Lucifer's Hammer

Epilogue

Tim Hamner stood at the top of a low hill. Paper crackled in his breast pocket when he shifted weight.

The long slope behind him buzzed with activity. Animal teams dragged harrows through the hard soil, while methanol-powered tractors worked with deep plows in adjacent fields. Myriads of white flecks gleamed in the soil behind the harrows. Enriched by mustard gas and the defeat of the New Brotherhood Army, this land would produce in abundance.

Three electric carts hummed along the road below. Another stood beside Tim Hamner, ready for his use. It was time to get back down the hill and go to work, but he stood a few moments longer, enjoying bright sunshine and the clear blue sky of spring. It was a glorious day.

Before him was the San Joaquin Sea. Much of what had been underwater was now a vast swampland. Directly ahead was a low island in the sea: the prisoner colony, where those of the Brotherhood who hadn’t wanted to go into permanent exile worked to grow crops. Jakov’s preserve. They called him “Comrade” now… and Comrade hadn’t given up communism. But Marxist theory said that history followed definite stages, slave society to feudal, feudal to capitalist — and the Valley was barely past the slave stage of history. The earth would not be ready for communism for a long time. Meanwhile Comrade was willing to re-educate the prisoners.

Tim shrugged. Comrade and Hooker kept them organized, and they grew their own crops, and if they escaped nobody cared.

Further to his left, distant in the south, he saw the rising plumes of steam from the nuclear power plant. Closer, the work crews stringing power lines. In another two weeks they would have electricity in the Stronghold. Tim tried to imagine what that new life would be like, but it was difficult. The winter had been hard. Damned hard. Eileen’s baby had almost died, and was still in the hospital. The infant mortality rate was above fifty percent, but it was slowly falling now; and Forrester’s notes showed that when they recovered his books from Tujunga they would know how to make penicillin.

Forrester’s notes. That was Tim’s job, to transcribe the reels and reels of tape Dan Forrester had dictated before he died. They could have made insulin, maybe, if they hadn’t committed themselves to saving the power plant; and of course Forrester had known that. The winter had cost them the life of their magician, as it had so many other lives. To learn that a friend had survived, that was always good. Tim patted his pocket.

The past could hit you across the back of the head, no warning, Whap! Tim Hamner patted the telegram in his pocket. Half of a comet! Kitt Peak had confirmed his sighting. He shook his head violently and laughed at himself. It was only the rain-wrinkled scrap of paper Harry the Mailman had brought yesterday, an IOU for $250,000.

Harry Stimms was alive! Now, what would he take for that IOU? A job at the power plant? Stimms must have mechanical skills, and the power plant boys owed Tim. Failing that… could he promote a pregnant cow? That’d be worth $250,000 easy. Tim gazed into the sky, enjoying himself.

A clear thin line crossed the sky, the tip of it moving forward even as he watched. For a second he still did not know what it was. Shout a warning! But what did we used to call that?

“C-contrail! Jet plane!”

They’d heard something from Colorado Springs that some of the aircraft had survived. Harvey and Maureen would have to come to terms with Colorado Springs when they got back from visiting a septic tank in Tujunga. But though they’d heard it on the radio, it was not the same as seeing that clean white line across the sky. He’d forgotten how beautiful that could be.

Tim waved solemnly at the plane. “You can fly,” he said. His voice rose. “You can fly. But we control the lightning.”

The asteroid was a child of the maelstrom: a rough nugget of nickel-iron with some stony strata, three miles along its long axis. No man had ever seen a mastodon when the passing of mighty Jupiter plucked the nugget from its orbit and puny it out toward interstellar space.

It was on the second lap of its long, narrow elliptical orbit. The iron surface was frosted with strange ices now, as it passed the peak of the curve and began to coast back toward the Sun.

And the black giant was there. Its ring of cometary snowballs glowed broad and beautiful in starlight. Infrared light traced bands and whorls in its stormy surface. It was the only major mass out here between the stars, and the asteroid curved toward it and increased speed.

Infrared light bathed and thawed the frosted iron. The ringed planet grew huge.

The asteroid plunged through the plane of the ring at twelve miles per second. Battered and pocked with glowing craters, it receded, carrying in its own small gravitational field a spray of icy masses from the ring. They came like attendants, ahead and behind, in a pattern like the curved arms of a spiral galaxy.

The asteroid and a score of comets pulled free of the black giant and began their long fall into the maelstrom.