by Larry Niven
“You too?” Johnny asked. “How many Presidents have you heard about?”
“Five. Colorado Springs; Moose Jaw, Montana; Casper, Wyoming… anyway, I’ll take the Senator. Give us all the orders you want.”
Johnny Baker spoke carefully. “You didn’t understand me. I’ve got orders not to give you orders. Suggestions only.”
Price looked uncomfortable and confused. Mayor Allen and an assistant whispered together, then Allen said, “Doesn’t want the obligation?”
“Precisely,” Baker said. “Look, I’m on your side. We’ve got to keep this plant going. But I don’t control the Stronghold.”
Mayor Allen said, “You may be the highest-ranking—”
“Try to give the Senator orders? Me? Bullshit!”
“Just a thought, General. All right, feudal obligations work both ways,” Mayor Allen said. “At least they do if the King is Senator Jellison. So he wants to limit his obligations to us. So what suggestions do you have for us, General Baker?”
“I’ve given you some. Ways to build exotic weapons…”
Price nodded. “We’re working on them. Actually, it only took thinking of them. You know, we’ve worked on defenses here, not enough, I guess, but none of us ever thought of poison gas. Incendiaries we knew about, but we didn’t make enough. Or enough muzzle-loader cannon, either. I’ve got a crew on that right now. What else?”
“Lay in supplies. No water shortage, and you’ve got the power to boil it. There’s dried fish coming, and you can catch more. Get set for a siege. Our information is that the New Brotherhood is serious about taking over all of California, and very serious about wrecking this plant.”
“If Alim Nassor is involved, they’re serious,” Mayor Allen said. “Brilliant man, and determined as hell. But I don’t see his motive. He was never involved in any of the anti-industrial movements. Quite the opposite. ‘We’re just getting into the game, and now you say you’re shutting it down’ — that approach.”
“You’re forgetting Armitage,” Baker said. “Nassor and Sergeant Hooker together probably couldn’t hold this army together. Armitage can. It’s Armitage who wants the plant destroyed.”
The Mayor pondered. “The Los Angeles area used to be famous for funny religions…”
Tim was still hoping they wouldn’t have to bring Hugo in. He spoke for Hugo: “If Islam was a funny religion, go ahead and laugh, Mayor. They’re expanding that way. Join or get eaten, they assimilate everybody, one way or the other.”
“If the plant goes, they’ll never have another one,” Barry Price said. “They must be crazy.” Was he talking about the New Brotherhood or the Stronghold? Nobody asked.
But Baker stood up suddenly. “All right. We’re here, with our guns and Dr. Forrester’s notes. Tim, you go try on that wet suit. Maybe we can dig up some of what we need to fight with. I wish I knew how much time we’ve got.”
The policeman went up the slanting ladder slowly, carefully, with a fat sandbag balanced on his shoulder. He was sandyhaired and square-jawed, and his uniform was wearing through. Mark followed him with another sandbag. They added the bags to the barricade atop the cooling tower. By now Tim’s radio was nearly walled in.
The man turned to confront Mark. He was Mark’s own size, and angry. “We did not desert our city,” he said.
“That wasn’t what I meant.” Mark resisted the urge to back up. “I only said most of us—”
“We were on duty,” the policeman said. “I know at least a couple of us were watching TV if we could get to one. The Mayor was. I wasn’t. First I knew, one of the girls was yelling that the comet had hit us. I stayed at my post. Then the Mayor came through collecting us. He herded us all into elevators and down to the parking garage and packed the women and some of the men into half a dozen station wagons that were already loaded with stuff. He put us cops on motorcycles for an escort and we headed for Griffith Park.”
“Did you have any—”
“I had no idea what was happening,” Patrolman Wingate said. “We got up into the hills, and the Mayor told us the comet had done some damage and we could ride it out here and go clean up the mess afterward. Oh, boy.”
“Did you see the tidal wave?”
“Oh, boy. Czescu, there just wasn’t anything left to clean up. It was all foam and mist down there, and some of the buildings were still sticking up, and Johnny Kim and the Mayor were yelling at each other and I was almost next to them, but what with the thunder and lightning and the tidal wave I couldn’t hear a word. Then they got us together and headed north.”
