Lucifer's Hammer

Harvey moved into the dimness like a tired old man. As his eyes adjusted he spotted Mark Czescu on a stool. He pulled himself up next to Czescu and propped elbows on bar.

Czescu was thirty-odd, almost ageless, a perpetual young man about to launch himself on his career. Harvey knew Mark had been in the Navy for four years, and had tried several colleges, starting at UCLA and working down through community junior colleges. He sometimes called himself a student even yet, but no one believed he’d ever finish. He wore biker’s boots, old jeans, a T-shirt and a crumpled Aussie digger hat. He wore his black hair long and his black beard full. There was ground-in dirt under his nails and fresh streaks of grease on the jeans, but his hands and clothes had been freshly washed for all of that; he just didn’t have any pathological need to be scrubbed pink.

When Mark wasn’t smiling he had a dangerous look, despite the respectable beer belly. He smiled at lot; but he could take some things very seriously, and he sometimes moved with a tough crowd. They were part of his image: Mark Czescu could run with the real bikers if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. Just now he looked concerned. “You don’t look good,” he said.

“I feel like killing somebody,” said Harvey.

“You feel that way, I could maybe find somebody,” Mark said. He let it trail off.

“No. They’re my bosses. They’re all of them my bosses, damn their i

“I want something from them,” Harvey said. “And they know they’re going to give it to me. How the hell can they not know? I’ve even got the sponsor wired! But the sons of bitches have to play games. If one of them fell off a balcony tomorrow, I’d be in for an extra month breaking in a new one, and I can’t afford the time.” It didn’t hurt to humor Czescu; the guy could be useful, and a lot of fun — and maybe he could arrange a murder. You never really knew.

“So what are they going to give you?” Mark asked.

“A comet. I’m going to make a whole series of documentaries about a new comet. The guy who discovered it chances to own seventy percent of the company that will sponsor the documentaries.”

Czescu chortled. Harvey nodded agreement. “It’s a beautiful setup. Chance to make the kind of films I really want to do. And to learn a lot. Not like that last shit, interviewing doomsters, everybody with his own private vision of the end of the world. I wanted to cut my throat and get it over with before that one was finished.”

“So what’s wrong?”

Harvey sighed, and drank more beer, and said, “Look. There are about four guys who could really tell me to go take a flying frig and make it stick. But that’d be a mistake, right? The New York people won’t put up with blowing a sponsored series. They’re going to buy the show. But how will anyone know they’ve got the power to say no if they don’t hesitate and demand I write up treatments and do budget estimates and all that crap? None of that shit gets used, but they’ve got to have a sound basis for decisions.’ Four fucking prima do

“Okay, I could live with them. But then there are a couple of dozen who couldn’t stop a Time for Beany revival, but they want to show how important they are, too. So to show each other they could really stop the show if they wanted to, they raise as many objections as they can. Got the best interests of the sponsors in mind, right? Don’t want to get Kalva Soap mad, right? Bullshit. But I’ve got to put up with it.” Harvey was suddenly aware of what he sounded like, “Look, let’s change the subject.”

“Right. You’ve noticed the name of this place?”

“Security First Federal Bar. Cute. Stolen from George Carlin. About time, too.”

“Right! Now maybe some others will pick up the idea. Can you see Crazy Eddie’s Insurance?”

“Why not? They bought cars from Madman Muntz. How about Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic?”

“Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic and Mortuary,” Czescu said.

The tightness in Harvey’s neck and shoulders was going away. He drank more beer, then went to a booth where he could lean against something. Mark followed and took the opposite seat.

“Hey, Harv, when we making another run? Your bike still work?”

“Yeah.” A year ago — no, dammit, two years and more — he’d said the hell with it and let Mark Czescu lead him on a ride up the coast, drinking in little bars, talking to other drifters, camping where they felt like it. Czescu took care of the bikes, and Harvey paid the bills, not that they amounted to much. It had been a time of no worries. “The bike works, but I won’t get a chance to use it. When this series gets going it’ll take full time.”

“Anything I can get in on?” Mark asked.

Harvey shrugged. “Why not?” Mark often worked on Harvey’s shows. He carried cameras or clipboards and did maintenance or just plain acted as gofer. “If you’ll shut up once in awhile.”

“I’m hip.”

The bar was filling up. The jukebox ran out of sound, and Mark got up. “Something just for you,” he said. He retrieved his twelve-string guitar from behind the bar and took a chair at the end of the room. This, too, was part of his routine: Czescu sang for drinks and meals in bars. On their run up the coast Mark had got them free steaks in half the places between L.A. and Carmel. He was good enough to be professional, but he wouldn’t discipline himself; whenever he got a regular gig it didn’t last a week. To Mark, those who made steady money were magicians with a secret that he couldn’t quite learn.

Mark strummed an experimental chord, then began a prologue. The tune was the old cowboy number, “Cool Clear Water.”

Harvey laughed approval. A fat man at the bar sent over a pitcher of beer and Mark acknowledged with a toss of his head.

There was a short break as Mark picked at the guitar. The chords jangled, obviously wrong, but obviously right too, as if Mark were searching for something he could never find.

The guitar stopped and Mark said in a plonking voice, “Almost as much as you get from an old Bogart movie.”

“Leonard Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and the Rolling Stones in a dazzling display of

“Folks, tonight we have a debate between the president of the United Farm Workers versus twenty-two hungermaddened housewives armed with butcher knives. It’s