by Larry Niven
“No use?” Tim exploded. “Power! Clean clothes! Light—”
“Luxuries,” Al Hardy said. “Are they worth our lives? We’re a farm community. The balance is delicate. Not many weeks ago we did not know if we would live through the winter Now we know we can. A few days ago we did not know whether we could resist the cannibals. We did. We are safe, and we have work to do, and we cannot afford more people for a needless war.” He looked to George Christopher. “You agree, George? Neither of us runs from a fight — but do we have to run to one?”
“Not me,” Christopher said. “We won our war.”
There were murmurs of agreement. Harvey stepped forward, intending to join in. Not another war. Not another afternoon with the crossbow…
He felt Maureen beside him. She looked up at him, pleading in her eyes. “Don’t let them do this,” she said. “Make them understand!” She dropped her hand from Harvey’s arm and bent over the Senator. “Dad. Tell them. We have to… to fight. To save that power plant.”
“Why?” Jellison asked. “Haven’t we had enough war? It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t order it. They wouldn’t go.”
“They would. If you told them, they would.”
He didn’t answer. She turned back to Harvey.
Randall stared at her without comprehension. “Listen,” he said. “Listen to Al.”
“Reinforcements wouldn’t be enough, Tim,” Al Hardy was saying. “Chief Hartman and the Senator and the Mayor and I, we looked at the problem this afternoon. We hadn’t forgotten you! And the cost is too high. You said it yourself, the plant is fragile. It’s not enough to put a garrison in there, to keep it filled with troops. You have to keep the Brotherhood from dropping one mortar shell in the right place. Tell me, if that plant worker hadn’t turned off the steam valve, wouldn’t that have done it?”
“Yes,” Tim snarled. “That would have finished us. So a twenty-year-old kid parboiled himself to save the plant. And General Baker made his decision.”
“Tim, Tim,” Hardy pleaded. “You don’t understand. It wouldn’t do any good just to send reinforcements. Look, I’ll send volunteers. As many as want to go, and with plenty of food and ammunition…”
Tim’s face showed joy, but only for a moment.
“…but it won’t do any good, and you know it. To save that power plant we will have to send out all our strength, everyone, not to defend the plant, but to attack the New Brotherhood. Pursue them, fight them, wipe them out. Take all their weapons. Then set up patrols around the edges of the lake. Keep the enemy at least a mile from the plant. It would take all our strength, Tim, and the cost would be horrible.”
“But—”
“Think about it,” Hardy said. “Patrols. Spies. An army of occupation. All to stop one fanatic from getting one hit on one crucial piece of equipment and putting it out of commission for one day. That’s the task. Isn’t it?”
“For now,” Tim said. “But given peace and quiet for a few weeks, Price will have Number Two on line. Then as long as either works, the other can be repaired.”
The roomful of survivors was sobering now, most of them, because the last of the liquor was as dead as the coffee supply. They muttered to each other, spoke, argued, and they seemed to Harvey to be divided in opinion, but the strength was against Tim. As it should be, Harvey thought. Not more war.
But… he looked at Maureen. Now she was crying openly. Because of Baker? Baker had made his choice, and Maureen wouldn’t let him be wasted? Her eyes met his. “Talk to them,” she said. “Make them understand.”
“I don’t understand myself,” Harvey said.
“What we can afford,” she said. “A civilization has the ethics it can afford. We can’t afford much. We can’t afford to take care of our enemies — you know about that.”
He shuddered. He knew about that.
Leonilla Malik came in the back way, through the Mayor’s office. She bent over the Senator. “I am told that you need me,” she said.
“Who told you that?” Jellison demanded.
“Mister Hardy.”
“I’m all right. Get back to your hospital.”
“Doctor Valdemar is on duty. I have a few minutes.”
She stood slightly behind the Senator, and she watched him carefully, her expression professional — and concerned.
“We must count the costs,” Al Hardy was saying. “You ask us to risk everything. We have assured survival. We are alive. We have fought the last battle. Tim, electric lights are not worth throwing that away.”
