To all of them Alvin Hardy was the same: “Show your hands. I’m not armed. But there’s a man with a scope-sighted rifle and you can’t see him.”
“Can he drive a truck?”
Al Hardy stared at the bearded man. “What?”
“First things first.” The bearded man reached into the bag on the seat beside him. “Mail. Only I’ve got a registered letter. Senator will have to sign for it. And there’s a dead bear—”
“What?” Al’s routine wasn’t working so well. “What?”
“A dead bear. I killed him early this morning. I didn’t have much choice. I was sleeping in the truck and this enormous black hairy arm smashed the window and reached inside. He was huge. I backed up as far as I could, but he kept coming in, so I took this Beretta I found at the Chicken Ranch and shot the bear through the eye. He dropped like so much meat. So—”
“Who are you?” Al asked.
“I’m the goddam mailman! Will you try to keep your mind on one thing at a time? There’s five hundred to a thousand pounds of bear meat, not to mention the fur, just waiting for four big men with a truck, and it’s starting to spoil right now! I couldn’t move him myself, but if you get a team out there you can maybe stop some people from starving. And now I’ve got to get the Senator’s signature for this registered letter, only you better send somebody for the bear right away.”
It was too much for Al Hardy. Far too much. The one thing he knew was the Beretta. “You’ll have to let me hold that weapon for you. And you drive me up the hill,” Al said.
“Hold my gun? Why the hell should you hold my gun?” Harry demanded. “Oh, hell, all right if it makes you happy. Here.”
He handed the pistol out. Al took it gingerly. Then he opened the gate.
“Good Lord, Senator, it’s Harry!” Mrs. Cox shouted.
“Harry? Who’s Harry?” Senator Jellison got up from the table with its maps and lists and diagrams and went to the windows. Sure enough, there was Al with somebody in a truck. A very bearded and mustachioed somebody, in gray clothes.
“Mail call!” Harry shouted as he came up onto the porch.
Mrs. Cox rushed to the door. “Harry, we never expected to see you again!”
“Hi,” Harry said. “Registered letter for Senator Jellison.”
Registered letter. Political secrets about a world dead and burying itself. Arthur Jellison went to the door. The mail carrier—yes, that was the remains of a Postal Service uniform—looked a bit worn. “Come in,” Jellison said. What the devil was this guy doing—
“Senator, Harry shot a bear this morning. I better get some ranch-hands out to get it before the buzzards do,” Al Hardy said.
“You don’t go off with my pistol,” Harry said indignantly.
“Oh.” Hardy produced the weapon from a pocket. He looked at it uncertainly. “Senator, this is his,” he said. Then he fled, leaving Jellison holding the weapon in still more confusion.
“I think you’re the first chap to fluster Hardy,” Jellison said. “Come in. Do you call on all the ranches?”
“Right,” Harry said.
“And who do you expect to pay you, now that—”
“People I bring messages to,” Harry said. “My customers.”
That hint couldn’t be ignored. “Mrs. Cox, see what you can find—”
“Coming up,” she called from the kitchen. She came in with a cup of coffee. A very nice cup, Jellison saw. One of his best. And some of the last coffee in the world. Mrs. Cox thought well of Harry.
That at least told him one thing. He handed over the pistol. “Sorry. Hardy’s got instructions—”
“Sure.” The mailman pocketed the weapon. He sipped the coffee and sighed.
“Have a seat,” Jellison said. “You’ve been all over the valley?”
“Most places.”
“So tell me what things are like—”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Harry had been nearly everywhere. He told his story simply, no embellishments. He’d decided on that style. Just the facts. Mail truck overturned. Power lines down. Telephone lines gone. Breaks in the road, here, and here, and ways around on driveways through here and across there. Millers okay, Shire still operating. Muchos Nombres deserted when he’d gone back with the truck, and the bodies—oops, getting ahead of himself.
He told of the murder at the Roman place. Jellison frowned, and Harry went to the table to show him on the big county engineer’s map.
