Lucifer's Hammer

Journey’s End

In the imminent dark age people will endure hardship, and for the greater part of their time they will be laboring to satisfy primitive needs. A few will have positions of privilege, and their work will not consist in… cultivating the soil or in building shelters with their own hands. It will consist in schemes and intrigues, grimmer and more violent than anything we know today, in order to maintain their personal privileges…

Ding!

The kitchen timer went off, and Tim Hamner put down his book and picked up the binoculars. He had two sets of binoculars in the guard shack: the very powerful day glasses he now carried, and a much larger night glass that didn’t magnify so much, but gathered a lot of light. They’d have been perfect field-viewing astronomical glasses, except that there were always clouds and Tim rarely saw the stars.

The hut had been vastly improved. Now there was insulation, and more wood frame; it could even be heated. It contained a bed, a chair, a table and some bookshelves — and a rifle rack at the door. Tim slung the Winchester 30/06 over his shoulder on the way out, and only momentarily felt amusement at the thought: Tim Hamner, playboy and amateur astronomer, armed to the teeth as he ventured forth to search out the ungodly!

He climbed up onto the boulder. A tree grew next to it. From any distance away he’d be invisible in the foliage. When he reached the top he braced himself against the tree and began his careful scan of the terrain below him.

Trouble Pass appeared on no maps. It was Harvey Randall’s name for the low spot in the ridges surrounding the Stronghold. Trouble Pass was the most likely route for any one invading on foot, and Tim sca

There was nobody there. There never was, these days. In the first weeks, walkers had tried to come in that way, and they’d be spotted, and Tim would use the bugle to sound an alarm; ranchers on horseback would go out to meet the intruders and turn them away. Now the pass was always clear. Still, it had to be watched.

Tim spotted two deer and a coyote, five jackrabbits and a lot of birds. Meat, if hunters could be spared. Nothing else in the pass. He swept the glasses on around, over the tops of the skylines and along the barren hillsides. It wasn’t too different from looking for comets: You remember what things ought to look like, and search for anything different. Tim knew every rock on the hillsides by now. There was one shaped like a miniature Easter Island statue, and another that looked like a Cadillac. Nothing was on the hillsides that shouldn’t be there.

He turned and looked down into the valley behind, and gri

The Stronghold looked good. Secure, safe, with greenhouses, and grazing herds and flocks; and there was going to be enough to eat. “I am one lucky son of a bitch,” Tim said.

It came to him, as it often did, that he was far luckier than he deserved. He had Eileen, and he had friends. He had a secure place to sleep, and enough to eat. He had work to do, although his first scheme, to rebuild the dams above the Stronghold, hadn’t worked out — no fault of his. He and Brad Wagoner had worked out new ways to generate electricity — always assuming they could get Outside and find the wire and bearings and other tools and equipment they’d need.

And books. Tim had a whole list of books that he wished for. He’d owned nearly all of them, back in a time that he barely remembered, a time when all he had to do if he wanted anything was to let someone know it, and let money do the rest. When he thought about books and how easy it had been to get them, his thoughts sometimes strayed further, to hot towels and the sauna and swimming pool, Tanqueray gin and Irish coffee and clean clothes whenever he wanted them… But those times were hard to remember. They were times before Eileen, and she was worth a lot. If it took the end of the world to bring them together, then maybe it was worth it.

Tim was sad only when he thought of life Outside, when he remembered the dead baby and the police and nurses working at the Burbank hospital. Those memories of driving past helpless people sometimes rose to haunt him, and he couldn’t help wondering why he’d survived — more than survived; lived to find security and a lot more happiness than he’d ever expected…

Movement caught his eye. A truck was coming up the road. It was full of men, and Tim almost leaped down into the hut to call a warning. The air was clear of lightning except for the constant flashes up in the High Sierra; the little CB radio would work, but he wasn’t supposed to use it more than necessary. It was damned tough hauling batteries up and down this hill, and it took precious gasoline to recharge them. He let the impulse pass. The truck had a way to go, there was time to examine it through the binoculars.

He didn’t doubt that it was Deke Wilson’s truck. He looked anyway. A single truck could carry considerable firepower, and a single such mistake could cost a score of lives and put the poor stuttering sentry back on the road without his balls.

It looked like Deke’s truck, more crowded than usual; the truck bed was jammed with standing men. You wouldn’t crowd an attack force together like that. One was a woman. …

Those four: Why did they leap to the eye like that? One was a woman, and one was black, and two were white men. But the four seemed clumped together as if… as if in mutual distaste for the mortals around them. No, they didn’t look like mortals. Tim shifted his elbows on the rock and studied elusively familiar faces through the binoculars…

But the truck was coming too close. Tim sprinted for the hut. He was picking up the microphone when he remembered.

“Yeah?”

“Deke Wilson’s here, three minutes,” said Tim, “and he’s got the astronauts with him, the astronauts from Hammerlab! All four! Chet, you won’t believe them. They look like gods. They look like they never went through the end of the world at all.”

Faces. Dozens of faces, all white, all staring up at them in the truck. They were all talking at once, and Rick Delanty heard only snatches of conversation. “Russians.” “Astronauts, it’s really them.” When he got down from the truck they crowded around, hanging back a bit to avoid crushing the men from space, staring, smiling. Men and women, and they weren’t starving. Their eyes did not have the haunted look that Rick had got used to at Deke Wilson’s place. These people had seen only a part of Hell.

They were mostly middle-aged, and their clothes showed signs of hard work and not much washing. The men tended to be large, the women plain, or was it only that they were dressed for work? At Deke Wilson’s farm the women had dressed like men and worked like men. Here there was a difference. In this valley women were different from men. It wasn’t like the world before Hammerfall. It wasn’t that obvious, and if Rick hadn’t been weeks with Deke Wilson he would have reflected on how things had changed since the Hammer; now, he noticed the similarities. This valley was as different from Wilson’s fortified camp as…

Rick had no more time to reflect on it. There were introductions, and they were ushered up onto the big porch of the stone ranch house. Rick would have known who was in charge even if he hadn’t recognized Senator Jellison: The Senator was not as large as the big, burly men, but everyone made room for him, waited for him to speak first; and his smile made them all feel welcome, even Pieter and Leonilla, who had been dreading this meeting.