester were in the living room. Forrester thrust papers encased in a Ziploc Bag into Tim’s hands. “These are some more ideas I had. General Baker has copies too, but…”

“Right,” Tim said.

“If you get a chance, scout out the west shore,” Al Hardy said. “We’d like to know what’s going on over there. And there’s a list of stuff you might be able to use.”

Tim looked at the papers in his hands. Through the plastic he could see only the top sheet. It was a list: iron oxide (found in paint stores, called red pigment, red spell; also found in the rust pile in automobile wrecking yards; or can be scraped from any rusty iron and ground finely); powdered aluminum (found in paint stores as a pigment); plaster of paris…

The list was long, and most of the items seemed useless. Tim knew better. He knew that on the other sheets in the stack were the means for turning those common items into deadly weapons. He looked at Forrester. “I’d hate to have you mad at me.”

Forrester looked embarrassed. “I remember everything I read, and I read a lot.”

“Have you ever done any skin diving?” Al Hardy asked.

Strange question. “Yes.”

“Thought so,” Hardy said. “Turns out you and Randall weren’t the only ones to think of that idea. The fishing camp down by Porterville salvaged some scuba gear. They’re selling it to us along with the boats.” Hardy looked darkly at Forrester. “This expedition is expensive. You wouldn’t believe how expensive. We had to trade for the boats, and they’ll use gasoline we don’t have enough of. And all those sacks of stuff you’re taking with you. Good fertilizer…”

“I’m sorry,” Forrester said.

“Sure,” Hardy said. “Hamner, there are towns out in the valley. Under water. We’re hoping either you or Baker will have a chance to do some salvage work. Both of you have scuba experience, but the only wet suit we could buy turns out to be small. I don’t know if Baker can get into it, which means you may have to do the diving. There’s another list in that packet of papers Forrester gave you. Stuff we need. But give his first priority.”

“And we want information,” Senator Jellison said. He sounded tired, and Tim thought he looked gray, but perhaps it was only the pale yellow kerosene light. “We’ve had short radio contact with people on the other side of the San Joaquin Sea,” Jellison said. “There were oil fields out there, lots of them, and there seem to be survivors. They were friendly enough on the radio, but you never can tell. Anyway, find out what you can. Maybe the power-plant people know. We can use allies. Baker has authority to make deals. You don’t, but you know conditions here better than Johnny does. He’ll need your advice.”

Tim looked thoughtful. “Everybody has assumed the people at the power plant will be friendly,” he said. “What if they’re not? I thought my observatory… anyway, what if they’re not?”

“Baker has instructions on that,” Jellison said. “Warn them about the cannibals and leave them alone.”

“And see what you can salvage out in the valley,” Hardy said. “We can’t let all this manpower and gasoline go to waste.”

A rancher put his head in the door. “Scouts are back,” he said. “It’s okay. We have the boats.”

Hardy nodded. “All right. Hamner, get your goodbyes said. Now I’ll go find out exactly what all this cost us,” he said, with distaste. He went.

Under the black beard Dan Forrester’s lips were a hard, thin line. Forrester didn’t always show his anger. It showed now only in the way he fumbled for words before saying, “Giving up the power plant would not turn out to be an optimum solution.”

“We’ll save it. You guard the home front.” Tim went back out into the cold night. Four hours until dawn.

Maureen blinked back tears as the truck drove away. She watched the taillight dwindle and vanish on the highway south, and stood in the cold wind long after she couldn’t see it any longer.

It all made sense. If they had to send off an expedition, Johnny Baker was the logical man to lead it. People knew who he was. They’d recognize him, or at least know of him, and nobody else in the Stronghold qualified that way. George Christopher and the others on horses could move down the east side of the valley, staying up in the hills, looking for ranchers, organized valleys, anyone to recruit for the attack on the cannibals, but no one across the Sea would have heard of the Christophers, and everyone knew Johnny Baker. Johnny was a hero.

She didn’t want to go inside. In there Al Hardy and Harvey Randall would be working with Dr. Forrester, planning tomorrow’s work, locating supplies and chemicals that Forrester could use. Her father might be there, too. She didn’t want to see Harv just then, and she didn’t want to see her father.

“I’m a goddam prize in a goddam contest,” she said aloud, “in a goddam fairy tale. Why doesn’t anyone ever speak for the princess?” She could hardly blame her father for the symmetry of it all, though she was tempted. But it was all so pat, it made so much sense.

The Stronghold had to have allies. People who might join to fight the cannibals were in the hills, where men could go only on foot or horseback. They would be locals, most of them. It made good sense to send twenty locals into the hills on horseback, led by a local, a farmer, a fine horseman: George Christopher.

And the power plant had to be saved, thanks to Forrester’s gentle extortion. But, cut off from events by the sea around them, how were the defenders to know their friends from their enemies? Best to send a man with some military authority, a man any adult American would recognize in a fog on a moonless night: General Johnny Baker.

Which left Harvey Randall free to work with Dr. Forrester, whom he had known in a previous life, on the weapons to defend the Stronghold.

So the knights were riding off in three directions, and he who came back with the prize — his life — would inherit the princess and half the kingdom. They could all come back. It could happen. But when did the princess ever get her choice?

“Hello.”

She didn’t turn to look. “He’s so damn visible.”

“Yeah,” Harv said. He wondered, but in silence, how the Angels who hated the atomic plant so much would feel about the space program. Someone like Jerry Owen would recognize Baker as fast as any power-plant operator would. “That’s why he’s there,” he said. When she didn’t answer, didn’t even turn, he went back inside.

There were four boats for twenty men. Two were cabin cruisers, small fiberglass boats used in inland lakes, powered by outboards. There was a twenty-foot open dory, also with an outboard; and there was the Cindy Lu. She was a bomb. Twenty feet long, and only wide enough for two people to sit in the tiny cockpit. The rest of the boat was an enormous inboard engine covered with bright chrome.

Cindy Lu had lost most of her bright tangerine metallicflake paint. The chrome didn’t glow when Johnny Baker played a flashlight across her. She was a nautical drag-racer, but she wouldn’t go very fast with an oil-drum barge hooked behind her and loaded with supplies.

“This was quite a find,” said Horrie Jackson. “We can use her to—”

“She’s gorgeous! Who cares what she’s for?”

The fishing-camp leader chortled. “Isn’t she just? But the Senator wanted something that could tow a load. And since I’m comin’ along I’d as soon have something fast. Just in case we have to run away from anything.”

“Were not going there to run away,” Baker told him.

Jackson’s grin was wide. He was missing a tooth. “General, I’m going because they hired me. Some of my boys are going because the Senator’s man said he’d take their women up into that valley and keep ’em there for the winter. I don’t know what the last astronaut is doing here.”

“Don’t you care?” Baker demanded. “Isn’t it worth saving? It could be the last nuclear power plant on Earth!”

Jackson shook his head. “General, after what I’ve seen T can’t think more than a day ahead. and right now all I know is you’re going to feed me awhile. I remember…” His brow furrowed. “Seems so long ago. The papers were screaming about how the gov’mint was putting an atomic plant right next to us and if a melt-down happened… I don’t remember. But I can’t get excited about saving an atomic plant.”

“Or anything else,” Jason Gillcuddy said. “Disaster syndrome.”

“Let’s board,” Horrie Jackson said coldly.

Tim Hammer made his choice: One of the boats had an awning, protection from the drizzle. He sat next to Hugo Beck. The man must have had enough of being avoided. Mark and Gillcuddy boarded the same boat. Horrie Jackson took the pilot’s chair. then looked around to find that Johnny Baker was in command of Cindy Lu.

“I don’t suppose she’ll be too fast for an astronaut,” he called “but you won’t get so wet under the awning.”

Baker laughed. “What’s a little rain to a man in love?” He activated Cindy Lu with a marrow-freezing, mind-numbing roar.

The small fleet moved cautiously out from shore, out into the inland sea. The water was dangerous with treetops, floating debris, telephone poles. Horrie Jackson led the way in the cabin boat, going very slowly. The top of a silo marked where a submerged barn must be; he steered wide. He seemed to know exactly where to turn to find the channel among the islands and obstructions.

The night was not quite pitch black. A dull glow beyond the drizzle marked where the moon was hidden by the constant cloud cover.

Mark fished out corn dodgers and passed them around. They had bags of cornmeal with them, and enough of the round cornmeal cakes to feed them while they crossed the water. Enough, until Hugo Beck put one in Horrie Jackson’s hand.

“Hey!” Horrie cried. He bit it, then stuffed it whole in his mouth and tried to talk around it. “Dried fish just by my foot. Pass it around. It’s all yours. I want as much of these things as you can spare, and all for me.”

Mark was stunned. “Just what is so extra special about corn dodgers?”

Horrie got his mouth clear. “They aren’t fish, that’s what! Look, for all of me the whole world is starving except us. We aren’t starving. For a couple of months we were, then all of a sudden there was fish everywhere, but only two kinds. Catfish and goldfish. The only problem is cooking them. We—”

“Hold up!” That was Mark. “You didn’t really say goldfish, did you?”

“They look like goldfish, but big. That’s what you’re eating now. Gary Fisher says goldfish can grow to any size. The catfish were always there, in the streams. You want me to shut up? Pass me that bag of corn dodgers.”

They passed Horrie the bag. Tim ate with enthusiasm. He hadn’t tasted fish in a long time, and it was good, even dried. He wondered why there were suddenly so many fish, then considered how their food supply had exploded. All those dead things floating in the water. It only bothered him for a moment.

“But why goldfish?” Mark Czescu wondered.

Gillcuddy laughed at him. “Easy to picture. Here’s a rising freshwater sea, and here’s a living room with a goldfish bowl in it. The water rises, breaks through the picture window, and suddenly the most docile of household pets is whirled out of his cage into the great wide world. ‘Free at last!’ he cries.” Gillcuddy bit into a filet of goldfish and added, “Freedom has its price, of course.”

Horrie ate corn dodgers in single-minded silence.

Mark rummaged through his pockets and came up with a tiny scrap of cigar. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. “I would kill for a Lucky Strike,” he said.

“You may well have the opportunity,” Jason Gillcuddy said.

Mark grinned in the dark. “I can hope. That’s why I volunteered.”

“Really?” said Tim.

“Not really. Anything beats breaking rocks.”

Jason Gillcuddy laughed at a private thought. “Let’s see,” he said. “You’d kill for a Lucky Strike. I suppose you’d maim for a Tareyton?”

“Right!” Mark roared approval.

“And shout insults for a Carlton,” Hugo Beck said. They all laughed, but it died quickly; they were still nervous around Hugo Beck.

“Now you know why I’m here,” Mark said. “But why you, Tim?”

Tim shook his head. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. No, forget I said that. It feels like I owe somebody something…” The people he’d driven past. The cops working to unearth a hospital while a tidal wave marched toward them. “…and Eileen’s pregnant.”

When he didn’t go on, Horrie Jackson called without looking back. “So?”

“So I’ll have children. Don’t you see?”

“I’m here,” Hugo Beck said without being asked, “because nobody at the Stronghold would look at me.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Tim said. “If anyone wants to surrender, you tell ’em what it means.”

Beck chewed that. “They don’t have to know about me, do they?”

A look passed among them. “Not till they have to,” Tim said quickly, and he turned to Jason. “You’re the one I don’t understand. You’re Harry’s friend. They couldn’t possibly make you volunteer.”

Jason chuckled. “No, I’m a genuine volunteer, all right. Had to. You ever read my books?” He went on before any of them could answer. “Full of the marvels of civilization, what great things science does for us. Now how could I not volunteer for this crazy mission?” Gillcuddy looked out at the dark night and darker water. “But there’s places I’d rather be.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “The Savoy Hotel in London. With Eileen. That’s what I want.”

“And Hugo wants the Shire back,” Mark said.

“No.” Hugo Beck’s voice was firm. “No, I want civilization.” When nobody stopped him he went on, eagerly. “I want a hot car and some practice talking a cop out of giving me a ticket. I want Gone With The Wind on a noncommercial channel, no interruptions. I want dinner at Mon Grenier restaurant with a woman who can’t spell ‘ecology’ but she’s read the Kama Sutra.”

“And spotted the mistakes,” Mark said.

“You knew Mon Grenier?” Gillcuddy demanded.

“Sure. I lived in Tarzana. You’ve been there?”

“Mushroom salad.” said Gillcuddy.

“Bouillabaisse. With a chilled Moselle,” Tim said. They talked of meals they’d never eaten and now never would.

“And I missed most of my chances,” Hugo Beck said. “I had to start a goddam commune. Fellows, let me tell you, it doesn’t work.”

“I’d never have guessed,” Jason said. Hugo Beck retreated from the irony in Gillcuddy’s voice, and the writer said quickly, “Anyway, we carry miracles. I think.” He kicked a large sack that lay in the bottom of the boat. “Will this stuff work?”

“Forrester says it will,” Mark said, “especially if you give it a good kick. But we don’t have much with us. Hardy bargains hard.”

Horrie Jackson looked back from his place at the wheel “Jesus, I’ll say he does. I’m here.”

The drizzle turned gray and lighter gray. Ninety-three million miles eastward, the Sun must be placidly unaffected by the greatest disaster in written history. The boats floated on an endless sea dotted with debris. The corpses of men and animals were gone now. Horrie Jackson increased speed, but not by a lot. There were logs and bits of houses, inflated tires, the jetsam of civilization. Treetops showed like rectangular arrays of puffy bushes; but there were single trees, and some were just submerged. Any of that could tear the bottom out of their boat.

Hugo Beck called across the boat, “Hey, Mark. What would you do for a Silva Thin?”

“Get your hand off my knee and I’ll tell you.”

Jackson steered by compass through the gloomy dawn. There was no one else on the lake, only the small flotilla. Cindy Lu labored in the rear, a big motor with a tiny boat molded around her, roaring her frustration at the weight she must pull. Horrie bellowed above the sound of his own motor, “I’ll come back with a boatload of fish, enough to feed everyone in that power plant. What I want in return is enough of those corn things to fill that gunnysack the fish was in. Now, it’s not that big a sack…”

Tim Hamner peered ahead into the rain. Something ahead? At first he saw an island with rectangular shapes jutting upward. Not unusual… but as they got closer he saw that some of the shapes were cylinders, and big. He looked for motion, human shapes. They had to have heard Cindy Lu’s roar.

Alim Nassor found Hooker and Jerry Owen in the command post. Maps were spread across the table, and Hooker was moving small cardboard units on them. A voice cut through the fabric wall to thunder in Alim’s ear.

“For their pride is the pride of the magicians of old, who thought to force all Nature to their bidding. But ours is the pride of those who trust in the Lord. Our need is not for the magicians’ weapons, but only for the Lord’s favor…”

Hooker looked up in disgust. “Crazy bastard.”

Alim shrugged.

They needed Armitage, and despite the cynical talk they used when Armitage wasn’t around, most of them at least partly believed in the preacher’s message. “Well, I got nothing against wrecking the damn power plant,” Hooker said. “It’s got to go, I can see that. But it’s—”

“Sure! It takes a lot of industry to support something like that.” Jerry Owen spoke with no idea that he was interrupting. “If we have that plant, we’ll want to use the electricity. First because it’s convenient, then because we need it, and then it’s too later Then we’ll need all the other industry to keep the nuclear plant running. Industrial society all over again, and that’s the end of freedom and brotherhood, because we’ll need wage slavery to—”

“I said I believe you. Just for God’s sake stop with the fucking speeches.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Owen asked.

“Well, the plant isn’t going anywhere, is it? It’ll wait till we’re ready. The question is when?” Hooker said. “Look, when we started off all we wanted was a place to hide. Like the goddam Senator has, someplace we can defend. Someplace ours. Well, we can’t do that.”

“You gave that up the first time you stewed a man.”

“Think I don’t know that, motherfucker?” Hooker’s voice had a tightly controlled edge to it. “So now we’re on a roller coaster. We can’t stop. We have to keep growing. Take the whole goddam state. Maybe more. But we sure as hell can’t stop now.”

He pointed to the map. “And the Senator’s valley sits right here. We can’t go north of that till we take his place. Hell, we can’t even hold White River and those hills as long as the Senator’s people can come raiding our territory anytime they want to. One thing we learned in ’Nam: You leave the enemy a place to retreat and get organized, what they call a sanctuary, and you cannot beat him. And you know what that Senator is doing?” Hooker ran his finger along the line of hills to the east of the San Joaquin Sea. “He’s sent fifty men on horses up in there. They’re recruiting. On our flanks. Now I don’t know how many there are up in those hills, but if they all get together they can do us trouble. So. We don’t give ’em a chance to do it. We hit the Senator, and we do it now, before he gets organized.”

“I see,” said Jerry Owen. He stroked his blond beard. “And the Prophet wants us to go after the power plant—”

“Right,” Hooker said. “Pull the whole army south. You see what that does to us? But how the hell do I talk that crazy bastard into letting me finish off the Senator’s place before we go after that power plant?”

Owen looked thoughtful. “Maybe you don’t. You know, I don’t think they’d have more than fifty, sixty people in that plant. Not fighting people. They could have a lot more women and kids, but they won’t have much of an army. And they’re on an island out there, they can’t have much food. Not much ammunition. No real defenses…”

“You saying it will be easy to knock off?” Alim Nassor said.

“How easy?” Hooker asked. “How many?”

Jerry shrugged. “Give me a couple of hundred men. And some of the artillery. Mortars. Hit the turbines with mortars and that finishes the electricity. They can’t operate the nuclear reactor without electricity. They need it for the pumps. Hit the turbines, and the whole thing melts down—”

“Will it blow up?” Alim asked. The idea excited him and scared him. “Big mushroom cloud? What about fallout? We’d have to get out from under that fast, wouldn’t we?”

Jerry Owen looked at him with amusement. “Nope. No great white light. No big mushroom cloud. Sorry.”

“I’m not sorry,” Hooker said. “Once we get that place, can you make me some atom bombs?”

“No.”

“You don’t know how?” Hooker showed his disappointment. Owen had been talking like he knew it all.

And Owen was offended. “Nobody does. Look, you can’t make atom bombs out of nuclear fuel. Wrong stuff. It wasn’t designed for that. Wasn’t designed to blow up, either. Hell, we probably won’t get a real melt-down. They put safety precautions on their safety precautions.”

Alim said, “You guys always said they weren’t safe.”

“No, of course they’re not, but safe compared to what?” Jerry Owen waved north toward the ruined dam and the drowned city of Bakersfield: cubistic islands rising from a filthy sea. “That was a hydroelectric plant. Was that safe? People who wouldn’t go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams.”

“So why do you hate that place?” Hooker asked. “Maybe… maybe we ought to save it.”

“Goddammit, no,” Jerry Owen said.

Alim shot Hooker a look. Now you’ve started him off again, it said.

“It’s too much, don’t you see that?” Owen demanded. “Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology. Bigger and bigger. More quick fixes. You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you’re ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth. Pollution. Cities so big they rot in the center. Ghettos. Don’t you see? Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature. For awhile. Until finally you can’t get back in balance. The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth…”

“All right, dammit,” Hooker said. “You take two hundred men and two mortars and go shuck that plant. Make sure the Prophet knows what you’re doing. Maybe he’ll shut up long enough to let me organize.” Hooker stared at the map. “You go play, Owen. We got to go after the real enemy.” He’ll ask for volunteers, Hooker thought, and he smiled. The crazies would go with Owen and leave Hooker alone for awhile.

The room Adolf Weigley took Tim to was beautiful. Granted that it was crowded: A massive wave of cables surged through a wall, divided, subdivided, ran in metal raceways overhead. But there were lights, electric lights! Neatly enameled green panels lined two walls, busy with dials and lights and switches, and clean with the dust-filtered cleanliness of an operating room. Tim asked, “What is this, the main control room?”

Weigley laughed. He was chronically cheerful, free from the jumpiness of disaster syndrome, and elaborately casual about all the technology. A baby-smooth face made him look younger than he was; the Stronghold men generally wore beards. “No, it’s a cable-spreading room,” he said. “But it’s the only place we’ve got that you can sleep in. Uh… it wouldn’t be smart to push any buttons.” His smile was sly and partly concealed.

Tim laughed. “Not me.” He gazed euphorically at fire extinguishers and winking lights and massive cables, everything precisely in place, all glowing in indirect lighting. Power hummed softly in his ear.

Dolf said, “Drop your backpack over there. There’ll be others sleeping in here, too. Mind you stay out of the way. Duty operators have to get in here. Sometimes they have to work fast.” His grin faded. “And there’s a lot of voltage in some of those lines. Stay out of the way.”

“Sure,” said Tim. “Tell me, Dolf, what’s your job here?” Weigley seemed too young to be an engineer, but he wasn’t built like one of the construction workers.

“Power system apprentice,” Weigley said. “Which means we do everything. Got that stuff settled? Let’s go. They told me to show you around and help you set up the radio.”

“Right… What does it mean, ‘everything’?”

Weigley shrugged. “When I’m on duty I sit in the control room and drink coffee and play cards until the duty operator decides something needs working on. Then I go do it. That could be anything at all. Get a reading on a dial. Put out a fire. Throw a switch. Turn a valve. Repair a break in a cable. Anything.”