The policeman stopped. Mark Czescu respected his silence. They watched four boats leaving with Robin Laumer and part of his construction crew. There had been a shouting match when Laumer tried to claim some of the supplies, but the men with guns — including Mark and the Mayor’s police — had won their point.
“We went through the San Joaquin in four hours,” the policeman said, “and let me tell you, that was tricky driving.
We had the sirens, but we spent as much time off the road as on. We had to leave one of the wagons. We got here and it was already over the hubcaps, and that dike was a solid wall. We packed stuff from the wagons on our backs over the levees in the rain. When we’d done that, Price put us to work on the levees. He worked us like donkeys. Next morning it was an ocean out there, and it was six hours more before I got a shower.”
“Shower.”
The policeman turned to look at Mark. “What?”
“You said it so casually. Shower. A hot shower. Do you know how long… ? Skip it. All I ever said was, most of us had to do some running.”
The policeman’s nose almost touched Mark’s. It was narrow, prominently bridged, a classic Roman nose. “We did not run. We were in the right place to put the city back together again afterward. Goddammit, there wasn’t anything left! There’s nothing left but this power plant, which the Mayor says is officially part of Los Angeles. We’re here now. Nobody’s going to hurt it.”
“All right.”
The four boats were dwindling with distance. A few of the remaining construction men had climbed the levee to watch them go — wistfully, perhaps. “I expect they’ll be fishermen now,” Mark said.
“Try to imagine how little I care,” the policeman said. “Let’s get to work.”
Horrie Jackson cut the motor and let the boat drift to a stop. “Far as I can tell, Wasco is just under us,” he said. “If it’s not, there ain’t much I can do about it.”
Tim looked at the cold water and shuddered. The wet suit fit him, but there were loose spots, and it was going to be damned cold out there. He tested the air system. It worked. The tanks were fully charged; and that had been impressive, too. When the mechanics at SJNP hadn’t had valves and fittings in stock, they simply went into the machine shop and made them. It was a reminder of another world, a world when you didn’t have to make do with what was around, when you had some control.
“I keep thinking,” Tim said. “If people’s pet goldfish got loose, what happened to the piranhas?”
“Too cold for them,” Jason Gillcuddy said, and he laughed.
“Yeah. Well, here goes.” Tim climbed to the gunwale, sat balanced for a moment, and rolled off backward into the water.
The cold was a shock, but it wasn’t as bad as he expected. He waved at the boat crew, then tried an experimental dive. The water was as black as ink. He could barely see his wrist compass and depth gauge. The gauge was another of the SJNP crew’s miracles, fabricated and calibrated in a couple of hours. Tim turned on the sealed lantern. The beam gave him no more than ten feet of milky visibility.
The sea in Emerald Bay off Catalina had been clear as glass. He had flown through seaweed jungles rich with darting fish… Iong ago.
He kicked down into the white murk, searching for the bottom, and found it at sixty feet. There was no sound but the bubbles from his regulator, the sound of his breathing. A shape loomed up in front of him, monstrous, humpbacked, a Volksw
agen, he saw when he got closer. He didn’t look inside.
He followed the road. He passed an Imperial with hordes of fish swarming in and out of the broken windows. No buildings. More cars… and finally a gas station, but it had burned before it was flooded. He kept going. He would be out of air soon.
Finally, civilization: rectangular shadings in the murk. Visibility was too poor to let him be selective. The doors he tried were locked. Locked against the sea… He swam on until he found a smashed plate-glass window. It was frighteningly dark in there, but he forced himself to enter.
