by Larry Niven
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
H. Poincare
Maureen Jellison stood at the top of the ridge. Warm rain poured over her. Lightning flared in the mountains above. She stepped closer to the deep cleft in the granite knob. The surface was slippery. She smiled slightly, thinking of how her father had told her not to come up here alone even before…
It was difficult to finish that thought. She could not put a name to what had happened. The End of the World sounded trite, and for a little while it wasn’t even true. Not yet. The world hadn’t ended here at the ranch they now called the Stronghold. She couldn’t see into the valley below because of the rain, but she knew what was there. A bustle of activity; inventory of everything — gasoline, cartridges, needles and pins, plastic bags, cooking oil, aspirin, firearms, baby bottles, pots and pans, cement — anything that might help keep them alive through the winter. Al Hardy was going about it systematically, using Maureen and Eileen Hamner and Marie Vance as agents to call on every house in the valley.
“Snoopers. That’s what we are,” Maureen shouted to the wind and the rain. Her voice fell. “And it’s all so damned useless.”
The snooping didn’t bother her. If anything was necessary, if anything could save them, it would be Al Hardy’s careful work. It wasn’t the snooping, or those who tried to hide their possessions. They were fools, but that was a folly that did not disturb her. It was the others; the ones who welcomed her. They believed. They were utterly certain that Senator Jellison would keep them alive, and they were pathetically happy to see his daughter. They didn’t care that she had come to pry and snoop and perhaps take their possessions. They were only too glad to offer everything they had, freely, in exchange for a protection that did not exist.
Some farmers and ranchers had pride and independence. They understood the need for organization, but they weren’t servile about it. But the others — the pathetic refugees who had somehow got past the roadblocks; the city people who owned houses in the valley, who had fled here to avoid Hammerfall, who had no idea what to do next; even rural people whose life-styles depended on feed trucks and refrigerated railroad cars and California weather — for them the Jellisons were “the government” which would care for them, as it always had.
Maureen couldn’t bear the responsibility. She told them lies. She told them they would live, and she knew better. There would be no crops this year, here or anywhere. How long could the loot from flooded stores keep them alive? How many more refugees were there in the San Joaquin basin, and what right did she have to live when the world was dying?
Lightning flared nearby. She did not move. She stood on the bare granite, near the edge. I wanted goals. Now I have them. And it’s too much. Her life didn’t revolve around Washington parties and who was speaking to whom. You couldn’t say that surviving the end of the world was trivial. But it is. If there’s not more to life than just existing, how is it different? It was more comfortable in Washington. It was easier to hide the suffering. That’s the only difference.
She heard footsteps behind her. Someone was coming along the ridgetop. She had no weapons, and she was afraid. She could laugh at that. She stood at the edge of a cliff, on a bare granite knob as lightning flashed, and she was afraid; but it was the first time she had felt fear of an approaching stranger in this valley, and that made it more terrifying. The Hammer had destroyed everything. It had taken her place of refuge. She looked toward the edge and slightly shifted her weight. It would be so easy.
The man came closer. He wore a poncho and a widebrimmed hat, and carried a rifle under the poncho. “Maureen?” he called.
Relief washed over her in waves. There was an edge of hysterical laughter in her voice as she said, “Harvey? What are you doing up here?”
Harvey Randall came to the edge of the rock. He stood uncertainly. She remembered that he was afraid of heights, and she stepped carefully toward him, away from the cleft.
“I’m supposed to be up here,” he said. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.” She summoned up a reserve of strength she hadn’t known she had. “Getting wet, I suppose.” Now that she’d said it she realized it was true. Despite the raincoat, she was soaked. Her low boots were filled with water. The rain was just cool enough to feel clammy on her back where it had come down inside her jacket. “Why are you supposed to be here?”
“Guard duty. I have a shelter over there. Come on, let’s get in out of the wet.”
“All right.” She followed him along the ridge. He didn’t turn back to look at her, and she followed passively.
Fifty yards away were boulders leaning against each other. A crude framework of wood and polyethylene garbage bags had been built under their partial shelter. There was no source of light inside except the afternoon gloom. The furniture was an air mattress and sleeping bag on the floor and a wooden box to sit on. A post had been driven into the ground and pegs stuck into it; from them hung a bugle, a plastic bag of paperback books, binoculars, a canteen and lunch.
“Welcome to the palace,” Harvey said. “Here, get that jacket off and let yourself dry out a bit.” He spoke calmly and naturally, as if there were nothing strange about finding her alone on a bare rock knob in a lightning storm.
The shelter was large; there was room to stand. Harvey shrugged himself out of the rainhat and poncho, then helped her with the jacket. He hung the wet clothes on pegs near the open entrance.
“What are you guarding?” Maureen asked.
“The back way in.” He shrugged. “In this rain it’s not likely that anyone will come or that I’d see them if they did, but we have to get the shelter built.”
“Do you live here?”
“No. We take turns. Me, Tim Hamner, Brad Wagoner and Mark. Sometimes Joanna. We all live down below here. Didn’t you know?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t seen you since we got here,” Harvey said. “I came looking a couple of times, but I got the impression you wouldn’t ever be at home for me. And I wasn’t all that welcome around the big house. Thanks for voting for me, anyway.”