“So you’re a robot for the engineers.”

“Engineers?”

“The duty operators.”

“They aren’t engineers. They got their job doing what I do. One day I’ll be an operator, if there’s anything left to operate. Hell, Hobie Latham started by walking on snowshoes in the Sierra, measuring the snow to find out how much spring runoff we could expect, and he’s Operations Manager now.”

They went outside into the muddy yard. The big earthen levees loomed high around them. Men worked on them, putting tip forms while others poured in concrete to reinforce the cofferdam that kept SJNP safe. Others did incomprehensible things with forklifts. The yard was a bustle of activity, seemingly chaotic, but everyone seemed to know what he was doing.

It made Tim feel curiously vulnerable, to stand inside the Project grounds and know that the water outside was thirty feet above them. San Joaquin Nuclear Project was a sunken island, surrounded by levees thrown up by bulldozers. Pumps took care of seepage through the earthen walls. One break in the levees, or a day without power to the pumps, would drown them.

The Dutch had lived with that knowledge all their lives, and what they feared had come to pass; Holland couldn’t conceivably have survived the tidal waves following Hammerfall.

“I think the best place for your radio is on one of the cooling towers,” Dolf said. “But those are cut off from the plant.” He climbed a board staircase to the top of the levee and pointed. Across a hundred feet of water the cooling towers loomed up, four of them set inside a smaller levee that had leaked badly. Their bases were partly flooded. A thick white plume rose from each of the towers, climbed into the sky, growing ghostly, finally vanishing.

“They won’t have any trouble finding this place,” Tim said.

“No.”

“Hey, I thought nuclear plants were nonpolluting.”

Dolf Weigley laughed. “That’s no pollution. Steam, that’s all it is. Water vapor. How could it be smoke? We’re not burning anything.” He pointed to a narrow planked footbridge leading from the levee to the nearest tower. “That’s the only way over unless we get out a boat. But I still think it’s the best place for the radio.”

“So do I, but we can’t carry the antenna on that plank.”

“Sure we can. You ready? Let’s get the stuff.”

Tim gingerly climbed the slanting ladder that zigzagged up the side of the big redwood tower. Once again he was impressed with the organization at SJNP. Weigley had gone into the yard and come back with men to carry the radio, car batteries and antenna, and they’d skipped along the narrow plank bridge with all the stuff in one trip, then gone back to work. No questions, no arguments, no protests. Maybe Hammerfall had changed more than marriage patterns: Tim remembered from the papers that SJNP had been plagued with strikes and arguments over which union would represent whom, overtime pay, living conditions… Labor troubles had delayed the station almost as long as the environmentalists who’d done their best to kill it.

He reached the top of the fifty-foot tower. He was about thirty feet above the level of the sea. The base of the tower was surrounded by a leaking dam, and pumps worked to keep its intakes clear. There was a strong wind into the tower at its bottom.

The thing was big, over two hundred feet in diameter. The deck where Tim stood was a large metal plate pierced by innumerable holes. Pumps brought water up and poured it onto the deck, where it stood a few inches high. It trickled down into the tower and vanished. Above him a dozen smaller cylindrical columns jutted twenty feet above the deck. Steam poured out of each one. The deck vibrated with the hum of pumps.

“This is a good place for the radio,” Tim said. He looked doubtfully out across the San Joaquin Sea. “But it’s a little exposed.”

Weigley shrugged. “We can put some sandbags up. Build a shelter. And we can string a telephone line from here back to the plant. Question is, do you want the radio here?”

“Let’s find out.”

It took an hour to get the beam antenna set up and clamped onto one of the smaller rising venturi columns. Tim connected the CB set to the batteries. They carefully rotated the beam antenna to point twenty degrees magnetic, and Tim looked at his watch. “They won’t be listening for a quarter-hour. Let’s take a break. Tell me how things are going here. We were really surprised to find out you were here, that the plant was going.”

Weigley found a perch on the rail. “It surprises me, sometimes,” he said.

“Were you here when… ?”

“Yeah. None of us believed the comet would hit us, of course. As far as Mr. Price was concerned, it was just another working day. He was mad about absenteeism. A lot of the crew didn’t show up. Then, when it did hit, that just made it worse. We didn’t have all our people.”

“I still don’t see how you could do it,” Tim said.

“Price is a genius,” Weigley said. “As soon as we knew, even before the earthquake, he was getting things set for survival. He had those bulldozers out scraping up a levee before the rain hit us. He sent me and some others out into the valley to the railroad, to fill up the tank trucks. Diesel fuel, gasoline, we got all we could. And there was a boxcar on the siding. full of flour and beans, and Mr. Price made us get all of it. We’re sure glad he did. There’s not much variety, but we didn’t starve. Why you laughing?”

“The fishermen feel the same way.”

“Who doesn’t? Can you believe you’ll never taste a banana again? We could use some orange juice, for that matter. We’re worried about scurvy.”

“The orange tree is extinct in California. Sometimes we can dig some Tang out of a market.” The longer Tim looked at that wall of earth between him and the San Joaquin Sea, the bigger it got. “Doff, how could you have put that up while the valley was flooding?”

“We couldn’t have. It’s a crazy story. The original idea was to put the plant over nearer to Wasco. Mr. Price wanted it up here, on the ridge, because the blowdown from the cooling towers would drain better, we wouldn’t have to dig the ponds as deep. The Department’s managers didn’t like that. Made the plant more visible.”

“Oh, but it’s beautiful! It’s like a 1930s Amazing Stories cover. The future!”

“That’s what Mr. Price said. Anyway, they did put the plant up here on the ridge.”

It wasn’t much of a ridge, of course; no more than a low rolling hill. The plant wasn’t more than twenty feet higher than the surrounding valley.

“And after they did the work, the Department got scared and they built the levees,” Weigley said. “Not for any real reason. Just to hide the plant so the environmentalists wouldn’t think about it when they drove along Interstate Five.” Weigley’s lips tightened. “And then some of the bastards who tried to kill the plant raised hell because we spent the extra money on the levee! But it came in handy. All we had to do was bulldoze up enough dirt to fill the gaps, the places where the roads and railway came in through the screening banks, and a good thing, too. That water rose fast after Hammerfall.”

“I’ll bet. I drove over that sea,” Tim said.

“How’s that?”

Tim explained. “Heard any stories about Flying Dutchmen?”

Weigley shook his head. “But we haven’t had much contact with outsiders. Mayor Allen didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Allen. I saw him. How’d he get here?”

“Showed up just before the water got too deep. He was in City Hall when the tidal wave came through Los Angeles. Man, has he got a story to tell! Anyway, he showed up the next day with a dozen cops and City Hall people. You know, Los Angeles owned the plant, before Hammerfall—”

“So Mayor Allen is the boss here.”

“No! Mr. Price is in charge. The mayor’s a guest. Just like you. What does he know about power plants?”

Tim didn’t point out that it was Weigley who’d told him the mayor was the one who discouraged outside contacts. “So you’ve ridden out the end of the world,” Tim said. “By keeping the plant going. What are you planning to do with it?”

Weigley shrugged. “That’s up to Mr. Price. And don’t think it’s been any soft job keeping things running. Everything’s got to work, all the time. We can put out a thousand megawatts.”

“That sounds like a lot of—”

“Ten million light bulbs.” Weigley grinned.

“A lot, yeah. How long can you keep that up?”

“At full capacity, about a year. But we’re not running full, and we won’t ever be. It takes about ten megawatts to operate the plant. Cooling pumps, control equipment, the lights… you know. That’s one percent of capacity, so we could keep that up for a hundred years. But then we’ve got another set of fuel elements, over in Number Two.”

Tim looked back at the plant. Two enormous concrete domes, which contained the nuclear reactors. Each had a series of rectangular buildings attached that contained the turbines and control equipment.

“Number Two’s not operational,” Weigley said. “Getting her up will be our first job once the water’s gone down. And then we’ll be able to put twenty megawatts on line for somebody else to use. We can keep that up for fifty years.”

“Fifty years.” Tim thought about that. In fifty years the United States had gone from a horse-and-buggy to an automobile civilization; had opened mines, built cities, built industries; discovered electronics and computers, taken space flight from comic books to the Moon. And this one plant could put out more power than the whole United States generated in the Twenties… “That’s exciting. My God, it was worth coming here! Forrester was right, letting anything happen to this plant wouldn’t be an optimum solution.”

“Uh?” Weigley gave Tim a puzzled look.

Tim grinned. “Nothing. Time to try the radio out.”

To enter the conference room was like walking into the past, straight into a Board of Directors meeting. It was all there, the long table with comfortable chairs, pads of paper, blackboards, chalk and erasers, even wooden pointers. Tim was jolted. He wondered what Al Hardy would give for a well-equipped conference room, and bulletin boards to hang maps and lists on, file cabinets…

There was an argument in progress. Johnny Baker waved Tim to a seat on his left. Tim whispered rapidly: The radio gave mostly static, but it worked; they had communications with the Stronghold. No further news. Baker whispered thanks and turned back to listen.

They looked like human scarecrows, diversely dressed, most of them armed, pale as ghosts except for Mayor Allen and a black Detective-Investigator. Their clothes were old, their shoes were worn. A few months ago they would have looked wildly out of place here. Now it was the room that was strange. The people were normal, except that they were so clean.

Tim wriggled inside his clothes. His hand patted his smoothshaven cheek. Clean! There was hot water for bathing, and working electric razors. The washer-dryer hadn’t stopped since the Stronghold party arrived. His shirt and shorts and socks were clean and dry. Tim wriggled and tried to listen. He was hearing the same sentence over and over again: “I didn’t know there was going to be a goddam army after us.”

Barry Price wasn’t as large as the construction crew chief who confronted him, but there was no question who was in charge. Price wore khaki field clothing, bush jacket and a shirt bulging with pens; a pocket calculator hung from his belt; an assistant with a clipboard hovered nearby. His brush haircut and precisely trimmed pencil mustache made him look almost finicky. He said, “So what’s changed? We were never popular.”

“No, dammit, but a cannibal army?” It wasn’t heat that made the crew chief sweat inside his hard hat. “Barry, we got to get out of here.”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

“Nuts. West side of the sea. Anyplace. But we can’t stay here! We cannot fight a whole army.”

“We have to,” Price said. “How can we let all this go down the drain? Robin, you worked as hard as anybody! We’ve got allies now—”

“Some allies. A dozen men.” Robin Laumer leaned across the table toward Barry Price. They might have been alone in the room; certainly nobody was interrupting. “Look. Everything’s got to work or nothing does, right?”

“Right.”

“So they get one hit on the turbines, the switchyard, the cable rooms, the control rooms, and that’s it! We’re underwater, and nothing ever works again!”

“I know all that,” Price said. “So we don’t let them get one hit.”

“Bullshit. Barry, I’m pulling out. Any of my people want to come with me, I’ll take. We’ll give ’em back, but we’re borrowing your boats—”

“Not mine you don’t,” Johnny Baker said. He sat at Barry Price’s left, just across the table from Mayor Allen. “I did not bring boats to help evacuate this plant.”

Laumer seemed about to argue; then he shrugged. “So I take the boats that were already here. One of ’em’s mine anyway, that one I keep. But we’re leaving.”

He stalked out of the room. As he passed Tim Hamner, Tim told him, “You’ll never be clean again.” Laumer broke stride, then kept going.

Baker asked, “Shouldn’t we stop him?”

“How?” Price demanded.

Baker dropped it. None of them were ready to use the only way they had of stopping Laumer. “So how many will go with him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe twenty or thirty of the construction crew. Maybe not so many. We worked like slaves to save this plant. I don’t think any of my operating people will leave.”

“So you can still run the plant.”

“I’m sure of that much,” said Price.

Johnny turned to the Mayor. “How about your people? Especially your cops?”

“I doubt any will go,” Bentley Allen said. “We had too damned much trouble getting here.”

“That’s good,” Baker said. He saw the look on the Mayor’s face. “That they won’t run. And of course you’re staying, Barry…”

The effect on Price was disturbing. He didn’t look nonchalant, or proud; he looked like a man in agony. “I have to stay,” he said. “That ticket’s already been paid for. No, you wouldn’t know. When that goddam Hammer hit, I could go look for somebody in Los Angeles, or stay here and try to save the plant. I stayed.” His jaw clenched. “So what do we do now?”

“I can’t give you orders,” Johnny said.

Price shrugged. “By me you can.” He looked to Mayor Allen and got a nod. “Far as I’m concerned, Senator Jellison is in charge of this state. Maybe he’s President. Makes more sense than the others.”

“You too?” Johnny asked. “How many Presidents have you heard about?”

“Five. Colorado Springs; Moose Jaw, Montana; Casper, Wyoming… anyway, I’ll take the Senator. Give us all the orders you want.”

Johnny Baker spoke carefully. “You didn’t understand me. I’ve got orders not to give you orders. Suggestions only.”

Price looked uncomfortable and confused. Mayor Allen and an assistant whispered together, then Allen said, “Doesn’t want the obligation?”

“Precisely,” Baker said. “Look, I’m on your side. We’ve got to keep this plant going. But I don’t control the Stronghold.”

Mayor Allen said, “You may be the highest-ranking—”

“Try to give the Senator orders? Me? Bullshit!”

“Just a thought, General. All right, feudal obligations work both ways,” Mayor Allen said. “At least they do if the King is Senator Jellison. So he wants to limit his obligations to us. So what suggestions do you have for us, General Baker?”

“I’ve given you some. Ways to build exotic weapons…”

Price nodded. “We’re working on them. Actually, it only took thinking of them. You know, we’ve worked on defenses here, not enough, I guess, but none of us ever thought of poison gas. Incendiaries we knew about, but we didn’t make enough. Or enough muzzle-loader cannon, either. I’ve got a crew on that right now. What else?”

“Lay in supplies. No water shortage, and you’ve got the power to boil it. There’s dried fish coming, and you can catch more. Get set for a siege. Our information is that the New Brotherhood is serious about taking over all of California, and very serious about wrecking this plant.”

“If Alim Nassor is involved, they’re serious,” Mayor Allen said. “Brilliant man, and determined as hell. But I don’t see his motive. He was never involved in any of the anti-industrial movements. Quite the opposite. ‘We’re just getting into the game, and now you say you’re shutting it down’ — that approach.”

“You’re forgetting Armitage,” Baker said. “Nassor and Sergeant Hooker together probably couldn’t hold this army together. Armitage can. It’s Armitage who wants the plant destroyed.”

The Mayor pondered. “The Los Angeles area used to be famous for funny religions…”

Tim was still hoping they wouldn’t have to bring Hugo in. He spoke for Hugo: “If Islam was a funny religion, go ahead and laugh, Mayor. They’re expanding that way. Join or get eaten, they assimilate everybody, one way or the other.”

“If the plant goes, they’ll never have another one,” Barry Price said. “They must be crazy.” Was he talking about the New Brotherhood or the Stronghold? Nobody asked.

But Baker stood up suddenly. “All right. We’re here, with our guns and Dr. Forrester’s notes. Tim, you go try on that wet suit. Maybe we can dig up some of what we need to fight with. I wish I knew how much time we’ve got.”

The policeman went up the slanting ladder slowly, carefully, with a fat sandbag balanced on his shoulder. He was sandyhaired and square-jawed, and his uniform was wearing through. Mark followed him with another sandbag. They added the bags to the barricade atop the cooling tower. By now Tim’s radio was nearly walled in.

The man turned to confront Mark. He was Mark’s own size, and angry. “We did not desert our city,” he said.

“That wasn’t what I meant.” Mark resisted the urge to back up. “I only said most of us—”

“We were on duty,” the policeman said. “I know at least a couple of us were watching TV if we could get to one. The Mayor was. I wasn’t. First I knew, one of the girls was yelling that the comet had hit us. I stayed at my post. Then the Mayor came through collecting us. He herded us all into elevators and down to the parking garage and packed the women and some of the men into half a dozen station wagons that were already loaded with stuff. He put us cops on motorcycles for an escort and we headed for Griffith Park.”

“Did you have any—”

“I had no idea what was happening,” Patrolman Wingate said. “We got up into the hills, and the Mayor told us the comet had done some damage and we could ride it out here and go clean up the mess afterward. Oh, boy.”

“Did you see the tidal wave?”

“Oh, boy. Czescu, there just wasn’t anything left to clean up. It was all foam and mist down there, and some of the buildings were still sticking up, and Johnny Kim and the Mayor were yelling at each other and I was almost next to them, but what with the thunder and lightning and the tidal wave I couldn’t hear a word. Then they got us together and headed north.”

The policeman stopped. Mark Czescu respected his silence. They watched four boats leaving with Robin Laumer and part of his construction crew. There had been a shouting match when Laumer tried to claim some of the supplies, but the men with guns — including Mark and the Mayor’s police — had won their point.

“We went through the San Joaquin in four hours,” the policeman said, “and let me tell you, that was tricky driving.

We had the sirens, but we spent as much time off the road as on. We had to leave one of the wagons. We got here and it was already over the hubcaps, and that dike was a solid wall. We packed stuff from the wagons on our backs over the levees in the rain. When we’d done that, Price put us to work on the levees. He worked us like donkeys. Next morning it was an ocean out there, and it was six hours more before I got a shower.”

“Shower.”

The policeman turned to look at Mark. “What?”

“You said it so casually. Shower. A hot shower. Do you know how long… ? Skip it. All I ever said was, most of us had to do some running.”

The policeman’s nose almost touched Mark’s. It was narrow, prominently bridged, a classic Roman nose. “We did not run. We were in the right place to put the city back together again afterward. Goddammit, there wasn’t anything left! There’s nothing left but this power plant, which the Mayor says is officially part of Los Angeles. We’re here now. Nobody’s going to hurt it.”

“All right.”

The four boats were dwindling with distance. A few of the remaining construction men had climbed the levee to watch them go — wistfully, perhaps. “I expect they’ll be fishermen now,” Mark said.

“Try to imagine how little I care,” the policeman said. “Let’s get to work.”

Horrie Jackson cut the motor and let the boat drift to a stop. “Far as I can tell, Wasco is just under us,” he said. “If it’s not, there ain’t much I can do about it.”

Tim looked at the cold water and shuddered. The wet suit fit him, but there were loose spots, and it was going to be damned cold out there. He tested the air system. It worked. The tanks were fully charged; and that had been impressive, too. When the mechanics at SJNP hadn’t had valves and fittings in stock, they simply went into the machine shop and made them. It was a reminder of another world, a world when you didn’t have to make do with what was around, when you had some control.

“I keep thinking,” Tim said. “If people’s pet goldfish got loose, what happened to the piranhas?”

“Too cold for them,” Jason Gillcuddy said, and he laughed.

“Yeah. Well, here goes.” Tim climbed to the gunwale, sat balanced for a moment, and rolled off backward into the water.

The cold was a shock, but it wasn’t as bad as he expected. He waved at the boat crew, then tried an experimental dive. The water was as black as ink. He could barely see his wrist compass and depth gauge. The gauge was another of the SJNP crew’s miracles, fabricated and calibrated in a couple of hours. Tim turned on the sealed lantern. The beam gave him no more than ten feet of milky visibility.

The sea in Emerald Bay off Catalina had been clear as glass. He had flown through seaweed jungles rich with darting fish… Iong ago.

He kicked down into the white murk, searching for the bottom, and found it at sixty feet. There was no sound but the bubbles from his regulator, the sound of his breathing. A shape loomed up in front of him, monstrous, humpbacked, a Volkswagen, he saw when he got closer. He didn’t look inside.

He followed the road. He passed an Imperial with hordes of fish swarming in and out of the broken windows. No buildings. More cars… and finally a gas station, but it had burned before it was flooded. He kept going. He would be out of air soon.

Finally, civilization: rectangular shadings in the murk. Visibility was too poor to let him be selective. The doors he tried were locked. Locked against the sea… He swam on until he found a smashed plate-glass window. It was frighteningly dark in there, but he forced himself to enter.

He was in a large room; at least it felt large. A dense cloud of white fog to one side proved to be a rack of paperback books turned to mush and floating particles. The mist followed him as he swam away. He found counters and shelves, racks and goods toppled to the floor. He coasted above the floor, finding treasure everywhere — lamps, cameras, radios, tape recorders, Tensor lamps, television sets, nose drops, spray cans of paint, plastic models, tropical fish tanks, batteries, soap, scouring pads, light bulbs, canned salted peanuts…

So many things, and mostly ruined. His air supply cut off abruptly; in panic he looked behind for his diving partner, then realized that despite all his training he was diving without a buddy. That was almost funny. You had to have more than one scuba outfit in the world before you could use the buddy system. He calmed himself and reached back to the air tanks, arm contorting to grasp the regulator valve and turn it to reserve. Now he had only a few moments, and he used them to scoop up objects and stuff them into the goody bag tied to his weight belt.

He left the store and surfaced. He was a long way from the boat. He waved until he had their attention, and let them come to him. He was exhausted when they hauled him aboard.

