Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

  It could help.

  In a room off the meeting hall at City Hall, Rick Delanty argued for his honor against Ginger Dow, who seemed determined to take him home with her. She was also indecently amused by the whole thing. “You don’t have to marry me, you know.”

  When he didn’t answer, she laughed. She was a sturdy matron in her mid-thirties whose long brown hair had been brushed to a soft glow, possibly for the first time since Hammerfall. “Although if you like everything, you could move in. And if you don’t, leave in the morning. Nobody will care. This isn’t Mississippi, you know. There’s probably not another black woman other than the cannibals for a thousand miles.”

  “Well, I admit it makes me nervous,” Rick said. “The whole situation. But it isn’t just that. I’m in mourning.”

  He would have been less nervous if he and Ginger hadn’t been trying to raise their voices against the singing in the big room next door. The tune seemed to be optional, but at least they were loud.

  He never shaved a whisker

  From off his horny hide;

  He hammered in the bristles,

  And bit them off inside!

  Ginger lost some of her smile. “We’re all in mourning for someone, Rick. We don’t let it get to us. The last I ever saw of Gil, my husband, he was off to Porterville for lunch with his lawyer. Then banal I think the dam must have got them both.”

  I saw my logger lover

  Go shoulderin’ through the snow,

  Goin’ gaily homeward,

  At forty-eight below!

  “It’s not mourning time,” she told him. “It’s time to celebrate.” Her mouth puckered into a pout. “There are a lot of men. Lots more than women. And nobody’s ever told me I was ugly.”

  “Ugly you’re not,” Rick said. Was it the astronaut’s scalp she wanted to collect, or the black man’s? Or was she husband hunting? Rick found he was flattered; but the memories of the house in El Lago were too vivid. He opened the connecting door.

  The wind it tried to freeze him,

  It tried its level best,

  At a hundred degrees below zero,

  He buttoned up his vest.

  The City Hall was also the town library, police station and jail. The large book-lined meeting room had been decorated with paintings and drapes. They absorbed some of the sound, but it was still a damned noisy party. Rick found Brad Wagoner at the end of the big room. Wagoner was staring at something in a glass display case.

  “Where did that come from?” Rick asked. “Somebody up here collect Steuben glass?”

  Wagoner shrugged. “Don’t know. Right classy whale, isn’t it?” Wagoner had a large bandage around his forehead. It looked impressive, like a scene from The Red Badge of Courage. He didn’t tell people about it though: that he’d slung a thermit grenade with too much vigor and fallen onto a rock and rolled downhill until he thought he was going to be gassed, but he wasn’t. He was pretty well gassed now, on bourbon and water. He told Rick, “At least we won’t ever have to do that again.” He’d been saying that a lot.

  Happiness was contagious. Rick wanted to join in. If only he could quit worrying about that damned power plant, and about Johnny. And forget El Lago. He decided to go over to the hospital and do some honest work. He wouldn’t be spoiling anybody’s party at the hospital. As he made his way toward the door, Tim Hamner came in, a girl at each arm and a crowd around him all trying to talk at once.

  Rick shoved toward Hamner. The noise level doubled. Hamner kept moving toward the back of the hall, toward the Mayor’s office, and Rick followed. A number of people shouted for silence, adding to the general noise level. Eileen Hamner saw Rick, slipped from under Tim’s arm and came toward him. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

  Rick knew at once. It turned him cold with the chill of a man about to faint. “How did Johnny buy it?” he asked.

  “Tim says saving their asses. That’s all I know.”

  He felt his knees weaken, but he stayed stiffly upright. “I should have made him let me go,” he said to nobody. Now there are three astronauts left in the world. “Does Maureen know?”

  “Not yet. Where is she?”

  “Last I saw, in the Mayor’s office with her father.” The Senator wasn’t going to like this much either. “I’ll come with you.” He pushed through, making a way for both of them.

  So Johnny was dead. Now everybody he loved was dead. The Hammer had got them all. He felt a crazy impulse to laugh: America’s record was still perfect. Not one astronaut lost on space duty. “Saving their asses from what?” he demanded, but Eileen was too far away and the noise was too great.

