It was dusk when Harry reached Muchos Nombres Ranch. The rain had increased and was falling slantwise, and lightning played across the nearly black sky.
Muchos Nombres was thirty acres of hilly pastureland dotted with the usual great white boulders. Of the four families who jointly owned it, two would sometimes invite Harry in for coffee. The result was diffidence on Harry’s part. He never knew whose turn it was. The families each owned one week in four, and they treated the ranch as a vacation spot. Sometimes they traded off; sometimes they brought guests. The oversupply of owners had been unable to agree on a name, and had finally settled for Muchos Nombres. The Spanish fooled nobody.
Today Harry was fresh out of diffidence. He yelled his “Mail call!” and waited, expecting no answer. Presently he opened the gate and went on in.
He reached the front door like something dragged from an old grave. He knocked.
The door opened.
“Mail,” said Harry. “Hullo, Mr. Freehafer. Sorry to be so late, but there are some emergencies going.”
Freehafer had an automatic pistol. He looked Harry over with some care. Behind him the living room danced with candlelight, and it looked crowded with wary people. Doris Lilly said, “Why, it’s Harry! It’s all right, Bill. It’s Harry the mailman.”
Freehafer lowered the gun. “All right, pleased to meet you, Harry. Come on in. What emergencies?”
Harry stepped inside, out of the rain. Now he saw the third man, stepping around a doorjamb, laying a shotgun aside. “Mail,” said Harry, and he set down two magazines, the usual haul for Many Names. “Somebody shot at me from Carrie Roman’s place. It wasn’t anyone I know. I think the Romans are in trouble. Is your phone working?”
“No,” said Freehafer. “We can’t go out there tonight.”
“Okay. And my mail truck went off a hill, and I don’t know what the roads are like. Can you let me have a couch, or a stretch of rug, and something to eat?”
The hesitation was marked. “It’s the rug, I’m afraid,” Freehafer said. “Soup and a sandwich do you? We’re a little short.”
“I’d eat your old shoes,” said Harry.
It was canned tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, and it tasted like heaven. Between bites he got the story: how the Freehafers had started to leave on Tuesday, and seen the sky going crazy, and turned back. How the Lillys had arrived (it being their turn now) with the Rodenberries as guests, and their own two children. The end of the world had come and gone, the Rodenberries were on the couches, and nobody had yet tried to reach the supermarket in town.
“What is this with the end of the world?” Harry asked.
They told him. They showed him, in the magazines he’d brought. The magazines were damp but still readable. Harry read interviews with Sagan and Asimov and Sharps. He stared at artists’ conceptions of major meteor impacts. “They all think it’ll miss,” he said.
“It didn’t,” said Norman Lilly. He was a football player turned insurance executive, a broad-shouldered wall of a man who should have kept up his exercises. “Now what? We brought some seeds and farm stuff, just in case, but we didn’t bring any books. Do you know anything about farming, Harry?”
“No. People, I’ve had a rough day—”
“Right. No sense wasting candles,” said Norman.
All of the beds, blankets and couches were in use. Harry spent the night on a thick rug, swathed in three of Norman Lilly’s enormous bathrobes, his head on a chair pillow. He was comfortable enough, but he kept twitching himself awake.
Lucifer’s Hammer? End of the world? Crawling through mud while bullets punched into his mailbag and the letters inside. He kept waking with the memory of a nightmare, and always the nightmare was real.
Harry woke and counted days. First night he slept in the truck. Second with the Millers. Last night was the third. Three days since he’d reported in.
It was definitely the end of the world. The Wolf should have come looking for him with blood in his eye. He hadn’t. The power lines were still down. The phones weren’t working. No county road crews. Ergo, Hammerfall. The end of the world. It had really happened.
“Rise and shine!” Doris Lilly’s cheer was artificial. She tried to keep it up anyway. “Rise and shine! Come and get it or we throw it out.”