“Did you find any food?” Horrie Jackson wanted to know. “We found some food with that scuba stuff before we ran out of air. We get back to Porterville I can show you lots of places where there’s food. You dive for it and we’ll split.”

Tim shook his head. He felt an infinite sadness. “That was a general store,” he said.

“Can you find it again?”

“I think so. It’s right under us.” Probably he could, and there would be much to salvage; but in his exhaustion he could not feel any excitement over his find. He felt only a terrible sense of loss. He turned to Jason Gillcuddy as probably the only man who could understand — if anyone could.

“Anyone could walk in there and buy,” Tim said. “Razor blades, Kleenex, calculators. Books. Anyone could afford to buy those; and if we all work very hard for a long time, maybe a few of us will have them again.”

“What did you bring up?” Horrie Jackson demanded.

“General store,” Adolf Weigley said. “Did you get any of that stuff on Forrester’s list? Solvent? Ammonia? Any of that?”

“No.” Tim held up the bag. When they opened it they found a bottle of liquid soap and a Kalliroscope. They all looked at him strangely — all but Jason Gillcuddy, who put his hand on Tim’s shoulders. “You’re not in shape to dive again today,” he said.

“Give me half an hour. I’ll go down again,” Tim said.

Horrie Jackson dug further into Tim’s goody bag. Fishhooks and fishing line. A vacuum tin of pipe tobacco. The peanuts: Horrie opened the tin, passed it around. Tim took a handful. They tasted like… a cocktail party in progress.

“Diving can do funny things to your head,” he said, and knew at once that that wasn’t the explanation. All the world that he had lost was down there under the water, turning to garbage.

Gillcuddy said, “Here. One sip left.” He handed Tim a bottle of Heublein Whiskey Sour that Tim didn’t even remember stowing. One sip, a blast of nostalgia on the palate, and he threw the bottle far over the water. And there, sinister specks on the eastern horizon, were the boats of the New Brotherhood.

“Start the motor. Horrie, start the motor quick. They’ll cut us off,” he said. He strained forward for details, catching his balance when the motor started up, but all he could see was a lot of little boats and one much larger… a barge, with things on it. “They’ve got a gun platform, I think.”

Expendables

Dan Forrester looked exhausted. He sat in the wheelchair Mayor Seitz had brought up from the valley convalescent home, and he was plainly fighting off sleep. He was padded against the cold: a blanket, a windbreaker with hood, flannel shirt and two sweaters, one of which was three sizes too big; that one he wore backward. A .22 bullet would not have reached his skin.

The dairy barn was unheated. Outside, the wind howled at twenty-five miles an hour, with gusts at twice that. It blew thin flurries of snow and sleet. The swaying gasoline lantern threw out a bright ring of light, leaving shadows of lunar blackness in the contours of the concrete barn.

Three men and two women took turns rotating the cement mixer by hand, while others shoveled powders into it. Two of red, one of aluminum powder, while the dry cement mixer turned. When the powders were well mixed, others took them out and put them in cans and jars, then cast plaster of parts around them.

Maureen Jellison came in and shook the snow from her hair. She watched from the door for a moment, then went to Forrester’s wheelchair. He didn’t see her, and she shook his shoulder. “Dan. Dr. Forrester.”

He looked up with glazed eyes. “Yes?”

“Do you need anything? Coffee? Tea?”

He thought that through, slowly. “No. I don’t drink coffee or tea. Something with sugar in it? A Coke. Or just sugar water. Hot sugar water.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, please.” What I need, he thought, is fresh insulin. There’s nobody here who knows how to prepare that. If they ever give me the time I can do it myself, but first… “First thing is to bring the benefits of civilization back to the Stronghold.”

“What?”

“I might have known I’d walk into a war,” he told Maureen. “I was looking for the haves. The have-nots were bound to be somewhere around.”

“I’ll bring tea,” Maureen said. She went to the men turning the cement mixer. “Harvey, Dad wants you up at the house.”

“Right,” Harvey Randall said. “Brad, you stay with Dr. Forrester, and make sure—”

“I know,” Brad Wagoner said. “I think he should get some sleep.”

“I can’t.” Forrester was far enough away that they didn’t think he could hear them… and he looked like death warmed over anyway. The dead don’t hear. “I have to get to the other barn now.” He started to get up.

“Dammit, stay in that chair,” Wagoner shouted. “I’ll wheel you over.”

Harvey followed Maureen out of the barn. He zipped up all his clothes against the wind, and they walked on in silence for a moment. Presently he caught up to her. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to talk about,” he said.

She shook her head.

“You’re really in love with him?”

She turned and her expression was… strange. “I don’t know. I think Dad wants me to be. Wouldn’t that turn you off? Breeding for politics! It’s Johnny’s rank Dad wants. I think he believes in Colorado Springs.”

“Oddly phrased. Well, it certainly would be convenient.”

“It would, wouldn’t it? Harv, Johnny and I were sleeping together before you ever met me, and not because I was ordered to, either.”

“Yeah?” He smiled suddenly, and she saw and wondered; but he wasn’t going to mention George Christopher’s tirade. No. “Have I got a chance?”

“Don’t ask me now. Wait till Johnny gets back. Wait till it’s all over.”

Over? When is that? He pushed the thought away. Despair would be too easy. First Hammerfall and Loretta dead. The drive through nightmare, with Harv Randall curled around his wounded ego, a dead weight in the passenger seat. The fight to be ready for winter, for Fimbulwinter. The glaciers had been here once; every damn boulder in that damn wall was a reminder. Harv tasted the urge to howl at the heavens: Isn’t that enough? Wasn’t it enough without cannibals, war gases, thermite?

“You didn’t say no,” he said. “I’ll hang onto that.”

She didn’t answer, and that was encouraging, too. “I know how you must feel,” he said.

“Do you?” She was bitter. “I’m the prize in a contest. I always thought it was a joke, poor little rich girl. Suddenly nothing is funny anymore.”

They reached the house and went in. Senator Jellison and Al Hardy had maps spread out on the living-room floor. Eileen Hamner held more papers, Hardy’s eternal lists.

“You look frozen,” Jellison said. “There’s something hot in the Thermos. I won’t call it tea.”

“Thanks.” Harvey poured a cup. It smelled like root beer, add tasted much like that, but it was hot and it warmed him.

“Progress?” Hardy asked.

“Some. The thermit bombs are coming along, but the fuses have to be made. Over in Hal’s barn they’re cooking up a god-awful brew that Forrester says will be mustard gas, but he’s not sure how long it takes to finish the reaction. He’s cooking it slow so as not to take chances.”

“We may need it quicker than we think,” Jellison said.

Harvey looked up quickly. “Sir?”

“Deke’s people sent us a message on the CB an hour ago,” Jellison said. “Couldn’t make it out. Alice took another CB out to get on top of Turtle Mountain.”

“Alice? Turtle Mountain?” Harvey was incredulous.

“It’s in line of sight to us and Deke,” Al Hardy said. “And communications are better lately. It should work.”

“But Alice? A twelve-year-old girl?”

Hardy looked at him strangely. “Do you know anyone else who’d have a better chance of getting a horse up that mountain at night in the snow?”

Harvey started to say that of course he did, but then he thought better of it. If a horse and rider could climb that mountain in the dark, Alice and her stallion could. But it didn’t seem right, to send young girls out into the snow and dark. Wasn’t that what civilization was all about, to protect Alice Cox?

“Meanwhile,” Hardy continued, “we called in some reserves. Just in case. They’re loading up your TravelAII.”

“But… what do you think Deke was saying?” Harvey asked.

“Hard to say.” Jellison sounded tired. He looked as exhausted as Forrester, and had the same gray color. His voice was grim. “You know the New Brotherhood tried an attack on the power plant this afternoon.”

“No.” Harvey felt relief. The power plant was over fifty miles away. The New Brotherhood was there, not here. They’d be fighting Baker. Relief, then guilt, and he shrugged off the guilt because it was the last thing he needed now. “What’s happening?”

“They were in boats,” Al Hardy said. “They sent in a surrender demand, and when Mayor Allen told them to go to hell—”

“What? Wait! Mayor Allen?”

Hardy showed his irritation at the interruption. “Mayor Bentley Allen is in charge at the San Joaquin Nuclear Plant, and no, I don’t know the details. The point is, Randall, that the New Brotherhood only had about two hundred people for the attack on the power plant. It was not much of an attack, and it did not succeed, and they did not renew it.”

Harvey looked over at Maureen. She was gathering up the Thermos and some honey and brown sugar in a briefcase. She’d known about the fight at the power plant, and she didn’t look as if she’d lost anyone there. He asked, “Casualties?”

“Light. One killed, of the Mayor’s police. Three wounded, don’t know how bad. None of them were from our relief force,” Hardy said.

“Hm. Good news from all over. I knew Bentley Allen,” Harvey said. “I know he was on duty in central L.A. at Hammerfall. He’s some kind of man, to get out of that! Funny, though, how we always assume anyone who isn’t at the Stronghold must be dead.”

Al, Maureen, the Senator They watched him thoughtfully, seriously. “Not so funny as all that,” he said. “All right, so two hundred New Brotherhood attacked the power plant. That means… What does it mean?” Harvey followed the thought to a conclusion he didn’t like. “They thought the power plant would be easy. They sent their main strength somewhere else. Here? Sure, here. Before we can get ready.”

Hardy nodded. His lips pulled tight in a thin line, not a grin, a gesture of self-disgust. “Dammit, we did the best we could.”

“I was in charge,” Jellison said.

“Yes, sir, but I should have thought of it. But we were so busy trying to organize for the winter. We never had time to think about defense.”

“Hell, we’ve got defenses,” Harvey said. “You couldn’t expect a whole damned army to show up in the San Joaquin Valley.”

“Why couldn’t I?” Hardy demanded. “I should have. The point is, I didn’t, and now we all have to pay for my mistakes.”

“Look,” Harvey said. “If you hadn’t got us all working on food, there’d be nothing here to fight for. You don’t have to—”

The CB set beside Eileen came alive. Alice Cox’s voice came through clearly, high-pitched, young and afraid, but every word intelligible. “Senator, this is Alice.”

“Go ahead, Alice,” Eileen said into the mike.

“Mr. Wilson reports they are under heavy attack,” Alice Cox said. “There are a lot of them. Hundreds. Mr. Wilson says over five hundred. Mr. Wilson says he can’t hold them. He’s sending his people out now, and he wants instructions.”

“Holy shit,” Harvey Randall said.

“Tell her we’ll have orders for them in five minutes,” Senator Jellison said.

Eileen nodded. “Alice, can they wait five minutes?”

“I think so. I’ll tell Mr. Wilson.”

“You don’t sound surprised,” Harvey said. “You knew already.”

Al Hardy turned away. Senator Jellison spoke carefully. “Surprised? No. I had hoped the New Brotherhood would wait until their deadline ran out, but I am not surprised that they did not.”

“So what do we do now?” Harvey asked.

Al Hardy bent down to the maps. “We’ve been doing it since we got their ultimatum. I’ve had everybody we could spare from Forrester’s work digging in up on these ridges.” He pointed to penciled lines on the map. “Chief Hartman and his people have been working up there two days straight. George Christopher isn’t due back for three days. We hope he’ll have reinforcements, but we can’t count on it. Hartman’s people are exhausted and they are nowhere near through digging in. I gather that Forrester’s superweapons are not complete.”

“No. He expected another week,” Harvey said.

“Which we don’t have,” Jellison muttered.

Al Hardy nodded. “Harvey, you’ve been working all day, but not outside digging the way Hartman’s people have been. And someone must go buy us some time.”

Harvey had been expecting that. “You mean me.” He saw that Maureen had paused, briefcase full of sassafras and honey in her hand. She closed the door without going out and stood at the door looking back into the room. “It’s time I earned my keep,” Harvey said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Jellison said. He glanced at Maureen. “Was that stuff important?”

She nodded.

“You’ll get to talk to him before he goes. He’s got an hour or so,” Jellison said.

“Thank you.” She opened the door. “Be careful, Harvey. Please.” Then she was gone.

“I’ve got some troops for you,” Al Hardy said crisply. Now that the decision was made, he was all business again. Harvey thought he’d liked him better when he was sounding worried. “Not the best people we have. Kids, I’m afraid.”

“Expendables,” Harvey Randall said. He kept his voice flat.

“If need be,” Al Hardy said.

The worst of it, Harvey thought, is that it makes sense. You don’t put your best people out to buy time. You keep your best troops to dig in, and you send out what you can spare. Hardy can spare me! So can the Stronghold…

“We don’t expect miracles,” Senator Jellison said. “But it’s important.”

“Sure,” Harvey said.

“We want you to take the TravelAIl,” Hardy said. “We put your CB back into it. Take the TravelAII and a truckload of gear and go buy us some time. Days if you can, but hours anyway. As the Senator said, we don’t expect miracles. Deke’s people will make a fighting withdrawal. They’ll blow bridges and burn what they can on the way out. You go meet them. Take chain saws and dynamite and the winch on that TravelAll and make a mess out of the road.”

“Put them on foot,” Jellison said. “Get the New Brotherhood on foot. Ruin those roads. That buys us a day, maybe more, right there.”

“And how long do I stay out?” Harvey asked. He was having trouble with his breathing, and hiding it. You need time to psych yourself up, he thought; that, or zero time to get scared.

Jellison laughed. “I can’t order you to go sit there until they kill you. Maybe I would if I thought you’d do it… Never mind. Just let Deke’s people get past you, then come home — and take as long getting here as you can. Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

Harvey shook his head. He’d already tried to think of a better idea.

“You’ll do it?” Hardy barked the question, as if trying to catch Harvey in a lie.

It was irritating as hell, and Harvey barked back. “Yah.”

“Good man,” Hardy said. “Eileen, have the message relayed to Deke. Operation Scorched Earth is on.”

Task Force Randall, a dozen boys, the oldest seventeen; two teen-age girls; Harvey Randall; and Marie Vance.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Harvey demanded.

She shrugged. “They don’t need a cook just now.” She was dressed for hiking: boots, hat with earmuffs, and several layers of clothing topped by a jacket that was all pockets. She carried a scope-sighted rifle. “I’ve done some varmint hunting. I can drive. You know that.”

Harvey looked at the rest of his command and tried not to show dismay. He knew only a few of them. Tommy Tallifsen, seventeen, would be his other leader. He couldn’t imagine what Marie’s status would be. “Tommy, you drive the pickup.”

“Okay, Mr. Randall. Barbara Ann will come with me. If that’s all right.” He indicated a girl who didn’t look more than fifteen.

“It’s all right,” Harvey said. “Okay, everybody get in.” He went back up onto the porch. “Jesus, Al, they’re just kids.”

Hardy looked at him, mildly disappointed, mildly disgusted. You’re messing u p my patterns. Or, Don’t make waves. “They’re what we’ve got. Look, they’re farm kids. They know how to shoot, and most of them have worked with dynamite before. They know these hills pretty well, too. Don’t put them down.”

Harvey shook his head.

“And,” said Hardy, “they’ll die just as dead if the New Brotherhood breaks through. Marie too. You too. Me too. Hell, you’re not going out to fight!”

“Not with just four guns, we’re not.”

“These are the guns we can spare. These are the people we can spare. Just get out there and work. You’re wasting time.”

Harvey nodded and turned away. Maybe farm kids were different. It would he nice to believe… because he had seen too many city boys, older than these, in Vietnam; kids just out of training camp, who didn’t know how to fight, and they were scared all the time. Harvey had done a series on them, but it had never been cleared by the Army.

He told himself: We aren’t going out to fight. Maybe it will be all right. Maybe.

They stopped in town and loaded supplies into the truck, and onto the carrier on top of the TravelAIl. Dynamite. Chain saws. Gasoline. Picks and shovels. Fifty gallons of used crankcase oil, a bitch to move. When it was all loaded, Harvey let Marie drive. He sat in the second seat to let one of the local boys sit up front with the map. They drove down the highway, out of the valley.

Harvey tried to get the boys talking, to get to know them, but they didn’t volunteer much. They’d answer questions, politely, but they sat wrapped in their own thoughts. After a time Harvey leaned back in his seat and tried to rest. But that reminded him gruesomely of the last time Marie had driven the TravelAII, and he jerked upright.

They were leaving the valley. It made Harvey feel naked, vulnerable. He and Mark and Joanna and Marie had gone through too much getting there. He wondered what the boys thought. And the girl, Marylou, he couldn’t remember her last name. Her father was the town pharmacist, but she’d never been interested in the store. She seemed interested in the boy she sat with. Harvey remembered his name was Bill, and Bill and Marylou had both managed some kind of state scholarship to UC Santa Cruz. The others thought them odd, that they’d want to go so far away to college.

Marie drove up the ridge that led out of the valley. Harvey had never been here before. Up on top of the ridge were moving lights: Chief Hartman’s people digging in, still working at midnight despite the cold blowing wind. The roadblock below the ridge had only one guard huddled in the small shelter. They passed it and were out of the valley.

He saw it and felt it: They had entered the universal chaos left by Hammerfall. It was scary out here. Harvey held himself very still, so that he wouldn’t shout at Marie to turn the TravelAII and break for safety. He wondered if the others felt the same way. Better not to ask. Let us all feel that nobody else is scared. and that way nobody will run. They drove on in unnatural silence.

The road was washed out in places, but vehicles had made paths around the broken pavement. Harvey noted places where the road could easily be blocked; he pointed them out to the others in the car. He couldn’t see much through the intermittent sleet and the thick dark out there. The map showed they were in another valley, with a series of ridges to the south much lower than those surrounding the Stronghold.

This would be the battleground. Below lay a branch of the Tule River, the main line of defense for the Stronghold. Beyond was territory Hardy wouldn’t even attempt to hold. In a few days, perhaps only hours, the valley they were now driving through would be a killing ground, a place of battle.

Harvey tried to imagine it. Noise, incessant noise: the stutter of machine guns, a crackle of rifle fire, dynamite bombs, mortars; and through it all the screams of the wounded and dying. There wouldn’t be any helicopters and field hospitals here. In Vietnam the wounded were often in hospitals faster than they’d have been if they’d been civilians at home in an auto accident. Here they’d have to take their chances.

They? Not they. Me, Harvey thought. Who was it that said “A rational army would run away”? Somebody. But run to where?

The Sierra. Run to Gordie and Andy. Go find your son. A man’s duty is to his children… Stop it! Act like a man, he told himself.

Does acting like a man mean to sit calmly while they drive you where you’ll be killed?

Yes. Sometimes. This time. Think about something else. Maureen. Have I got a chance? That wasn’t a satisfying line of thought either. He wondered why he was so concerned about Maureen. He hardly knew her. They’d spent an afternoon together here, a lifetime ago, and then they’d made love; and three times since, furtively. Not much to build a life around. Was he interested in her because she was a promise of safety, power, influence? He didn’t think so, he was certain there was more, but objectively he couldn’t find reasons. Fidelity? Fidelity to the woman he’d had an adulterous relationship with; in a way a kind of fidelity to Loretta. That wasn’t getting him anywhere.

There were a few lights visible through the gloom; farmhouses in the battleground, places not abandoned yet. They weren’t Harvey’s concern. Their occupants were supposed to know already. They drove on in silence until they came to the south fork of the Tule River. They crossed it, and now there was no turning back. They were beyond the Stronghold’s defenses, beyond any help. Harvey felt the tension in the car, and felt strangely comforted by it. Everyone was afraid, but they weren’t saying it.

They turned south and went over a ridge to the valley beyond. The ground seemed even and smooth on both sides of the road. Harvey stopped and planted homemade mines: jars of nails and broken glass over dynamite and percussion caps; shotgun shells pointed upward and buried just above a board pierced by a nail.

Marie watched, puzzled. “How will you get them to walk out here?” she asked.

“That’s what the oil is for.” They wrestled the drum of crankcase oil to the side of the road. “We shoot holes in that when we get past. When the oil’s on the road, nobody can walk on it, drive on it, anything.”

The route beyond was ridge, valley, ridge, valley, with the road curving to cross low spots in the ridges. It was rippling landscape, a land with waves in it. Ten miles beyond the Stronghold they passed the first of Deke Wilson’s trucks. It was filled with women and children and wounded men, household possessions and supplies. There were baskets tied to the top and sides of the truck bed, filled with goods — pots and pans, useless furniture, precious food and fertilizer, priceless ammunition. The truck bed was covered by a tarpaulin, and more people were huddled under it, along with more goods. Bedding and blankets. A birdcage but no bird. Pathetic possessions, but everything these people had.

A few miles on there were more trucks, then two cars. The driver of the last didn’t know whether any others would get out. They crossed a broad stream and Harvey stopped and planted dynamite, leaving the fuses marked with rocks so that any of his party could find them to blow the bridge.

There was a faint tinge of gray-red in the east when they reached the top of the last ridge before the low rolling hills where Deke Wilson’s farm band lived. They approached it carefully, concerned that the New Brotherhood might have got past Deke’s people and come to secure the road, but no one challenged them. They stopped the TravelAII to listen. The infrequent popping of gunshots came from far away. “All right,” Harvey said. “Let’s get to work.”

