by Larry Niven
“Thanks.” Harvey turned away. It was too damned personal. Rifles would be better. Or machine guns. A machine gun was very impersonal. If you shot someone with a machine gun, you could persuade yourself that the gun had done it. But the crossbow had to be wound with your own musclepower. Personal.
There was nothing else to do. The valley was death to enter. In the cold night the mustard had condensed, and now small streamers of the yellow gas were sometimes visible. No one could enter that valley. They could leave the enemy — thank God all the Stronghold wounded had been taken out before the gas attack, although Harvey knew that Al Hardy would have ordered the attack even if they hadn’t been — they could leave the enemy wounded, or they could kill them. And they couldn’t spare rifle or machine-gun ammunition for the purpose. The crossbow bolts were recoverable. After the first good rain, or after a few days of warmth, the gas would be dispersed.
It made good fertilizer. So would the dead. Battle Valley would be good cropland next spring. Now it was a slaughterhouse.
We won. Victory. Harvey tried to recall the elation he’d felt the night before, the sense of life he’d had when he woke in the morning, and he knew he’d be able to. This was horrible work, but it was needed. They couldn’t leave the Brotherhood’s wounded to suffer. They’d die soon enough anyway; better to kill them cleanly.
And it was the last. No more wars. Now they could build a civilization. The Brotherhood had done the Stronghold’s work: They had cleared out much of the area near the Stronghold. It wouldn’t take a big expedition to go looking for salvage. Harvey kept his thoughts on that: on what they could find, on the wonders out there that they could search for and bring home.
When he heard the bow, Harvey turned back. His turn. Let Brad be alone for a moment.
The blood typing was done, and she’d visited the wounded. That had been tough, but not as bad as she’d thought. She knew why, but she didn’t think about it.
It wasn’t too bad in the hospital, because the worst cases had already died. Maureen wondered if they’d been… helped. Leonilla and Doc Valdemar and his psychiatrist wife, Ruth, knew their limits, knew that many who had inhaled mustard or taken gut shots were finished because they didn’t have the drugs and equipment it would take to save them, and the mustard cases would end up blind anyway, most of them. Had the doctors been more than choosers of the slain? Maureen didn’t want to ask.
She left the hospital.
In City Hall they were preparing for a party. A victory celebration. And we damned well deserve it, Maureen thought. We can mourn the dead, but we have to go on living, and these people have worked and bled and died for this moment: for the celebration that said the fighting was over, that the Hammer had done its worst and now it was time to rebuild.
Joanna and Rosa Wagoner were shouting with joy. They’d got a lamp burning. “It works!” Joanna said. “Hi, Maureen. We’ve got the lamp burning on methanol.”
It didn’t give off much light, but it would do. At the end of the big central book-lined room some of the children were setting up punch bowls. Mulberry wine, really quite good (well, not too bad); a case of Cokes someone had saved. And there would be food, mostly stew, and you didn’t want to know what was in it. Rats and squirrels weren’t really very different kinds of animals, nor did cat taste much different from rabbit. There wouldn’t be many vegetables in the stew. Potatoes were scarce and terribly valuable. There were oats, though. Two of Gordie Vance’s scouts had come down with oats, carefully separated: the scrawny ones for eating, and the best separated out to be kept as seed. The Sierra was full of wild oats.
And Scotland had built a national cuisine on oats. Tonight they’d find out what haggis tasted like…
She went through the main hall, where women and children were putting up decorations, bright-colored drapes now used as wall hangings, whatever might add a festive air. The Mayor’s office was through a door at the far end.
Her father, Al Hardy, Mayor Seitz and George Christopher were in there with Eileen Hamner. Their conversation stopped abruptly as she entered. Maureen greeted George and got an answer, but he seemed slightly nervous, somehow made to feel guilty in her presence. Or was she imagining it? She wasn’t imagining the silence in the room.
“Go on with what you were doing,” she said.