  Someone passed Tim a bottle. Scotch. This time he drank and carried the bottle into the Mayor’s office. The leaders were there: the Senator, sitting behind the Mayor’s desk; Al Hardy, hovering over him; Maureen, Chief Hartman, the Mayor. They looked happy, triumphant. Tim resented that. He knew he was irrational, that they deserved their celebration, but his grief was too great. He limped on into the office, pleased to see their grins fade as they saw the way he walked, the expression on his face. He felt Eileen and Rick Delanty crowd in behind him, then the door was closed.

  “You were attacked again?” Al Hardy asked.

  “Yes.” Tim looked at Maureen. She knew. She knew from his face. No point in being gentle about it. “General Baker is dead. We stopped their attack, but just barely. And the rest of it I want to say to everybody.” He kept his attention on the Senator. He didn’t want to see Maureen’s face.

  Hardy turned to the Senator. “All right with me,” he said. Jellison nodded, and Hardy went past Tim to the door. “Get it quiet out there,” he said.

  Steve Cox went to the podium and rapped for attention, while Hardy led Tim over and a dozen hands helped him up on the platform. Someone moved the Senator’s chair to the doorway so that he could hear. The Mayor and Chief Hartman stood behind him, leaning forward. Tim couldn’t see Maureen.

  He braced himself on the lectern, facing hundreds of eyes, and drank more scotch. It warmed him. The room was almost quiet: no talking, except for newcomers crowding in by the door, and shushing noises from those already inside; He had never spoken before a live audience in real life… before the comet fell. They were too close, too real; he could smell them. He saw George Christopher making his way through the crowd like an icebreaker, moving triumphantly, like Beowulf displaying the arm of the monster Grendel, and hell, they all looked like that. Triumphant. And waiting expectantly.

  “Good news first,” he said. “The power plant’s still running. We were attacked. This afternoon. We beat them, but it was close. Some of us are dead and some of us are wounded and more will die of the wounds. You already know that most of the Brotherhood wasn’t even there—”

  Applause and triumphant laughter erupted. Tim should have expected that, from the warriors who’d decimated the New Brotherhood’s main force, but he hadn’t. He was jolted. Where did these yahoos get off, drinking and dancing and bragging while the men and women Tim Hamner had left behind waited to die? When quiet came he spoke in anger.

  “General Baker is dead. The New Brotherhood isn’t,” Tim said. He watched the reaction. Anger. Incredulity.

  “They won’t come here again,” someone shouted. There were more cheers.

  “Let him talk. What happened?” George Christopher demanded. The room was silent again.

  “The Brotherhood came at us with boats, the first time,” Tim said. “It wasn’t hard to drive them off. Then we heard on the radio that you were fighting them, and we figured that would be the end of it, when you said you’d won.” He gripped the lectern, remembering the shouting celebration they’d held in the San Joaquin plant after news of the Stronghold victory.

  “But they did come back. Today. They had a big raft. Sandbags around it. Mortars. They stayed out of range of anything we had, and they were blowing us apart. One of the shells got a steam line, live steam, and Price’s people had a hell of a time putt
ing it back together. Another shell got Jack Ross.”

  Tim watched George Christopher lose his triumphant grin.

  “Jack was alive when we took him off the boat and put him in the van. But he was dead when we got here,” Tim said. “Another mortar went off just in front of me. It hit the sandbags we’d put on top of the cooling tower, where we had the radio. It killed the guy next to me and blew the radio apart, and it punched a piece of shrapnel into my hipbone. It’s still there.

  “They kept that up. Standing off where we couldn’t shoot back. Price’s people had made some cannon. Muzzle-loaders, made out of pipe, powered by compressed air. They weren’t accurate enough. We couldn’t hit the barge. And the damned mortar shells kept dropping on us. Baker took some troops out in boats. That didn’t do any good either. The Brotherhood had machine guns and the boats couldn’t get close enough — they had those sandbags anyway. Finally Baker brought the boats back. He put everybody off.”

  In the corner of his eye Tim saw Maureen in the doorway of the Mayor’s office. She stood behind her father, her hand on his shoulder. Eileen was near her.

