Lucifer's Hammer

“I said I believe you. Just for God’s sake stop with the fucking speeches.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Owen asked.

“Well, the plant isn’t going anywhere, is it? It’ll wait till we’re ready. The question is when?” Hooker said. “Look, when we started off all we wanted was a place to hide. Like the goddam Senator has, someplace we can defend. Someplace ours. Well, we can’t do that.”

“You gave that up the first time you stewed a man.”

“Think I don’t know that, motherfucker?” Hooker’s voice had a tightly controlled edge to it. “So now we’re on a roller coaster. We can’t stop. We have to keep growing. Take the whole goddam state. Maybe more. But we sure as hell can’t stop now.”

He pointed to the map. “And the Senator’s valley sits right here. We can’t go north of that till we take his place. Hell, we can’t even hold White River and those hills as long as the Senator’s people can come raiding our territory anytime they want to. One thing we learned in ’Nam: You leave the enemy a place to retreat and get organized, what they call a sanctuary, and you ca

“I see,” said Jerry Owen. He stroked his blond beard. “And the Prophet wants us to go after the power plant—”

“Right,” Hooker said. “Pull the whole army south. You see what that does to us? But how the hell do I talk that crazy bastard into letting me finish off the Senator’s place before we go after that power plant?”

Owen looked thoughtful. “Maybe you don’t. You know, I don’t think they’d have more than fifty, sixty people in that plant. Not fighting people. They could have a lot more women and kids, but they won’t have much of an army. And they’re on an island out there, they can’t have much food. Not much ammunition. No real defenses…”

“You saying it will be easy to knock off?” Alim Nassor said.

“How easy?” Hooker asked. “How many?”

Jerry shrugged. “Give me a couple of hundred men. And some of the artillery. Mortars. Hit the turbines with mortars and that finishes the electricity. They can’t operate the nuclear reactor without electricity. They need it for the pumps. Hit the turbines, and the whole thing melts down—”

“Will it blow up?” Alim asked. The idea excited him and scared him. “Big mushroom cloud? What about fallout? We’d have to get out from under that fast, wouldn’t we?”

Jerry Owen looked at him with amusement. “Nope. No great white light. No big mushroom cloud. Sorry.”

“I’m not sorry,” Hooker said. “Once we get that place, can you make me some atom bombs?”

“No.”

“You don’t know how?” Hooker showed his disappointment. Owen had been talking like he knew it all.

And Owen was offended. “Nobody does. Look, you can’t make atom bombs out of nuclear fuel. Wrong stuff. It wasn’t designed for that. Wasn’t designed to blow up, either. Hell, we probably won’t get a real melt-down. They put safety precautions on their safety precautions.”

Alim said, “You guys always said they weren’t safe.”

“No, of course they’re not, but safe compared to what?” Jerry Owen waved north toward the ruined dam and the drowned city of Bakersfield: cubistic islands rising from a filthy sea. “That was a hydroelectric plant. Was that safe? People who wouldn’t go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams.”

“So why do you hate that place?” Hooker asked. “Maybe… maybe we ought to save it.”

“Goddammit, no,” Jerry Owen said.

Alim shot Hooker a look. Now you’ve started him off again, it said.

“It’s too much, don’t you see that?” Owen demanded. “Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology. Bigger and bigger. More quick fixes. You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you’re ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth. Pollution. Cities so big they rot in the center. Ghettos. Don’t you see? Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature. For awhile. Until finally you can’t get back in balance. The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth…”

“All right, dammit,” Hooker said. “You take two hundred men and two mortars and go shuck that plant. Make sure the Prophet knows what you’re doing. Maybe he’ll shut up long enough to let me organize.” Hooker stared at the map. “You go play, Owen. We got to go after the real enemy.” He’ll ask for volunteers, Hooker thought, and he smiled. The crazies would go with Owen and leave Hooker alone for awhile.

The room Adolf Weigley took Tim to was beautiful. Granted that it was crowded: A massive wave of cables surged through a wall, divided, subdivided, ran in metal raceways overhead. But there were lights, electric lights! Neatly enameled green panels lined two walls, busy with dials and lights and switches, and clean with the dust-filtered cleanliness of an operating room. Tim asked, “What is this, the main control room?”

Weigley laughed. He was chronically cheerful, free from the jumpiness of disaster syndrome, and elaborately casual about all the technology. A baby-smooth face made him look younger than he was; the Stronghold men generally wore beards. “No, it’s a cable-spreading room,” he said. “But it’s the only place we’ve got that you can sleep in. Uh… it wouldn’t be smart to push any buttons.” His smile was sly and partly concealed.

Tim laughed. “Not me.” He gazed euphorically at fire extinguishers and winking lights and massive cables, everything precisely in place, all glowing in indirect lighting. Power hummed softly in his ear.

Dolf said, “Drop your backpack over there. There’ll be others sleeping in here, too. Mind you stay out of the way. Duty operators have to get in here. Sometimes they have to work fast.” His grin faded. “And there’s a lot of voltage in some of those lines. Stay out of the way.”

“Sure,” said Tim. “Tell me, Dolf, what’s your job here?” Weigley seemed too young to be an engineer, but he wasn’t built like one of the construction workers.

“Power system apprentice,” Weigley said. “Which means we do everything. Got that stuff settled? Let’s go. They told me to show you around and help you set up the radio.”

“Right… What does it mean, ‘everything’?”

Weigley shrugged. “When I’m on duty I sit in the control room and drink coffee and play cards until the duty operator decides something needs working on. Then I go do it. That could be anything at all. Get a reading on a dial. Put out a fire. Throw a switch. Turn a valve. Repair a break in a cable. Anything.”

“So you’re a robot for the engineers.”

“Engineers?”

“The duty operators.”

“They aren’t engineers. They got their job doing what I do. One day I’ll be an operator, if there’s anything left to operate. Hell, Hobie Latham started by walking on snowshoes in the Sierra, measuring the snow to find out how much spring runoff we could expect, and he’s Operations Manager now.”

They went outside into the muddy yard. The big earthen levees loomed high around them. Men worked on them, putting tip forms while others poured in concrete to reinforce the cofferdam that kept SJNP safe. Others did incomprehensible things with forklifts. The yard was a bustle of activity, seemingly chaotic, but everyone seemed to know what he was doing.

It made Tim feel curiously vulnerable, to stand inside the Project grounds and know that the water outside was thirty feet above them. San Joaquin Nuclear Project was a sunken island, surrounded by levees thrown up by bulldozers. Pumps took care of seepage through the earthen walls. One break in the levees, or a day without power to the pumps, would drown them.