“Voting?”
“The Senator said you’d asked to have me let in.”
“You’re welcome.” That had been easy enough to decide. I don’t sleep with every man I meet. Even if you got terminal guilt and went off to another room, it was nice, and I don’t really regret it. There’s an honest thought. If I thought enough of you to sleep with you, I sure as hell had to save your life, didn’t I?
“Have a seat.” He waved toward the wooden box. “Eventually there’ll be furniture. Nothing else to do up here but work on the place.”
“I don’t see what good you’re doing here,” Maureen said.
“Nor I. But try to explain that to Hardy. The maps show this as a good place for a guard post. When the visibility is more than fifty yards it will be, too, but right now it’s a waste of manpower.”
“We’ve got plenty of manpower,” Maureen said. She sat gingerly on the box and leaned back against the hard boulder. The plastic liner between her back and the boulder was damp from water condensing on its inside surface. “You’re going to have to insulate this,” she said. She ran a finger along the wet plastic.
“All in good time.” He stood nervously in the center of the shelter, finally went over to the air mattress and sat on top of his sleeping bag.
“You think Al’s a fool,” she said.
“No. No, I didn’t say that.” Harvey’s voice was serious. “I suppose I could do some good up here. Even if a raiding party got past me, I’d be an armed man behind them. And any warning I could give would be worth something down there. No, I don’t think Hardy’s a fool. As you say, we’ve got plenty of manpower.”
“Too much,” Maureen said. “Too many people, not enough food.” She didn’t recognize this matter-of-fact man who sat on his sleeping bag and never smi
led; who didn’t talk about galactic empires, and didn’t ask why she was up here. This wasn’t the man she’d slept with. She didn’t know who he was. Almost he reminded her of George. He seemed confident. The rifle he’d brought in was leaning against the post, ready to his hand. There were cartridges sewn in loops on his jacket pocket.
In all this world there are two people I’ve slept with, and they’re both strangers. And George doesn’t really count. What you do at fifteen doesn’t count. A hurried, frantic coupling on this hill, not very far from here, and both of us so afraid of what we’d done that we never talked about it again. Afterward we acted as if it had never happened. That doesn’t count.
George, and this man, this stranger. Two strangers. The rest are dead. Johnny Baker must be dead. My ex-husband too. And… There weren’t many more to inventory. People she’d cared for, for a year, for a week, for one night even. They were few, and they had been in Washington. All dead.
Some people are strong in a crisis. Harvey Randall is. I thought I was. Now I know better. “Harvey, I’m scared.” Now why did I say that?
She’d expected him to say something comforting. To be reassuring, as George would be. It would be a lie, but—
She hadn’t expected hysterical laughter. She stared as Harvey Randall giggled, bubbled, laughed insanely. “You’re scared,” he gasped. “Lord God above, you haven’t seen anything to be scared of!” He was shouting at her. “Do you know what it’s like out there? You can’t know. You haven’t been outside this valley.” Visibly he fought for control of himself. She watched fascinated, as he slowly won the struggle for calm. The laughter died away. Then, amazingly, the stranger was sitting there again, as if he hadn’t moved. “Sorry about that,” he said. The phrase was flippantly conventional, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out as a genuine apology.
She stared in horror. “You too? It’s only a big act? All this masculine calm, this—”
“What do you expect?” Harvey asked. “What else can I do? And I really am sorry. Didn’t mean to crack like that…”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t all right,” Harvey said. “The only damned chance we’ve got, any of us has got, is to go on trying to act rationally. And when one of us cracks, it makes it that much harder for the rest. That’s what I’m sorry about. Not that it gets to me, out of the blue sometimes, wham! I’m learning to live with that. But I shouldn’t have let you see it. It can’t make things easier for you—”
“But it does,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to… to say confession.” They sat silently for a moment, listening to the wind and rain, the crackle of thunder in the mountains. “We’ll swap,” Maureen said. “You tell me, I’ll tell you.”
“Is that wise?” he asked. “Look, I haven’t forgotten the last time we met up here on this ridge.”
“I haven’t either.” Her voice was small and thin. She thought he was about to move, to get up, and she spoke quickly. “I don’t know what to do about that. Not yet.”
He sat, unmoving, so that she wasn’t sure that he’d been about to get up after all. “Tell me,” he said.
“No.” She couldn’t quite make out his face. There was a stubble of beard, and the light was very bad in the shelter. Sometimes lightning struck near enough to throw a brilliant flash, eerily green from the color of the plastic bags, but that only blinded her for an instant and she still could not see his expression. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s horrible to me, but it would sound trivial—”
“And what if it does?”
“They hope,” she said. “They come to the house, or I go to theirs, and they believe we can save them. That I can save them. Some of them are crazy. There’s a boy in town, Mayor Seitz’s youngest boy. He’s fifteen, and he wanders around naked in the rain unless his mother brings him in. There are five women whose husbands never came back from a hunting trip. There are old people and children and city people and they all expect us to come up with a miracle — and, Harvey, I just don’t have any miracles, but I have to go on pretending that I do.”