  “We had a racing boat we used as a tug,” Tim said. “Cindy Lu. Johnny told Barry Price, ‘I used to be a fighter pilot. They always taught us there was one way not to miss.’ Then he took Cindy Lu out at top speed and rammed her right into the barge. Covered the raft with burning gasoline. He’d carried some extra gasoline and thermit on the deck. After that the Brotherhood came on with their other boats, but they had to come in range of our stuff, and we did some damage. Finally they left.”

  “Ran away,” George Christopher said. “They always run.”

  “They didn’t run,” Tim said. “They retreated. There was some crazy white-haired guy standing in plain sight on one of the boats. We kept shooting at him, but we never hit him. He was shouting at them to kill us. Last I heard, he still was. They’ll be back.”

  Tim paused to see what effect he’d had. Not enough. He’d killed the gay mood of the party, but all he saw was resentment and sorrow. Nothing else.

  “They killed fourteen of us, counting Jack. Hit maybe three times that many, and a lot of them will die. There’s a nurse and some medicines, but no doctor. We need one. We need another radio.” Their looks: anger, sorrow, resentment. They knew what he’d say next. He went doggedly on. “What we need most is reinforcements. We can’t take another attack like that one. I don’t think gas bombs will do it either. We need guns. Machine guns you took from the New Brotherhood would help. But mostly we need men, because it takes just about all the power-plant staff on standby just to keep the place going in case there’s a hit on the plant. Price’s people are…” He fumbled for words. Hell, it would sound corny. So what? “They’re magnificent. I saw a guy wade into a cloud of live steam. Live steam. He walked right into it to turn a valve, to turn the steam off. He was still alive when I left, but there wasn’t any point in bringing him here.

  “Another of the power workers spliced live wires. Thousands of volts, and he worked on it hot while mortar bombs fell around him. Baker’s dead. They’re still alive. And they need help. We need help. I’m going back.” He couldn’t look at Eileen as he said that.

  He felt someone behind him. Al Hardy had climbed onto the podium. He came to the left side of the lectern and stood there with his hand held up for attention. When he spoke, it was with an orator’s voice that rolled about the large room. “Thank you, Tim,” he said. “You are persuasive. Of course you want to go back. But the question is, have we anything to gain? How many people are there at the nuclear plant? Because we have boats, and now we have food, and we can bring all of them here. It will not be hard to evacuate that plant, and I’m sure we will have no trouble getting volunteers for the job.”

  Harvey Randall came in from the hospital in time to hear Tim’s report begin. He’d come in the back way, through the Mayor’s office, and he found himself next to Maureen. When Tim told of what had happened to Baker, he was there, with his hand on her arm, but lightly. She wasn’t going to faint or scream; she may have been crying, but even that wasn’t obvious. And Harvey didn’t want to be obtrusively present, not now.

  He was thinking: Son of a bitch! Maureen was taking it better than Delanty. The black astronaut seemed ready to murder. Well, that figured. Baker’s other two companions weren’t in the room. Leonilla was operating on the gut-shot policeman, with Comrade helping her.

  (They called him Comrade now. Brigadier Pieter Jakov was the last Communist, and proud of it, and it avoided the difficulty of his name.)

  The Senator’s face was ashen gray and his hands were clasped tightly in his lap. There went one of his plans, Harvey thought. It struck him, then: One prince was dead, and one was enthralled by a witch.

  George Christopher wasn’t alone. Marie stood with him: Marie, the only woman in the room in stockings and heels as well as skirt and sweater and simple jewelry; and she and George stood as a couple, not as two single people. Whenever anyone got too close to Marie or ogled her too suggestively, George’s face clouded.

  Three princes. One was killed by ogres. One was spellbound by a witch. The third was standing beside the princess, and the enemy had been defeated. The need for fighting men was not over, but it was no longer critical. Now the Stronghold needed builders — and that Harvey Randall could do. I’m crown prince now, he thought. Son of a bitch.

  But Tim Hamner was calling for a new battle!