Tim Hamner swayed from exhaustion and pain. “We won’t leave,” he said. “We’ll fight. All of us.” But his voice was not strong, he sounded beaten.
“Do something,” Maureen said. “Tell them.” She gripped Harvey’s arm.
“You tell them.”
’I can’t. But you’re a hero, now. Your force held them—”
“You stand pretty high yourself,” Harvey said.
“Let’s both tell them,” Maureen said. “Come with me. We’ll talk to them. Together.”
And that’s a hell of an offer, Harvey thought. For the power plant itself? For Johnny Baker’s memory? Because she was jealous of Marie with George Christopher? Whatever her motive, she’d just offered him the leadership of the Stronghold — and her look made it plain that he wasn’t going to get another such.
“We’d have to hold their territory,” Al Hardy was saying. “Deke couldn’t do it—”
“We could!” Tim cried. “You beat them! We could.”
Hardy nodded gravely. “Yes, I suppose we could. But first we have to take it — and we can’t do that with magic weapons. Grenades and gas bombs aren’t much use in the attack. We’d lose people. A lot of people. How many lives are your electric lights worth?”
“Many,” Leonilla Malik said. Her voice didn’t carry very far. “If I had had proper lights for the operating theater last night, I could have saved ten more at least.”
Maureen was moving toward the platform. Harvey hesitated, then went with her. What would he say? Men would charge machine guns for a cause. Viva la republic! For King and Country! Duty, Honor, Country! Remember the Alamo! Liberte! Egalitel Fraternite! But nobody had ever gone over the top shouting “A Higher Standard of Living!” or “Hot Showers and Electric Razors!”
And what about me? he thought. When I get up there, I’m committed. When the New Brotherhood comes over the water with their new raft and their mortars, I’d have to be first into the boats, first to attack, first to be blown apart.
And what could I possibly be yelling that would make me do it?
He remembered the battle: the noise, loneliness, fear, the shame of running, the terror when you didn’t. Running was a decision of the moment, but not running went on and on. A rational army would run away. He caught her arm to hold her back.
She turned, and her look was… full of concern. Sympathy. She spoke, low, so no one else would hear. “We all have to do our jobs,” she said. “And this is right. Don’t you see that?”
The short delay had been too much; Al Hardy was retiring, having made his point. The crowd was turning away, talking among themselves. Harvey heard snatches of conversation:
“Hell, I don’t know. I sure as hell don’t want to fight anymore.” “Dammit, Baker got killed for that place. Wasn’t that worth something?” “I’m tired, Sue. Let’s go home.”
Before Hardy could leave the platform, Rick Delanty barred his way. “The Senator said this was an important decision,” he said. “Let’s talk about it. Now.” Delanty was no longer planning murder, Harvey saw with relief. But he seemed determined. “Al, you say we’ll live through the winter. Let’s talk about that.”
Hardy shrugged. “If you choose. I think it has all been said.”
Delanty’s grin was crafty, artificial. “Oh, hell, Al, we’re all here and the liquor’s gone, and tomorrow it’s back to moving rocks. Let’s talk it all out right now. We can survive the winter?”
“Yes.”
“But without coffee. That’s all gone.”
Hardy frowned. “Yes.”
“How are we fixed for clothing? There are glaciers coming, and the clothes are rotting off our backs. Can we dig anything out of underwater department stores?”
“Some plastics, maybe. It can wait, now that we don’t have to worry about the New Brotherhood getting there first.” Oddly, there was no cheering this time. “We’ll have to make most of our clothing. Or shoot it.” Hardy smiled.
“Transportation? The cars and trucks are dying like sterile beasts, aren’t they? Will we have to eat the horses?”
Al Hardy ran his hands through his hair. “No. For awhile I thought… No. Horses don’t breed fast, but we’ll have the trucks for years yet.”
“What else have we run out of? Penicillin?”
“Yes-”
“Aspirin? And the liquor. No anesthetics of any kind.”