They cut trees and built a maze on the road: a system of fallen trees that a truck could get through, but only slowly, by stopping to back up and turn carefully. They made dynamite bombs and put them at convenient places to throw down onto the road, then Harvey sent half his troops out to the sides, the others down the hill. They cut trees partway through so that they would fall easily. The others ranged out to both sides, and Harvey could hear the growl of the chain saws, and sometimes the sharp whump of half a stick of dynamite.

The gray became a red smear behind the High Sierra when the work parties returned. “A couple more trees cut and one charge set off, and that road’s blocked for hours,” Bill reported. “This won’t be so hard.”

“I think we should do it now,” someone said.

Bill looked around, then back at Randall. “Shouldn’t we wait for Mr. Wilson’s truck?”

“Yes, wait,” Marie said. “It would be awful if we stopped our own people from getting through.”

“Sure,” Harvey said. “The maze will stop the Brotherhood if they get here first. Let’s take a break.”

“The shooting is getting closer,” one of the boys said.

Harvey nodded. “I think so. Hard to tell.”

“It’s officially dawn,” Marie said. “Muslim definition. When you can tell a white thread from a black one. It’s in the Koran.” She listened for a moment. “There’s something coming. I hear a truck.”

Harvey took out a whistle and sounded it. He shouted to the boys nearest him to spread out and get off the road. They waited while the truck noises got louder and louder. It came around the bend and there was a screech of brakes as it stopped just short of the first tree. It was a large truck, still only an indistinct object in the gray light. “Who’s there?” Harvey shouted.

“Who are you?”

“Get out of the truck. Show yourself.”

Someone leaped out of the truck bed and stood on the road. “We’re Deke Wilson’s people,” he shouted. “Who’s there?”

“We’re from the Stronghold.” Harvey started toward the truck. One of the boys was much closer. He stepped up to the cab and looked in. Then he backed up fast.

“It’s not—”

He never finished. There were pistol shots, and the boy was down. Something smashed Harvey in the left shoulder, a hard blow that knocked him backward. There was more shooting. People were jumping out of the truck.

Marie Vance fired first. Then there was more shooting from the sides of the road and the rocks above it. Harvey struggled to find his rifle. He’d dropped it, and he scrabbled around for it.

“Stay down!” someone yelled. A sputtering object landed just in front of the truck and rolled underneath. Nothing happened for an eternity, and there were more gunshots; then the dynamite exploded. The truck lifted slightly, and there was a gasoline smell; then it blew up in a column of fire. Fire danced in the air near Harvey’s face as the gasoline was flung around. He could see human shapes in the fire: Men and women screamed and moved in dancing flame. There were more shots.

“Stop. Stop shooting. You’re wasting ammunition.” Marie Vance ran down toward the burning truck. “Stop it!” The gunfire died and there were no sounds but the burning fire.

Harvey found his rifle at last. His left shoulder was throbbing and he was afraid to look, but he forced himself, expecting to see a bloody hole. There was nothing at all. He felt it, and it was sore, and when he opened his coat he found a large bruise. Ricochet, he thought. I must have been hit by a ricochet. The heavy coat stopped it. He got up and went down to the road.

The girl, Marylou, was trying to get closer to the fire, and two boys held her back. She wasn’t saying anything, just struggling with them, staring at the burning truck and the bodies near it.

“He was dead when he hit the ground,” one of the boys shouted. “Dead, dammit, you can’t do anything.” They seemed dazed now as they stared at the bodies and the fire.

“Who?” Harvey asked. He pointed at the dead boy near the truck cab. The boy lay on his face. His back was on fire.

“Bill Dummery,” Tommy Tallifsen said. “Shouldn’t we… what do we do, Mr. Randall?”

“Do you know where Bill planted the charges downhill?”

“Yes.”

“Show me. Let’s go light them.” They moved down the hill. Visibility was increasing fast. A hundred yards, two hundred. They found a rock that overhung the road. Tommy pointed. As Harvey bent down to light the fuse, Tommy grabbed his shoulder. “Another truck coming,” he said.

“Aw, shit.” Harvey reached for the fuse again. Tommy said nothing. Finally Harvey stood. “It’ll be light before they get up here. You go on back up the hill and alert the troops. They can’t get past that burning truck anyway. Don’t get close to it until you know who it is.”

“All right.”

Harvey waited, cursing himself, Deke Wilson, the New Brotherhood. Bill Dummery, with a scholarship to Santa Cruz and a girl named Marylou. My fault.

The truck came on up the hill. It was loaded with people. No household goods at all. In a cartop carrier on top of the cab, two children in bulky raincoats hunkered down against the wind. As the truck got closer Harvey recognized the man standing in the bed next to the cab. He was one of the farmers who had come with Wilson to the Stronghold. Something Vinge?

The people in the truck were all women and children and men patched with bloody bandages. Some lay in the truck bed, not moving as the overloaded vehicle ground its gears and crawled uphill. Harvey let it pass him, then lit the fuse. He followed behind it. He could walk almost as fast as it could go. The dynamite went off behind him, but the boulder didn’t roll onto the road.

The truck stopped at the log maze. There was no question about who was in this truck. The boys came out of cover. Vinge jumped down. He looked exhausted, but showed no obvious wounds or bandages. “You weren’t supposed to block the goddam road until we got through!” he shouted.

“Fuck yourself!” Harvey screamed in rage. He fought for self-control. The truck was filled with wounded and with women and children, and all of them looked half dead from exhaustion. Harvey shook his head in pity and resentment, then called to Marie Vance. “Get the TravelAII! We’ll have to use the winch to clear a way for them.”

It took half an hour to saw through two logs and snake them out of the way so the truck could get through. While they worked, Harvey sent Tommy Tallifsen down to try again with the boulder. At the rate they were using the stuff, they’d run out of dynamite right here, with miles of road still to block. This time the boulder rolled. It formed a formidable obstacle, with no easy way around it. Others with chain saws dropped more trees on the road.

“All clear,” one of the boys called. “You can roll.”

Vinge went up to the truck cab. There were four people crammed into it. The driver was a teen-age boy, fourteen or so, barely big enough to reach the controls. “Take care of your mother,” the farmer shouted.

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered.

“Get moving,” the farmer said. “And…” He shook his head. “Get moving.”

“Goodbye, Dad.” The truck crawled away.

The farmer came back to Harvey Randall. “Name’s Jacob Vinge,” he said. “Let’s get to work. There won’t be any more coming out of our area.”

The fighting sounded much closer. Harvey could see across the hills and out to the San Joaquin Sea. There were columns of smoke to mark the burning farmhouses, and a continuous popcorn crackle of small-arms fire. It was strange to know that men and women were fighting and dying not a mile away, and yet see nothing. Then one of the boys called, “There’s somebody running.”

They spilled over the top of the hill half a mile off. They ran haltingly, not in any order, and few carried weapons or anything else. Running in terror, Harvey thought. Not a fighting withdrawal. Run away! They flowed down into the valley, and on toward the hill held by Task Force Randall.

A pickup truck came over the top of the next ridge. It stopped and men jumped out. Harvey was startled to see more men on foot to each side; they’d come over so carefully that he hadn’t noticed them. They gestured to the people in the pickup, and someone in the back of the truck stood up and leaned on the cab. He held binoculars to his eyes. They swept over the men fleeing uphill toward Harvey, paused only a moment there, then swept up along the road, examining each of Harvey’s roadblocks with care. The enemy had a face now; and the enemy knew Harvey Randall’s face. So be it.

In less than five minutes the valley and ridge beyond swarmed with armed men. They walked carefully, they were spread out half a mile to each side. They advanced toward Harvey.

The fugitives staggered uphill, to Harvey’s men and trucks and past them. They breathed like terminal pneumonia cases. They held no weapons, and their eyes were blind with terror.

“Stop!” Harvey shouted. “Stand and fight! Help us!” They staggered on without seeming to hear. One of Harvey’s boys stood up, looked back at the grimly advancing skirmish line below, then ran to join the fugitives. Harvey screamed at him, but the boy kept running.

“Lucky the others stayed,” Jacob Vinge said. “I… hell, I’d like to run, too.”

“So would I.” This wasn’t going according to plan. The New Brotherhood wasn’t coming up the ridge to clear the road. Instead they were fanning out to each side, and Harvey didn’t have nearly enough troops to hold the ridgeline. He’d hoped to delay them longer, but there was no chance. If they didn’t get out fast they’d be cut off. “And we’re going to.” He lifted his whistle and blew loudly. The advance below broke into a run even as he did.

Harvey waved his command into their truck and the TravelAll. Jacob Vinge took Bill’s place. Harvey sent the truck out, then hesitated. “We ought to try. Come on, a few rounds…”

“It won’t do any good,” Marie Vance said. “There’s too much cover and they aren’t showing themselves enough. We’d be trapped and we wouldn’t have hurt any of them.”

“How do you know so much about strategy?” Harvey demanded.

“I watch war movies. Let’s get out of here!”

“All right.” Harvey turned the TravelAII and drove away, down off the ridge and into the next valley. The truck stopped and let the running men get aboard.

“Poor bastards,” Marie said.

“We fought them for a day,” Vinge said, “but we couldn’t hold them. Like the ridge back there. They spread out and get around you, behind you, and then you’re dead. So you have to keep running. After awhile it can get to be a habit.”

“Sure.” Habit or not, Harvey thought, they had run like rabbits, not like men.

The road led down to a stream swollen with the rain of Hammerfall. The low parts of the valley were deep mud. Harvey stopped at the far side of the small bridge, and got out to light dynamite sticks already in place.

“There they are!” one of the boys shouted.

Harvey looked up on the ridge. A hundred and more armed enemies boiled over the top and came down the hill at a dead run. There was a staccato chatter, and a rustle in the grass not far from Harvey.

“Get it done!” Jacob Vinge shouted. “They’re shooting at us!”

It was nearly a mile up to the ridge, but that sound was familiar from Vietnam: a heavy machine gun. It wouldn’t take long to walk its fire over to Harvey and the TravelAII and then they’d be finished. He flicked his Zippo and blessed it when it caught the first time, even though it was filled with gasoline rather than regular lighter fluid. The fuse sputtered, and Harvey ran for the TravelAII. Marie had slid over into the driver’s seat and was already rolling. Harvey caught on and hands grabbed him and pulled him inside. There was more of the chatter, brup-brup-brup, and something roared past his ear.

“Holy shit!” he yelled.

“They shoot pretty good,” Vinge said.

The dynamite went off, and the bridge was in ruins. But not completely, Harvey saw. There was still a full span, wide enough to walk across. It wasn’t going to take long to repair, but he sure wasn’t going back. They drove up to the top of the next ridge, and got out, looking for more trees to drop, boulders to dynamite into the road, anything.

The New Brotherhood troops came on into the valley, some on foot, a dozen on motorcycles. They reached the ruined bridge and stopped, then a few swam and waded across and came on. Others spread along the banks and found new crossings. In five minutes a hundred had crossed and they walked on steadily toward Harvey’s work crews.

“Jesus, it’s like watching the tide come in,” Harvey said.

Jacob Vinge didn’t say anything. He kept on digging under a boulder to make a hole for the dynamite. Just above them a tree crashed across the road, and the boys moved to another.

There were motors in the valley ahead. Two motorcycles gingerly drove across the narrow remains of the bridge. Extra riders got on and the bikes gunned forward toward Harvey’s position.

Marie Vance unslung her rifle and worked the sling around her left arm. “Go on digging,” she called. She took a sitting position and rested the rifle on a large rock, then squinted through the telescopic sights. She waited until the bikes were about a quarter of a mile away before she fired. Nothing happened. She worked the bolt and aimed again, fired. At the third shot the lead motorcycle wobbled and swerved into the ditch at the side of the road. One of the riders got up. Marie aimed again, but the other bike moved off the road and the riders scrambled for cover. They waited for the advancing skirmish line. That came steadily closer, and Marie changed her aim point, firing to slow the advance.

Again the center of the line slowed, while more attackers spread to each side, fanning out well beyond any point Harvey could defend. “Get finished,” Harvey shouted. “We have to get out of here!”

No one argued with that. Vinge put two sticks of dynamite into the hole beneath the boulder and tamped mud in on top of it.

“Look!” Barbara Ann, Tommy Tallifsen’s partner, shouted in horror. She pointed at the opposite ridge, where they’d spent the dawn hours putting barriers on the road.

A truck appeared at the top of the ridge. It went over and came down the road, and another followed, then another. When the trucks reached the downed bridge, men jumped out with timbers and steel plates. More trucks came over the ridge.

Harvey looked at his watch. They had delayed the enemy trucks by precisely thirty-eight minutes.

Valley of Death

The pattern was always the same. No matter what obstructions Harvey’s group put into the road, the New Brotherhood Army was delayed for no longer than it took to put them up. If Task Force Randall could have actively defended its roadblocks, they might have stopped the advancing enemy for much longer, but there was no chance of that. The New Brotherhood used its trucks to bring troops as far forward as possible; their skirmishers then spread out to both flanks and advanced, threatening to cut Harvey off; and once again Harvey had to retreat.

The enemy developed a new tactic as well: They mounted heavy machine guns in one of their trucks, and brought that forward to fire on Harvey’s workers from well out of rifle range. It kept Harvey from doing a proper job of ruining the road, and he couldn’t even shoot back. The enemy were faceless ghosts who couldn’t be harmed, and Harvey couldn’t stop them. Their infantry continued to advance, avoiding Harvey’s defenders, trying always to get around and behind. It was battle at long range, with few casualties; but the New Brotherhood’s advance was relentless. By midafternoon they had come a dozen miles toward the Stronghold.

Work and run; and running was becoming a habit. A dozen times Harvey wanted to keep going, to drive for the Stronghold, and the devil with the roadblocks. His mind found a dozen excuses for running.

“It’s like nothing can stop them,” Tommy Tallifsen screamed. They had halted at another ridgeline. The maps said the valley below — where the New Brotherhood was busily removing trees, filling in holes, repairing the road quicker than Harvey had been able to destroy it — was called “Hungry Hollow.” The name seemed appropriate.

“We’ve got to try,” said Harvey.

Tallifsen looked doubtful. Harvey knew what he was thinking. They were all exhausted, they’d lost five of Task Force Randall: one shot dead as he worked with a chain saw, the other four vanished — run away, captured, wounded and Iying back in the hills, they didn’t know. They hadn’t got aboard when it was time to bug out, and the New Brotherhood had been too close to let them look for them; and running had become a habit. What could eight exhausted people do to stop a horde that flowed forward like the tide?

“It will be dark in a couple of hours,” Harvey said. “Then we can rest.”

“Can we?” Tallifsen asked. But he went back to work, digging out under another boulder above the road. Others stretched the cable from the TravelAll’s winch around the rock. There wasn’t enough dynamite to use on every rock they found.

An hour before dark they were forced out of Hungry Hollow and over the ridge beyond. They fled across Deer Creek, pausing only long enough to light the fuse on the dynamite they’d placed there. When they climbed onto the next ridge, they found men already there.

It took Harvey a moment to realize they were friends. Steve Cox and almost a hundred troops had been sent from the ranch to hold the ridge. The Stronghold forces were through running away; now they would stand and fight. Cox had spread his forces along the ridge and they’d dug in. Harvey and Task Force Randall — what was left of it — could rest. There was even cold supper and a Thermos of hot tea.

“We’re all dead on our feet,” Harvey told Steve Cox. “We won’t be much help.”

Cox shrugged. “That’s all right. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll hold them.”

You’re a fool, Harvey wanted to say. There are a thousand of them and a hundred of you, and they come like death, like army ants, and nothing can stop them. “Have you brought… how is Forrester’s work? Have you got any of his superweapons?”

“Thermit grenades.” Cox showed Harvey a box of what looked like lumps of baked clay with fuses stuck out of the top. Each was about six inches in diameter, and each had two feet of parachute cord attached to it. “You light the fuse and whirl it around,” Cox said. “Then throw it.”

“Do they work?”

“They sure do.” Cox was enthusiastic. “Some explode like bombs. Others just break open, but even then they throw fire ten or twelve feet. They’ll scare the hell out of those cannibal bastards.”

“But what about the other weapons? Mustard gas?”

Cox shrugged. “They’re working on it. Hardy says it will take time. That’s why we’re out here.”

In the valley below, the lead elements of the New Brotherhood force had reached the ruined bridge. Deer Creek was high and swift, and the bridge was entirely gone; the few men who tried to wade it gave up quickly. The Brotherhood army stopped, then began to spread along the banks. Elements went upstream until they vanished. Others turned downstream toward the sea a few miles to the west.

“They’ll get around us,” Harvey said nervously.

“Nope.” Cox grinned. He pointed upstream, toward the towering Sierra. “We’ve got allies up there. About fifty Tule Indians, some of Christopher’s reinforcements. Tough bastards. Get some sleep, Randall. They won’t get through here, not tonight and not tomorrow. We’ve got a good position. We’ll hold them.”

“I think Cox is crazy,” Harvey told Marie. “I’ve… we’ve seen the New Brotherhood fight. He hasn’t.”

“They have our radio reports,” Marie said. She stretched in the back seat of the TravelAII. “Feels good to relax. I could sleep for a week.”

“So could I,” Harvey said; but he didn’t. The TravelAII was parked on the far side of the ridge from Deer Creek. He had sent the others back further, to a farmhouse where they could get proper rest, and he knew he should join them, but he was worried. Harvey had learned to respect whoever was in charge of the New Brotherhood. The enemy general hadn’t wasted a man, had never exposed his people recklessly, yet he had swept through eighteen miles and more in less than a day.

And he was using gasoline and ammunition recklessly. This was an all-out war; the New Brotherhood must have stripped their territory, must be gambling on taking the Stronghold for new supplies.

Dusk brought a chill wind, but no more sleet. A few stars showed through the overcast, blinking points of light too far apart to recognize as constellations. Harvey remembered a hot sauna followed by a cold swimming pool in hot sunlight; he remembered driving the TravelAII south through the blazing desert beauty of Baja California, finally to swim in an ocean warm as a bathtub; bellysurfing the bigger, more exciting waves of Hermosa Beach, and spreading a towel over sand too hot to walk on.

Down in the valley they could hear the sounds of Brotherhood trucks and men moving heavy objects. There was no way to know what the enemy was doing. Cox had patrols alert for infiltrators, but instead the enemy commander had his men fire weapons at irregular intervals, raise shouts, throw grenades and rocks across the creek, and often the ranchers responded, shooting wildly into the night, wasting ammunition, losing sleep.

Harvey knew that was what the Brotherhood wanted, but the knowledge didn’t help. He slept fitfully, awakened too often. Marie stirred in the seat behind him. “You awake?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Who was it? In the truck, with the binoculars. Do you know?”

“Probably the sergeant. Hooker. Why?”

“Put a name on him and he’s less frightening. Do you think we can win? Is Hardy smart enough?”

“Sure,” Harvey said.

“They keep coming. Like a machine, a huge grinding machine.”

Harvey sat up. Somewhere a grenade went off, and Cox shouted not to waste ammunition.

“That’s a frightening image. Fortunately it’s not the right one,” Harvey said. “It’s not a meat grinder. It’s one of those kinetic structures where the artist invites a horde of newsmen to stand around and drink and watch while the machine tears itself to pieces.”

Her laugh sounded forced. “Nice imagery, Harv.”

“Hell, I made a living off imagery, before I took up breaking rocks. And ruining roads. I used to think of battles as a chess game, but they’re not. It’s like those sculptures. The commander puts together this huge sculpture, knowing that the pieces will grind each other up, and he doesn’t control them all. Half of them are controlled by an art critic who hates him. And each one tries to see that he has pieces left when it’s over, but there won’t be enough, so it has to be done over and over.”

“And we’re some of the pieces,” Marie said. “I hope Hardy knows what he’s doing.”

In the morning there was new excitement in the Stronghold camp. During the night Stephen Tallman, Vice-President of the Tule Council, had come in to tell how his warriors were dug in to the east, and more were coming. The rumors grew. George Christopher was coming back, and he had a hundred, two hundred, a thousand armed ranchers he’d recruited from the hill country. Anyone who doubted it was shouted down.

But certainly there were fifty Indians to the east, and all the ranchers talked about how tough the Indians were, and what great allies they’d be. There were other stories, of an attempt in the night by the New Brotherhood to force passage of Deer Creek five miles upstream, and how Tallman’s Indians had beaten them back and killed dozens; how the New Brotherhood had run away. When Harvey talked to the others, he could find nobody who had seen the battle. He found a few who claimed to have spoken to someone who was in it. Everyone had a friend who’d talked to Tallman himself, or to Stretch Tallifsen, who was with the ranch force sent upstream to hold the western end of the line.

It was always like this. The new guys were demons incarnate; they would go through the enemy like so many mincing machines. The new guys always thought so too. But it could be true… sometimes it was true… maybe they would win this after all. The New Brotherhood could be stopped, and it wouldn’t even take the full strength of the Stronghold to do it.