Breakfast wasn’t much. They shared with Harry, which was pretty damned generous of them. The Lilly children, eight and ten, stared at the adults. One of them complained that the TV wasn’t working. No one paid any attention.
“Now what?” Freehafer asked.
“We get food,” Doris Lilly said. “We have to find something to eat.”
“Where do you suggest we look?” Bill Freehafer asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Doris shrugged. “In town? Maybe things aren’t as bad as…maybe they’re not so bad.”
“I want to watch TV,” Phil Lilly said.
“Not working,” Doris said absently. “I vote we go to town and see how things are. We can give Harry a ride—”
“TV now!” Phil screamed.
“Shut up,” his father said.
“Now!” the boy repeated.
Smack! Norman Lilly’s huge hand swept against the boy’s face.
“Norm!” his wife cried. The child screamed, more in surprise than pain. “You never hit the children before—”
“Phil,” Lilly said. His voice was calm and determined. “It’s all different now. You better understand that. When we tell you to be quiet, you’ll be quiet. You and your sister both, you’ve got a lot of learning to do, and quick. Now go in the other room.”
The children hesitated for a moment. Norman raised his hand. They looked at him, startled, then ran.
“Little drastic,” Bill Freehafer said.
“Yeah,” Norm said absently. “Bill, don’t you think we better look in on our neighbors?”
“Let the police—” Bill Freehafer stopped himself. “Well there might still be police.”
“Yeah. Who’ll they take orders from, now?” Lilly asked. He looked at Harry.
Harry shrugged. There was a local mayor. The Sheriff was out in the San Joaquin, and with this rain that could be under water. “Maybe the Senator?” Harry said.
“Hey, yeah, Jellison lives over the hill there,” Freehafer said. “Maybe we should…Jesus, I don’t know, Norm. What can we do?”
Lilly shrugged. “We can look, anyway. Harry, you know those people?”
“Yes…”
“We have two cars. Bill, you take everybody else into town. Harry and I’ll have a look. Right?”
Harry looked dubious. “I’ve already left their mail—”
“Jesus,” Bill Freehafer said.
Norman Lilly held up an immense hand. “He’s right, you know. But look at it this way, Harry. You’re a mailman.”
“Yes—”
“Which can be damned valuable. Only there won’t be any mail. Not letters and magazines, anyway. But there’s still a need for message carriers. Somebody to keep communications going. Right?”
“Something like that,” Harry agreed.
“Good. You’ll be needed. More than ever. But here’s your first post-comet message. To the Romans, from us. We’re willing to help, if we can. They’re our neighbors. But we don’t know them, and they don’t know us. If they’ve had trouble they’ll be watching for strangers. Somebody’s got to introduce us. That’s a worthwhile message, isn’t it?”
Harry thought it over. It made sense. “You’ll give me a ride after—”
“Sure. Let’s go.” Norm Lilly went out. He came back with a deer rifle, and the automatic pistol. “Ever use one of these, Harry?”
“No. And I don’t want one. Wrong image.”
Lilly nodded and laid the pistol on the table.
Bill Freehafer started to say something, but Lilly’s look cut it off. “Okay, Harry, let’s go,” Norm said. He didn’t comment when Harry carried his mailbag to the car.
They got in. They’d gone
halfway when Harry patted his bag and, half laughing himself, said, “You’re not laughing at me.”
“How can I laugh at a man who’s got a purpose in life?”
They pulled up at the gate. The letters were gone from the mailbox. The padlock was still in place. “Now what?” Harry asked.
“Good questi—”
The shotgun caught Norm Lilly full in the chest. Lilly kicked once and died. Harry stood in shock, then dashed across the road for the ditch. He sprawled into it, headfirst into the muddy water, careless of the mailbag, of getting wet, of anything. He began to run toward Many Names again.
There were sounds ahead of him. Right around that bend—and there was someone coming behind, too. They weren’t going to let him get away this time. In desperation he crawled up the bank, away from the road, and began scrambling up the steep hillside. The mailbag dragged at him. His boots dug into mud, slipping and sliding. He clawed at the ground and pulled himself upward.