“We’ll be able to ferment liquor!”
“So. We’ll live. Through this winter, and the next one, and the one after that.” Rick paused, but before Hardy could say anything, he thundered, “As peasants! We had a ceremony here today. An award, to the kid who caught the most rats this week. And we can look forward to that for the rest of our lives. To our kids growing up as rat catchers and swineherds. Honorable work. Needed work. Nobody puts it down. But… don’t we want to hope for something better?
“And we’re going to keep slaves,” Delanty said. “Not because we want to. Because we need them. And we used to control the lightning!”
The phrase struck Harvey Randall with a physical shock. He saw it hit the others, too. A lot of them. They stood, unable to turn away.
“Sure we can huddle here in our valley,” Delanty shouted. “We can stay here and be safe and our kids can grow up herding pigs and shoveling sewage. There’s a lot here to be proud of, because it’s so much more than what might have been — but is it enough? Is it enough for us to be safe when we leave everybody else out in the cold? You all say how sorry you are to have to turn people away. To have to send people Outside. Well, we’ve got the chance now. We can make all of Outside, the whole damn San Joaquin Valley, as safe as we are.
“Or there’s another way. We can stay here, safe as… as ground squirrels. But if we take the easy way this time, we’ll take it next time. And the next, and the next, and in fifty years your kids will hide under the bed when they hear the thunder! The way everybody used to hide from the great thunder gods. Peasants always believe in thunder gods.
“And the comet. We know what it was. In ten more years we’d have been able to push the damned thing out of our way! I’ve been in space. I won’t go there again, but your children could! Hell yes! Give us that electric plant and twenty years and we’ll be in space again. We know how, and all it takes is power, and that power’s right out there, not fifty miles from here, if we’ve just got guts enough to save it. Think about it. Those are the choices. Go on and be good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants — or have worlds to conquer again. To control the lightning again.”
He paused, but not long enough to let anyone else speak.
“I’m going,” he said. “Leonilla?”
“Certainly.” She moved toward the platform.
“And I,” Comrade General Jakov shouted from the back of the room. “For the lightning.”
“Now.” Harvey slapped Maureen’s butt and bounded ahead of her onto the platform, moving quickly before the moment died away. Decisions were simple, now that he knew what he’d be shouting. “Task Force Randall?”
“Sure,” someone shouted. And then Maureen joined him, and another farmer came forward, and Tim Hamner, and Mayor Seitz. Marie Vance and George Christopher were arguing. Good! Marie belonged to Task Force Randall, unless there was a Task Force Christopher. Christopher would join them.
Al Hardy stood in confusion, wanting to speak but held by the command in Maureen’s eyes.
He could stop them, Harvey Randall thought. It wouldn’t take much to stop them. Once everyone’s committed it will be hard to back down, but right now this bandwagon can be stopped, or it can be shoved forward so hard nothing can stop it, and Al Hardy has that power…
Hardy was looking past Maureen now, at the Senator. The old man was half rising from his chair, and he gasped for breath before he fell back into it. Leonilla ran toward him, but he waved her away, beckoning to Hardy. “Al,” he gasped.
Leonilla had her medical bag in the office. She threw it open and seized a hypodermic needle, fought away the Senator’s feeble resistance as she ripped open his jacket and shirt. She swabbed his chest quickly and thrust the needle directly into his chest, near the heart.
Al Hardy tore through the crowd like a madman. He knelt beside the gasping man. Jellison thrashed and writhed in the chair, his hands reaching for his chest while Chief Hartman and others held them. His eyes focused on Al Hardy. “Al.”
“Yes, sir.” Hardy’s voice was choked, almost inaudible. He bent closer.
“Al. Give my children the lightning again.” The voice was clear, projecting through the hall, and for a moment Jellison’s eyes were bright, but then he slumped into the chair, and they heard only a thin whisper that faded to nothing. “Give them the lightning again.”
Epilogue
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
Robert A. Heinlein
Tim Hamner stood at the top of a low hill. Paper crackled in his breast pocket when he shifted weight.
