by Larry Niven
Too hungry. Too damn many miles coming out of the hills and all the stores looted, all the people run off or barricaded up so even the bazookas and the recoilless wouldn’t make it sure…
Hooker wanted to think about something else. If they’d fought earlier it would have been all right; but no, he let himself get talked out of that, talked into moving on to look for a better place, and by the time they got to it…
“If you’ve got to eat human meat…” The doctor couldn’t leave it alone. He had to talk about it. His face wrinkled and he fought nausea. Hooker hoped it was just in the doctor’s head.
“If you’ve got to eat human meat, the ones you want are the healthy ones, the ones who run the fastest and shoot back the best. The ones you can catch are the sick ones. The meat makes you sick, too. Better you eat diseased cattle than sick men—”
“Shut up, pussy doctor. You know why they died. They died because you’re not a real doctor at all, you’re only a pussy doctor.”
“Sure. First time you catch a real doctor, I’m for the pot.”
“Stick close to me if you want to live that long.”
Cowles had been a gynecologist before Hammerfall. He had left a commercial hunting lodge and driven downslope in the endless rain, and stopped at the border of the new sea that covered the San Joaquin Valley. Hooker’s band had found him there, sitting on the fender of his car in the pouring rain, slack-jawed and fresh out of ideas. If Cowles had not had just enough sense to name his profession, he would have joined the stewpot then.
He had protested at being conscripted into the army, until Hooker told him the true situation.
He was docile enough now. There had been no more mumbling about the rights of the citizen. Hooker didn’t doubt that he did the best he could to save lives. And he marched as fast as the slowest of them — with the stewpot following behind, carried by three men who were still healthy. Gillings was one of them. It gave Hooker an extra measure of safety: Gillings would have to drop the stewpot before he shot Hooker in the back.
Hooker didn’t want to shoot anyone. They’d already lost too many men, to disease, to desertion, to the guns in the valley behind them. Who’d have thought those farmers could put up such a good fight? Against a military outfit with modern weapons?
Only it wasn’t a very good military outfit, and they didn’t have much ammunition, and they hadn’t been very smart about anything. No time to train the recruits. No real discipline among the troops. Everybody edgy, wondering if a real Army patrol was out looking for them, or even a bunch of civilian cops.
There wasn’t any turning back, though, not now. And they couldn’t march faster than the news. What they needed was more recruits, only they couldn’t do much recruiting until they had plenty to eat. Economics could be a terrible enemy. To kill a man for the pot, and gather the fuel and water to make him meat, required a given amount of effort. If the company’s numbers dropped too low, the meat would spoil before it could be eaten. Waste of effort, waste of… murder.
It was small wonder that Hooker felt he was pursued by furies. Nothing had worked right since Hammerfall Day, and that was weeks ago. He’d forgotten exactly how many days, but two troopers kept an independent record, crossing off days on pocket calendar cards; if Sergeant Hooker needed to know precisely he could find out.
He’d learned to delegate other responsibilities too. He had to. As a sergeant he’d done the detail work; now that he was effectively the commanding officer he couldn’t. He didn’t think too much about how good an officer he was. There wasn’t anybody else to do it.
Left. Right. Away from that valley, back south again, where they might find some place to stop, new recruits, something to eat besides…
He studied the clouds and wondered if they were really moving in a counterclockwise whirlpool. The only cover in sight was a house ahead and downslope. He ought to send scouts now. Shelter might be needed. He hoped it was abandoned. And maybe there’d be some canned goods inside. Not bloody likely. “Bascomb! Flash! Cover that farmhouse. See if anybody’s home. If there is, get ’em talking, not shooting.”
“Right, Sarge.” Two troopers, two of the healthy ones, broke from the formation and ran down the hill.
“Talk them to death?” the doctor asked.
