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EVER WONDER WHAT HAPPENED

TO GIL THE SURFER

IN LUCIFERS HAMMER?

Below is a hidden gem that appears in THE BEST OF JERRY POURNELLE edited by John Carr.

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Originally, Analog Science Fiction and Fact published this story in issue 07-08|16,  on June 2, 2016 by Penny Publications.

You can buy LUCIFERS HAMMER on Amazon here.

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Story Night at the Stronghold

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Everybody ate early in those post-comet days.

Monte had exercised himself to a frazzle, riding the fanribbon all morning. At a dinner that was mainly rice, they’d offered him raw homemade whiskey, and he couldn’t resist one drink. He was already thinking of that stretch of thick rug they’d offered as a bed. But these farmers weren’t going to let him sleep, were they? They had him talking and talking.

In fading twilight, somebody turned on the lights.

The stronghold’s big gray common room turned to gold. Captain Monte Martini stopped in midsentence. Several voices among the thirty-odd said, “Ooh!”

Lights.

Randall in chair near the desk, grinned and announced, “Give my children the lightning!” Harvey Randall still sounded like a commentator/interviewer. His resonant voice easily interrupted anyone. “Monte, you were saying?”

Monte looked around. He’d missed most of the names, but Randall and his wife Maureen seemed to be in charge of story night. Monte had caught another famous name. Muscular, long-headed guy. Tim Hammer was the one who had found the comet that had smacked the Earth over a year ago. That was his wife, Eileen, who’d brought him the whiskey, neat. Not as smooth as they made back home, but—

Monte said, “Yeah. They’ve got two jet planes going again at Colorado Springs. You say you saw one last spring. But Gildings couldn’t find a place to land. We do things simpler down at Hoover. The vehicle I use is just me, a chair, a box or whatever for cargo, a tank for gasoline, a great big fan, and that ribbon of parachute that does the lifting. It’s wonderfully safe. Whatever goes wrong, you’ve already bailed out! It’s wonderfully cheap, too, compared to a helicopter. Farmers are using them to spray our fields. We can make one for you if you’ve got anything to trade. But we already have, uh, lightening.”

“Good for you. Boulder Dam survived? And we’ve got the atomic plant. Where were you when the Hammer hit?”

“We mostly call it Hoover Dam. On duty. I was in charge of a security detail at the dam.”

“Did you take a hit?” A lanky guy nobody had introduced. He seemed to be popular, though. “We had a dam, but we had to blow it up.”

“You had to blow up your own dam?”

“Cannibals were coming,” the guy said as if that explained it all. It did, too, at least as far as this crowd was concerned.

“Cannibals we didn’t have. Elvis impersonators.”

That got a laugh. “It’s funny now, but a lot of Vegas people came out to the dam looking for a place to hide. They seemed to think we could feed them. Hell, it was tough enough feeding my troops, until the Air Force cadets got down there and the Cheyenne Mountain people took over.”

“How’d that work?” Harvey asked.

“Pretty well, once things got settled. First winter was bad until the population—well, thinned out.” Monte took another sip of the whiskey.

“Cadets. How were things in Colorado Springs?” That was Tim Hamner. “I had relatives there. May still have. Penelope Joyce Wilson?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t get up there much, but that’s where the government is, so it’s doing pretty well.”

“Good. What do they govern?”

Monte laughed. “They claim to be the United States. We don’t argue with them, but we have the dam. They don’t.” Monte swallowed the last drop of whiskey, then set the glass on a table. “I take it you all were already here?”

The laughter that erupted was flavored with hysteria. Randall said, “Some of us were. Senator Jellison set up the Stronghold where he already had a ranch. But me and a lot of others had to fight our way here.”

A big man named Christopher said, “Even if we were here, we still had to fight off the cannibal army. Save the nuke plant. Grow enough to eat. Jennifer here is visiting form the Shire. It’s weird, but those hippies were growing rice before it got wet, and maybe that saved us till spring. Harry the Mailman here has stories to match anything you’ve got. And Rick here was in orbit when that thing hit.”

“We saw it all,” the lone black man said. “Mostly it hit the northern hemisphere. From space it looked like someone was poking lit cigars through the back of a map.”

Monte asked, “Cannibal army?”

“They’re pretty near gone now. Survivors are working our crops,” Randall said. “But we weren’t all there in safety, Captain Martini. Helena?”

A big woman said, “We were caught out there in rain and the floods. It’s a wonder we survived long enough to get to the atomic plant. But we saw an SUV driving over the water, and that was a tale too.”

“There was laughter, and Eileen Hamner said, “That was us.”

“And there’s us,” a ragged-looking young man with long dirt-colored hair. “We were a Boy Scout troop and a girls’ hiking group. When the Hammer hit we were all in the mountain. We had it better than most. We trade dried meat for some of what the Stronghold grows. I’m just visiting.”

Maureen Randall said, “They’re self-sufficient or close enough.”

They were talking to each other rather than Monte now. His attention began wandering. He heard, “The atomic plant can’t send current very far, but some cottage industry is growing up around it, and their products travel….”