Clouds parted in the east; the sun shone shockingly bright. Full daylight, and still nothing happened. The ranchers and the forward skirmish line of the Brotherhood exchanged sniping shots, with little effect. Then—

Over the opposite ridge trucks appeared. They didn’t look like trucks. They looked strange, for they had large wooden structures attached in front of them. They came down the hill, not too fast, because with all that weight in front they were hard to drive and unstable, but they came on toward the swollen creek.

At the same time, hundreds of the enemy came out from behind rocks and folds of ground where they’d been hidden. They began firing at anything that moved. The trucks with their strange towers advanced to the stream edge, and some drove across meadows that should have been too swampy, except that during the night the Brotherhood had laid down tracks of fencing wire and planks to get them across the mud.

They went to the stream edge and the towers fell, making bridges across the stream. Brotherhood troops rushed toward the bridges, began swarming across. Other Brotherhood units concentrated fire on any Stronghold defenders who dared show themselves. Harvey heard the sharp whump! which he recognized from Vietnam: mortars. The mortar bombs fell among the rocks where Cox’s ranchers hid, and each time they fell more accurately. Someone across the river was directing them, and he had good control: Wherever Cox’s men tried to oppose the crossing, the mortars soon found them.

And more of the Brotherhood troops poured across the river. They fanned out and moved forward, along a line almost a mile wide, and Cox’s forward troops either fell back or were overrun. Suddenly — it had taken no more than half an hour — the river line was gone, and Cox held only the ridge; and even there the relentless mortars and machine guns, far out of range of effective rifle fire, sought them out, pinned them down, while more Brotherhood troops advanced up the hills, hiding behind boulders, dodging and leapfrogging and always moving on…

“Ants!” Harvey screamed. “Army ants!” Now he knew. The cannibals couldn’t be stopped. They’d been fools to think they could do it. And at the rate they advanced, Cox would lose most of his force. Already groups of men had begun to break and run, some throwing down their weapons, others grimly hanging on to them and stopping to shoot back at the enemy. But there was no organization to the defense any longer, and more and more saw it and thought only of saving themselves. There was no place to make a stand: Every position was threatened by a breakthrough at some other point, and these men had not fought together, lived together; they didn’t have confidence that the man down the line wouldn’t run and leave an opening for the yelling cannibals to pour through and cut them off forever.

A dozen men clung to the TravelAII, piled into it, hung on top or lay on fenders as Harvey drove away. Deer Creek, which Cox had expected to hold all day, perhaps even to break the Brotherhood and stop them permanently, had fallen in less than an hour and a half.

The rest of the morning was nightmare. Harvey could not find his truck; the only equipment he had left was in the TravelAII and only a few of Cox’s ranchers were willing to help. Reinforcements from the Stronghold came finally, twenty men and women with more dynamite and gasoline and the chain saws from the truck, but they could never get far enough away from the advancing Brotherhood forces to do any useful work.

The Brotherhood tactics had changed: Now instead of fanning out and outflanking the defenses, they flooded forward trying to close; they wanted to keep the Stronghold force running, and now their general was willing to spend men to do it.

If Marie had not been with him Harvey would have run with the rest; but she wouldn’t let him. She insisted they keep on with their mission, at least that they stop and light the fuses of the charges they’d set two nights before when they went forward. Once they delayed too long, and there was a crash; shattered glass from the rear window sprayed over them and the front windshield was smashed out as well. A .50 slug had passed all the way through the TravelAII, passed between them, missing them by inches. The next time they stopped, the ranchers who’d stayed with them abandoned the car.

Harvey yelled to Marie, “Why the hell are you so — ” He didn’t finish the sentence. He’d wanted to say “brave,” but if he did, it meant he wasn’t, that he was a coward. ” — determined?” he finally said.

She looked up from where she was digging. They had one last stick of dynamite and she wanted to plant it. She pointed up toward the Sierra. “My boy is up there,” she said. “If we don’t stop them, who will? This is good enough. Give me the dynamite.”

Harvey had already crimped fuse onto the cap. He handed her the stick and she thrust it into the hole, then shoveled dirt and rock onto it.

“That’s enough!” Harvey screamed. “Let’s get out of here!” They were on the far side of a low hill and couldn’t see the advancing enemy, but Harvey didn’t think they would be far behind.

“Not yet,” Marie said. “Something I have to do first.” She walked toward the hilltop.

“Come back here! I swear, I’ll leave you! Hey!”

She didn’t look back. After a moment he cursed, then followed her uphill. She was adjusting her rifle, setting the strap on her left arm. She braced herself against a rock. “Down there is where you put the oil. And the mines,” she said. “We drove right past it.”

“We had to! They were right behind us!” And it’s all so damned futile anyway. Motorcycles were coming up the road. They’d reach the ridge in a minute or two.

Marie took careful aim. Fired. “Good,” she muttered to herself. She fired again. “I’d be done quicker if you’d do some shooting too,” she said.

Harvey knew he wasn’t about to hit the oil drum set three hundred yards away. He braced his rifle on a rock and aimed at the first of the oncoming motorcycles. He fired again and again, and missed each time. But the cyclists slowed, then stopped and took cover in the ditch to wait for the infantry. Marie continued to fire, slowly, carefully. Finally she said, “That ought to do it. Let’s go… Actually, what’s the hurry? They’re stopped.” She took up her position again and waited.

Harvey clenched his fists and took a deep breath. She was right. There was no immediate danger. The oil was spilling across the road now, and the two motorcycles were going nowhere.

Another motorcycle reached the oil slick. It skidded into the ditch and the biker screamed. Marie smiled faintly. “Good idea, those pungie sticks of yours.”

Harvey looked at her in horror. Marie Vance: on the board of governors of half a dozen charities; banker’s wife, socialite, country club member; and she was grinning at the thought of a man impaled on a stick smeared with human shit to make the wounds fester…

A truck came to the oil slick and stopped; then it started forward, slowly. Marie put a bullet through its windshield. It slid forward and skidded, turning slightly sideways. The motor gunned and the wheels spun, but it did not move.

Another truck came up behind it and started around; one of the dynamite mines went off, loudly, and the truck went up in flames. Harvey felt it now: the urgent impulse to shout in triumph. Something had worked. Those weren’t people down there, scrambling to get away from the burning truck, some themselves burning; they were army ants, and the trick had worked—

They heard the plop! from in front of them, then a faint whistle. Something exploded twenty yards to their left. Another plop!

“The car! Now, dammit!” Harvey shouted.

“Yes, I think it’s time.” Marie followed. The second mortar round went off somewhere behind them. They leaped into the TravelAII and drove off laughing and shouting like children.

“Son of a bitch, it worked!” Harvey shouted. He looked over at Marie and her eyes shone with triumph to match his own. We make a great team, he thought.

“’Run away!’” cried Harvey.

Marie looked at him strangely.

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Harvey said. “Didn’t you see it?”

“No.”

They drove on, still laughing with excitement. Inside, Harvey knew it wasn’t really much of a victory, but it was better than the rest of the day. There was no question of stopping now, not until they reached the next large barrier, which was a fork of the Tule River. That would be a formidable barrier once its bridge was blown; surely it would stop the New Brotherhood. It had to; beyond was the ridgeline that marked the entrance to the Stronghold itself. The Tule was their most important defense line.

They came around a curve and started down into the Tule Valley — and there was no bridge. It had already been blown.

Harvey drove up to the wrecked bridge and stared at the swollen river. A hundred feet wide, and deep, and swiftly flowing. “Hey!” he shouted.

Across the river, one of Hartman’s constables rose from hiding behind a log bunker. “They said you’d had it,” he called.

“What do I do now?” Harvey shouted.

“Whatever it is, do it quick,” Marie said. “They won’t be far behind us—”

“Go upstream,” the constable yelled. “We’ve got troops up there. Make sure you radio ahead that you’re coming.”

“All right.” Harvey turned the TravelAII and started up the county road toward the Tule Indian Reservation. “Get on that CB,” he told Marie. “Tell ’em the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”

A mile and a half upstream the road crossed the Tule. A dozen men were working with shovels at the bridge foundations. Harvey drove up warily, but they waved him on. He drove across and stopped.

They looked like ranchers, but they were darker and did not show the effects of months without sunlight. Harvey wondered if lack of vitamin D would affect them; pale faces were evolved for life in a cold, cloudy environment.

One of the work crew left off digging and came over to the TravelAII. “Randall?”

“Yes. Look, the New Brotherhood must be right behind us—”

“We know where they are,” the man said. “Alice can see them, and we’ve got a radio. You’re supposed to go on up there onto Turtle Mountain and help her observe. Find a place where you can see the valley and still get her on the CB.”

“All right. Thanks. And we’re glad to have you on our side.”

The Indian grinned. “I see it that you’re on our side. Good luck.”

Their earlier mood of elation had vanished now. They drove on along an increasingly difficult road: mud, fallen rocks, deep ruts. Harvey put the TravelAII into four-wheel drive. As they climbed higher the entire valley came into view. To the southwest was the south fork of the Tule, and the road junction and bridge they’d just left. The fork ran northwest to the remains of Lake Success, where it joined the Tule itself.

A ridge separated the forks of the Tule; the ridge that guarded the Stronghold. From their vantage point Harvey and Marie could see the defense line of Police Chief Hartman’s troops — trenches and foxholes and log bunkers. There were less elaborate defenses thrown forward into the south fork valley; they didn’t look adequate to hold. Only the high ridgelines seemed well defended. A classic crust defense, Harvey thought; the enemy need only punch through, and there was nothing to stop them from overrunning the entire Stronghold.

At dusk it was clear what the enemy’s plan was. He brought up his trucks, dug in his troops and lit large campfires in plain sight of the Stronghold. They looked relaxed, confident, and Harvey knew they’d be working on bridges during the night. Finally dark came, and the hills were silent.

“Well, we can’t see anything more,” Harvey said. “Now we really don’t have anything to do.”

Marie moved restlessly beside him. In the dark she was only a presence, her very shape indeterminate; but Harvey grew itchingly aware that Marie Vance was only inches away, and that they were cut off from the universe until sunrise. His memory played him a dirty trick. It showed him Marie Vance some weeks before Hammerfall, as she met Harvey and Loretta at her front door. She wore emeralds and a vividly green evening gown cut nearly to the navel; her hair was set in fantastic convolutions; she smiled graciously and hugged him and welcomed them in. His mind superimposed that image on the dark blur next to him, and the silence grew really uncomfortable.

“I can think of something,” she said softly.

Harvey found his voice. “If it isn’t sex, you’d better tell me now.”

She said nothing. He slid toward her and pulled her against him. Things crunched and crackled; not one of the dozen pockets in that jacket was empty. She chuckled and took it off while he doffed his own jacket with its own lumpy pockets.

Then the terror of the day and the danger of tomorrow, the slow, agonizing death of a world and the coming end of the Stronghold, could be forgotten in the frantic importance of each other. The passenger foot-well grew cluttered with clothing until Harvey broke off and dumped the whole armful behind the steering wheel. The passenger seat wasn’t shaped for this, but they coupled with care and ingenuity, and maintained the position afterward: he half reclining in the passenger seat, she kneeling before him, her face above his. Their breath fell each on the other’s cheek.

“I’m glad you thought of something,” he said presently. (He couldn’t say he loved her.)

“Ever screwed in a car before?”

He thought back. “Sure. I was more limber then.”

“I never did.”

“Well, generally you use the back seat, but…”

“The back seat’s covered with broken glass,” Marie finished, and they felt each other’s tension as they remembered: a .50-caliber bullet, glass showering everywhere, Marie brushing the tiny splinters off him while he drove. But there was a way to forget.

And again, later, there was a way to forget, the same way repeated, with the same frantic urgency. They were not drawn to each other, he thought; they were thrust against each other in their fear of what was outside them. They made love with their ears cocked for gunfire; but they made love. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.

Harvey woke before dawn. He was covered with the blanket from the back seat, but he couldn’t remember getting it. He lay awake, not moving, his thoughts confused.

“Hi,” Marie said softly.

“Hi yourself. I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Not for a while. You get some rest.”

Harvey tried. But there were twinges from muscles he’d overused last night, and twinges from his conscience, which apparently hadn’t been informed that he was a widower whose new girl had dropped him for an astronaut. To hell with that. But he still wasn’t sleeping. “Oh, well,” he said, and sat up. “We seem to have survived the night.”

“I didn’t work you that hard.”

There might have been something false in his own laugh, or… she’d known him a long time. She turned toward him in the dark. “You’re not worried about Gordie, are you? That’s all over. He’s got his new girl, and it doesn’t need a judge to say a marriage is over. We didn’t really need one before.”

Harvey hadn’t been thinking of Gordie. “What will you do now?” he asked. “When this is over? If?”

She laughed. “I won’t stay a cook. But thank you for bringing me to this valley. It’s been much better than anything I could have found for myself.” She was quiet for a moment, and they heard a sound outside: an owl, and the squeal of the rabbit it had caught. “It’s a man’s world now,” Marie said. “So I guess I’ll just have to marry an important one. I’ve always been a status-conscious bitch, and I don’t see any reason to change now. In fact, there’s more reason than ever. Muscle counts. I’ll find me a leader and marry him.”

“And who would that be?”

She giggled. “After yesterday you’re a leader. You’re an important man.” She slid across to him and put her arm around him. Then she laughed aloud. “What’s got you so tense? Am I that terrifying?”

“Certainly.” She was.

She laughed again. “Poor Harvey. I know exactly what you’re thinking. Obligation. You’ve seduced the girl, and you ought to marry her, and you know damn well you can’t resist if I really work at it… see?” Her hands moved to intimate places.

Living with Loretta hadn’t readied him for this kind of warfare. He kissed her hard (she couldn’t bluff Harvey Randall!) and maintained the kiss (because it felt so good, and hell, Maureen had her winged man) until she drew back.

“That wasn’t very nice of me,” she said. “Don’t worry, Harv, I’m really not after you. It wouldn’t work. You know me too well. No matter what we did, even if we really did learn to love each other, you’d always wonder about it. You’d wonder if it was all an act, wonder when I’d decide to drop it. And we’d fight, and play head games, and dominance games…”

“I was thinking something like that.”

“Don’t talk yourself into anything,” Marie said. “I don’t need that. I would like to be your friend.”

“Sure. I’d like that. Who’s your real target?’

“Oh, I’m going to marry George Christopher.”

Harvey was startled. “What? Does he know?”

“Of course not. He still thinks he’s got a chance with Maureen. He tells me about her every chance he gets. And I listen, too.”

“I just bet you do. What makes you think he won’t get Maureen?”

“Don’t be silly. With you and Johnny Baker to choose between? She’ll never marry George. If they hadn’t known each other forever, if he weren’t her first, she wouldn’t even consider him.”

“And me?”

“You got a chance. Baker has a better one.”

“Yeah. I suppose it would be silly to ask if you’re in love with George,” Harvey said.

Marie shrugged. He could feel that in the dark. “He’ll be sure I am,” she said. “And it won’t be anybody else’s business. There won’t be any repetitions of tonight, Harvey. This was… something special. The right man at the right time. I’ve always… Tell me, all those years we lived next door, weren’t you ever tempted to come over some afternoon when Loretta was out and Gordie was at the bank?”

“Yes. But I didn’t.”

“Good. Nothing would have happened, but it always worried me that you didn’t try. Good. Now let’s get some sleep.” She turned away and curled up in the blanket.

Poor George, Harvey thought. No. That’s not right. Lucky George. If I didn’t know her so damned well… Dammit, I’m still tempted. George, you don’t know it, but you’re about to be a happy man.

If you live long enough.

If Marie lives!

Dawn: a red smear in the Sierra. The winds blew fitfully, light airs. Mist rose from the San Joaquin Sea.

When the sun was high, they saw them: A hundred or more of the New Brotherhood had crossed during the night. They were concentrated near the old Lake Success bed, and they moved back toward the ruined bridge, sweeping aside the screen of Stronghold defenders. The Brotherhood’s mortars began to fire, forcing the defenders back up the valley and onto the ridges.

The withdrawal was orderly, but steady. “By noon they’ll have cleared the valley,” Harvey told Marie. “I thought — I hoped — they’d hold longer. At least they aren’t running like rabbits.”

She nodded, but went on reporting the enemy positions on the CB. There wasn’t anything else to do.

Alice sounded terrified whenever she spoke, but she demanded their reports anyway.

Useless, Harvey thought. It’s no good. He looked at the map, wondering if he could find a way into the Sierra that didn’t go back down and through the enemy — or where the New Brotherhood would be soon.

“They’re repairing the bridge,” Marie reported. “They’ve got big trees, and hundreds to carry them.”

“How long until they can get trucks across?” Alice asked.

“No more than an hour.”

“Stand by, I have to report that to Mr. Hardy,” Alice said. The radio went silent.

“It’s no good,” Harvey said. He tried to smile. “Looks like it’s you and me after all. Maybe we can get up there and find the boys. I don’t suppose I’ll have to fight Gordie for you—”

“Shut up and watch,” Marie said. She sounded scared, and Harvey couldn’t blame her.

The bridge took a little more than an hour; then a stream of trucks, led by the pickups with the machine guns, moved over them. They swept on up the valley roads. Other trucks brought the New Brotherhood mortars forward, while crews dug in emplacements for them. The Brotherhood army swarmed into the valley below, probed toward the ridges, fell back wherever opposed. They had plenty of time — and night would be on their side now. They could infiltrate men through the rocks, over the ridges, into the Stronghold itself.

The day became warmer, but not for Harvey and Marie. The rising air from the San Joaquin Sea drew a cold wind down from the Sierra. The enemy moved on forward in the cloudy bright day. Noon came, and they had reached the far end, were beginning to climb the ridges toward the last defenses.

“Stand by,” Alice said. She sounded excited now. Not afraid.

“Stand by for what?” Harvey demanded.

“To watch, and report,” Alice said. “That’s why you’re there. I can’t see…”

Something was happening on the ridge far below. Men had pushed something big, it looked like a wagon, to the brow of the ridge. They shoved, and it went over, tumbling down the ridge, rolling down until it came to rest a hundred yards from the repaired bridge. It sat, did nothing for thirty seconds… and exploded. A huge cloud burst from it and was carried downwind toward the bridge, across it, through the traffic jam at the bridgehead.

And everywhere along the ridge, objects came lobbing over, falling slowly. Men pushed heavy framework forward, boxes with long arms that spewed tiny black dots in an arcing trajectory.

“Catapults!” Harvey yelled.

They were. He didn’t know what powered them. Nylon cords, probably. Carthaginian women donated their hair; maybe…

The catapults didn’t have much range, but they didn’t need it. They threw jars that burst into yellow fog on impact. The wind carried the fog down through the valley, across the advancing enemy…

The New Brotherhood screamed in panic. They threw away weapons, ran in pain, tearing at their clothes, threw themselves into the river to be carried away by the rushing water. They fought to get across the bridge, and from the ridges rifles fired again and again, cutting the running men down as they fled. The catapults poured a continuous rain of bursting jars, renewing the deadly yellow fog.

Harvey’s voice broke as he screamed into the microphone. “They’re running! They’re dying! Good Lord, there must be five hundred of them down out there.”

“What is happening to those who didn’t cross the river?” The voice was Alice Cox, but the question had to be Al Hardy.

“They’re loading up the trucks.”

“What about their weapons? Are they getting those out?”

Harvey scanned with the binoculars. “Yes. They hadn’t brought all the mortars across… there goes one of their trucks.” Harvey shuddered. The pickup, with a load of men gasping in horror, drove down the road at high speed and didn’t slow when it reached the bridge. It flung a dozen off the bridge into the water and kept going, leaving behind those it had run down in its flight.

“There were two of their machine guns on that truck,” Harvey reported. “Looks like they got away.”

The gas didn’t cover the entire valley, and some of the New Brotherhood were able to escape. Many ran screaming without weapons, but Harvey saw others pause, look for a route, and leave carrying heavy weapons. Two of the mortars were carried away before the catapults closed off that escape route. Harvey grimly reported clear areas, and watched as minutes later the gas canisters dropped into them.

“Something’s happening upstream,” Harvey shouted. “I can’t see—”

“Don’t worry about it. Is the road down from the reservation clear of gas?” Alice demanded.

“Hold on a second… Yes.”

“Stand by.”

Moments later trucks came down that road. They carried Tallman’s Indian troops, and more ranchers. Harvey thought he recognized George Christopher in one of the trucks. They roared on in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, but were stopped at the top of the ridge beyond the road junction. Now it was the Stronghold’s turn to deploy and probe, search for weak spots, clear the roads…

While behind them the valley had become an alien world. Its unusual atmosphere was yellow-tinged, deadly to men without pressure-suits. Its native life was eerie to look upon: slow-moving quadrupeds and belly-crawlers, some armed with metallic stings, growing ever more torpid until most seemed to hibernate and only a few still moved. Like snails they crawled on their bellies, leaving trails of red slime, and they moved at snail’s pace downhill toward the river. River life thrashed about, incredibly active, then suddenly stopped moving, to float motionless with clumsy blunt fins wavering in the current.

