Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

  Hugo had inherited the spread from his aunt and uncle three years ago, when they racked up their car on a Mexico vacation. It had been called something else then: Inverted Fork Ranch, some such name, probably named after a branding iron. Hugo Beck had arrived for the funeral. a pudgy boy of eighteen who wore his straight black hair at shoulder length and a kind of beard with the chin bared. He’d looked the place over, and stayed to sell the cattle and most of the horses, and left. A month later he’d returned, followed by (the number varied according to who was talking) a score of hippies. There was enough money, somehow, to keep them alive and fairly comfortable. Certainly the Shire was not a successful business. It exported nothing. But they must be growing some food; they didn’t import enough from town.

  Harry hollered again. The front door opened and a human shape strolled down to the gate.

  It was Tony. Harry knew him. Scrawny and sun-darkened, grinning to show teeth that had been straightened in youth, Tony was dressed as usual: jeans, wool vest, no shirt, digger hat, sandals. He looked at Harry through the gate. “Hey, man, what’s happenin’?” The rain affected him not at all.

  “The picnic’s been called off. I came to tell you.”

  Tony looked blank, then laughed. “The picnic! Hey, that’s funny. I’ll tell them. They’re all huddling in the house. Maybe they think they’ll melt.”

  “I’m half melted already. Here’s your mail.” Harry handed it over. “Your mailbox is wrecked.”

  “It won’t matter.” Tony seemed to be grinning at some private joke.

  Harry skipped it. “Can you spare someone to run me into town? I wrecked my truck.”

  “Sorry. We want to save the gas for emergencies.”

  What did he think this was? Harry held his temper. “Such is life. Can you spare me a sandwich?”

  “Nope. Famine coming. We got to think of ourselves.”

  “I don’t get you.” Harry was beginning to dislike Tony’s grin.

  “The Hammer has fallen,” said Tony. “The Establishment is dead. No more draft. No more taxes. No more wars. No more going to jail for smoking pot. No more having to pick between a crook and an idiot for President.” Tony grinned beneath the shapeless, soggy hat. “No more Trash Day either. I thought I’d flipped when I saw a mailman at the gate!”

  Tony really had flipped, Harry realized. He tried to sidestep the issue. “Can you get Hugo Beck down here?”

  “Maybe.’’

  Harry watched Tony reenter the farmhouse. Was there anyone alive in there? Tony had never struck him as dangerous, but… if he stepped out with anything remotely like a rifle, Harry was going to run like a deer.

  Half a dozen of them came out. One girl was in rain gear; the rest seemed to be dressed for swimming. Maybe that made a kind of sense. You couldn’t hope to stay dry in this weather. Harry recognized Tony, and Hugo Beck, and the broad-shouldered, broad-hipped girl who called herself Galadriel, and a silent giant whose name he’d never learned. They clustered at the gate, hugely amused.

  Harry asked, “What’s it all about?”

  Much of Hugo Beck’s fat had turned to muscle in the past three years, but he still didn’t look like a farmer. Maybe it was the expensive sandals and worn swim trunks; or maybe it was the way he lounged against the gate, exactly as Jason Gillcuddy the writer would lounge against his bar, leaving one hand free to gesture.

  “Hammerfall,” said Hugo. “You could be the last mailman we ever see. Consider the implications. No more ads to buy things you can’t afford. No more friendly reminders from the collection agency. You should throw away that uniform, Harry. The Establishment’s dead.”

  “The comet hit us?”

  “Right.”

  “Huh.” Harry didn’t know whether to believe it or not. There had been talk… but a comet was nothing. Dirty vacuum, lit by unfiltered sunlight, very pretty when seen from a hilltop with the right girl beside you. This rain, though What about the rain?

  “Huh. So I’m a member of the Establishment?”

  “That’s a uniform, isn’t it?” said Beck, and the others laughed.

  Harry looked down. “Somebody should have told me. All right, you can’t feed me and you can’t transport me—”

  “No more gas, maybe forever. The rain is going to wipe out most of the crops. You can see that, Harry.”

  “Yeah. Can you loan me a hatchet for fifteen minutes?”

  “Tony, get the hatchet.”

  Tony jogged up to the farmhouse. Hugo asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Trim the roots off my walking stick.”

  “What then?”

  He didn’t have to answer, because Tony was back with the hatchet. Harry went to work. The Shire people watched. Presently Hugo asked again. “What do you do now?”

  “Deliver the mail,” said Harry.

