Lucifer's Hammer

George gripped the wheel tightly. He believed in prayer and he didn’t like hearing his brother’s mocking tone. Not that Ray meant anything. Ray went to church too, sometimes. About as often as George did. But you couldn’t pray for something like that.

All those people. And they’d all die, and dying they’d take George’s people with them. He pictured his little sister, thin, belly protruding, last stages of starvation, the way those kids had looked in ’Nam. A whole village of kids trapped in the combat zone, nobody to look out for them, no place to go until the ranger patrol came looking for Cong and found the kids. Suddenly he knew he couldn’t see that again. He couldn’t think about it.

“How long you reckon that dam will last?” Ray asked. “Uh — why are you stopping?”

“I brought a couple of sticks of forty percent,” George said. “Right up there.” He pointed to a steep slope above the road. “Two sticks there, and nobody’ll use this road for awhile.”

Ray thought about it. There was another road up from the San Joaquin, but it didn’t show on gas station maps. A lot of people wouldn’t know about it. With the main highway out, maybe they’d go somewhere else.

The truck came to a complete stop and George opened the door. “Coming?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Ray said. He usually went along with George. He had since their father had died. The other two brothers, and their cousins and nephews, usually did too. George had made a big success out of his ranch. He’d brought in a lot of new ideas and equipment from that agricultural college. George usually knew what he was doing.

Only I don’t like this, Ray thought. Don’t like it at all. Don’t guess George does much either, but what can we do? Wait until we have to look ’em in the eye and turn them away?

They climbed the steep bank behind the truck. Rain poured onto them, finding its way inside their slickers, under the brims of their hats and down their necks. It was warm rain. It drove hard, and Ray thought about the hay crop. That timothy was ruined already. What the hell would they feed the stock, come winter?

“About here, I think,” George said. He scrabbled at the base of a medium-size rock. “Bring this down, it ought to drop a lot of the mud above it onto the road.”

“What about Chief Hartman? And Dink Latham’s already gone down to Porterville…”

“So they find the road’s out when they come back,” George said. “They know the other way.” He reached into his pocket and took out a bulky styrofoam case. It held five detonators, each in its own fitted compartment. George took one out, put it onto the end of a fuse, crimped it with his teeth and used his penknife to poke a hole in a dynamite stick. He pushed the detonator into the stick and shoved it into the hole. “No primacord,” he said. “Have to put both sticks in the same hole. I think this’ll do it.” He tamped wet mud down into the hole he’d scooped, covering the dynamite. Only the fuse end protruded.

Ray turned his back to the wind and hunched low over a cigarette. He flicked the wheel of his Zippo until it caught and got the cigarette burning. Then, carefully, shielding the burning tobacco with his hat brim, he brought it down to the fuse end. The fuse sputtered once, then caught. It hissed softly in the rain.

“Let’s go,” Ray said. He scrambled down the bank, George behind him. They had many minutes before the fuse burned down, but they ran as if pursued by furies.

They were around the bend when they heard the explosion. It wasn’t very loud. The rain dulled all sounds. George carefully backed the truck around until they could see.

The road was covered with four feet of mud and boulders. More had tumbled across the road and down into the river valley below.

“Man might get over that with a four-wheel,” George said. “Nothing else.”

“What the hell are you sitting here for? Let’s go!” Ray’s enraged bellow was too loud for the truck cab, but he knew his brother wouldn’t say anything about it.

There was water standing in the streets when they reached Porterville. It wasn’t more than hubcap deep. The dam still held.

The City Hall meeting room smelled of kerosene lamps and damp bodies. There was also the faint odor of books and library paste. There weren’t many books in the library, and they took up space around the walls but not in the center of the room.

Senator Jellison looked at his electric watch and grimaced. It was good for another year, but then… Why the hell didn’t he have an old-fashioned windup? The watch told him it was 10:38 and 35 seconds, and it wouldn’t be off by more than a second until the battery ran out.

The room was nearly full. All the library tables had been moved to make room for more folding chairs. A few women, mostly men, mostly in farm clothes and rain gear, mostly unarmed. They smelled of sweat and they were soaked and tired. Three whiskey bottles moved rhythmically from hand to hand, and there were a lot of cans of beer. There wasn’t much talk as they waited for the meeting to start.

There were three distinct groups in the room. Senator Jellison dominated one of them. He sat with Mayor Seitz, Chief Hartman and the constables. Maureen Jellison was part of the group, and in the front rows, right up front, were their close friends. A solid bloc of support for the Jellison party.

Beyond them was the largest group, neutrals waiting for the Senator and the Mayor to tell them what to do. They wouldn’t have put it that way, and the Senator would never have dreamed of saying it flat out. They were farmers and merchants who needed help, and they weren’t used to asking for advice. Jellison knew them all Not well, but well enough to know that he could count on them, up to a point. Some of them had brought their wives.

At the back, off in one corner, were George Christopher and his clan. “Clan” is the right word, Arthur Jellison thought. A dozen. All men, all armed. You’d know they were relatives just to look at them (although, Jellison knew, it wasn’t strictly true: Two were brothers-in-law. But they looked like Christophers — heavyset, red of face and strong enough to lift jeeps in their spare time). The Christophers didn’t precisely sit apart from everyone else; but they sat together, and they talked together, and they had few words for their neighbors.

Steve Cox came in with two of Jellison’s ranch-hands. “Dam’s still holding,” he shouted above rain and thunder and muted conversation. “Don’t know what’s keeping it together. There’s water higher than the spillway behind it. It’s eating out the banks at the sides.”

“Won’t be long now,” one of the farmers said. “Did we warn the people down in Porterville?”

“Yes,” Chief Hartman said. “Constable Mosey told the Porterville police. They’ll get people out of the flood area.”

“What’s the flood area?” Steve Cox asked. “Whole damn valley’s filling up. And the highway’s out, they can’t come up here—”

“Some have,” Mayor Seitz said. “Three hundred, more or less. Up the county road. Expect there’ll be more tomorrow.”

“Too damn many,” Ray Christopher said.

There was a babble of voices, some agreeing, some arguing. Mayor Seitz pounded for order. “Let’s find out what we’re facing,” Seitz said. “Senator, what have you learned?”

“Enough.” Jellison got up from his seat at the table and went around in front of it. He perched his buttocks on the table in an informal pose that he knew was effective. “I’ve got pretty good shortwave radio gear. I know there are amateurs trying to communicate. And I get nothing but static. Not just on amateur bands, on CB, commercial, even military. That tells me the atmosphere is all fouled up. Electrical storms. I don’t need to guess about those,” he said with a grin. He waved expressively toward the windows, and as if on cue lightning flared. There wasn’t quite so much thunder and lightning as there’d been earlier in the day, but there was so much that no one noticed unless they were thinking about it.