When dark came, the silence was that of a dead, deserted world.

Aftermath

It was too dark to see. A cold wind blew down from the Sierra. Harvey turned to Marie. “Victory.”

“Yes! We did it! My God, Harvey, we’re safe!” It was too dark to see her face, but Harvey knew she must be grinning like an idiot.

He started the TravelAII. Alice had told him to stay out of the valley, away from the main road. They’d have to drive to the Stronghold on the dirt cowpath. He put the car in gear and moved gingerly ahead. The headlamps showed the road ahead, smooth, untraveled, but the drop to the left was steep, and Harvey knew they were sinking deep into the mud surface. It would be easy to go over the edge. That was frightening — that they could be killed after the battle was over — but it was only a bad road, and he’d been on a lot of those; it wasn’t malevolent.

A wave of exhilaration swept over him. He had to fight an urge to gun the car. He had never been so aware of being alive. They rounded the mountain and crossed the ridge leading down to Senator Jellison’s house, and then he did let himself go, gunning the car forward and driving through the mud at high speed, dangerously fast over the ruts and potholes. The TravelAII leaped as if to share their joy.

He drove as if running away from something. He knew that, and knew that if he let himself think about it, about what he’d seen, he would not feel joy but an infinite sadness. Back in that valley of battle were hundreds, all ages, men, girls, women, boys, crawling with ruined lungs, leaving trails of blood that had been visible through binoculars until the merciful dark fell across the land: the dying, who had survived the end of the world.

“Harvey, you can’t think about them as people.”

“You too?”

“Yes. A little. But we’re alive! We’ve won!”

The TravelAII leaped upward at the top of a small hillock, all four wheels briefly leaving the ground. It was stupid driving at this speed, but Harvey didn’t care. “We’ve fought our last battle,” he shouted. “Ain’t gonna study war no more.” Euphoria again: The world was a lovely place for the living. Let the dead bury the dead. Harvey Randall was alive, and the enemy was defeated. “Hail the conquering heroes come. Wish I could remember the tune. Silly language. Hero. Hell, you’re more of a hero — heroine? — than I am. I’d have run like hell if you’d let me. But I couldn’t. Sexism — men can’t run while women are watching. Why am I babbling? Why aren’t you?”

“I’m not because you won’t give me a chancel” Marie shouted. There was laughter in her voice. “And you didn’t run, and neither did I, and it would have been so easy…” She laughed again, this time with a peculiar note in it. “And now, my friend, we go collect the traditional reward for heroes. Find Maureen. You’ve earned it.”

“Strange to say, I thought of that. But of course George will be coming back—”

“You leave George to me,” Marie said primly. “After all, I’ve got a reward coming, too. You leave George to me.”

“I think I’m jealous of him.”

“Too bad.”

The mood lasted only until they reached the Senator’s stone ranch house and went inside. There were many others there. Al Hardy, drunk but not with liquor, grinning like a fool while others pounded him on the back. Dan Forrester, exhausted, introspective and unhappy, and no one caring; they praised him and thanked him and let him have his mood, to enjoy or hate, be glad or sad. Magicians may do as they please.

Many were absent. They might be among the dead, they might have joined the pursuit; they might have fled, and be fleeing still, unaware that nobody was hunting them. The victors were too tired to think about them. Harvey searched until he found Maureen, and he went to her. There was no lust between them, only an infinite tenderness, concern; they touched each other like children.

There was no party, no celebration. Within minutes the gathering was finished. Some dropped into chairs and slept; some went to their own houses. Harvey felt nothing now; only the need to rest, to sleep, to forget everything that had happened that day. He had seen this before, in men returned from patrol in Vietnam, but he had not felt it himself: drained of energy, drained of emotion, not unhappy, able to rouse himself to brief moments of excitement only to have them slip away and leave him more exhausted than ever.

He woke remembering that they’d won. The details were gone; there had been dreams, vivid and mixed with memories of the past few days, and as the dreams faded so did the memories, leaving him only the word. Victory!

He was Iying on the floor of the front room, on a rug and covered with a blanket; he had no idea how he had come there. Perhaps he had been talking with Maureen and simply fallen to the floor. Anything was possible.

There were sounds in the house, people moving, smells of cooking food. He savored them all, the sounds and smells and sensations of life: The gray clouds outside the window seemed infinitely detailed, vivid and brilliant as sunlight; the bronze trophies on the walls were a marvel that needed investigation. He treasured each moment of life and what it might bring.

Gradually the mood faded. It left him desperately hungry. He got up, and saw that the living-room rug itself looked like a battlefield. They lay where fatigue had dropped them. Someone had lasted long enough to spread blankets… and had run short. Harvey spread his own blanket over Steve Cox, who was coiled into a ball against the cold, and followed his nose toward breakfast.

There was bright sunlight in the room. Maureen Jellison stared in disbelief. She was afraid to get out of bed; the bright sun might be a dream, and it was a dream she wanted to savor. Finally she convinced herself that she was awake. It was no illusion. The sun came in the window, warm and yellow and bright. It was over an hour high. She could feel its warmth on her arms when she threw back the covers.

Gradually she came to full wakefulness. Terror and blood and a fatigue like death itself, the memories of yesterday ran together like a too-fast movie film. There had been the horror of the morning, when the Stronghold forces had to hold fast, retreating slowly, letting the Brotherhood into the valley but never on the ridges; the gradual retreat that could not seem too obvious, with troops who couldn’t be told the battle plan for fear that they would be captured; finally the general panic, when they had all run.

“When you run they bunch up and follow,” Al Hardy had said. “Randall’s reports make that pretty clear. Their commander goes by the book. So will we, up to a point.”

The problem had been to hold along the high ground, so that the Brotherhood would stay down in the valley; to give way along the valley floor until enough of the Brotherhood had crossed the bridge. How could they get the ranchers to fight and not run until the signal? Hardy had chosen the simplest solution to that. “If you’re out there,” he’d said, “if you stand, some of them will stay with you. They’re men.”

She had resented that, but it had been no time to give Al Hardy a lecture; and he’d been right. All she’d had to do was hold on to her own courage. For someone who wasn’t sure she wanted to live, that had seemed a simple job. It wasn’t until she was actually under fire that she began to have doubts.

Something unseen had ripped Roy Miller’s side. He tried to block the wound with his forearm. His forearm nestled neatly in the great gap of torn ribs. Maureen’s breakfast rose in her throat… and in his last moment Roy looked around and caught her expression.

A mortar shell had exploded behind Deke Wilson and two of his men. The others rolled over and over and lay sprawled in positions that would have been hideously uncomfortable if they hadn’t been dead; but Deke flew forward and upward, his arms flapping frantically, and fluttered downhill like a fledgling just learning to fly, down into the yellow murk.

Joanna MacPherson turned to yell at Maureen. A bullet whispered through her hair, through the space where her skull had been only a moment before, and Joanna’s message became frantically obscene.

A fragment of metal from a mortar blast shattered Jack Turner’s mustard bomb as he was winding up for the throw. His friends ran from him, and his sister-in-law ran too, and Jack Turner staggered and thrashed within the yellow cloud, drowning.

Pudgy Galadriel from the Shire swung her sling round and round, stepped forward and sent a bottle of nerve gas flying far down the hill. A moment too long on the follow-through, and Galadriel stood poised like Winged Victory, with her head gone. Maureen saw black spots before her eyes. She leaned against a boulder and managed to stay upright.

It was one thing to stand on a clifftop and contemplate (at her leisure) jumping off (but would she have had the nerve? or was it all an act? Now she’d never know). It was quite another to watch poor, homely Galadriel crumple with the stump of her neck spitting blood, and then, without looking to see if anyone was actually watching her, to pick up her sling and a bottle of nerve gas and swing the deadly, evil thing round and round her head and, remembering at the last second that the damn thing would fly at a tangent and not in the direction the sling was pointing when she let go, sling it down into the cannibal horde that was still coming up at them. Suddenly Maureen Jellison had found quite a lot to live for. The gray skies, cold winds, brief snow flurries, the prospect of hunger in winter; all of that faded away. First there was a simple realization: If you could feel terror, you wanted to live. Strange that she’d never understood that before.

She dressed quickly and went outside. The bright sun was gone. She could not see the sun at all, but the sky overhead was bright, and the clouds seemed much thinner than usual. Had the sunlight been a final dream? It didn’t matter. The air was warm, and there was no rain. The small creek below the house was very high, and the water gurgled happily. It would be cold water, just right for trout. Birds dipped low into the stream and cried loudly. She walked down the drive to the highway.

There was no traffic. There had been, earlier, when the Stronghold’s wounded had been taken to the former county convalescent home that served as the valley’s hospital, and later there would be more when the less critically injured were brought in horse-drawn wagons, but for now the road was clear. She walked steadily on, aware of every sight and sound: the ring of an ax in the hills above; the flash of red as a red-winged blackbird darted into the brush nearby; the shouts of children herding the Stronghold’s pigs through the woods.

The children had adjusted quickly to the new conditions.

One elderly adult as teacher, a dozen or more children, two working dogs and a herd of swine school and work. A different sort of school with different lessons. Reading and arithmetic, certainly, but also other knowledge: to lead the pigs to dog droppings (the dogs in turn ate part of the human sewage); and always to carry a bucket to collect the pig manure, which must be brought back at night. Other lessons: how to trap rats and squirrels. Rats were important to the new ecology. They had to be kept out of the Stronghold’s barns (cats did most of that), but the rats were themselves useful: They found their own food, they could be eaten, their fur made clothing and shoes, and their small bones made needles. There were prizes for the children who caught the most rats.

Closer to town was the sewage works, where the animal and human wastes were shoveled into boilers with wood chips and sawdust. The heat of fermentation sterilized everything, and the hot gases were led out through pipes that ran under City Hall and the hospital to form part of the heating system, then condensed. The resulting methanol, wood alcohol, ran the trucks that collected the wastes, with some left over for other work. The system wasn’t complete — they needed more boilers, and more pipes and condensers, and the work absorbed too much skilled labor — but Hardy could be deservedly proud of the start they had made. By spring they’d have a lot of high-nitrogen fertilizer from the residue in the boilers, all sterilized and ready for the crops they’d plant — and there should be enough methanol to run tractors for the initial heavy work of plowing.

We’ve done well, she thought. There’s a lot more to do, all kinds of work. Windmills to build. Waterwheels. Crops to plant. A forge to set up. Hardy had found an old book on working bronze and methods of casting it in sand, but they hadn’t had time to do much about it yet. Now they’d have the time, now that there was no threat of war hanging over them. Harvey Randall had been singing when he came into the ranch house after the battle. “Ain’t gonna study war no more!”

It wasn’t going to be easy. She looked up at the clouds; they were turning dark. She wished the sunlight would break through, not because she wanted to see the sun again, although she certainly did, but because it would be so appropriate: a symbol of their eventual success. Instead there were only the darkening clouds, but she refused to let them depress her. It would be so easy to fall back into her black mood of despair.

Harvey Randall had been right about that: It was worth almost anything to spare people that feeling of helplessness and doom. But first you had to conquer it in yourself. You had to look squarely at this new and terrible world, know what it could and would do to you — and shout defiance. Then you could get to work.

The thought of Harvey reminded her of Johnny Baker, and she wondered what had happened to the expedition to the power plant. They should be all right now. With the New Brotherhood defeated, the power plant should be all right, now that they’d repelled that first, tentative attack. But…

Their last message had come three days ago.

Maybe there had been a second attack. Certainly the radio was out. Maureen shivered. Maybe a damn transistor had given up the ghost, or maybe everybody was dead. There was just no way to tell. Johnny would have been in the thick of things … he was too damn visible…

So let it be a transistor, she told herself, and keep busy. She turned downhill toward the hospital.

Alim Nassor gasped for breath and couldn’t find it. He sat propped up in the truck bed; if he lay down, he would drown. His lungs were filling anyway, and it wouldn’t be long. They had failed. The Brotherhood was defeated, and Alim Nassor was a dead man.

Swan was dead. Jackie was dead. Most of his band, dead in the valley of the Tule River, killed by choking clouds of yellow gas that stung like fire. He felt Erika’s hands moving a cloth over his face, but he couldn’t focus his eyes on her. She was a good woman. White woman, but she stayed with Alim, got him out when the others ran away. He wanted to tell her so. If he could speak…

He felt the truck slow, and heard someone call a challenge. They had reached the new camp, and somebody had organized sentries. Hooker? Alim thought the Hook had lived. He hadn’t crossed the river; he was directing the mortars, and that should have been safe unless he was caught by the pursuit. Alim wondered if he wanted Hooker to have lived. Nothing really mattered anymore. The Hammer had killed Alim Nassor.

The truck stopped near a campfire, and he felt himself being lifted out. They put him near the fire, and that felt good.

Erika stayed by him, and someone brought him a cup of hot soup. It was too much trouble to tell them they were wasting good broth; that he wouldn’t live past the next time he fell asleep. He’d drown in his own phlegm. He coughed, hard, to try to clear his lungs so he could talk, but that hurt too bad, and he stopped.

Gradually he heard a voice.

“And ye have defied the Lord God of Hosts! Ye placed your faith in armies, ye Angels of the Lord. Strategy! What do the Angels need of strategy! Place your trust in the Lord God Jehovah! Do His work! Work His will, o my people. Destroy the Citadel of Satan as God wills it, and then can ye conquer!”

The voice of the prophet lashed over him. “Weep not for the fallen, for they have fallen in the service of the Lord! Great shall be their reward. O ye Angels and Archangels, hear me! This is no time for sorrow! This is a time to go forth in the Name of the Lord!”

“No,” Alim gasped, but no one heard.

“We can do it,” a voice said nearby. It took Alim a moment to recognize it. Jerry Owen. “They don’t have any poison gas in the power plant. Even if they do, it won’t matter. We take all the mortars and recoilless rifles out on the barge and blow up the turbines. That’ll end that power plant.”

“Strike in the Name of God!” Armitage was shouting. There were some answers now. “Hallelujah!” someone called. “Amen!” another said. Tentative at first, but as Armitage continued, the responses became more enthusiastic.

“Shee-it.” That had to be Sergeant Hooker. Alim couldn’t turn his head to look at him. “Alim, you hear me?”

Alim nodded slightly.

“He says he hears,” Erika said. “Leave him alone. He’s got to rest. I wish he’d get some sleep.”

Sleep! That would kill him for sure. Every breath was a fight, something to struggle for, an effort of will. If he relaxed for a moment he’d stop breathing.

“What the hell do I do now?” Hooker was asking. “You the only brother left I can rap with.”

Words formed on Alim’s lips. Erika translated. “He asks how many brothers are left.”

“Ten,” Hooker said.

Ten blacks. Were they the last blacks in the world? Of course not. Africa was still there. Wasn’t it? They hadn’t seen any black faces among their enemies, though. Maybe there weren’t any more in California. He whispered again. “He says ten is not enough,” Erika said.

“Yeah.” Hooker bent low, to speak into Alim’s ear. No one else could hear. “I got to stay with this preacher,” he said. “Alim, is he crazy? Is he right? I can’t think no more.”

Alim shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about that. Armitage was speaking again, of the paradise that waited for the fallen. The words blended into the vague, slow thoughts that crept into Alim’s consciousness. Paradise. Maybe it was true. Maybe that crazy preacher was right. It was better to think so. “He knows the truth,” Alim gasped.

The fire’s warmth was almost pleasant. Darkness gathered in his head despite the glimpses of morning sunshine he thought he’d seen earlier. The preacher’s words sank through the dark. “Strike now, ye Angels! This very day, this very hour! It is the will of God!”

The last thing Alim heard was Sergeant Hooker shouting “Amen!”

When Maureen reached the hospital, Leonilla Malik took her and led her firmly into a front room.

“I came to help,” Maureen said. “But I wanted to talk to the wounded. One of the Tallifsen boys was in my group, and he—”

“He’s dead,” Leonilla said. There was no emotion in her voice. “I could use some help. Did you ever use a microscope?”

“Not since college biology class.”

“You don’t forget how,” Leonilla said. “First I want a blood sample. Please sit down here.” She took a hypodermic needle from a pressure cooker. “My autoclave,” she said. “Not very pretty, but it works.”

Maureen had wondered what happened to the pressure cookers from the ranch house. She winced as the needle went into her arm. It was dull. Leonilla drew out the blood sample and carefully squirted it into a test tube that had come from a child’s chemistry set.

The tube went into a sock; a piece of parachute cord was attached to the sock, and Leonilla used that to whirl the test tube around and around her head. “Centrifuging,” she said. “I show you how to do this, and then you can do some of the work. We need more help in the lab.” She continued to swing the test tube.

“There,” she said. “We have separated the cells from the fluid. Now we draw off the fluid, so, and wash the cells with saline.” She worked rapidly. “Here on the shelf we have cells and fluid from the patients who need blood. I will test yours against theirs.”

“Don’t you want to know my blood type?” Maureen asked.

“Yes. In a moment. But I must make the tests anyway. I do not know the patient blood types and I have no way to find out, and this is more certain. It is merely very inconvenient.”

The room had been an office. The walls had been painted not long ago and were well scrubbed. The office table where Leonilla worked was Formica, and very clean. “Now,” Leonilla said, “I put samples of your cells into a sample of the patient’s serum, and the patient’s cells in yours, so, and we look in the microscope.”

The microscope had also come from a child’s collection. Someone had burned the local high school before Hardy had thought to send an expedition for its science equipment.

“This is very difficult to work with,” Leonilla said. “But it will work. You must be very careful with the focus.” She peered into the microscope. “Ah. Rouleaux cells. You cannot be a donor for this patient. Look, so that you will know.”

Maureen looked into the microscope. At first she saw nothing, but she worked the focus, the feel of it coming back to her fingers… Leonilla was right, she thought. You don’t really forget how. She remembered that you weren’t supposed to close the other eye, but she did anyway. When the instrument was properly focused she saw blood cells. “You mean the little stacks like poker chips?” she asked.

“Poker chips?”

“Like saucers—”

“Yes. Those are rouleaux formations. They indicate clumping. Now, what was your blood type?”

“A,” Maureen said.

“Good. I will mark that down. We must use these file cards, one for every person. I note on your card that your blood clumps that of Jacob Vinge, and note the same on his card. Now we try yours with others.” She went through the procedure again, and once more. “Ah. You can be a donor for Bill Darden. I will note that on your card and his. Now. You know the procedure. Here are the samples, clearly labeled. Each must be tested against the others, donors against patients. When that is done we must test donors against each other, although this is not so critical; then we will know, in case we must someday give one of you a transfusion…”

“Shouldn’t you be drawing blood for Darden?” Maureen tried to remember him; he’d come to the Stronghold late, and was let in because his mother lived here. He’d been in Chief Hartman’s group in the battle.

“I gave him a pint already,” Leonilla said. “Rick Delanty. We have no way to store whole blood, except as now — in the donor. When Darden requires more, I will send for you. Now I must go back to the ward. If you truly wish to help, you may continue with the cross matching.”

Maureen spoiled the first test, but when she was careful she found it wasn’t difficult, merely tedious. The work wasn’t made easier by the smells from the sewage works nearby, but there wasn’t much choice about that. They needed the heat from the fermenting boilers; by running the extraction through City Hall and the hospital they got that heat free, but at the cost of the ripe smells…

Once Leonilla came in and removed a patient sample and card. She didn’t explain; it wasn’t needed. Maureen reached for the card and looked at the name. One of the Aramson girls, age sixteen, wounded while throwing a dynamite bomb.

“With penicillin I might have saved her,” Leonilla said. “But there is none, and there will never be any.”

“We can’t make it?” Maureen demanded.

Leonilla shook her head. “Sulfa, perhaps. But not the other antibiotics. That would require more equipment than we will have for years. Precise temperature regulation. High-speed centrifuges. No, we must learn to live without penicillin.” She grimaced. “Which means that a simple cut untreated can be a death sentence. People must be made to understand that We cannot ignore hygiene and first aid. Wash all cuts. And we will soon be out of tetanus vaccine, although perhaps that can be made. Perhaps.”

The crossbow was large, and wound with a wheel. Harvey Randall turned it with effort, then laid the long, thin shaft into the weapon. He looked up at Brad Wagoner. “I feel like I ought to have on a black mask.”

Wagoner shuddered. “Get it over,” he said.

Harvey took careful aim. The crossbow was set on a large tripod, and the sights were good. He stood on the ridge above Battle Valley. That name would stick, he thought. He aimed the crossbow at a still figure down below. The figure moved slightly. Harvey checked the sights again, then stood aside. “Okay,” he said. He gently pulled the lanyard.

The steel springs of the bow gave a humming sound, and the traveler block clattered. The shaft flew out, over a yard long, a thin steel rod with metal feathering at the end; it went in a flat trajectory and imbedded itself in the figure below. The hands jerked convulsively, then were still. They hadn’t seen the face. At least this one hadn’t screamed.

“There’s another. About forty yards to the left,” Wagoner said. “I’ll take that one.”

