by Larry Niven
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.
The Stronghold: One
It is certain that free societies would have no easy time in a future dark age. The rapid return to universal penury will be accomplished by violence and cruelties of a kind now forgotten. The force of law will be scant or nil, either because of the collapse or disappearance of the machinery of state, or because of difficulties of communication and transport. It will be possible only to delegate authority to local powers who will maintain it by force alone…
Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age
Senator Arthur Jellison was in a foul mood on Hammerfall Morning. The only people he could get at JPL were PR flacks who didn’t know anything that wasn’t being reported on radio and TV. There was no way to reach Charlie Sharps. It made sense, but Senator Jellison wasn’t used to having people too busy to talk to him. Finally he settled for a phone patch into the space communications network, so he could hear what the astronauts were saying.
That didn’t help much because of the static. The live TV shots were bad, too. Was the damned thing going to hit or not?
If it did hit, there were a lot of moves Jellison should have made but hadn’t, because he couldn’t afford to look like a fool to his constituents, not even here in the valley, where he routinely got eighty percent of the vote. He’d brought his family and a couple of assistants and as much gear as he could buy without attracting a lot of attention, and that was about all he could do. Now they were all gathered in the house, most of them sitting with him in the big living room.
The phone speaker squawked. Johnny Baker’s voice, and Maureen came unnaturall
y alert. Jellison had known about that for a long time, but he didn’t think Maureen knew he was aware. Now Baker had his divorce, and his Hammerlab mission. Maybe, when he got down… That would be a good thing. Maureen needed somebody.
So did Charlotte, but she thought she had him. Jellison didn’t care for Jack Turner. His son-in-law was too handsome, too quick to talk about his tennis medals, and not quick at all to pay back the sizable “loans” he asked for when his investments didn’t turn out so well — as they almost never did. But Charlotte seemed happy enough with him, and the kids were being well brought up, and Maureen was getting old enough that maybe Charlotte’s would be the only grandchildren he’d ever have. Jellison rather hoped not.
“Crummy pictures,” Jack Turner said.
“Grandpa will get us good ones,” Jennifer Turner, nine, told her father. She’d found that her grandfather could get photographs and pins and things that made a big hit in her school classes, and she’d read all about comets.
“Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy,” the telephone speaker said.
“Grandpa—”
“Hush, Jenny,” Maureen said. The tension in her voice quieted the room. The TV picture became a crazy pattern of blurs, then sharpened to show a myriad of rocks enveloped in vapor and fog rushing toward them out of the screen.
“Jesus, it’s coming closer”
“That’s Johnny—”
“Like it’s going to hit—”
The TV image vanished. The phone line continued to chatter. “FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” “HOUSTON, HOUSTON, THERE IS A LARGE STRIKE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO…”
“Good Lord!”
“Shut up, Jack,” Jellison said quietly.
“…REQUEST YOU SEND A HELICOPTER FOR OUR FAMILIES… THE HAMMER HAS FALLEN.”
“You shouldn’t talk to Jack that way—”
Jellison ignored Charlotte. “Al!” he shouted.
“Yes, sir,” Hardy answered from the next room. He came in quickly.
“Round up all the ranch-hands. Quick. Any that have trucks should bring them. And rifles. Get moving.”
“Right.” Hardy vanished.
The others seemed stunned. Jennifer asked, plaintively, “What happened, Grandpa?”
“Don’t know,” Jellison said. “Don’t know how bad it was. Damned phone’s dead. Maureen, see if you can get anything, anybody, at JPL on that phone. Move.”
“Right.”
Then he looked at Jack Turner. Turner wasn’t known in the valley. No one would take orders from him. And what use was he? “Jack, get one of the Scouts started. You’ll drive me into town. I want to see the Chief of Police. And the Mayor.”
Turner almost said something, but the look on Jellison’s face stopped that.
“Can’t get through to L.A. at all, Dad,” Maureen said. “The phone’s working but—”
She was interrupted by the earthquake. It wasn’t very strong, this far from California’s major faults, but it was enough to shake the house. The children looked afraid, and Charlotte gathered them to her and took them to a bedroom.
“I can get the local phone numbers,” Maureen finished.
“Good. Get the local police and tell them I’m coming to town to talk to their Chief, and the Mayor. It’s important, and tell them I’m already on the way. Let’s go, Jack. Maureen, when Al gets the ranch-hands together, you and Al talk to them. What we’ll need is every friend they’ve got, all their trucks, rifles, everything. There’s a lot to do. Send about half the troops into town to find me, and have the rest secure for rainstorms, mudslides…” He thought for a moment. “And snow, if Charlie Sharps knows what he’s talking about. Snow within a week.”
“Snow? That’s stupid,” Jack Turner protested.
“Right,” Maureen said. “Anything else, Dad?”
The City Hall doubled as library, jail and police station. The local Chief commanded two full-time patrolmen and several unpaid volunteer auxiliaries. The Mayor owned the local feedstore. Government in Silver Valley was not a large or important activity.