“I need recruits, pussy doctor. And we have some stewed meat left, enough to last another day…” Hooker spoke absently. He was still watching Bascomb and Flash as they moved toward the farmhouse, and that weather worried him. It was only just past noon, but the clouds did seem to be moving in a bathtub whirlpool pattern…
Something bright showed in the clouds. It couldn’t be sunlight breaking through. It was only a ruddy pinpoint, moving very fast, almost parallel to the clouds, dipping in and out of their dark underbellies. Hooker cried, “Noooo…”
Doctor Cowles edged away, suspecting madness.
“No,” Hooker said softly, “no, no, no. We can’t take it. Enough is enough, don’t you understand? It has to stop now,” Hooker explained, his eyes on the falling bright point. He couldn’t take it, nobody could take it, if the Hammer should fall again.
His prayer was answered, weirdly, as a parachute bloomed behind the meteorite. Hooker stared, not understanding.
“It’s a spacecraft,” Cowles said. “I’ll be damned. Hooker, it’s a spacecraft. Must be from Hammerlab. Hooker, are you all right?”
“Shut up.” Hooker watched the descending parachute.
Gillings bellowed from behind him. “Hey, Sergeant, what does an astronaut taste like? Like turkey?”
“We’ll never know,” Hooker called, and it was good that his voice was under control; good that only Cowles had seen his face. Cowles wouldn’t talk. “They’re coming down in the valley. Right where those farmers shot the shit out of us yesterday.”
Falling east, blind. Clouds shone fiercely bright beneath the meteorite Soyuz. Here and there were whirlpool patterns, hurricane patterns. North of their path there had been a towering spike of cloud, a mother of hurricanes spinning off little ones, above the hot water that must still cover the Pacific strike. The small window shook with the Soyuz’s vibration, and Johnny Baker’s eyes vibrated in a different pattern. The Soyuz dipped low, dipped in and out of the cloud deck, and in, and the view went from gray-white gradually to gray-dark.
“Could be anything down there,” he reported.
Falling more steeply now. Out of the clouds, but it was still dark below. Land, sea, swamp? It didn’t matter. They were committed. The Soyuz had no fuel, no power, no way to maneuver. They’d stayed up as long as they could, until they were down to their last few pounds of oxygen, the last of their rations; until Hammerlab, with its low electrical power because of the sandblasted solar cells, was almost intolerably hot; until they couldn’t stay in orbit any longer, and had to return to a blasted Earth.
It had seemed appropriate to make mankind’s last space flight last as long as possible. Maybe they’d done some good. They’d been able to pinpoint the strikes and broadcast their locations. They’d seen the rockets rise and fall and the atomic blasts, and that was all over now. The Sino-Russian war went on and on and might last forever, but it wasn’t fought with atomic weapons any longer. They’d seen it all and broadcast what they saw, and somebody heard them. There’d been an acknowledgment from Pretoria, and another from New Zealand, and almost five minutes of conversation with NORAD and Colorado Springs. Not a lot to show for four weeks in orbit past Hammerfall, but they’d have stayed if there’d been nothing. The last of the space travelers.
“Parachute opening,” Pieter said from behind him. Innocuous words, but something in the tone made Johnny brace himself. It was just as well.
“Rough ride,” Rick said from behind his other ear. “Maybe because we’re overloaded.”
“No, it’s always like this,” Leonilla said. “Are your Apollos more comfortable?”
“I never came down in one,” Rick answered. “It must be easier on the nerves. We wear pressure su
its.”
“Here there is no room,” Pieter said. “I have told you, we made the design different after that trouble that killed three kosmonauts. We have had no leaks, da?”
“Da.”
The view was clearing, and coming up fast. “I think we are too far south,” Pieter said. “The winds were not predictable.”
“So long as we get down,” Johnny Baker said. He looked down at the solid sheet of water below. “Can we all swim?”
Leonilla chuckled. “Can we all wade? The water doesn’t look deep. In fact…” She stared down at the scene below while the others waited. She was in the chair beside Johnny; Pieter and Rick were in the cramped space behind them. “In fact, we are moving inland. East. I see three — no, four people running from a house.”
“Two hundred meters,” Johnny Baker said. “Get set. We’re coming in. One hundred… fifty… twenty-five…”
Splot! The overburdened Soyuz landed hard. That felt like land. Johnny sighed and let muscles go limp one by one. No more vibration, scream of air, fear of explosive decompression or death by drowning. They were down.