“Thanks.” Harvey turned away. It was too damned personal. Rifles would be better. Or machine guns. A machine gun was very impersonal. If you shot someone with a machine gun, you could persuade yourself that the gun had done it. But the crossbow had to be wound with your own musclepower. Personal.

There was nothing else to do. The valley was death to enter. In the cold night the mustard had condensed, and now small streamers of the yellow gas were sometimes visible. No one could enter that valley. They could leave the enemy — thank God all the Stronghold wounded had been taken out before the gas attack, although Harvey knew that Al Hardy would have ordered the attack even if they hadn’t been — they could leave the enemy wounded, or they could kill them. And they couldn’t spare rifle or machine-gun ammunition for the purpose. The crossbow bolts were recoverable. After the first good rain, or after a few days of warmth, the gas would be dispersed.

It made good fertilizer. So would the dead. Battle Valley would be good cropland next spring. Now it was a slaughterhouse.

We won. Victory. Harvey tried to recall the elation he’d felt the night before, the sense of life he’d had when he woke in the morning, and he knew he’d be able to. This was horrible work, but it was needed. They couldn’t leave the Brotherhood’s wounded to suffer. They’d die soon enough anyway; better to kill them cleanly.

And it was the last. No more wars. Now they could build a civilization. The Brotherhood had done the Stronghold’s work: They had cleared out much of the area near the Stronghold. It wouldn’t take a big expedition to go looking for salvage. Harvey kept his thoughts on that: on what they could find, on the wonders out there that they could search for and bring home.

When he heard the bow, Harvey turned back. His turn. Let Brad be alone for a moment.

The blood typing was done, and she’d visited the wounded. That had been tough, but not as bad as she’d thought. She knew why, but she didn’t think about it.

It wasn’t too bad in the hospital, because the worst cases had already died. Maureen wondered if they’d been… helped. Leonilla and Doc Valdemar and his psychiatrist wife, Ruth, knew their limits, knew that many who had inhaled mustard or taken gut shots were finished because they didn’t have the drugs and equipment it would take to save them, and the mustard cases would end up blind anyway, most of them. Had the doctors been more than choosers of the slain? Maureen didn’t want to ask.

She left the hospital.

In City Hall they were preparing for a party. A victory celebration. And we damned well deserve it, Maureen thought. We can mourn the dead, but we have to go on living, and these people have worked and bled and died for this moment: for the celebration that said the fighting was over, that the Hammer had done its worst and now it was time to rebuild.

Joanna and Rosa Wagoner were shouting with joy. They’d got a lamp burning. “It works!” Joanna said. “Hi, Maureen. We’ve got the lamp burning on methanol.”

It didn’t give off much light, but it would do. At the end of the big central book-lined room some of the children were setting up punch bowls. Mulberry wine, really quite good (well, not too bad); a case of Cokes someone had saved. And there would be food, mostly stew, and you didn’t want to know what was in it. Rats and squirrels weren’t really very different kinds of animals, nor did cat taste much different from rabbit. There wouldn’t be many vegetables in the stew. Potatoes were scarce and terribly valuable. There were oats, though. Two of Gordie Vance’s scouts had come down with oats, carefully separated: the scrawny ones for eating, and the best separated out to be kept as seed. The Sierra was full of wild oats.

And Scotland had built a national cuisine on oats. Tonight they’d find out what haggis tasted like…

She went through the main hall, where women and children were putting up decorations, bright-colored drapes now used as wall hangings, whatever might add a festive air. The Mayor’s office was through a door at the far end.

Her father, Al Hardy, Mayor Seitz and George Christopher were in there with Eileen Hamner. Their conversation stopped abruptly as she entered. Maureen greeted George and got an answer, but he seemed slightly nervous, somehow made to feel guilty in her presence. Or was she imagining it? She wasn’t imagining the silence in the room.

“Go on with what you were doing,” she said.

“We were just talking about… things,” Al Hardy said. “I don’t know if you’d be interested…”

Maureen laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Go on.” Because if you’re going to treat me like a goddam princess, she thought, I can sure as hell learn what’s going on.

“Yes. Well, it’s a bit of an ugly subject,” Al Hardy said.

“So?” She took a seat next to her father. He didn’t look good. He didn’t look good at all, and Maureen knew he wouldn’t live through the winter. The doctors at Bethesda had told her he would have to take things a lot easier — and there was no way he could do that. She put her hand on his arm and smiled, and he returned it. “Tell Al I’ll be all right,” she said.

His smile broadened. “Sure about that, Kitten?”

“Yes. I can do my part.”

“Al,” Jellison said.

“Yes, sir. It’s about the prisoners. What do we do with them?”

“There weren’t many of their wounded in the hospital,” Maureen said. “I’d have thought there would be more — oh.”

Hardy nodded. “The rest are being… taken care of. It’s the forty-one men and six women who surrendered that we’ve got to worry about.” He held up his hand and ticked off points on his fingers. “I see the following alternatives. One. We can take them in as citizens—”

“Never,” George Christopher growled.

“Two. We can take them in as slaves. Three, we can let them go. Four, we can kill them.”

“We don’t let them go, either,” George said. “Let them go, they’ll rejoin the Brotherhood. Where else would they go? And the Brotherhood is still bigger than we are. Don’t forget that. They put up a good fight after the first ten or fifteen miles. They’ve still got leaders, some trucks, mortars… Sure, we captured a lot of their weapons, but they’re still out there.” He grinned wolfishly. “But I bet they don’t ever stick their noses our way again.” Then he looked thoughtful. “Slaves. I can think of a lot we could do with slaves.”

“Yes.” Hardy nodded agreement. “So can I. Brute labor. Turning compressor pumps so we can have refrigeration. Musclepower for hand lathes. Grinding lenses. Even pulling plows. There’s a lot of work nobody wants to do—”

“But slavery?” Maureen protested. “That’s horrible.”

“Is it? Would you like it better if we call it imprisonment at hard labor?” Hardy asked. “Would their lives be so much worse than they were as part of the Brotherhood? Or worse than convicts in prisons before the Hammer?”

“No,” Maureen said. “It’s not them I’m thinking of. It’s us. Do we want to be the kind of people who keep slaves?”

“Then let’s kill ’em and get it over with,” George Christopher said. “Because we’re sure as hell not going to just turn them loose. Inside or outside.”

“Why can’t we just let them go?” Maureen demanded.

“I already told you,” George said. “They’ll go back to the cannibals—”

“Is the Brotherhood all that dangerous now?” Maureen asked.

“Not to us,” Christopher said. “They won’t come here again.”

“And by spring there won’t be many of them left, I suspect,” Al Hardy added. “They don’t have much organization for winter. Or if they do, the ones we captured don’t know about it.”

Maureen fought the feeling that threatened her. “It’s all pretty horrible,” she said.

“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low; conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of our own wounded, much less theirs, so all we can afford to do for theirs is put them out of their misery. Now what can we afford to do with the other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intentions.”

Maureen patted her father’s arm. “That’s what I figured out, somewhere in the last week. But — if we can’t afford much, then we have to build so that we can! What we don’t dare do is get used to evil. We have to hate it, even if we can’t do anything else.”

“Which doesn’t settle what we do with the prisoners,” George Christopher said. “I vote for killing them. I’ll do it myself.”

And he hadn’t brought any back from his pursuit, Maureen knew. And he’d never understand. Yet in his way he was a good man. He’d shared everything he had. He worked longer than anyone else, and harder, and not just for himself.

“No,” Maureen said. “All right. We can’t let them go. And we can’t keep them as citizens. If all we can afford is slavery, then keep them as slaves. And put them to work so we can afford something more. Only we don’t call them slaves, either, because that makes it too easy to think like a slavemaster. We can put them to work, but we call them prisoners of war and we treat them as prisoners of war.”

Hardy looked confused. He’d never seen Maureen so assertive. He looked from her to the Senator, but all he got from the Senator was the look of a man tired unto death.

“All right,” Al said. “Eileen, we’ll have to organize a POW camp.”

The Final Decision

The van had not been new when the comet fell. In these past few months it had aged many years. It had bulled its paths across roadless land and through fresh sea bottom. It stank of fish. Maintenance had been impossible, and continual rain had caused years of corrosion. Half blinded with one headlamp working, it seemed to know that its era was dead. It groaned, it limped; and with every jolt of its dying shock absorbers, Tim Hamner felt a needle of pain stab his hip.

Shifting gears was worse. His right leg wouldn’t reach the clutch pedal. He used his left, and it was like an ice pick being wiggled in the bone. Still he drove fast across the potholed road, balancing the jouncing against the need for speed.

Cal Christopher was on guard at the barricade. His weapon was an Army submachine gun. He carried a bottle of Old Fedcal in the other hand, and he beamed, he swaggered, he wanted to talk. “Hamner! Good to see you.” He thrust the bottle through the truck window. “Have a drink — hey! What happened to your face?”

“Sand,” said Tim. “Look, I’ve got three wounded in the truck bed. Can somebody drive for me?”

“Gee, there are only two of us here. Rest are celebrating. You guys won, huh? We heard you’d had a fight and beat them off-”

“The wounded,” Tim said. “Is there somebody at the hospital?”

“You better believe it. We had wounded here, too. But we won! They weren’t expecting it, Tim, it was beautiful! Forrester’s brew really clobbered them. They won’t stop running until—”

“They did stop. And I can’t take time to talk, Cal.”

“Yeah, right. Well, everybody’s celebrating at City Hall, and the hospital’s right next door, so you’ll get plenty of help. They may not be sober, but—”

“The barricade, Cal. I can’t help you with it. I got hit myself.”

“Oh. Too bad.” Cal moved the log aside, and Tim drove on. The road was dark, and none of the houses were lit. He saw no one along the way, but the going was easier here; the potholes had all been filled in. He rounded a bend and saw the town.

City Hall glowed softly through the dark. Candlelight and lanterns in every window: not an impressive sight after the brilliant glare of the atomic plant, but still a sign of celebration. The crowd was too big for the building. It had spilled onto the street despite the tiny flurries of snow. People formed tight clumps against the chill and the wind, but their laughter reached him for all that. Tim parked next door, in front of the county convalescent home.

People moved toward him from outside City Hall as he climbed from the cab. One was running — off-balance. Eileen, her sunburst smile wide and familiar. “Easy!” he cried, but too late. She crashed into him and hugged him tight, laughing, while he tried to maintain balance for both. Agony twisted and grated in the bone. “Easy. Jesus Christ. There’s a piece of metal in my hip.”

She jumped back as if scalded. “What happened?” And saw his face. Her smile faded. “What happened?”

“Mortar shell. It went off just in front of us. We were up on the cooling tower with the radio. It blasted the radio to bits, and it shredded the cop, uh, Wingate, his name was, and I was standing right between them, Eileen. Right between them. All I got was a blast of sand from the sandbags and this thing in my hip. Are you okay?”

“Oh, sure. And you’re all right, aren’t you? You can walk. You’re safe. Thank God.” Before Tim could interrupt she went on. “Tim, we won! We must have killed half of the cannibals, and the rest are still running. George Christopher chased them for fifty miles!”

“They’ll never try us again,” someone boasted, and Tim realized he was surrounded. The man who spoke was a stranger, an Indian, by his looks. He handed Tim a bottle. “Last Irish whiskey in the world,” he said.

“Should save it for Irish coffee,” someone laughed, “but there ain’t no more coffee.”

The bottle was nearly empty. Tim didn’t drink. He shouted “There are wounded in the back! I need stretcher bearers!” He called again, “Stretcher bearers. And stretchers, come to that.” Some of the merrymakers moved toward the hospital. Good.

Eileen was frowning, more in puzzlement than sadness. She kept looking at Tim to be sure he was still there, that he was all right. “We heard about the attack on the plant,” she said. “But you beat them. None of our people hurt—”

“That was the first attack,” Tim said. “They hit us again. This afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” The Indian was incredulous. “But they were running. We chased them.”

“They stopped running,” Tim said.

Eileen put her mouth close to his ear. “Maureen will want to know about Johnny Baker.”

“He’s dead.”

She looked at him, shocked.

Men came with stretchers. The wounded were in the back of the van, wrapped in cocoons of blankets. One was Jack Ross. The men carrying the stretchers stopped in surprise at seeing the others: Both were black. “Mayor Allen’s police,” Tim told them. He wanted to help carry, but he was lucky to carry himself. He found the stick Horrie Jackson’s fishermen had given him and used it for a cane as he limped into the hospital.

Leonilla Malik directed them into a heated front room. It had a large office table set up as a surgery. They put the stretchers on the floor and she examined the men quickly and carefully. First Jack Ross; she used her stethoscope, frowned, moved the instrument, then lifted a hand and pressed hard on the thumbnail. It went white and stayed that way. Silently she pulled the blanket over his head and went to the next.

The policeman was conscious. “Can you understand me?” she asked.

“Yeah. Are you the Russian spacewoman?”

“Yes. How many times were you hit?”

“Six. Shrapnel. Guts are on fire,” he said.

As she felt for the pulse, Tim limped out of the room. Eileen followed, hugging at his arm. “You’ve been hit! Stay here,” she said.

“I’m not bleeding. I can come back. Somebody’s got to ten George about his brother-in-law. And there’s something else I have to do. We’ve got to have reinforcements. Fast.”

He saw it in her face. Nobody here wanted that kind of news. They’d fought and won, and they didn’t want to hear that there was more fighting to do. “We don’t have a doctor at the plant,” Tim said. “Nobody wanted to dig that steel out of me.”

“Get back in that hospital!” Eileen commanded.

“I will. But the cops come first, they’re hurt worse than me. The plant nurse squeezed sulfa in the hole and covered it with sterile gauze. I’ll be okay for awhile. I’ve got to talk to Hardy.” It was hard to keep his thoughts in order; his hip felt like fire, and the pain kept him confused.

He let Eileen help support his weight as they crossed the narrow way toward City Hall. Damn, they were surrounded again. Steve Cox, Jellison’s foreman, asked, “Hamner, what happened?” Someone else bellowed, “Let him alone, let him tell all of us at once.” And another: “Hamner, are you going to drink that?”

Tim discovered the near-empty bottle still in his hand. He surrendered it.

“Hey,” Steve Cox yelled. “Give that back to him. Come on, man, have a drink with us. We won!”

“Can’t. Have to talk to the Senator. And Hardy. We’ve got to have help.” He felt Eileen stiffen. The others looked as she had: They hated him for his bad news. “We can’t take another attack,” Tim said. “They did us too much damage.”

“No. It’s got to be over,” Eileen whispered. Tim heard.

“You thought it was all over,” Tim said.

“Everybody does.” Eileen’s face showed unbearable grief. It should have melted Tim Hamner, but it didn’t. “Nobody wants to fight again,” Eileen said.

“We won’t have to!” Joanna MacPherson’s high, clear voice cried, “We slaughtered the sons of bitches, Tim!” She edged up to him and put her shoulder under his other armpit. “There aren’t enough of them left to fight. They’ll split up and pretend they never heard of the Brotherhood. And that won’t work either. We’ll know them.” Joanna had tasted blood. Suddenly she said, “Is Mark all right?”

“Mark’s fine.” Tim was just beginning to realize what he was up against. A hopeless task. But it had to be done, they had to understand. He added, “Healthy and happy and cleaner than you are. They’ve got hot showers and washing machines at the power plant.”

It could help.

In a room off the meeting hall at City Hall, Rick Delanty argued for his honor against Ginger Dow, who seemed determined to take him home with her. She was also indecently amused by the whole thing. “You don’t have to marry me, you know.”

When he didn’t answer, she laughed. She was a sturdy matron in her mid-thirties whose long brown hair had been brushed to a soft glow, possibly for the first time since Hammerfall. “Although if you like everything, you could move in. And if you don’t, leave in the morning. Nobody will care. This isn’t Mississippi, you know. There’s probably not another black woman other than the cannibals for a thousand miles.”

“Well, I admit it makes me nervous,” Rick said. “The whole situation. But it isn’t just that. I’m in mourning.”

He would have been less nervous if he and Ginger hadn’t been trying to raise their voices against the singing in the big room next door. The tune seemed to be optional, but at least they were loud.

Ginger lost some of her smile. “We’re all in mourning for someone, Rick. We don’t let it get to us. The last I ever saw of Gil, my husband, he was off to Porterville for lunch with his lawyer. Then banal I think the dam must have got them both.”

“It’s not mourning time,” she told him. “It’s time to celebrate.” Her mouth puckered into a pout. “There are a lot of men. Lots more than women. And nobody’s ever told me I was ugly.”

“Ugly you’re not,” Rick said. Was it the astronaut’s scalp she wanted to collect, or the black man’s? Or was she husband hunting? Rick found he was flattered; but the memories of the house in El Lago were too vivid. He opened the connecting door.

The City Hall was also the town library, police station and jail. The large book-lined meeting room had been decorated with paintings and drapes. They absorbed some of the sound, but it was still a damned noisy party. Rick found Brad Wagoner at the end of the big room. Wagoner was staring at something in a glass display case.

“Where did that come from?” Rick asked. “Somebody up here collect Steuben glass?”

Wagoner shrugged. “Don’t know. Right classy whale, isn’t it?” Wagoner had a large bandage around his forehead. It looked impressive, like a scene from The Red Badge of Courage. He didn’t tell people about it though: that he’d slung a thermit grenade with too much vigor and fallen onto a rock and rolled downhill until he thought he was going to be gassed, but he wasn’t. He was pretty well gassed now, on bourbon and water. He told Rick, “At least we won’t ever have to do that again.” He’d been saying that a lot.

Happiness was contagious. Rick wanted to join in. If only he could quit worrying about that damned power plant, and about Johnny. And forget El Lago. He decided to go over to the hospital and do some honest work. He wouldn’t be spoiling anybody’s party at the hospital. As he made his way toward the door, Tim Hamner came in, a girl at each arm and a crowd around him all trying to talk at once.

Rick shoved toward Hamner. The noise level doubled. Hamner kept moving toward the back of the hall, toward the Mayor’s office, and Rick followed. A number of people shouted for silence, adding to the general noise level. Eileen Hamner saw Rick, slipped from under Tim’s arm and came toward him. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

Rick knew at once. It turned him cold with the chill of a man about to faint. “How did Johnny buy it?” he asked.

“Tim says saving their asses. That’s all I know.”

He felt his knees weaken, but he stayed stiffly upright. “I should have made him let me go,” he said to nobody. Now there are three astronauts left in the world. “Does Maureen know?”

“Not yet. Where is she?”

“Last I saw, in the Mayor’s office with her father.” The Senator wasn’t going to like this much either. “I’ll come with you.” He pushed through, making a way for both of them.

So Johnny was dead. Now everybody he loved was dead. The Hammer had got them all. He felt a crazy impulse to laugh: America’s record was still perfect. Not one astronaut lost on space duty. “Saving their asses from what?” he demanded, but Eileen was too far away and the noise was too great.

Someone passed Tim a bottle. Scotch. This time he drank and carried the bottle into the Mayor’s office. The leaders were there: the Senator, sitting behind the Mayor’s desk; Al Hardy, hovering over him; Maureen, Chief Hartman, the Mayor. They looked happy, triumphant. Tim resented that. He knew he was irrational, that they deserved their celebration, but his grief was too great. He limped on into the office, pleased to see their grins fade as they saw the way he walked, the expression on his face. He felt Eileen and Rick Delanty crowd in behind him, then the door was closed.

“You were attacked again?” Al Hardy asked.

“Yes.” Tim looked at Maureen. She knew. She knew from his face. No point in being gentle about it. “General Baker is dead. We stopped their attack, but just barely. And the rest of it I want to say to everybody.” He kept his attention on the Senator. He didn’t want to see Maureen’s face.

Hardy turned to the Senator. “All right with me,” he said. Jellison nodded, and Hardy went past Tim to the door. “Get it quiet out there,” he said.

Steve Cox went to the podium and rapped for attention, while Hardy led Tim over and a dozen hands helped him up on the platform. Someone moved the Senator’s chair to the doorway so that he could hear. The Mayor and Chief Hartman stood behind him, leaning forward. Tim couldn’t see Maureen.

He braced himself on the lectern, facing hundreds of eyes, and drank more scotch. It warmed him. The room was almost quiet: no talking, except for newcomers crowding in by the door, and shushing noises from those already inside; He had never spoken before a live audience in real life… before the comet fell. They were too close, too real; he could smell them. He saw George Christopher making his way through the crowd like an icebreaker, moving triumphantly, like Beowulf displaying the arm of the monster Grendel, and hell, they all looked like that. Triumphant. And waiting expectantly.

“Good news first,” he said. “The power plant’s still running. We were attacked. This afternoon. We beat them, but it was close. Some of us are dead and some of us are wounded and more will die of the wounds. You already know that most of the Brotherhood wasn’t even there—”

Applause and triumphant laughter erupted. Tim should have expected that, from the warriors who’d decimated the New Brotherhood’s main force, but he hadn’t. He was jolted. Where did these yahoos get off, drinking and dancing and bragging while the men and women Tim Hamner had left behind waited to die? When quiet came he spoke in anger.

“General Baker is dead. The New Brotherhood isn’t,” Tim said. He watched the reaction. Anger. Incredulity.