SPANG! The shot sounded very loud. Much louder than the .22 yesterday. Maybe the shotgun? Harry kept on. He reached the top of the first rise and began to run.
He couldn’t tell if they were still behind him. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going back down there. He kept remembering the look of surprise on Norman Lilly’s face. The big man folding up, dying before he hit the ground. Who were these people who shot without warning?
The hill became steeper again, but the ground was harder, more rock than mud. The mailbag seemed heavy. Water in it? Probably. So why carry it?
Because it’s the mail, you stupid SOB, Harry told himself.
The Chicken Ranch was owned by an elderly couple, retired L.A. business people. It was fully automated. The chickens stood in small pens not much bigger than an individual chicken. Eggs rolled out of the cage onto a conveyor belt. Food came around on another belt. Water was continuously supplied. It was not a ranch but a factory.
And it might have been heaven, for chickens. All problems were solved, all struggling ended. Chickens weren’t very bright, and they got all they could eat, were protected from coyotes, had clean cages—another automated system—
But it had to be a damned dull existence.
The Chicken Ranch was over the next hill. Before Harry got there he saw chickens. Through the rain and the wet weeds they wandered, bewildered, pecking at the ground and the limbs of bushes and Harry’s boots, squawking plaintively at Harry, demanding instructions.
Harry stopped walking. Something must be terribly wrong. The Sinanians would never have let the chickens run loose.
Here too? Those bastards, had they come here too? Harry stood on the hillside and dithered, and the chickens huddled around him.
He had to know what had happened. It was part of the job. Reporter, mailman, town crier, message carrier; if he wasn’t that, he wasn’t anything. He stood among the chickens, nerving himself, and eventually he went down.
All the chicken feed had been spilled out onto the floor of the barn. There was little left. Every cage was open. This was no accident. Harry waded through squawking chickens the full length of the building. Nothing there. He went out and down the path to the house.
The farmhouse door stood open. He called. No one answered. Finally he went inside. It was dimly lit; the shades and curtains were drawn and there was no artificial light. His way led him to the living room.
The Sinanians were there. They sat in big overstuffed chairs. Their eyes were open. They did not move.
Amos Sinanian had a bullet hole in his temple. His eyes bulged. There was a small pistol in his hand.
Mrs. Sinanian had not a mark on her. Heart attack? Whatever it was, it had been peaceful; her features were not contorted, and her clothing was carefully arranged. She stared at a blank TV screen. She looked to have been dead two days, possibly more. The blood on Amos’s head was not quite dry. This morning at the latest.
There wasn’t any note, no sign of explanation. There hadn’t been anyone Amos had cared to explain it to. He’d released the chickens and shot himself.
It took Harry a long time to make up his mind. Finally he took the pistol from Amos’s hand. It wasn’t as hard to do as he’d thought it would be. He put the pistol in his pocket and searched until he found a box of bullets for it. He pocketed those, too.
“The mail goes through, dammit,” he said. Then he found a cold roast in the refrigerator. It wouldn’t keep anyway, so Harry ate it. The oven was working. Harry had no idea how much propane there might be in the tank, but it didn’t matter. The Sinanians weren’t going to be using it.
He took the mail out of his bag and put it carefully into the oven to dry. Circulars and shopping newspapers were a problem. Their information wasn’t any use, but might people want them for paper? Harry compromised, throwing out the ones that were thin and flimsy and soaked, keeping the others.
He found a supply of Baggies in the kitchen and carefully enclosed each packet of mail in one. Last Baggies on Earth, a small voice told him. “Right,” he said, and went on stuffing. “Have to keep the Baggies. You can have your mail, but the Baggies belong to the Service.”
After that was done he thought about his next move. This house might be useful. It was a good house, stone and concrete, not wood. The barn was concrete too. The land wasn’t much good—at least Amos had said it wasn’t—but somebody might make use of the buildings. “Even me,” Harry said to himself. He had to have some place to stay between rounds.