Almost she told him the rest: of her sister Charlotte, sitting alone in her room and staring at the walls with vacant eyes, but then she’d come alive and scream if she couldn’t see the children; of Gina, the black woman from the post office, who’d broken a leg and lay in a ditch until somebody found her and then she died of gas gangrene and nobody could help her; of the three children with typhus that nobody could save; of the others who’d gone mad. They wouldn’t sound trivial. But they were. She could face horror. “I can’t go on giving people false hopes,” she said at last.
“You have to,” Harvey said. “It’s the most important thing in the world.”
“Why?”
He spread his hands in astonishment. “Because it is. Because there are so few of us left.”
“If life wasn’t important before, why should it be now?”
“It is.”
“No. What’s the difference between meaningless survival in Washington and meaningless survival here? None of that means anything.”
“It means something to the others. To the ones who want your miracles.”
“Miracles I don’t have. Why is it important that other people depend on you? Why does that make my life worth living?”
“Sometimes it’s all that does mean anything,” Harvey said. He was very serious. “And then you find there’s more. A lot more. But first you do a job, one that you didn’t really take on, looking out for others. Then after awhile you see that it’s important to live.” He laughed, not with humor but sadness. “I know, Maureen.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you really want to hear it?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Yes, I do.”
“All right.” He told her. She listened to his story: of the preparations before Hammerfall, of his quarrel with Loretta; of his self-doubts and guilt about his brief affair with her, not so much that he had slept with her, but that he had thought about her afterward and compared her with his wife, and how that had made it harder to take Loretta seriously.
He went on, and she heard, but she didn’t really comprehend. “And then finally we were here,” he said. “Safe. Maureen, you can’t know that feeling: to know, really know, that you’ll live another hour; that there may be a whole hour when you won’t see someone you love torn apart like a used rag doll. I wouldn’t want you to understand, not really, but you have to know that much: What your father is building here in this valley is the most important thing in the world. It’s priceless, and it’s worth anything to keep it, to know… to know that somebody, somewhere, has hope. Can feel safe.”
“No! That’s the real horror. It’s all false hope! The end of the world, Harvey! The whole goddam world’s come apart, and we’re promising something that doesn’t exist, won’t happen.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sometimes I think that too. Eileen is down there in the big house, you know. We hear what’s going on.”
“Then what’s the point if we won’t live through the winter?”
He got up and came toward her. She sat very still, and he stood next to her, not touching her, but she knew he was there. “One,” he said. “It’s not hopeless. You must know that. Hardy and your father have done some damned good planning. It takes some luck, but we’ve got a chance. Come on, admit it.”
“Maybe. If we’re lucky. But what if our luck has all run out?”
“Two ” he went on relentlessly. “Suppose it’s all a scam. We’ll all starve this winter. Suppose that. Maureen, it’s still worth it. If we can put off for an hour, if for a lousy hour we can spare somebody feeling the way I did curled up in the back of my car… Maureen, it’s worth dying just to keep one human being from feeling that way. It is. And you can do that. If it takes an act, put on an act. But do it.”
He meant it. Maybe he was acting too, doing what he had told her to do; but he meant it too, or why would he bother? Maybe he was right. Oh, God. Let him be right. Only
You aren’t there, are You?
How much do you believe all this, Harvey Randall? How strong is this resolve of yours? Please don’t lose it, because you make me feel it too. I can share it. She looked up at him and said, very gently, “Do you want to make love to me?”
“Yes.” He didn’t move.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve thought about you for months. Because I won’t feel guilt. Because I want someone to be in love with.”
“Those are good reasons.” She stood, and reached for him. She felt his arms go to her shoulders. He held her, not tightly, looking at her. The wet spot on her back was cold now. Almost she drew away, this wasn’t something casual, not like the last time. This would mean something. It had to.
His hands were warm on her back, and he smelled like sweat and work; an honest smell, not something from a spray can. When he bent to kiss her, it was like an electric shock, and she grasped him and held him, burrowing into him, hoping to lose herself.
Presently they lay on the air mattress, on the open sleeping bag. Gently he held her, and she knew it would be good, and after a long time it was.
Later she lay against him and watched the lightning make strange patterns through the green plastic; and she thought of what she’d done.
Do your job. That’s what life is all about, doing one’s job. Harvey hadn’t really said that, that was Albert Camus, The Plague, but it was what Harvey meant. And doing my job includes a lot of things, but I’m not sure it includes Harvey Randall. There’s a paradox. He tells me what I should be living for, and I know damned well I can’t hold onto it by myself, but what would George do if he knew where I was now?
He’d put Harvey on the road.
“What’s the matter?” Harvey asked. His voice came from a long way off.
She turned to him and tried to smile. “Nothing. Everything. I was just thinking.”
“You shivered. Are you cold?”
“No. Harvey… what about your boy? And Marie’s son?”
“They’re up there, somewhere. And I have to go look for them. I’ve been trying to get Hardy to let me, but he’s been too busy to talk to me. I’ll go without permission if I have to, but I’ll ask once more. I’ll try again tomorrow. No. Not tomorrow. There’s something else tomorrow.”