“We were just talking about… things,” Al Hardy said. “I don’t know if you’d be interested…”
Maureen laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Go on.” Because if you’re going to treat me like a goddam princess, she thought, I can sure as hell learn what’s going on.
“Yes. Well, it’s a bit of an ugly subject,” Al Hardy said.
“So?” She took a seat next to her father. He didn’t look good. He didn’t look good at all, and Maureen knew he wouldn’t live through the winter. The doctors at Bethesda had told her he would have to take things a lot easier — and there was no way he could do that. She put her hand on his arm and smiled, and he returned it. “Tell Al I’ll be all right,” she said.
His smile broadened. “Sure about that, Kitten?”
“Yes. I can do my part.”
“Al,” Jellison said.
“Yes, sir. It’s about the prisoners. What do we do with them?”
“There weren’t many of their wounded in the hospital,” Maureen said. “I’d have thought there would be more — oh.”
Hardy nodded. “The rest are being… taken care of. It’s the forty-one men and six women who surrendered that we’ve got to worry about.” He held up his hand and ticked off points on his fingers. “I see the following alternatives. One. We can take them in as citizens—”
“Never,” George Christopher growled.
“Two. We can take them in as slaves. Three, we can let them go. Four, we can kill them.”
“We don’t let them go, either,” George said. “Let them go, they’ll rejoin the Brotherhood. Where else would they go? And the Brotherhood is still bigger than we are. Don’t forget that. They put up a good fight after the first ten or fifteen miles. They’ve still got leaders, some trucks, mortars… Sure, we captured a lot of their weapons, but they’re still out there.” He grinned wolfishly. “But I bet they don’t ever stick their noses our way again.” Then he looked thoughtful. “Slaves. I can think of a lot we could do with slaves.”
“Yes.” Hardy nodded agreement. “So can I. Brute labor. Turning compressor pumps so we can have refrigeration. Musclepower for hand lathes. Grinding lenses. Even pulling plows. There’s a lot of work nobody wants to do—”
“But slavery?” Maureen protested. “That’s horrible.”
“Is it? Would you like it better if we call it imprisonment at hard labor?” Hardy asked. “Would their lives be so much worse than they were as part of the Brotherhood? Or worse than convicts in prisons before the Hammer?”
“No,” Maureen said. “It’s not them I’m thinking of. It’s us. Do we want to be the kind of people who keep slaves?”
“Then let’s kill ’em and get it over with,” George Christopher said. “Because we’re sure as hell not going to just turn them loose. Inside or outside.”
“Why can’t we just let them go?” Maureen demanded.
“I already told you,” George said. “They’ll go back to the cannibals—”
“Is the Brotherhood all that dangerous now?” Maureen asked.
“Not to us,” Christopher said. “They won’t come here again.”
“And by spring there won’t be many of them left, I suspect,” Al Hardy added. “They don’t have much organization for winter. Or if they do, the ones we captured don’t know about it.”
Maureen fought the feeling that threatened her. “It’s all pretty horrible,” she said.
“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low; conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of our own wounded, much less theirs, so all we ca
n afford to do for theirs is put them out of their misery. Now what can we afford to do with the other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intentions.”
Maureen patted her father’s arm. “That’s what I figured out, somewhere in the last week. But — if we can’t afford much, then we have to build so that we can! What we don’t dare do is get used to evil. We have to hate it, even if we can’t do anything else.”
“Which doesn’t settle what we do with the prisoners,” George Christopher said. “I vote for killing them. I’ll do it myself.”
And he hadn’t brought any back from his pursuit, Maureen knew. And he’d never understand. Yet in his way he was a good man. He’d shared everything he had. He worked longer than anyone else, and harder, and not just for himself.
“No,” Maureen said. “All right. We can’t let them go. And we can’t keep them as citizens. If all we can afford is slavery, then keep them as slaves. And put them to work so we can afford something more. Only we don’t call them slaves, either, because that makes it too easy to think like a slavemaster. We can put them to work, but we call them prisoners of war and we treat them as prisoners of war.”