Which meant something had to be done about the bodies. Harry wasn’t up to digging two graves. He sure as hell wasn’t going to drag them out for the coyotes and buzzards. There wasn’t enough dry wood to cremate a mouse.
Finally he went out again. He found an old pickup truck. The keys were in the ignition, and it started instantly. It sounded smooth, in good tune. There was a drum of gasoline in the shed, and Harry thoughtfully filled the tank of the truck, filled two gas cans, then stacked junk against the drum to hide it.
He went back into the house and got old bedclothes to wrap the bodies, then drove the truck around to the front of the house. The chickens swarmed around his feet, demanding attention, while he wrestled the corpses onto the truck bed. Finished, Harry stooped and quickly wrung six chickens’ necks before the rest of the chickens got the idea. He tossed the birds into the truck with the Sinanians.
He went around carefully locking doors and windows, put Amos’s keys in his pockets and drove away.
He still had his route to finish. But there were things he must do first, not the least of which was burying the Sinanians.
Al Hardy didn’t like guard duty. It didn’t do him much good to dislike it. Somebody had to pull guard, and the ranch-hands were more useful elsewhere. Besides, Hardy could make decisions for the Senator.
He looked forward to giving up the whole thing. Not too long, he thought. Not too long until we won’t need guards at the Senator’s gate. The roadblock stopped most intruders now; but it didn’t get them all. A few walked up from the flooded San Joaquin. Others came down from the High Sierra, and a lot of strangers had got into the valley before the Christophers began sealing it off. Most would be sent on their way, and they’d heard the Senator could let them stay on. It meant a lot, to be able to talk to the Senator.
And the Old Man didn’t like sending people away, which was why Al didn’t let many get up to see him. It was part of his job, and always had been: The Senator said yes to people, and Al Hardy said no.
There’d be a flood of them every hour if they weren’t stopped, and the Senator had important work to do. And Maureen and Charlotte would stand guard if Al didn’t, and to hell with that. The only good thing about Hammerfall, women’s lib was dead milliseconds after Hammerstrike…
Al had paper work to do. He made lists of items they needed, jobs for people to do, worked out details of schemes the Senator thought up. He worked steadily at the clipboard in the car, pausing when anyone came to the drive.
You couldn’t tell. You just couldn’t tell
. The refugees all looked alike: half-drowned and half-starved, and worse every day. Now it was Saturday, and they looked just awful. When he’d been Senator Jellison’s aide, Al Hardy had judged himself a good judge of men. But now there was nothing to judge. He had to fall back on routine.
These wandering scarecrows who came on foot, leading two children and carrying a third; but the man and woman both claimed to be doctors and knew the lingo…specialists, but even the woman psychiatrist had had GP training; they all did. And that surly giant was a CBS executive; he had to be turned back to the road, and he didn’t stop swearing until Hardy’s partner wasted a round through the side window of his car.
And the man in the remains of a good suit, polite and speaking good English, who’d been a city councilman out in the valley there, and who’d got out of his car, got close to Al and showed the pistol hidden in his raincoat pocket.
“Put your hands up.”
“Sure you want it this way?” Al had asked.
“Yes. You’re taking me inside.”
“Okay.” Al raised his hands. And the shot went through the city councilman’s head, neat and clean, because of course the signal was Al raising his right hand. Pity the councilman had never read his Kipling:
Twas only by favour of mine, quoth he, ye rode so long alive,
There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,
But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.
If I had raised my bridle-hand, as I have held it low,
The little jackals that flee so fast were feasting all in a row.
If I had bowed my head on my breast, as I have held it high,
The Kite that whistles above us now were gorged till she could not fly…
A truck came up to the drive. Small truck, thin hairy man with mustache drooping. Probably a local, Al thought. Everyone around here drove a small truck. By the same token he might have stolen it, but why drive to the Senator’s home with it? Al got out of the car and splashed through muddy water to the gate.