They were all soaked in sweat. It had been a hot ride. “Everybody okay?” Johnny asked.
“Rojj.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Let’s get the hell out,” Rick said.
Johnny didn’t see the hurry; but Rick and Pieter must be hellishly cramped back there. Rick had suggested the arrangement himself, but that wouldn’t make it more comfortable. Johnny fumbled with the unfamiliar locks. They wouldn’t work until he cursed them; then the latch popped open.
“Oops.”
“What is it?” Rick asked. Leonilla craned to look past him.
“Curtain time,” said Johnny. He stood in the hatch and smiled brilliantly into a crowd that bristled with shotguns and rifles. More than a dozen men faced him, and no women. He wasn’t counting, but he saw half a dozen shotguns and a lot of rifles and revolvers, and Jesus! — two Army submachine guns.
He raised his hands. It wasn’t easy to keep them high and still scramble out of the capsule. What were they all so damned nervous about? He moved, rotated, so they could see the U.S. flag on his shoulder. “Don’t shoot, I’m a hero.”
They were not a prepossessing lot. They were half-drowned rats in farm clothes much the worse for total disaster, and their faces were as grim as their guns. There were a couple of bloody bandages in evidence, too. Johnny had a sudden wild impulse to speak in pidgin talk: Me-fella big astronaut, come from same country belong you-fella. He controlled it.
One spoke from the semicircle. He was white-haired and stout — though not as stout as his coveralls; they had all shrunk within their clothes. But his arms were as thick as a wrestler’s. The lightweight machine gun looked fragile in his big hands. “Tell us, Hero, how you come to be in a commie airplane.”
“Spaceship. We’re from Hammerlab. You know about Hammerlab?” (Head belong you-fella him savvy big rocket go up up up in sky long-time not come down?) “Hammerlab was the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission in space. We went up to study the comet.”
“We know.”
“Okay, the Apollo got a hole poked through it. We think it got hit by a snowflake moving at God’s own speed. We had to beg a ride home with the Soviets. In their spaceship. I’m—”
“Johnny Baker! I know him, that’s Johnny Baker.” The voice belonged to a man: thin, limp black hair, slender fingers wrapped around an enormous shotgun. “Hey!”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Johnny, and he was. “Would it hurt if I put my hands down?”
“Go ahead,” said the white-haired spokesman. He was obviously the man in charge, partly by tradition, partly because of bull strength. The submachine gun didn’t hurt his leadership credentials. It hadn’t moved, aimed not quite at Johnny. “Who else is in there?”
“The other astronauts. Two Soviets and another American. It’s crowded in there. They’d like to come out, if… well, if you people can stay calm about it.”
“Nobody excited here,” the spokesman said. “Bring out your friends. I got some questions for them. Like why did the commies come down here?”
“Where could we go? Only one spaceship for the four of us. Leonilla?”
She stepped out, smiling, her hands slightly raised. Johnny announced, “Leonilla Malik. The first woman in space.” It wasn’t strictly true, but it sounded good.
The hard stares softened. The white-haired man lowered his weapon. “I’m Deke Wilson,” he said. “Come on out, miss. Or is it comrade?”
“Whatever you choose,” she said. She scrambled down from the open hatchway and stood blinking at the reflected light off the sheet of water two hundred yards to the west. “My first visit to America. Or outside the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t let me out before.”
“Others coming,” Johnny said. “Pieter…”
Brigadier General Jakov was not smiling. His hands were high and his back was straight, the hammer-and-sickle and CCCP prominent on his shoulder. The farmers were looking wary again. “General Pieter Jakov,” Johnny announced, making the pronunciation very Russian in the hope that nobody would get smart-mouthed about the name. “There’s one more. Rick…”
A couple of the farmers were giving their friends knowing looks.
Rick emerged, also smiling, making certain that the U.S. flag showed.
“Colonel Rick Delanty, U.S. Air Force,” Johnny said.