The long slope behind him buzzed with activity. Animal teams dragged harrows through the hard soil, while methanol-powered tractors worked with deep plows in adjacent fields. Myriads of white flecks gleamed in the soil behind the harrows. Enriched by mustard gas and the defeat of the New Brotherhood Army, this land would produce in abundance.
Three electric carts hummed along the road below. Another stood beside Tim Hamner, ready for his use. It was time to get back down the hill and go to work, but he stood a few moments longer, enjoying bright sunshine and the clear blue sky of spring. It was a glorious day.
Before him was the San Joaquin Sea. Much of what had been underwater was now a vast swampland. Directly ahead was a low island in the sea: the prisoner colony, where those of the Brotherhood who hadn’t wanted to go into permanent exile worked to grow crops. Jakov’s preserve. They called him “Comrade” now… and Comrade hadn’t given up communism. But Marxist theory said that history followed definite stages, slave society to feudal, feudal to capitalist — and the Valley was barely past the slave stage of history. The earth would not be ready for communism for a long time. Meanwhile Comrade was willing to re-educate the prisoners.
Tim shrugged. Comrade and Hooker kept them organized, and they grew their own crops, and if they escaped nobody cared.
Further to his left, distant in the south, he saw the rising plumes of steam from the nuclear power plant. Closer, the work crews stringing power lines. In another two weeks they would have electricity in the Stronghold. Tim tried to imagine what that new life would be like, but it was difficult. The winter had been hard. Damned hard. Eileen’s baby had almost died, and was still in the hospital. The infant mortality rate was above fifty percent, but it was slowly falling now; and Forrester’s notes showed that when they recovered his books from Tujunga they would know how to make penicillin.
Forrester’s notes. That was Tim’s job, to transcribe the reels and reels of tape Dan Forrester had dictated before he died. They could have made insulin, maybe, if they hadn’t committed themselves to saving the power plant; and of course Forrester had known that. The winter had cost them the life of their magician, as it had so many other lives. To learn that a friend had survived, that was always good. Tim patted his pocket.
The past could hit you across the back of the head, no warning, Whap! Tim Hamner patted the telegram in his pocket. Half of a comet! Kitt Peak had confirmed his sighting. He shook his head violently and laug
hed at himself. It was only the rain-wrinkled scrap of paper Harry the Mailman had brought yesterday, an IOU for $250,000.
Harry Stimms was alive! Now, what would he take for that IOU? A job at the power plant? Stimms must have mechanical skills, and the power plant boys owed Tim. Failing that… could he promote a pregnant cow? That’d be worth $250,000 easy. Tim gazed into the sky, enjoying himself.
A clear thin line crossed the sky, the tip of it moving forward even as he watched. For a second he still did not know what it was. Shout a warning! But what did we used to call that?
“C-contrail! Jet plane!”
They’d heard something from Colorado Springs that some of the aircraft had survived. Harvey and Maureen would have to come to terms with Colorado Springs when they got back from visiting a septic tank in Tujunga. But though they’d heard it on the radio, it was not the same as seeing that clean white line across the sky. He’d forgotten how beautiful that could be.
Tim waved solemnly at the plane. “You can fly,” he said. His voice rose. “You can fly. But we control the lightning.”
The asteroid was a child of the maelstrom: a rough nugget of nickel-iron with some stony strata, three miles along its long axis. No man had ever seen a mastodon when the passing of mighty Jupiter plucked the nugget from its orbit and puny it out toward interstellar space.
It was on the second lap of its long, narrow elliptical orbit. The iron surface was frosted with strange ices now, as it passed the peak of the curve and began to coast back toward the Sun.
And the black giant was there. Its ring of cometary snowballs glowed broad and beautiful in starlight. Infrared light traced bands and whorls in its stormy surface. It was the only major mass out here between the stars, and the asteroid curved toward it and increased speed.
Infrared light bathed and thawed the frosted iron. The ringed planet grew huge.