Hardy looked confused. He’d never seen Maureen so assertive. He looked from her to the Senator, but all he got from the Senator was the look of a man tired unto death.
“All right,” Al said. “Eileen, we’ll have to organize a POW camp.”
The Final Decision
The peasant is eternal man, independent of all Cultures. The piety of the real peasant is older than Christianity, his gods are older than those of any of the higher religions.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
The van had not been new when the comet fell. In these past few months it had aged many years. It had bulled its paths across roadless land and through fresh sea bottom. It stank of fish. Maintenance had been impossible, and continual rain had caused years of corrosion. Half blinded with one headlamp working, it seemed to know that its era was dead. It groaned, it limped; and with every jolt of its dying shock absorbers, Tim Hamner felt a needle of pain stab his hip.
Shifting gears was worse. His right leg wouldn’t reach the clutch pedal. He used his left, and it was like an ice pick being wiggled in the bone. Still he drove fast across the potholed road, balancing the jouncing against the need for speed.
Cal Christopher was on guard at the barricade. His weapon was an Army submachine gun. He carried a bottle of Old Fedcal in the other hand, and he beamed, he swaggered, he wanted to talk. “Hamner! Good to see you.” He thrust the bottle through the truck window. “Have a drink — hey! What happened to your face?”
“Sand,” said Tim. “Look, I’ve got three wounded in the truck bed. Can somebody drive for me?”
“Gee, there are only two of us here. Rest are celebrating. You guys won, huh? We heard you’d had a fight and beat them off-”
“The wounded,” Tim said. “Is there somebody at the hospital?”
“You better believe it. We had wounded here, too. But we won! They weren’t expecting it, Tim, it was beautiful! Forrester’s brew really clobbered them. They won’t stop running until—”
“They did stop. And I can’t take time to talk, Cal.”
“Yeah, right. Well, everybody’s celebrating at City Hall, and the hospital’s right next door, so you’ll get plenty of help. They may not be sober, but—”
“The barricade, Cal. I can’t help you with it. I got hit myself.”
“Oh. Too bad.” Cal moved the log aside, and Tim drove on. The road was dark, and none of the houses were lit. He saw no one along the way, but the going was easier here; the potholes had all been filled in. He rounded a bend and saw the town.
City Hall glowed softly through the dark. Candlelight and lanterns in every window: not an impressive sight after the brilliant glare of the atomic plant, but still a sign of celebration. The crowd was too big for the building. It had spilled onto the street despite the tiny flurries of snow. People formed tight clumps against the chill and the wind, but their laughter reached him for all that. Tim parked next door, in front of the county convalescent home.
People moved toward him from outside City Hall as he climbed from the cab. One was running — off-balance. Eileen, her sunburst smile wide and familiar. “Easy!” he cried, but too late. She crashed into him and hugged him tight, laughing, while he tried to maintain balance for both. Agony twisted and grated in the bone. “Easy. Jesus Christ. There’s a piece of metal in my hip.”
She jumped back as if scalded. “What happened?” And saw his face. Her smile faded. “What happened?”
“Mortar shell. It went off just in front of us. We were up on the cooling tower with the radio. It blasted the radio to bits, and it shredded the cop, uh, Wingate, his name was, and I was standing right between them, Eileen. Right between them. All I got was a blast of sand from the sandbags and this thing in my hip. Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure. And you’re all right, aren’t you? You can walk. You’re safe. Thank God.” Before Tim could interrupt she went on. “Tim, we won! We must have killed half of the cannibals, and the rest are still running. George Christopher chased them for fifty miles!”
“They’ll never try us again,” someone boasted, and Tim realized he was surrounded. The man who spoke was a stranger, an Indian, by his looks. He handed Tim a bottle. “Last Irish whiskey in the world,” he said.
“Should save it for Irish coffee,” someone laughed, “but there ain’t no more coffee.”
The bottle was nearly empty. Tim didn’t drink. He shouted “There are wounded in the back! I need stretcher bearers!” He called again, “Stretcher bearers. And stretchers, come to that.” Some of the merrymakers moved toward the hospital. Good.