The farmers were relaxing. A little.
“First black man in space,” Rick said. “And the last, for about a thousand years.” He paused. “We’re all the last.”
“For awhile. Maybe not that long,” Deke Wilson said. He slipped the submachine gun back on its shoulder strap so that it pointed to the sky There was a subtle change in the way the others held their weapons. Now they were a group of farmers who happened to be carrying guns.
One of the men flashed a mischievous grin. “They made you ride in back?”
“Well, it was the only bus out there,” Rick said.
There were laughs. “Derek, take your boys and get back to the roadblock,” Wilson said. He turned back to Baker. “We’re a little nervous here,” he said. “Some Army mutineers running around the area. Killed an Armenian chap down the road and ate him. Ate him. One of the kids got to us, we had some warning. Ambushed the sons of… we ambushed them. But there’s still a lot of them left. And others, city people, people with rabies…”
“It is that bad?” Leonilla said. “That bad so quickly?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have come down,” Rick said.
“There are vital records in the spacecraft.” Pieter Jakov laid a hand possessively on the Soyuz. “They must be preserved. Is there anyplace they can be studied? Any scientists or universities near here?”
The farmers laughed. “Universities? General Baker, look around you. Take a good look,” Deke Wilson said.
John Baker stared at the desolation surrounding him. To the east were rain-drenched hills, some green, most barren. All the low areas were filled with water. The highway that ran north and east looked more like a series of concrete islands than a road.
To the west was a vast inland sea, lapped with waves a foot high, dotted with small brown hills that had become islands. Treetops rose from the water in regular arrays where an orchard was not quite submerged. A few boats moved across this sea. The water was muddy, dark and dangerous, and it stank with dead things. Cattle, and…
The remains of a rag doll bobbed gently with the waves. It floated about thirty yards offshore. Not far from it, perhaps somehow attached to it, were wisps of blonde hair and checkered cloth, not recognizable as the remains of anything human. Deke Wilson followed Baker’s look, then turned away toward the farmhouse standing on the hill above the sea. “Nothing we can do,” he said. His voice was bitter. “We could spend all our time burying them. All of it. And we’d still not get it done.”
It was then that the full horror of Hammerfall struck Johnny Baker. “It doesn’
t go clean,” he said.
Wilson frowned a question.
“It isn’t just Bang! and it’s over, civilization’s fallen and we have to rebuild it. There’s the aftermath, and that’s worse than the comet—”
“Damn right,” Wilson said. “You’re goddam lucky, Baker. You missed the worst of it.”
“There is no central government?” Pieter Jakov asked.
“You’re looking at it,” Wilson said. “Bill Appleby there’s a deputy sheriff, but it’s nothing special. We haven’t heard from Sacramento since Hammerfall.”
“But surely someone is organizing, is trying,” Leonilla said.
“Yeah. There’s the Senator’s people,” Wilson said.
“Senator?” John Baker kept his face from showing emotion. He turned away from the terrible inland sea, toward the hills to the east.
“Senator Arthur Jellison,” Deke Wilson said.
“You sound like you don’t like him much,” Rick Delanty said.
“Not exactly. Can’t blame him, but I don’t have to like him.”
“What’s he done?” Baker asked.
“He’s organized,” Wilson said. “That valley of his” — Wilson pointed north and east, toward the foothills of the High Sierra — “is ringed with hills. They’ve got patrols, border guards, and they don’t let anybody in without their say-so. You want help, they’ll send it, but the price is damned high. Feed their troops, and send back more food, oil, ammunition, fertilizer, all the things you can’t get now.”
“If you have oil, I’d think you’d be in good shape,” Rick Delanty said.
Wilson waved expansively. “How do we hold onto this place? No borders. No rock piles to make into fortresses. No time to build. No way to keep refugees from coming in and looting what we haven’t got to yet. You want to lock that thing up? I’d rather not have this many people standing around. There’s work to do. Always work to do.”
“Yes. The records should be safe.” Pieter climbed onto the Soyuz and closed the hatch.