The rain started before Jellison arrived at City Hall. Sheet lightning played over the High Sierra to the east. Rain fell like the outpouring of a warm bathtub, filling the streets and running over the low bridges over the creeks. Mayor Gil Seitz looked worried. He seemed very glad to see Senator Jellison.
There were a dozen others in the large library room. Chief of Police Randy Hartman, a retired cop from one of the large eastern cities; three city councilmen; a couple of local store owners. Jellison recognized the bullnecked man sitting toward the rear of the group, and waved. He didn’t see his neighbor George Christopher very often.
Jellison introduced his son-in-law and shook hands around. The room fell silent.
“What’s happened, Senator?” the Mayor asked. “Did… that thing really did hit us, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I saw magazine articles about it,” Mayor Seitz mused. “Glaciers. East Coast wiped out.” There was a crash of thunder and Gil Seitz waved toward the windows. “Didn’t believe it before. Now I guess I have to. How long does that rain go on?”
“Weeks,” Jellison said.
That sobered them all. They were all farmers, or lived in a community where farming — and farming weather — was the most important topic of conversation. They all knew what weeks of pounding rain would do.
“Animals will starve,” Seitz said. There was a momentary smile as he thought of the prices his feedstore inventory would bring; then a frown as he thought it through. “Just how much damage did that do? Will there be trucks left? Trains? Feed deliveries?”
Jellison didn’t say anything for a moment. “The science people tell me it’ll be raining like this all across the country,” he said slowly.
“Jesus Christ,” the Mayor said. “Nobody gets in a crop this year. Nobody. What’s in the elevators and granaries is it.”
“And I don’t reckon anybody’s going to send much to us,” George Christopher observed. Everyone nodded agreement. “If it’s that bad… Is it?”
“Don’t know,” Jellison said. “Good chance it’s worse.”
Seitz turned to study the big contour map of Tulare and adjacent counties that hung on the library wall. “Jesus, Senator, what do we do? The San Joaquin’s going to fill up, rain like this. Fill right up. And there’s a lot of people out there. A lot.”
“And they’ll all head this way, looking for high ground,” George Christopher added. “Where’ll we put ’em? How can we feed them all? We can’t.”
Jellison sat on the edge of a library table. “Gil, George, I’ve always suspected you both had more sense than you let on. That’s the problem, no doubt about it. Half a million, maybe more people in the San Joaquin, and they’ll all be looking for high ground. More people up in the Sierra, went up to get away from the comet, and they’ll be coming down here now. People from as far as L.A. will come here. What do we do with them all?”
“Let’s get this straight,” one of the councilmen said. “It’s a disaster, but you’re saying…” He broke down, unable to finish for a moment. “You’re saying that the Army, the President, Sacramento, everybody’s knocked out? We’re on our own forever?”
“We may be,” Jellison said. “Maybe not, too.”
“It makes a difference,” George Christopher said. “We can take care of all those people for a week. Maybe two. Not longer. Longer than that, somebody’s got to starve. Who’ll it be? All of us because we tried to keep a hundred times too many alive for a couple of weeks?”
“That’s the problem, all right,” Mayor Seitz agreed.
“I’m not feeding any of them,” George Christopher said. His voice was like granite. “I have my own to take care of.”
“You can’t… you can’t just abandon all your responsibilities,” Jack Turner said.
“Don’t think I have any to outsiders,” Christopher said. “Not if they’re going to die anyway.”
“Some of them won’
t make it,” Chief Hartman said. He pointed to the big map. “Porterville and Visalia are both in old river bottoms. Flood basins. Rain like this, I doubt those flood-control dams will hold very long.”
They all looked at the maps. It was true. Lake Success hung over Porterville, billions of gallons of water poised to plunge down on the city. Visalia to the north was no better off.
“Not just the rain,” Mayor Seitz said thoughtfully. “Warm rain, while there’s still some snow in the high country. Expect that’s all melted by now, sure by this afternoon—”
“We have to warn those people!” Jack Turner said.
“Do we?” asked a councilman.
“Sure we do,” Chief Hartman said. “And then what do we feed them with when they all come here? The stock out of Granny Mason’s store?”
There was a babble of talk in the room.
“How long will those dams last?” Jellison asked. “All day?”
No one knew for sure. The telephone wasn’t working, so they couldn’t call the county engineers.
“What did you have in mind, Senator?” Chief Hartman asked.
“Is there time to get trucks down in that area? Strip the supermarkets, feedstores, hardware stores, whatever, before the dams go?”
There was a long silence. Then one of the councilmen got up. “I reckon that dam will hold the day out. If the water don’t come too fast it can’t stop my truck anyway. I got a big ten-wheeler. I’ll go.”
“Not alone,” Jellison warned. “And not unarmed.”
“I’ll send my constables down with him,” Hartman said.
“What happens to the stuff?” George Christopher demanded.
“We share,” Jellison said.
“Share. If you share with me, it means you expect me to share with you,” Christopher said. “Not sure I like that.”
“Dammit, George, we’re in this together,” Mayor Seitz said.
“Are we? Who’s we?” Christopher demanded.
“Us. Your neighbors. Your friends,” one of the councilmen said.
