Lucifer's Hammer

“When you run they bunch up and follow,” Al Hardy had said. “Randall’s reports make that pretty clear. Their commander goes by the book. So will we, up to a point.”

The problem had been to hold along the high ground, so that the Brotherhood would stay down in the valley; to give way along the valley floor until enough of the Brotherhood had crossed the bridge. How could they get the ranchers to fight and not run until the signal? Hardy had chosen the simplest solution to that. “If you’re out there,” he’d said, “if you stand, some of them will stay with you. They’re men.”

She had resented that, but it had been no time to give Al Hardy a lecture; and he’d been right. All she’d had to do was hold on to her own courage. For someone who wasn’t sure she wanted to live, that had seemed a simple job. It wasn’t until she was actually under fire that she began to have doubts.

Something unseen had ripped Roy Miller’s side. He tried to block the wound with his forearm. His forearm nestled neatly in the great gap of torn ribs. Maureen’s breakfast rose in her throat… and in his last moment Roy looked around and caught her expression.

A mortar shell had exploded behind Deke Wilson and two of his men. The others rolled over and over and lay sprawled in positions that would have been hideously uncomfortable if they hadn’t been dead; but Deke flew forward and upward, his arms flapping frantically, and fluttered downhill like a fledgling just learning to fly, down into the yellow murk.

Joa

A fragment of metal from a mortar blast shattered Jack Turner’s mustard bomb as he was winding up for the throw. His friends ran from him, and his sister-in-law ran too, and Jack Turner staggered and thrashed within the yellow cloud, drowning.

Pudgy Galadriel from the Shire swung her sling round and round, stepped forward and sent a bottle of nerve gas flying far down the hill. A moment too long on the follow-through, and Galadriel stood poised like Winged Victory, with her head gone. Maureen saw black spots before her eyes. She leaned against a boulder and managed to stay upright.

It was one thing to stand on a clifftop and contemplate (at her leisure) jumping off (but would she have had the nerve? or was it all an act? Now she’d never know). It was quite another to watch poor, homely Galadriel crumple with the stump of her neck spitting blood, and then, without looking to see if anyone was actually watching her, to pick up her sling and a bottle of nerve gas and swing the deadly, evil thing round and round her head and, remembering at the last second that the damn thing would fly at a tangent and not in the direction the sling was pointing when she let go, sling it down into the ca

She dressed quickly and went outside. The bright sun was gone. She could not see the sun at all, but the sky overhead was bright, and the clouds seemed much thi

There was no traffic. There had been, earlier, when the Stronghold’s wounded had been taken to the former county convalescent home that served as the valley’s hospital, and later there would be more when the less critically injured were brought in horse-drawn wagons, but for now the road was clear. She walked steadily on, aware of every sight and sound: the ring of an ax in the hills above; the flash of red as a red-winged blackbird darted into the brush nearby; the shouts of children herding the Stronghold’s pigs through the woods.

The children had adjusted quickly to the new conditions.

One elderly adult as teacher, a dozen or more children, two working dogs and a herd of swine school and work. A different sort of school with different lessons. Reading and arithmetic, certainly, but also other knowledge: to lead the pigs to dog droppings (the dogs in turn ate part of the human sewage); and always to carry a bucket to collect the pig manure, which must be brought back at night. Other lessons: how to trap rats and squirrels. Rats were important to the new ecology. They had to be kept out of the Stronghold’s barns (cats did most of that), but the rats were themselves useful: They found their own food, they could be eaten, their fur made clothing and shoes, and their small bones made needles. There were prizes for the children who caught the most rats.

Closer to town was the sewage works, where the animal and human wastes were shoveled into boilers with wood chips and sawdust. The heat of fermentation sterilized everything, and the hot gases were led out through pipes that ran under City Hall and the hospital to form part of the heating system, then condensed. The resulting methanol, wood alcohol, ran the trucks that collected the wastes, with some left over for other work. The system wasn’t complete — they needed more boilers, and more pipes and condensers, and the work absorbed too much skilled labor — but Hardy could be deservedly proud of the start they had made. By spring they’d have a lot of high-nitrogen fertilizer from the residue in the boilers, all sterilized and ready for the crops they’d plant — and there should be enough methanol to run tractors for the initial heavy work of plowing.

We’ve done well, she thought. There’s a lot more to do, all kinds of work. Windmills to build. Waterwheels. Crops to plant. A forge to set up. Hardy had found an old book on working bronze and methods of casting it in sand, but they hadn’t had time to do much about it yet. Now they’d have the time, now that there was no threat of war hanging over them. Harvey Randall had been singing when he came into the ranch house after the battle. “Ain’t go

It wasn’t going to be easy. She looked up at the clouds; they were turning dark. She wished the sunlight would break through, not because she wanted to see the sun again, although she certainly did, but because it would be so appropriate: a symbol of their eventual success. Instead there were only the darkening clouds, but she refused to let them depress her. It would be so easy to fall back into her black mood of despair.

Harvey Randall had been right about that: It was worth almost anything to spare people that feeling of helplessness and doom. But first you had to conquer it in yourself. You had to look squarely at this new and terrible world, know what it could and would do to you — and shout defiance. Then you could get to work.

The thought of Harvey reminded her of Joh

Their last message had come three days ago.

Maybe there had been a second attack. Certainly the radio was out. Maureen shivered. Maybe a damn transistor had given up the ghost, or maybe everybody was dead. There was just no way to tell. Joh

So let it be a transistor, she told herself, and keep busy. She turned downhill toward the hospital.