Lucifer's Hammer

“There is no central government?” Pieter Jakov asked.

“You’re looking at it,” Wilson said. “Bill Appleby there’s a deputy sheriff, but it’s nothing special. We haven’t heard from Sacramento since Hammerfall.”

“But surely someone is organizing, is trying,” Leonilla said.

“Yeah. There’s the Senator’s people,” Wilson said.

“Senator?” John Baker kept his face from showing emotion. He turned away from the terrible inland sea, toward the hills to the east.

“Senator Arthur Jellison,” Deke Wilson said.

“You sound like you don’t like him much,” Rick Delanty said.

“Not exactly. Can’t blame him, but I don’t have to like him.”

“What’s he done?” Baker asked.

“He’s organized,” Wilson said. “That valley of his” — Wilson pointed north and east, toward the foothills of the High Sierra — “is ringed with hills. They’ve got patrols, border guards, and they don’t let anybody in without their say-so. You want help, they’ll send it, but the price is damned high. Feed their troops, and send back more food, oil, ammunition, fertilizer, all the things you can’t get now.”

“If you have oil, I’d think you’d be in good shape,” Rick Delanty said.

Wilson waved expansively. “How do we hold onto this place? No borders. No rock piles to make into fortresses. No time to build. No way to keep refugees from coming in and looting what we haven’t got to yet. You want to lock that thing up? I’d rather not have this many people standing around. There’s work to do. Always work to do.”

“Yes. The records should be safe.” Pieter climbed onto the Soyuz and closed the hatch.

“No electricity,” Joh

Wilson shrugged. “Sacto used to be about twenty-five feet above sea level. Things got shifted in the quakes. That plant could be underwater. Maybe not. I just don’t know. There’s better than two hundred and fifty miles of swamp and lake between here and there, and most of the valley’s under deep water. Got that locked up? Let’s go.”

They walked up the hill toward the farmhouse. When they got closer, Baker saw the sandbags and foxholes dug in around the buildings. Women and children worked to add to the fortifications.

Wilson looked thoughtful. “General, you ought to be doing something better than digging foxholes, but I don’t know what it would be.”

Joh

“We can work,” Rick Delanty said.

“You’ll have to,” Wilson said. “Look, in a few weeks we’ll hear from the Senator. I’ll give word that you’re here. Maybe he’ll want you. Maybe he’ll want you bad enough to think he owes us for sending you. I could use him owing us.”

Fourth Week: The Prophet

Of all states that is the worst whose rulers no longer enjoy an authority sufficiently extensive for everyone to obey them with good grace, but in which their authority over a part of their subjects is sufficiently large to enable them to constrain others.

There had been a crazy world. It was vivid in Alim Nassor’s memory. Once the honkies had poured bread into the ghettos, bribes to stop riots, and Alim had taken his share. Not just money; there was power, and Alim was known in City Hall, was headed for something bigger.

Then a black Tom was Mayor, and the money stopped, the power vanished. Alim couldn’t stand that. Without money and the symbols you could buy with it, you were nothing, less than the pimps and the pushers and the other garbage that made their living out of the ghettos. He’d lost his power and had to have it back, but then he was caught ripping off a store, and the only way to get off was to pay a bondsman and a lawyer, both honkies. They got him out on bail, and then to pay them he had to rip off another store. Crazy!

Then hundreds of the richest honkies had run for the hills. Doom was coming from the sky! Alim and his brothers had been set to make themselves rich forever. They’d been rich, they’d had truckloads of what the fences paid money for, and then…

Crazy, crazy. Alim Nassor remembered, but it was like a dope dream, the time before the Hammer. He’d done his best to protect the brothers who would listen to him. Four of the six burglary teams had made it through the rain and the quakes and the refugees, all those people! But they’d made it to the cabin near Grapevine. The engine in one of the trucks had a death rattle. They’d stripped it and siphoned off the gas and ditched it. They’d dumped all that electrical stuff, too: TVs, hi-fi’s, radios, the small computer. But they’d kept the telescope and binoculars.

And they’d been all right for awhile. There was a ranch not far from the cabin, and there’d been cattle and some other food, enough to last two dozen brothers a long time. They hadn’t even had to fight for it. The rancher was dead under his collapsed roof, leg broken, and he’d starved or bled to death. But then a lot of honkies with guns came and took it away, and eighteen brothers in three trucks had to take off into a howling rain.

Then things really went to hell. Nothing to eat, no place to go. Nobody wanted blacks. What were they supposed to do, starve?

Alim Nassor sat cross-legged in the rain, half dozing, remembering. There had been a crazy world, with laws drawn up by gibbering idiots, and unbelievable luxuries: hot coffee, steak di

There were feet in his field of view: stolen boots burst at the seams, the soles worn thin by walking. Alim looked up.

Swan was a lightweight who carried all ma

“Shit.” Alim stood up.

“We should kill that Chick,” Swan said.

“Now you listen good.” Alim was dismayed at the lack of force in his voice. He was tired, tired. He leaned close to Swan and spoke low, letting the threat show. “We need Chick. I’d kill Jackie before I killed Chick. And I’d kill you.”

Swan backed up. “Okay, Alim.”

Alim savored that. Swan hadn’t gone for a blade. He’d backed off. Alim still had power. “Chick’s the biggest, strongest brother we got, but that isn’t the reason,” Alim said. “Chick’s a farmer. A farmer, you got that? You want to do this the rest of your life? Man, we were on foot for ten days, did you like that? There’s gotta be a place for us somewhere, but it don’t matter if we can’t farm—”

“Let somebody else do the fucking work,” Swan said.

“And how do you know if they do it right?” Alim demanded. “We…” He was on the verge of letting desperation show. “Where’s Chick?”

“By the fire. And Jackie isn’t.”

“Cassie?”

“With Chick.”

“Good.” Alim walked down toward the fire. It felt good, to know he could turn his back on Swan and nothing was going to happen. Swan needed him. They all needed him. None of the rest could have got them this far, and they all knew it.

The first week after Hammerfall it rained all the time. Then it dwindled off to a drizzle, and that went on and on until nobody could stand it and still it went on. Now, four weeks after the Hammer of God, it drizzled more often than not, and it always rained, hard, at least once every day.

Today it had rained three times, and the drizzle kept on. The rain was hard on everybody. It rasped nerves. It rotted feet in their boots. Everything was hopelessly wet, and people could be killed for a dry place. The drizzle stopped, almost, at midnight. Now everyone was huddled around the fire under a sheet-plastic lean-to. Tomorrow Alim might regret letting them use gas for a fire, but shit, they’d probably run out of road before the truck they’d ripped off in Oil City ran out of gas. Most roads ended at a low spot, underwater, and you had to backtrack for miles to find a way around a stretch only a few dozen yards across. Crazy.