Lucifer's Hammer

They didn’t talk much, they needed their breath. Presently Cissy brought out sandwiches. The Millers hardly stopped long enough to eat. Then they went back to it.

When they did talk, it was about the weather. Jack Miller had seen nothing like it in his fifty-two years in the valley.

“Comet,” Cissy said. “It did this.”

“Nonsense,” Roy said. “You heard the TV. It missed us by thousands of miles.”

“It did? Good,” Harry said.

“We didn’t hear that it missed. Heard it was going to miss,” Jack Miller said. He went back to harvesting tomatoes. When they got those picked, there were beans and squashes.

Harry had never worked so hard in his life. He realized suddenly it was getting late afternoon. “Hey, I have got to get to town!” he insisted.

“Yeah. Okay, Cissy,” Jack Miller called. “Take the pickup. Get by the feedstore, we’re going to need lots of cattle and hog feed. Damned rain’s battered down most of the fodder. Better get feed before everybody else thinks of it. Price’ll be sky-high in a week.”

“If there’s anyplace to buy it in a week,” Cissy said.

“What do you mean by that?” her husband demanded.

“Nothing.” She went off to the barn, tight jeans bulging, water dripping from her hat. She came out with the Dodge pickup. Harry squeezed into the seat, mailbag on his lap to protect it from the rain. He’d left it in the barn while he worked.

The truck had no trouble with the muddy drive. When they got to the gate, Cissy got out; Harry couldn’t move with the big mailbag. She laughed at him when she got back in.

They hadn’t gone half a mile when the road ended in a gigantic crack. The road had pulled apart, and the hillside with it, and tons of sloppy mud had come off the hillside to cover the road beyond the crack.

Harry studied it carefully. Cicelia backed and twisted to turn the truck around. Harry started toward the ruined road.

“You’re not going to walk!” she said.

“Mail must go through,” Harry muttered. He laughed. “Didn’t finish the route yesterday—”

“Harry, don’t be silly! There will be a road crew out today, tomorrow for sure. Wait for that! You won’t get to town before dark, maybe not at all in this rain. Come back to the house.”

He thought about that. What she said made sense. Power lines down, roads out, telephone lines out; somebody would come through here. The mailbag seemed terribly heavy. “All right.”

They put him back to work, of course. He’d expected that. They didn’t eat until after dark, but it was an enormous meal, suitable for farmhand appetites. Harry couldn’t stay awake, and collapsed on the couch. He didn’t even notice when Jack and Roy took his uniform off him and covered him with a blanket.

Harry woke to find the house empty. His uniform, hung to dry, was still soggy. Rain pounded relentlessly at the farm house. He dressed and found coffee. While he was drinking it, the others came in.

Cicelia made a breakfast of ham and pancakes and more coffee. She was strong and tall, but she looked tired now. Roy kept eying her anxiously.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Not used to doing men’s work and my own too.”

“We got most of it in,” Jack Miller said. “Never saw rain like this, though.” There was a softness, a wondering in Jack Miller’s voice that might have been superstitious fear. “Those bastards at the Weather Bureau never gave us a minute’s warning. What are they doing with all those shiny weather satellites ?”

“Maybe the comet knocked them out,” Harry said.

Jack Miller glared. “Comet. Humph. Comets are things in the sky! Live in the twentieth century, Harry!”

“I tried it once. I like it better here.”

He got a soft smile from Cissy. He liked it. “I’d best be on my way,” he said.

“In this?” Roy Miller was incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

Harry shrugged. “Got my route to finish.”

The others looked guilty. “Reckon we can run you down to where the road’s out,” Jack Miller said. “Maybe a work crew got in already.”

“Thanks.”

There wasn’t any work crew. More mud had slid off the hillside during the night.

“Wish you’d stay,” Jack said. “Can use the help.”

“Thanks. I’ll let people in town know how it is with you.”

“Right. Thanks. Good luck.”

“Yeah.”

It was just possible to pick his way across the crack, over the mudslide. The heavy mailbag dragged at his shoulder. It was leather, waterproof, with the plastic over the top. Just as well, Harry thought. All that paper could soak up twenty or thirty pounds of water. It would make it much harder. “Make it hard to read the mail, too,” Harry said aloud.

He trudged on down the road, slipping and sliding, until he found another sapling to replace the one he’d left at the Millers’ place. It had too many roots at the bottom, but it kept him upright.

“This is the pits,” Harry shouted into the rain-laden wind Then he laughed and added, “But it’s got to beat farm work.”

The rain had stopped Harry’s watch. He thought it was just past eleven when he reached the gate of the Shire. It was almost two.

He was back in flat country now, out of the hills. There had been no more breaks in the road. But there was always the water and the mud. He couldn’t see the road anywhere he had to infer it from the shape of the glistening mud-covered landscape. Soggy everywhere, dimly aware of the chafe spots developing beneath his clinging uniform, moving against the resistance of his uniform and the mud that clung to his boots, Harry thought he had made good time, considering.

He still hoped to finish his route in somebody’s car. It wasn’t likely he’d find a ride at the Shire, though.

He had seen nobody while he walked along the Shire’s splitlog fence. Nobody in the fields, nobody trying to save whatever crops the Shire was growing. Were they growing anything? Nothing Harry recognized; but Harry wasn’t a farmer.

The gate was sturdy. The padlock on it was new and shiny and big. Harry found the mailbox bent back at forty-five degrees, as if a car had hit it. The box was full of water.

Harry was a

The house was dark. Power out here, too? Or had Hugo Beck and his score of strange guests all tired of country life and gone away?

The Shire was a commune. Everyone in the valley knew that, and few knew more. The Shire let the valley people alone. Harry, in his privileged occupation, had met Hugo Beck and a few of the others.

Hugo had inherited the spread from his aunt and uncle three years ago, when they racked up their car on a Mexico vacation. It had been called something else then: Inverted Fork Ranch, some such name, probably named after a branding iron. Hugo Beck had arrived for the funeral. a pudgy boy of eighteen who wore his straight black hair at shoulder length and a kind of beard with the chin bared. He’d looked the place over, and stayed to sell the cattle and most of the horses, and left. A month later he’d returned, followed by (the number varied according to who was talking) a score of hippies. There was enough money, somehow, to keep them alive and fairly comfortable. Certainly the Shire was not a successful business. It exported nothing. But they must be growing some food; they didn’t import enough from town.

Harry hollered again. The front door opened and a human shape strolled down to the gate.

It was Tony. Harry knew him. Scrawny and sun-darkened, gri

“The picnic’s been called off. I came to tell you.”

Tony looked blank, then laughed. “The picnic! Hey, that’s fu