“They won’t come here again,” someone shouted. There were more cheers.

“Let him talk. What happened?” George Christopher demanded. The room was silent again.

“The Brotherhood came at us with boats, the first time,” Tim said. “It wasn’t hard to drive them off. Then we heard on the radio that you were fighting them, and we figured that would be the end of it, when you said you’d won.” He gripped the lectern, remembering the shouting celebration they’d held in the San Joaquin plant after news of the Stronghold victory.

“But they did come back. Today. They had a big raft. Sandbags around it. Mortars. They stayed out of range of anything we had, and they were blowing us apart. One of the shells got a steam line, live steam, and Price’s people had a hell of a time putting it back together. Another shell got Jack Ross.”

Tim watched George Christopher lose his triumphant grin.

“Jack was alive when we took him off the boat and put him in the van. But he was dead when we got here,” Tim said. “Another mortar went off just in front of me. It hit the sandbags we’d put on top of the cooling tower, where we had the radio. It killed the guy next to me and blew the radio apart, and it punched a piece of shrapnel into my hipbone. It’s still there.

“They kept that up. Standing off where we couldn’t shoot back. Price’s people had made some cannon. Muzzle-loaders, made out of pipe, powered by compressed air. They weren’t accurate enough. We couldn’t hit the barge. And the damned mortar shells kept dropping on us. Baker took some troops out in boats. That didn’t do any good either. The Brotherhood had machine guns and the boats couldn’t get close enough — they had those sandbags anyway. Finally Baker brought the boats back. He put everybody off.”

In the corner of his eye Tim saw Maureen in the doorway of the Mayor’s office. She stood behind her father, her hand on his shoulder. Eileen was near her.

“We had a racing boat we used as a tug,” Tim said. “Cindy Lu. Johnny told Barry Price, ‘I used to be a fighter pilot. They always taught us there was one way not to miss.’ Then he took Cindy Lu out at top speed and rammed her right into the barge. Covered the raft with burning gasoline. He’d carried some extra gasoline and thermit on the deck. After that the Brotherhood came on with their other boats, but they had to come in range of our stuff, and we did some damage. Finally they left.”

“Ran away,” George Christopher said. “They always run.”

“They didn’t run,” Tim said. “They retreated. There was some crazy white-haired guy standing in plain sight on one of the boats. We kept shooting at him, but we never hit him. He was shouting at them to kill us. Last I heard, he still was. They’ll be back.”

Tim paused to see what effect he’d had. Not enough. He’d killed the gay mood of the party, but all he saw was resentment and sorrow. Nothing else.

“They killed fourteen of us, counting Jack. Hit maybe three times that many, and a lot of them will die. There’s a nurse and some medicines, but no doctor. We need one. We need another radio.” Their looks: anger, sorrow, resentment. They knew what he’d say next. He went doggedly on. “What we need most is reinforcements. We can’t take another attack like that one. I don’t think gas bombs will do it either. We need guns. Machine guns you took from the New Brotherhood would help. But mostly we need men, because it takes just about all the power-plant staff on standby just to keep the place going in case there’s a hit on the plant. Price’s people are…” He fumbled for words. Hell, it would sound corny. So what? “They’re magnificent. I saw a guy wade into a cloud of live steam. Live steam. He walked right into it to turn a valve, to turn the steam off. He was still alive when I left, but there wasn’t any point in bringing him here.

“Another of the power workers spliced live wires. Thousands of volts, and he worked on it hot while mortar bombs fell around him. Baker’s dead. They’re still alive. And they need help. We need help. I’m going back.” He couldn’t look at Eileen as he said that.

He felt someone behind him. Al Hardy had climbed onto the podium. He came to the left side of the lectern and stood there with his hand held up for attention. When he spoke, it was with an orator’s voice that rolled about the large room. “Thank you, Tim,” he said. “You are persuasive. Of course you want to go back. But the question is, have we anything to gain? How many people are there at the nuclear plant? Because we have boats, and now we have food, and we can bring all of them here. It will not be hard to evacuate that plant, and I’m sure we will have no trouble getting volunteers for the job.”

Harvey Randall came in from the hospital in time to hear Tim’s report begin. He’d come in the back way, through the Mayor’s office, and he found himself next to Maureen. When Tim told of what had happened to Baker, he was there, with his hand on her arm, but lightly. She wasn’t going to faint or scream; she may have been crying, but even that wasn’t obvious. And Harvey didn’t want to be obtrusively present, not now.

He was thinking: Son of a bitch! Maureen was taking it better than Delanty. The black astronaut seemed ready to murder. Well, that figured. Baker’s other two companions weren’t in the room. Leonilla was operating on the gut-shot policeman, with Comrade helping her.

(They called him Comrade now. Brigadier Pieter Jakov was the last Communist, and proud of it, and it avoided the difficulty of his name.)

The Senator’s face was ashen gray and his hands were clasped tightly in his lap. There went one of his plans, Harvey thought. It struck him, then: One prince was dead, and one was enthralled by a witch.

George Christopher wasn’t alone. Marie stood with him: Marie, the only woman in the room in stockings and heels as well as skirt and sweater and simple jewelry; and she and George stood as a couple, not as two single people. Whenever anyone got too close to Marie or ogled her too suggestively, George’s face clouded.

Three princes. One was killed by ogres. One was spellbound by a witch. The third was standing beside the princess, and the enemy had been defeated. The need for fighting men was not over, but it was no longer critical. Now the Stronghold needed builders — and that Harvey Randall could do. I’m crown prince now, he thought. Son of a bitch.

But Tim Hamner was calling for a new battle!

Harvey, fresh from his work with the crossbow, was thinking helplessly: Shut up, shut up! When Al Hardy came up to offer the power-plant personnel refuge at the Stronghold, Harvey wanted to cheer, and some of Hardy’s audience did cheer. But Rick Delanty still looked like murder, and Tim Hamner…

“We won’t leave,” Tim said. “Use your boats to bring us men and guns and ammunition! Not for us to run away. We’re not leaving.”

“Be reasonable,” Al Hardy said. His voice projected; it reached all corners of the hall. It projected warmth, friendliness, understanding: a politician’s basic skill, and Al Hardy was well trained. Tim was outclassed. “We can feed everyone. We can use engineers and technical people. We lost people to the New Brotherhood, but we lost none of our food; we even captured some of their stores. We not only have enough to eat, we have enough to be well fed during the winter! We can feed everyone, including Deke Wilson’s women and children and the few survivors from his area. The New Brotherhood has been hurt, badly hurt” — he paused for the cheers again, and went on just as they died, his timing perfect — “and is now far too weak to attack us again. By spring the few surviving cannibals will be starving—”

“Or eating each other,” someone shouted.

“Exactly,” Hardy said. “And by spring we’ll be able to take their land. Tim, not only do we not need to turn any of our friends away, we need new people to work the lands we have taken or will have in spring. I don’t mean for your friends to run. I mean to welcome them as our guests, friends, as new citizens here. Does everyone agree?”

There were shouts. “Hell yeah!” “Glad to have them.”

Tim Hamner spread his hands, palms outward, pleading. He wobbled on his damaged hip. There were the beginnings of tears in his eyes. “Don’t you understand? The power plant! We can’t leave it, and without help the New Brotherhood will destroy it!”

“No, dammit,” Harvey muttered. He felt Maureen stiffen. “No more wars,” Harvey said. “We’ve had enough. Hardy’s right.” He looked for approval from Maureen, but only got a blank stare.

George Christopher was laughing. It carried, like Al Hardy’s voice. “They’re too damned weak to attack anything,” he shouted. “First we crunched them. Then you did. They won’t stop running until they’re back to Los Angeles. Who needs to worry about them? We chased the bastards fifty miles ourselves.”

More laughter in the room. Then Maureen broke away from Harvey and moved past her father. When she spoke her voice did not carry the way Hardy’s did, but it commanded silence, and the crowd listened to her. “They still have their weapons,” she said. “And, Tim, you said their leaders are still alive…”

“Well, one of them is,” Hamner said. “The crazy preacher.”

“Then some of them will try to destroy the power plant again,” Maureen said. “As long as he’s alive, he’ll keep trying.” She turned to Hardy. “Al, you know that. You heard Hugo Beck. You know.”

“Yes,” Hardy said. “We can’t protect the plant. But again I invite everyone there to come live here. With us.”

“Damn right, the Brotherhood’s no threat to us,” George Christopher said. “They won’t be back.”

“But they — ” Whatever Al Hardy had been about to say, he cut himself off at a wave from Senator Jellison. “Yes, sir,” Hardy asked. “Do you want to come up here, Senator?”

“No.” Jellison stood. “Let’s cut this short,” he said. His voice was thick with either drunkenness or exhaustion, and everyone knew he hadn’t been drinking. “We are agreed, are we not? The Brotherhood is not strong enough to harm us here in our valley. But their leaders are still alive, and they have enough strength to destroy the power plant. It is not that they are strong, but that the plant is fragile.”

Hamner jumped on that. He was interrupting the Senator, but he didn’t care. He knew he should speak carefully, weighing every word, but he was too tired, the sense of urgency was too strong. “Yes! We’re fragile. Like that whale!” He pointed to the glass case. “Like the last piece of Stueben crystal in the world. If the power stops for one day—”

“Beautiful and fragile,” Al Hardy’s voice cut in. “Senator, did you have something else to say?”

The massive head shook. “Only this. Think carefully. This may be the most important decision we have made since… that day.” He sat, heavily. “Go on, please,” he said.

Hardy looked worriedly at the Senator, then motioned to one of the women near him. He spoke to her, too low for Harvey to hear what he said, and the woman left. Then he stood at the lectern again. “Fragile and beautiful,” he said. “But not much use to a farming community—”

“No use?” Tim exploded. “Power! Clean clothes! Light—”

“Luxuries,” Al Hardy said. “Are they worth our lives? We’re a farm community. The balance is delicate. Not many weeks ago we did not know if we would live through the winter Now we know we can. A few days ago we did not know whether we could resist the cannibals. We did. We are safe, and we have work to do, and we cannot afford more people for a needless war.” He looked to George Christopher. “You agree, George? Neither of us runs from a fight — but do we have to run to one?”

“Not me,” Christopher said. “We won our war.”

There were murmurs of agreement. Harvey stepped forward, intending to join in. Not another war. Not another afternoon with the crossbow…

He felt Maureen beside him. She looked up at him, pleading in her eyes. “Don’t let them do this,” she said. “Make them understand!” She dropped her hand from Harvey’s arm and bent over the Senator. “Dad. Tell them. We have to… to fight. To save that power plant.”

“Why?” Jellison asked. “Haven’t we had enough war? It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t order it. They wouldn’t go.”

“They would. If you told them, they would.”

He didn’t answer. She turned back to Harvey.

Randall stared at her without comprehension. “Listen,” he said. “Listen to Al.”

“Reinforcements wouldn’t be enough, Tim,” Al Hardy was saying. “Chief Hartman and the Senator and the Mayor and I, we looked at the problem this afternoon. We hadn’t forgotten you! And the cost is too high. You said it yourself, the plant is fragile. It’s not enough to put a garrison in there, to keep it filled with troops. You have to keep the Brotherhood from dropping one mortar shell in the right place. Tell me, if that plant worker hadn’t turned off the steam valve, wouldn’t that have done it?”

“Yes,” Tim snarled. “That would have finished us. So a twenty-year-old kid parboiled himself to save the plant. And General Baker made his decision.”

“Tim, Tim,” Hardy pleaded. “You don’t understand. It wouldn’t do any good just to send reinforcements. Look, I’ll send volunteers. As many as want to go, and with plenty of food and ammunition…”

Tim’s face showed joy, but only for a moment.

“…but it won’t do any good, and you know it. To save that power plant we will have to send out all our strength, everyone, not to defend the plant, but to attack the New Brotherhood. Pursue them, fight them, wipe them out. Take all their weapons. Then set up patrols around the edges of the lake. Keep the enemy at least a mile from the plant. It would take all our strength, Tim, and the cost would be horrible.”

“But—”

“Think about it,” Hardy said. “Patrols. Spies. An army of occupation. All to stop one fanatic from getting one hit on one crucial piece of equipment and putting it out of commission for one day. That’s the task. Isn’t it?”

“For now,” Tim said. “But given peace and quiet for a few weeks, Price will have Number Two on line. Then as long as either works, the other can be repaired.”

The roomful of survivors was sobering now, most of them, because the last of the liquor was as dead as the coffee supply. They muttered to each other, spoke, argued, and they seemed to Harvey to be divided in opinion, but the strength was against Tim. As it should be, Harvey thought. Not more war.

But… he looked at Maureen. Now she was crying openly. Because of Baker? Baker had made his choice, and Maureen wouldn’t let him be wasted? Her eyes met his. “Talk to them,” she said. “Make them understand.”

“I don’t understand myself,” Harvey said.

“What we can afford,” she said. “A civilization has the ethics it can afford. We can’t afford much. We can’t afford to take care of our enemies — you know about that.”

He shuddered. He knew about that.

Leonilla Malik came in the back way, through the Mayor’s office. She bent over the Senator. “I am told that you need me,” she said.

“Who told you that?” Jellison demanded.

“Mister Hardy.”

“I’m all right. Get back to your hospital.”

“Doctor Valdemar is on duty. I have a few minutes.”

She stood slightly behind the Senator, and she watched him carefully, her expression professional — and concerned.

“We must count the costs,” Al Hardy was saying. “You ask us to risk everything. We have assured survival. We are alive. We have fought the last battle. Tim, electric lights are not worth throwing that away.”

Tim Hamner swayed from exhaustion and pain. “We won’t leave,” he said. “We’ll fight. All of us.” But his voice was not strong, he sounded beaten.

“Do something,” Maureen said. “Tell them.” She gripped Harvey’s arm.

“You tell them.”

’I can’t. But you’re a hero, now. Your force held them—”

“You stand pretty high yourself,” Harvey said.

“Let’s both tell them,” Maureen said. “Come with me. We’ll talk to them. Together.”

And that’s a hell of an offer, Harvey thought. For the power plant itself? For Johnny Baker’s memory? Because she was jealous of Marie with George Christopher? Whatever her motive, she’d just offered him the leadership of the Stronghold — and her look made it plain that he wasn’t going to get another such.

“We’d have to hold their territory,” Al Hardy was saying. “Deke couldn’t do it—”

“We could!” Tim cried. “You beat them! We could.”

Hardy nodded gravely. “Yes, I suppose we could. But first we have to take it — and we can’t do that with magic weapons. Grenades and gas bombs aren’t much use in the attack. We’d lose people. A lot of people. How many lives are your electric lights worth?”

“Many,” Leonilla Malik said. Her voice didn’t carry very far. “If I had had proper lights for the operating theater last night, I could have saved ten more at least.”

Maureen was moving toward the platform. Harvey hesitated, then went with her. What would he say? Men would charge machine guns for a cause. Viva la republic! For King and Country! Duty, Honor, Country! Remember the Alamo! Liberte! Egalitel Fraternite! But nobody had ever gone over the top shouting “A Higher Standard of Living!” or “Hot Showers and Electric Razors!”

And what about me? he thought. When I get up there, I’m committed. When the New Brotherhood comes over the water with their new raft and their mortars, I’d have to be first into the boats, first to attack, first to be blown apart.

And what could I possibly be yelling that would make me do it?

He remembered the battle: the noise, loneliness, fear, the shame of running, the terror when you didn’t. Running was a decision of the moment, but not running went on and on. A rational army would run away. He caught her arm to hold her back.

She turned, and her look was… full of concern. Sympathy. She spoke, low, so no one else would hear. “We all have to do our jobs,” she said. “And this is right. Don’t you see that?”

The short delay had been too much; Al Hardy was retiring, having made his point. The crowd was turning away, talking among themselves. Harvey heard snatches of conversation:

“Hell, I don’t know. I sure as hell don’t want to fight anymore.” “Dammit, Baker got killed for that place. Wasn’t that worth something?” “I’m tired, Sue. Let’s go home.”

Before Hardy could leave the platform, Rick Delanty barred his way. “The Senator said this was an important decision,” he said. “Let’s talk about it. Now.” Delanty was no longer planning murder, Harvey saw with relief. But he seemed determined. “Al, you say we’ll live through the winter. Let’s talk about that.”

Hardy shrugged. “If you choose. I think it has all been said.”

Delanty’s grin was crafty, artificial. “Oh, hell, Al, we’re all here and the liquor’s gone, and tomorrow it’s back to moving rocks. Let’s talk it all out right now. We can survive the winter?”

“Yes.”

“But without coffee. That’s all gone.”

Hardy frowned. “Yes.”

“How are we fixed for clothing? There are glaciers coming, and the clothes are rotting off our backs. Can we dig anything out of underwater department stores?”

“Some plastics, maybe. It can wait, now that we don’t have to worry about the New Brotherhood getting there first.” Oddly, there was no cheering this time. “We’ll have to make most of our clothing. Or shoot it.” Hardy smiled.

“Transportation? The cars and trucks are dying like sterile beasts, aren’t they? Will we have to eat the horses?”

Al Hardy ran his hands through his hair. “No. For awhile I thought… No. Horses don’t breed fast, but we’ll have the trucks for years yet.”

“What else have we run out of? Penicillin?”

“Yes-”

“Aspirin? And the liquor. No anesthetics of any kind.”

“We’ll be able to ferment liquor!”

“So. We’ll live. Through this winter, and the next one, and the one after that.” Rick paused, but before Hardy could say anything, he thundered, “As peasants! We had a ceremony here today. An award, to the kid who caught the most rats this week. And we can look forward to that for the rest of our lives. To our kids growing up as rat catchers and swineherds. Honorable work. Needed work. Nobody puts it down. But… don’t we want to hope for something better?

“And we’re going to keep slaves,” Delanty said. “Not because we want to. Because we need them. And we used to control the lightning!”

The phrase struck Harvey Randall with a physical shock. He saw it hit the others, too. A lot of them. They stood, unable to turn away.

“Sure we can huddle here in our valley,” Delanty shouted. “We can stay here and be safe and our kids can grow up herding pigs and shoveling sewage. There’s a lot here to be proud of, because it’s so much more than what might have been — but is it enough? Is it enough for us to be safe when we leave everybody else out in the cold? You all say how sorry you are to have to turn people away. To have to send people Outside. Well, we’ve got the chance now. We can make all of Outside, the whole damn San Joaquin Valley, as safe as we are.

“Or there’s another way. We can stay here, safe as… as ground squirrels. But if we take the easy way this time, we’ll take it next time. And the next, and the next, and in fifty years your kids will hide under the bed when they hear the thunder! The way everybody used to hide from the great thunder gods. Peasants always believe in thunder gods.

“And the comet. We know what it was. In ten more years we’d have been able to push the damned thing out of our way! I’ve been in space. I won’t go there again, but your children could! Hell yes! Give us that electric plant and twenty years and we’ll be in space again. We know how, and all it takes is power, and that power’s right out there, not fifty miles from here, if we’ve just got guts enough to save it. Think about it. Those are the choices. Go on and be good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants — or have worlds to conquer again. To control the lightning again.”

He paused, but not long enough to let anyone else speak.

“I’m going,” he said. “Leonilla?”

“Certainly.” She moved toward the platform.

“And I,” Comrade General Jakov shouted from the back of the room. “For the lightning.”

“Now.” Harvey slapped Maureen’s butt and bounded ahead of her onto the platform, moving quickly before the moment died away. Decisions were simple, now that he knew what he’d be shouting. “Task Force Randall?”

“Sure,” someone shouted. And then Maureen joined him, and another farmer came forward, and Tim Hamner, and Mayor Seitz. Marie Vance and George Christopher were arguing. Good! Marie belonged to Task Force Randall, unless there was a Task Force Christopher. Christopher would join them.

Al Hardy stood in confusion, wanting to speak but held by the command in Maureen’s eyes.

He could stop them, Harvey Randall thought. It wouldn’t take much to stop them. Once everyone’s committed it will be hard to back down, but right now this bandwagon can be stopped, or it can be shoved forward so hard nothing can stop it, and Al Hardy has that power…

Hardy was looking past Maureen now, at the Senator. The old man was half rising from his chair, and he gasped for breath before he fell back into it. Leonilla ran toward him, but he waved her away, beckoning to Hardy. “Al,” he gasped.

Leonilla had her medical bag in the office. She threw it open and seized a hypodermic needle, fought away the Senator’s feeble resistance as she ripped open his jacket and shirt. She swabbed his chest quickly and thrust the needle directly into his chest, near the heart.

Al Hardy tore through the crowd like a madman. He knelt beside the gasping man. Jellison thrashed and writhed in the chair, his hands reaching for his chest while Chief Hartman and others held them. His eyes focused on Al Hardy. “Al.”

“Yes, sir.” Hardy’s voice was choked, almost inaudible. He bent closer.

“Al. Give my children the lightning again.” The voice was clear, projecting through the hall, and for a moment Jellison’s eyes were bright, but then he slumped into the chair, and they heard only a thin whisper that faded to nothing. “Give them the lightning again.”