Lucifer's Hammer

His smile broadened. “Sure about that, Kitten?”

“Yes. I can do my part.”

“Al,” Jellison said.

“Yes, sir. It’s about the prisoners. What do we do with them?”

“There weren’t many of their wounded in the hospital,” Maureen said. “I’d have thought there would be more — oh.”

Hardy nodded. “The rest are being… taken care of. It’s the forty-one men and six women who surrendered that we’ve got to worry about.” He held up his hand and ticked off points on his fingers. “I see the following alternatives. One. We can take them in as citizens—”

“Never,” George Christopher growled.

“Two. We can take them in as slaves. Three, we can let them go. Four, we can kill them.”

“We don’t let them go, either,” George said. “Let them go, they’ll rejoin the Brotherhood. Where else would they go? And the Brotherhood is still bigger than we are. Don’t forget that. They put up a good fight after the first ten or fifteen miles. They’ve still got leaders, some trucks, mortars… Sure, we captured a lot of their weapons, but they’re still out there.” He gri

“Yes.” Hardy nodded agreement. “So can I. Brute labor. Turning compressor pumps so we can have refrigeration. Musclepower for hand lathes. Grinding lenses. Even pulling plows. There’s a lot of work nobody wants to do—”

“But slavery?” Maureen protested. “That’s horrible.”

“Is it? Would you like it better if we call it imprisonment at hard labor?” Hardy asked. “Would their lives be so much worse than they were as part of the Brotherhood? Or worse than convicts in prisons before the Hammer?”

“No,” Maureen said. “It’s not them I’m thinking of. It’s us. Do we want to be the kind of people who keep slaves?”

“Then let’s kill ’em and get it over with,” George Christopher said. “Because we’re sure as hell not going to just turn them loose. Inside or outside.”

“Why can’t we just let them go?” Maureen demanded.

“I already told you,” George said. “They’ll go back to the ca

“Is the Brotherhood all that dangerous now?” Maureen asked.

“Not to us,” Christopher said. “They won’t come here again.”

“And by spring there won’t be many of them left, I suspect,” Al Hardy added. “They don’t have much organization for winter. Or if they do, the ones we captured don’t know about it.”

Maureen fought the feeling that threatened her. “It’s all pretty horrible,” she said.

“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low; conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of our own wounded, much less theirs, so all we can afford to do for theirs is put them out of their misery. Now what can we afford to do with the other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intentions.”

Maureen patted her father’s arm. “That’s what I figured out, somewhere in the last week. But — if we can’t afford much, then we have to build so that we can! What we don’t dare do is get used to evil. We have to hate it, even if we can’t do anything else.”

“Which doesn’t settle what we do with the prisoners,” George Christopher said. “I vote for killing them. I’ll do it myself.”

And he hadn’t brought any back from his pursuit, Maureen knew. And he’d never understand. Yet in his way he was a good man. He’d shared everything he had. He worked longer than anyone else, and harder, and not just for himself.

“No,” Maureen said. “All right. We can’t let them go. And we can’t keep them as citizens. If all we can afford is slavery, then keep them as slaves. And put them to work so we can afford something more. Only we don’t call them slaves, either, because that makes it too easy to think like a slavemaster. We can put them to work, but we call them prisoners of war and we treat them as prisoners of war.”

Hardy looked confused. He’d never seen Maureen so assertive. He looked from her to the Senator, but all he got from the Senator was the look of a man tired unto death.

“All right,” Al said. “Eileen, we’ll have to organize a POW camp.”

The Final Decision

The peasant is eternal man, independent of all Cultures. The piety of the real peasant is older than Christianity, his gods are older than those of any of the higher religions.

The van had not been new when the comet fell. In these past few months it had aged many years. It had bulled its paths across roadless land and through fresh sea bottom. It stank of fish. Maintenance had been impossible, and continual rain had caused years of corrosion. Half blinded with one headlamp working, it seemed to know that its era was dead. It groaned, it limped; and with every jolt of its dying shock absorbers, Tim Hamner felt a needle of pain stab his hip.

Shifting gears was worse. His right leg wouldn’t reach the clutch pedal. He used his left, and it was like an ice pick being wiggled in the bone. Still he drove fast across the potholed road, balancing the jouncing against the need for speed.

Cal Christopher was on guard at the barricade. His weapon was an Army submachine gun. He carried a bottle of Old Fedcal in the other hand, and he beamed, he swaggered, he wanted to talk. “Hamner! Good to see you.” He thrust the bottle through the truck window. “Have a drink — hey! What happened to your face?”

“Sand,” said Tim. “Look, I’ve got three wounded in the truck bed. Can somebody drive for me?”

“Gee, there are only two of us here. Rest are celebrating. You guys won, huh? We heard you’d had a fight and beat them off-”

“The wounded,” Tim said. “Is there somebody at the hospital?”

“You better believe it. We had wounded here, too. But we won! They weren’t expecting it, Tim, it was beautiful! Forrester’s brew really clobbered them. They won’t stop ru

“They did stop. And I can’t take time to talk, Cal.”

“Yeah, right. Well, everybody’s celebrating at City Hall, and the hospital’s right next door, so you’ll get plenty of help. They may not be sober, but—”

“The barricade, Cal. I can’t help you with it. I got hit myself.”

“Oh. Too bad.” Cal moved the log aside, and Tim drove on. The road was dark, and none of the houses were lit. He saw no one along the way, but the going was easier here; the potholes had all been filled in. He rounded a bend and saw the town.

City Hall glowed softly through the dark. Candlelight and lanterns in every window: not an impressive sight after the brilliant glare of the atomic plant, but still a sign of celebration. The crowd was too big for the building. It had spilled onto the street despite the tiny flurries of snow. People formed tight clumps against the chill and the wind, but their laughter reached him for all that. Tim parked next door, in front of the county convalescent home.

People moved toward him from outside City Hall as he climbed from the cab. One was ru

She jumped back as if scalded. “What happened?” And saw his face. Her smile faded. “What happened?”

“Mortar shell. It went off just in front of us. We were up on the cooling tower with the radio. It blasted the radio to bits, and it shredded the cop, uh, Wingate, his name was, and I was standing right between them, Eileen. Right between them. All I got was a blast of sand from the sandbags and this thing in my hip. Are you okay?”