“No sign of the owners, but somebody shot at you, and killed this other chap?” Jellison asked.
“Right.”
Jellison nodded. Have to do something there. But—first tell the Christophers. Let them share the risks of a police action.
“And the people at Muchos Nombres were coming to find you,” Harry said. “That was yesterday, before noon.”
“Never got here,” Jellison said. “Maybe they’re in town. Good land there? Anything planted?”
“Not much. Weeds, mostly,” Harry said. “But I have chickens. Got any chicken feed?”
“Chickens?” This guy was a gold mine of information!
Harry told him about the Sinanians and the Chicken Ranch. “Lots of chickens left there, and I guess they’ll starve or the coyotes will get them, so you might as well help yourself,” Harry said. “I want to keep a few. There was one rooster, and I hope he lives. If not, maybe I’ll have to borrow one…”
“You’re taking up farming?” Jellison asked.
Harry shuddered. “Good God, no! But I thought it’d be nice to have a few chickens running around the place.”
“So you’ll go back there—”
“When I finish my route,” Harry said. “I’ll stop at other places on the way back.”
“And then what?” Jellison asked, but he already knew.
“I’ll start over again, of course. What else?”
That figures. “Mrs. Cox, who’s available as a runner?”
“Mark,” she said. Her voice was disapproving; she hadn’t made up her mind about Mark.
“Send him to town to find out about these tourists from Muchos Nombres. They were supposed to have come looking for me.”
“All right,” she said. She went off muttering. They needed the telephones working again. Her daughter was talking about a telegraph line last night. There were plans in one of her books, and of course the wires were still around, the old telephone lines.
After she sent Mark off she made lunch. There was plenty of food just now: scraps from what they were canning, gleanings from the garden patches. It wouldn’t test long, though…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
One night Jerry phones me. He’s at work on HAMMER. He’s planning to keep the grounded astronauts outside the Stronghold a little longer. Needs a scene showing how terrible it all is, outside the Stronghold, after Hammerfall. Maybe a raid on a supermarket? Deke’s gang has become jaded, has stopped seeing the horrors.
I hung up. I thought. If Deke’s gang has stopped noticing the horrors, where’s my viewpoint?
What would they notice?
Just short of midnight, I called him back…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
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, hand-pumped, 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. Fifty-fifty 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 Volks 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
, goddamn 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.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Fallout from HAMMER has been fun.
Readers have demanded that I tell them that the surfer survived. Okay. I didn’t actually see him die.
The book had been in print for months when the Nivens and Pournelles attended the next AAAS meeting. It’s our way of staying current. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is scientists gathered to explain what they’ve been doing all year. Programming follows roughly eighteen parallel tracks.
Thence came Luis Alvarez to tell how the dinosaurs died. The Alvarezes, father and son, had found excessive iridium in the layer of dead clay that forms the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary. Their conclusion: a major asteroid strike coincides with the death of the dinosaurs and most of the life that then occupied the Earth.
Alvarez recognized Jerry in the audience. He announced, “The dinosaurs were killed by Lucifer’s Hammer!”
There came a phone call from an Al Jackson in Texas. His group had published a paper suggesting that a giant planet or midget sun (brown dwarf) in Sol’s cometary halo was the cause of periodic flurries of comets through the inner solar system. Every twenty-six million years, Hammer-like strikes would disrupt Earth’s biosphere. What had we named that black giant planet in LUCIFER’S HAMMER?
For one wonderful moment, it looked like the brown dwarf would bear the name Lucifer. But a California group had published their own paper simultaneously, and they named their brown dwarf Nemesis. That’s the name that stuck.
• • •
• • •
THE SOFT WEAPON
Logically Jason Papandreou should have taken the Court Jester straight home to Jinx. But…
He’d seen a queer star once.
He’d been single then, a gunner volunteer on one of Earth’s warships during the last stages of the last Kzinti war. The war had been highly unequal in Earth’s favor. Kzinti fight gallantly, ferociously, and with no concept of mercy; and they always take on several times as much as they can handle.