He was in a large room; at least it felt large. A dense cloud of white fog to one side proved to be a rack of paperback books turned to mush and floating particles. The mist followed him as he swam away. He found counters and shelves, racks and goods toppled to the floor. He coasted above the floor, finding treasure everywhere — lamps, cameras, radios, tape recorders, Tensor lamps, television sets, nose drops, spray cans of paint, plastic models, tropical fish tanks, batteries, soap, scouring pads, light bulbs, canned salted peanuts…
So many things, and mostly ruined. His air supply cut off abruptly; in panic he looked behind for his diving partner, then realized that despite all his training he was diving without a buddy. That was almost funny. You had to have more than one scuba outfit in the world before you could use the buddy system. He calmed himself and reached back to the air tanks, arm contorting to grasp the regulator valve and turn it to reserve. Now he had only a few moments, and he used them to scoop up objects and stuff them into the goody bag tied to his weight belt.
He left the store and surfaced. He was a long way from the boat. He waved until he had their attention, and let them come to him. He was exhausted when they hauled him aboard.
“Did you find any food?” Horrie Jackson wanted to know. “We found some food with that scuba stuff before we ran out of air. We get back to Porterville I can show you lots of places where there’s food. You dive for it and we’ll split.”
Tim shook his head. He felt an infinite sadness. “That was a general store,” he said.
“Can you find it again?”
“I think so. It’s right under us.” Probably he could, and there would be much to salvage; but in his exhaustion he could not feel any excitement over his find. He felt only a terrible sense of loss. He turned to Jason Gillcuddy as probably the only man who could understand — if anyone could.
“Anyone could walk in there and buy,” Tim said. “Razor blades, Kleenex, calculators. Books. Anyone could afford to buy those; and if we all work very hard for a long time, maybe a few of us will have them again.”
“What did you bring up?” Horrie Jackson demanded.
“General store,” Adolf Weigley said. “Did you get any of that stuff on Forrester’s list? Solvent? Ammonia? Any of that?”
“No.” Tim held up the bag. When they opened it they found a bottle of liquid soap and a Kalliroscope. They all looked at him strangely — all but Jason Gillcuddy, who put his hand on Tim’s shoulders. “You’re not in shape to dive again today,” he said.
“Give me half an hour. I’ll go down again,” Tim said.
Horrie Jackson dug further into Tim’s goody bag. Fishhooks and fishing line. A vacuum tin of pipe tobacco. The peanuts: Horrie opened the tin, passed it around. Tim took a handful. They tasted like… a cocktail party in progress.
“Diving can do funny things to your head,” he said, and knew at once that that wasn’t the explanation. All the world that he had lost was down there under the water, turning to garbage.
Gillcuddy said, “Here. One sip left.” He handed Tim a bottle of Heublein Whiskey Sour that Tim didn’t even remember stowing. One sip, a blast of nostalgia on the palate, and he threw the bottle far over the water. And there, sinister specks on the eastern horizon, were the boats of the New Brotherhood.
“Start the motor. Horrie, start the motor quick. They’ll cut us off,” he said. He strained forward for details, catching his balance when the motor started up, but all he could see was a lot of little boats and one much larger… a barge, with things on it. “They’ve got a gun platform, I think.”
Expendables
It was nor their fault that no one had told them that the real function of an army is to fight and that a soldier’s destiny — which few escape — is to suffer, and if need be, to die.
T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War
Dan Forrester looked exhausted. He sat in the wheelchair Mayor Seitz had brought up from the valley convalescent home, and he was plainly fighting off sleep. He was padded against the cold: a blanket, a windbreaker with hood, flannel shirt and two sweaters, one of which was three sizes too big; that one he wore backward. A .22 bullet would not have reached his skin.
The dairy barn was unheated. Outside, the wind howled at twenty-five miles an hour, with gusts at twice that. It blew thin flurries of snow and sleet. The swaying gasoline lantern threw out a bright ring of light, leaving shadows of lunar blackness in the contours of the concrete barn.
Three men and two women took turns rotating the cement mixer by hand, while others shoveled powders into it. Two of red, one of aluminum powder, while the dry cement mixer turned. When the powders were well mixed, others took them out and put them in cans and jars, then cast plaster of parts around them.
Maureen Jellison came in and shook the snow from her hair. She watched from the door for a moment, then went to Forrester’s wheelchair. He didn’t see her, and she shook his shoulder. “Dan. Dr. Forrester.”