  “Why?” A frail and pretty blonde girl cried, “It’s all over, man. No more letters to your congressman. No more PLAYBOY, No more tax forms or… or voting instructions. You’re free! Take off the uniform and dance!”

  “I’m already cold. My feet hurt.”

  “Have a hit.” The silent giant was handing a generously fat homemade cigarette through the gate, shielding it with Tony’s digger hat. Harry saw the others’ disapproval, but they said nothing, so he took the toke. He held his own hat over it while he lit it and drew.

  Were they growing the weed here? Harry didn’t ask. But… “You’ll have trouble getting papers.”

  They looked at each other. That hadn’t occurred to them.

  “Better save that last batch of letters. No more Trash Day.” Harry passed the hatchet back through the bars. “Thanks. Thanks for the toke, too.” He picked up the trimmed sapling. It felt lighter, better balanced. He got his arm through the mailbag strap.

  “Anyway, it’s the mail. ‘Neither rain, nor sleet, nor heat of day, nor gloom of night,’ et cetera.”

  “What does it say,” Hugo Beck asked, “about the end of the world?”

  “I think it’s optional. I’m going to deliver the mail.”

  The Mailman: Two

  Among the deficiencies common to the Italian and the U.S. postal systems are:

  • inefficiency, and delays in deliveries,

  • old-fashioned organization

  • low efficiency and low salaries of personnel

  • high frequency of strikes

  • very high operational deficit

  Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age

  Carrie Roman was a middle-aged widow with two big sons who were Harry’s age and twice Harry’s size. Carrie was almost as big as they were. Three jovial giants, they formed one of Harry’s coffee stops. Once before, they had given Harry a lift to town to report a breakdown of the mail truck.

  Harry reached their gate in a mood of bright optimism.

  The gate was padlocked, of course, but Jack Roman had rigged a buzzer to the house. Harry pushed it and waited.

  The rain poured over him, gentle, inexorable. If it had started raining up from the ground, Harry doubted he would notice. It was all of his environment, the rain.

  Where were the Romans? Hell, of course they had no electricity. Harry pushed the buzzer again, experimentally.

  From the corner of his eye he saw someone crouched low, sprinting from behind a tree. The figure was only visible for an instant; then bushes hid it. But it carried something the shape of a shovel, or a rifle, and it was too small to be one of the Romans.

  “Mail call!” Harry cried cheerily. What the hell was going on here?

  The sound of a gunshot matched the gentle tugging at the edge of his mailbag. Harry threw himself flat. The bag was higher than he was as he crawled for cover, and it jerked once, coinciding with another gunshot. A .22, he thought. Not much rifle. Certainly not much for the valley. He pulled himself behind a tree, his breath raspy and very loud in his own ears.

  He wriggled the bag off his shoulder and set it down. He squatted and selected four envelopes t
ied with a rubber band. Crouched. Then, all in an instant, he sprinted for the Roman mailbox, slid the packet into it, and was running for cover again when the first shot came. He lay panting beside his mailbag, trying to think.

  Harry wasn’t a policeman, he wasn’t armed, and there wasn’t anything he could do to help the Romans. No way!

  And he couldn’t use the road. No cover.

  The gully on the other side? It would be full of water, but it was the best he could do. Sprint across the road, then crawl on hands and knees…

  But he’d have to leave the mailbag.

  Why not? Who am I kidding? Hammerfall has come, and there’s no need for mail carriers. None. What does that make me?

  He didn’t care much for the question.

  “It makes me,” he said aloud, “a turkey who got good grades in high school by working his arse off, flunked out of college, got fired from every job he ever had…”

  It makes me a mailman, goddammit! He lifted the heavy bag and crouched again. Things were quiet up there. Maybe they’d been shooting to keep him away? But what for?

  He took in a deep breath. Do it now, he told himself. Before you’re too scared to do it at all. He dashed into the road, across, and dived toward the gulley. There was another shot, but he didn’t think the bullet had come anywhere close. Harry scuttled down the gulley, half crawling, half swimming mailbag shoved around onto his back to keep it out of the water.

  There were no more shots. Thank God! The Many Names Ranch was only half a mile down the road. Maybe they had guns, or a telephone that worked… Did any telephones work? The Shire wasn’t precisely an official information source, but they’d been so sure.

  “Never find a cop when you need one,” Harry muttered.

  He’d have to be careful showing himself at Many Names. The owners might be a bit nervous. And if they weren’t, they damned well should be!

  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 ma
yor. 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?”