  Harvey, fresh from his work with the crossbow, was thinking helplessly: Shut up, shut up! When Al Hardy came up to offer the power-plant personnel refuge at the Stronghold, Harvey wanted to cheer, and some of Hardy’s audience did cheer. But Rick Delanty still looked like murder, and Tim Hamner…

  “We won’t leave,” Tim said. “Use your boats to bring us men and guns and ammunition! Not for us to run away. We’re not leaving.”

  “Be reasonable,” Al Hardy said. His voice projected; it reached all corners of the hall. It projected warmth, friendliness, understanding: a politician’s basic skill, and Al Hardy was well trained. Tim was outclassed. “We can feed everyone. We can use engineers and technical people. We lost people to the New Brotherhood, but we lost none of our food; we even captured some of their stores. We not only have enough to eat, we have enough to be well fed during the winter! We can feed everyone, including Deke Wilson’s women and children and the few survivors from his area. The New Brotherhood has been hurt, badly hurt” — he paused for the cheers again, and went on just as they died, his timing perfect — “and is now far too weak to attack us again. By spring the few surviving cannibals will be starving—”

  “Or eating each other,” someone shouted.

  “Exactly,” Hardy said. “And by spring we’ll be able to take their land. Tim, not only do we not need to turn any of our friends away, we need new people to work the lands we have taken or will have in spring. I don’t mean for your friends to run. I mean to welcome them as our guests, friends, as new citizens here. Does everyone agree?”

  There were shouts. “Hell yeah!” “Glad to have them.”

  Tim Hamner spread his hands, palms outward, pleading. He wobbled on his damaged hip. There were the beginnings of tears in his eyes. “Don’t you understand? The power plant! We can’t leave it, and without help the New Brotherhood will destroy it!”

  “No, dammit,” Harvey muttered. He felt Maureen stiffen. “No more wars,” Harvey said. “We’ve had enough. Hardy’s right.” He looked for approval from Maureen, but only got a blank stare.

  George Christopher was laughing. It carried, like Al Hardy’s voice. “They’re too damned weak to attack anything,” he shouted. “First we crunched them. Then you did. They won’t stop running until they’re back to Los Angeles. Who needs to worry about them? We chased the bastards fifty miles ourselves.”

  More laughter in the room. Then Maureen broke away from Harvey and moved past her father. When she spoke her voice did not carry the way Hardy’s did, but it commanded silence, and the crow
d listened to her. “They still have their weapons,” she said. “And, Tim, you said their leaders are still alive…”

  “Well, one of them is,” Hamner said. “The crazy preacher.”

  “Then some of them will try to destroy the power plant again,” Maureen said. “As long as he’s alive, he’ll keep trying.” She turned to Hardy. “Al, you know that. You heard Hugo Beck. You know.”

  “Yes,” Hardy said. “We can’t protect the plant. But again I invite everyone there to come live here. With us.”

  “Damn right, the Brotherhood’s no threat to us,” George Christopher said. “They won’t be back.”

  “But they — ” Whatever Al Hardy had been about to say, he cut himself off at a wave from Senator Jellison. “Yes, sir,” Hardy asked. “Do you want to come up here, Senator?”

  “No.” Jellison stood. “Let’s cut this short,” he said. His voice was thick with either drunkenness or exhaustion, and everyone knew he hadn’t been drinking. “We are agreed, are we not? The Brotherhood is not strong enough to harm us here in our valley. But their leaders are still alive, and they have enough strength to destroy the power plant. It is not that they are strong, but that the plant is fragile.”

  Hamner jumped on that. He was interrupting the Senator, but he didn’t care. He knew he should speak carefully, weighing every word, but he was too tired, the sense of urgency was too strong. “Yes! We’re fragile. Like that whale!” He pointed to the glass case. “Like the last piece of Stueben crystal in the world. If the power stops for one day—”

  “Beautiful and fragile,” Al Hardy’s voice cut in. “Senator, did you have something else to say?”

  The massive head shook. “Only this. Think carefully. This may be the most important decision we have made since… that day.” He sat, heavily. “Go on, please,” he said.

  Hardy looked worriedly at the Senator, then motioned to one of the women near him. He spoke to her, too low for Harvey to hear what he said, and the woman left. Then he stood at the lectern again. “Fragile and beautiful,” he said. “But not much use to a farming community—”