He looked up with glazed eyes. “Yes?”
“Do you need anything? Coffee? Tea?”
He thought that through, slowly. “No. I don’t drink coffee or tea. Something with sugar in it? A Coke. Or just sugar water. Hot sugar water.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, please.” What I need, he thought, is fresh insulin. There’s nobody here who knows how to prepare that. If they ever give me the time I can do it myself, but first… “First thing is to bring the benefits of civilization back to the Stronghold.”
“What?”
“I might have known I’d walk into a war,” he told Maureen. “I was looking for the haves. The have-nots were bound to be somewhere around.”
“I’ll bring tea,” Maureen said. She went to the men turning the cement mixer. “Harvey, Dad wants you up at the house.”
“Right,” Harvey Randall said. “Brad, you stay with Dr. Forrester, and make sure—”
“I know,” Brad Wagoner said. “I think he should get some sleep.”
“I can’t.” Forrester was far enough away that they didn’t think he could hear them… and he looked like death warmed over anyway. The dead don’t hear. “I have to get to the other barn now.” He started to get up.
“Dammit, stay in that chair,” Wagoner shouted. “I’ll wheel you over.”
Harvey followed Maureen out of the barn. He zipped up all his clothes against the wind, and they walked on in silence for a moment. Presently he caught up to her. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to talk about,” he said.
She shook her head.
“You’re really in love with him?”
She turned and her expression was… strange. “I don’t know. I think Dad wants me to be. Wouldn’t that turn you off? Breeding for politics! It’s Johnny’s rank Dad wants. I think he believes in Colorado Springs.”
“Oddly phrased. Well, it certainly would be convenient.”
“It would, wouldn’t it? Harv, Johnny and I were sleeping together before you ever met me, and not because I was ordered to, either.”
“Yeah?” He smiled suddenly, and she saw and wondered; but he wasn’t going to mention George Christopher’s tirade. No. “Have I got a chance?”
“Don’t ask me now. Wait till Johnny gets back. Wait till it’s all over.”
Over? When is that? He pushed the thought away. Despair would be too easy. First Hammerfall and Loretta dead. The drive through nightmare, with Harv Randall curled around his wound
ed ego, a dead weight in the passenger seat. The fight to be ready for winter, for Fimbulwinter. The glaciers had been here once; every damn boulder in that damn wall was a reminder. Harv tasted the urge to howl at the heavens: Isn’t that enough? Wasn’t it enough without cannibals, war gases, thermite?
“You didn’t say no,” he said. “I’ll hang onto that.”
She didn’t answer, and that was encouraging, too. “I know how you must feel,” he said.
“Do you?” She was bitter. “I’m the prize in a contest. I always thought it was a joke, poor little rich girl. Suddenly nothing is funny anymore.”
They reached the house and went in. Senator Jellison and Al Hardy had maps spread out on the living-room floor. Eileen Hamner held more papers, Hardy’s eternal lists.
“You look frozen,” Jellison said. “There’s something hot in the Thermos. I won’t call it tea.”
“Thanks.” Harvey poured a cup. It smelled like root beer, add tasted much like that, but it was hot and it warmed him.
“Progress?” Hardy asked.
“Some. The thermit bombs are coming along, but the fuses have to be made. Over in Hal’s barn they’re cooking up a god-awful brew that Forrester says will be mustard gas, but he’s not sure how long it takes to finish the reaction. He’s cooking it slow so as not to take chances.”
“We may need it quicker than we think,” Jellison said.
Harvey looked up quickly. “Sir?”
“Deke’s people sent us a message on the CB an hour ago,” Jellison said. “Couldn’t make it out. Alice took another CB out to get on top of Turtle Mountain.”
“Alice? Turtle Mountain?” Harvey was incredulous.
“It’s in line of sight to us and Deke,” Al Hardy said. “And communications are better lately. It should work.”
“But Alice? A twelve-year-old girl?”
Hardy looked at him strangely. “Do you know anyone else who’d have a better chance of getting a horse up that mountain at night in the snow?”
