Lucifer's Hammer

“All in good time.” He stood nervously in the center of the shelter, finally went over to the air mattress and sat on top of his sleeping bag.

“You think Al’s a fool,” she said.

“No. No, I didn’t say that.” Harvey’s voice was serious. “I suppose I could do some good up here. Even if a raiding party got past me, I’d be an armed man behind them. And any warning I could give would be worth something down there. No, I don’t think Hardy’s a fool. As you say, we’ve got plenty of manpower.”

“Too much,” Maureen said. “Too many people, not enough food.” She didn’t recognize this matter-of-fact man who sat on his sleeping bag and never smiled; who didn’t talk about galactic empires, and didn’t ask why she was up here. This wasn’t the man she’d slept with. She didn’t know who he was. Almost he reminded her of George. He seemed confident. The rifle he’d brought in was leaning against the post, ready to his hand. There were cartridges sewn in loops on his jacket pocket.

In all this world there are two people I’ve slept with, and they’re both strangers. And George doesn’t really count. What you do at fifteen doesn’t count. A hurried, frantic coupling on this hill, not very far from here, and both of us so afraid of what we’d done that we never talked about it again. Afterward we acted as if it had never happened. That doesn’t count.

George, and this man, this stranger. Two strangers. The rest are dead. Joh

Some people are strong in a crisis. Harvey Randall is. I thought I was. Now I know better. “Harvey, I’m scared.” Now why did I say that?

She’d expected him to say something comforting. To be reassuring, as George would be. It would be a lie, but—

She hadn’t expected hysterical laughter. She stared as Harvey Randall giggled, bubbled, laughed insanely. “You’re scared,” he gasped. “Lord God above, you haven’t seen anything to be scared of!” He was shouting at her. “Do you know what it’s like out there? You can’t know. You haven’t been outside this valley.” Visibly he fought for control of himself. She watched fascinated, as he slowly won the struggle for calm. The laughter died away. Then, amazingly, the stranger was sitting there again, as if he hadn’t moved. “Sorry about that,” he said. The phrase was flippantly conventional, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out as a genuine apology.

She stared in horror. “You too? It’s only a big act? All this masculine calm, this—”

“What do you expect?” Harvey asked. “What else can I do? And I really am sorry. Didn’t mean to crack like that…”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t all right,” Harvey said. “The only damned chance we’ve got, any of us has got, is to go on trying to act rationally. And when one of us cracks, it makes it that much harder for the rest. That’s what I’m sorry about. Not that it gets to me, out of the blue sometimes, wham! I’m learning to live with that. But I shouldn’t have let you see it. It can’t make things easier for you—”

“But it does,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to… to say confession.” They sat silently for a moment, listening to the wind and rain, the crackle of thunder in the mountains. “We’ll swap,” Maureen said. “You tell me, I’ll tell you.”

“Is that wise?” he asked. “Look, I haven’t forgotten the last time we met up here on this ridge.”

“I haven’t either.” Her voice was small and thin. She thought he was about to move, to get up, and she spoke quickly. “I don’t know what to do about that. Not yet.”

He sat, unmoving, so that she wasn’t sure that he’d been about to get up after all. “Tell me,” he said.

“No.” She couldn’t quite make out his face. There was a stubble of beard, and the light was very bad in the shelter. Sometimes lightning struck near enough to throw a brilliant flash, eerily green from the color of the plastic bags, but that only blinded her for an instant and she still could not see his expression. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s horrible to me, but it would sound trivial—”

“And what if it does?”

“They hope,” she said. “They come to the house, or I go to theirs, and they believe we can save them. That I can save them. Some of them are crazy. There’s a boy in town, Mayor Seitz’s youngest boy. He’s fifteen, and he wanders around naked in the rain unless his mother brings him in. There are five women whose husbands never came back from a hunting trip. There are old people and children and city people and they all expect us to come up with a miracle — and, Harvey, I just don’t have any miracles, but I have to go on pretending that I do.”

Almost she told him the rest: of her sister Charlotte, sitting alone in her room and staring at the walls with vacant eyes, but then she’d come alive and scream if she couldn’t see the children; of Gina, the black woman from the post office, who’d broken a leg and lay in a ditch until somebody found her and then she died of gas gangrene and nobody could help her; of the three children with typhus that nobody could save; of the others who’d gone mad. They wouldn’t sound trivial. But they were. She could face horror. “I can’t go on giving people false hopes,” she said at last.

“You have to,” Harvey said. “It’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Why?”

He spread his hands in astonishment. “Because it is. Because there are so few of us left.”

“If life wasn’t important before, why should it be now?”

“It is.”

“No. What’s the difference between meaningless survival in Washington and meaningless survival here? None of that means anything.”

“It means something to the others. To the ones who want your miracles.”

“Miracles I don’t have. Why is it important that other people depend on you? Why does that make my life worth living?”

“Sometimes it’s all that does mean anything,” Harvey said. He was very serious. “And then you find there’s more. A lot more. But first you do a job, one that you didn’t really take on, looking out for others. Then after awhile you see that it’s important to live.” He laughed, not with humor but sadness. “I know, Maureen.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you really want to hear it?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Yes, I do.”

“All right.” He told her. She listened to his story: of the preparations before Hammerfall, of his quarrel with Loretta; of his self-doubts and guilt about his brief affair with her, not so much that he had slept with her, but that he had thought about her afterward and compared her with his wife, and how that had made it harder to take Loretta seriously.

He went on, and she heard, but she didn’t really comprehend. “And then finally we were here,” he said. “Safe. Maureen, you can’t know that feeling: to know, really know, that you’ll live another hour; that there may be a whole hour when you won’t see someone you love torn apart like a used rag doll. I wouldn’t want you to understand, not really, but you have to know that much: What your father is building here in this valley is the most important thing in the world. It’s priceless, and it’s worth anything to keep it, to know… to know that somebody, somewhere, has hope. Can feel safe.”

“No! That’s the real horror. It’s all false hope! The end of the world, Harvey! The whole goddam world’s come apart, and we’re promising something that doesn’t exist, won’t happen.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sometimes I think that too. Eileen is down there in the big house, you know. We hear what’s going on.”

“Then what’s the point if we won’t live through the winter?”

He got up and came toward her. She sat very still, and he stood next to her, not touching her, but she knew he was there. “One,” he said. “It’s not hopeless. You must know that. Hardy and your father have done some damned good pla