Eileen was frowning, more in puzzlement than sadness. She kept looking at Tim to be sure he was still there, that he was all right. “We heard about the attack on the plant,” she said. “But you beat them. None of our people hurt—”
“That was the first attack,” Tim said. “They hit us again. This afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” The Indian was incredulous. “But they were running. We chased them.”
“They stopped running,” Tim said.
Eileen put her mouth close to his ear. “Maureen will want to know about Johnny Baker.”
“He’s dead.”
She looked at him, shocked.
Men came with stretchers. The wounded were in the back of the van, wrapped in cocoons of blankets. One was Jack Ross. The men carrying the stretchers stopped in surprise at seeing the others: Both were black. “Mayor Allen’s police,” Tim told them. He wanted to help carry, but he was lucky to carry himself. He found the stick Horrie Jackson’s fishermen had given him and used it for a cane as he limped into the hospital.
Leonilla Malik directed them into a heated front room. It had a large office table set up as a surgery. They put the stretchers on the floor and she examined the men quickly and carefully. First Jack Ross; she used her stethoscope, frowned, moved the instrument, then lifted a hand and pressed hard on the thumbnail. It went white and stayed that way. Silently she pulled the blanket over his head and went to the next.
The policeman was conscious. “Can you understand me?” she asked.
“Yeah. Are you the Russian spacewoman?”
“Yes. How many times were you hit?”
“Six. Shrapnel. Guts are on fire,” he said.
As she felt for the pulse, Tim limped out of the room. Eileen followed, hugging at his arm. “You’ve been hit! Stay here,” she said.
“I’m not bleeding. I can come back. Somebody’s got to ten George about his brother-in-law. And there’s something else I have to do. We’ve got to have reinforcements. Fast.”
He saw it in her face. Nobody here wanted that kind of news. They’d fought and won, and they didn’t want to hear that there was more fighting to do. “We don’t have a doctor at the plant,�
�� Tim said. “Nobody wanted to dig that steel out of me.”
“Get back in that hospital!” Eileen commanded.
“I will. But the cops come first, they’re hurt worse than me. The plant nurse squeezed sulfa in the hole and covered it with sterile gauze. I’ll be okay for awhile. I’ve got to talk to Hardy.” It was hard to keep his thoughts in order; his hip felt like fire, and the pain kept him confused.
He let Eileen help support his weight as they crossed the narrow way toward City Hall. Damn, they were surrounded again. Steve Cox, Jellison’s foreman, asked, “Hamner, what happened?” Someone else bellowed, “Let him alone, let him tell all of us at once.” And another: “Hamner, are you going to drink that?”
Tim discovered the near-empty bottle still in his hand. He surrendered it.
“Hey,” Steve Cox yelled. “Give that back to him. Come on, man, have a drink with us. We won!”
“Can’t. Have to talk to the Senator. And Hardy. We’ve got to have help.” He felt Eileen stiffen. The others looked as she had: They hated him for his bad news. “We can’t take another attack,” Tim said. “They did us too much damage.”
“No. It’s got to be over,” Eileen whispered. Tim heard.
“You thought it was all over,” Tim said.
“Everybody does.” Eileen’s face showed unbearable grief. It should have melted Tim Hamner, but it didn’t. “Nobody wants to fight again,” Eileen said.
“We won’t have to!” Joanna MacPherson’s high, clear voice cried, “We slaughtered the sons of bitches, Tim!” She edged up to him and put her shoulder under his other armpit. “There aren’t enough of them left to fight. They’ll split up and pretend they never heard of the Brotherhood. And that won’t work either. We’ll know them.” Joanna had tasted blood. Suddenly she said, “Is Mark all right?”
“Mark’s fine.” Tim was just beginning to realize what he was up against. A hopeless task. But it had to be done, they had to understand. He added, “Healthy and happy and cleaner than you are. They’ve got hot showers and washing machines at the power plant.”