“Bay level is going down, good farmland out there….”

“Comrade lives with Leonilla; they’re the other two astronauts. Everyone’s pregnant—”

“Yeah, now.”

“We used up a stock of condoms when we had it, to keep the hungry mouths to a minimum. Big box of condoms from the Shire. Paid for with chickens and a rooster.”

“The Shire isn’t getting many children, are you, Hennessey?”

Monte was losing the thread.

“Global warming? No, man, the Hammer shattered our weather….”

Now a sick looking guy two chairs down was talking about the cannibals, how he’d hidden around their edges and raided their garbage sites after they’d passed. The old man in the big, ornate chair was just letting them talk.

Monte perked up when a refugee spoke. “I rode a wave onto Santa Monica Beach and up Wilshire till I wiped out….”

Monte hadn’t caught his name. He must have arrived at the Stronghold gate earlier than Monte, maybe this morning. He was dark-tanned and gaunt, used to be muscular, Monte thought. “Walked out of Santa Monic and Westwood, over into the Valley. I wasn’t having much luck till I got to the Shire. I was looking for them, you follow? Because the surfers used to talk about a hippy who’d inherited a ranch and some money, and he’d invited all his friends there, and he’d take friends of friends too. I made for the Shire. It was all I could think of.”

“They’ve been kinder to passersby since it dawned on them that they’d offended the Mailman.” That was a guy named Mark.

The dark haired girl next to him had sung some kind of song earlier. Now she nursed a baby “Harry still won’t stop there. They have to work to get their news.” She laughed.

“Damned straight,” Harry said. Hennessey looked glum.

“Well, they were nice enough to me. Not that they didn’t work me, they did, but I smoked some weed with them, and they fed me, even if it was all vegetables—”

Mark asked, “Did you get laid?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s funny what those hippies know. They’ll lecture you on hybrid vigor.”

“And they gave me some letters for Harry. He brought me here. I’ve been told I get a meal and a stretch of rug. The meal was excellent, sir,” to the man across the circle.

“The rest depends. What have you got to offer?” the old man asked.

“I can match any story.”

“Where you been?”

The Surfer stood up and ran his finger over a map that half covered one wall. “I’m mostly guessing here. Up from Los Angeles, over the mountain. I was behind the Brotherhood Army most of the way, I think.”

“I did that too,” said the sick-looking guy two chairs over. “Followed them. They didn’t know how to eat some of the food in the markets. I could hide in drainpipes.”

“I didn’t see anything of an atomic plant. Shire’s here. Harry was here,” the Surfer said, pointing. The old man in the big chair was nodding, not saying anything. Monte had been told his name. He was important, somehow.

“A bunch of us were surfing that morning, waiting for a wave off Santa Monica Beach. I knew when the Hammer hit: I saw something way brighter than the sun come down and split the sea. I got most of us turned around and paddling before the wave came over the horizon. I don’t think anyone lived through it but me. I rode the shock wave when the wave hit the cliff. I was still on it while it ran down Wilshire as far as the Barrington Apartments. Then I couldn’t get out of the way.

“I aimed for a set of glass doors on a balcony.

“I just grazed the top of an iron railing halfway up the Barrington  Building. Leaned back on the board and got it tilted up and smashed through the glass doors flat on. I didn’t hit glass, I smacked against balsa and nylon. Hey, my nose was already bleeding; ears, too. But half the wave was still above my heard, still smashing at the building. So now I’m in a hallway in a surge of water I just can’t fight. It takes me down to the far face of the building, and now I’m starting to get my breath back. Then those doors shattered and I spilled out into space. The water was two or three stories down by now.

“I grabbed a floating desk.

“It gets a little hazy. I think I hit my head on the desk, coming down. When the water started going backward, I grabbed a lamppost. Or maybe a parking garage railing a few stories up. When I could walk I was too wiped out, and crying because all the others were drowned. I couldn’t do more than find a place to sleep.

“I made for a backpacker’s stories, but it was already looted. I had to put together my own package, doing my own looting

“I’d heard of the Shire, a heaven on earth established by a rich hippy. I got there. Two nights. They worked me, farming rice. They let me wash and dry my clothes. Fed me lots of rice, but also bacon and eggs. I’m not sure if they’d have let me stay, they think I’m lucky, but they were so weird, man. And they told me about you, and about a village in the mountains….”

The old man asked, “Can you dive?”

“Sure.”

“Water in the San Joachin has been subsiding, so sea bottom that was out of reach is more shallow now. Looting underwater isn’t good, but it’s possible.”

“I’m your man,” the Surfer said.

“Then we all get our happy endings. We’re the lucky ones. I’d have loved to see the lights go on in my living room again,” the old man said. Jellison, Senator Jellison. Wait now—”

The guy two chairs over wasn’t just unhealthy. Good Lord, he was coming apart. The smell…not unpleasant…smell of dinnertime.

“I remember. They caught me. Pulled me out of the culvert. They boiled me,” he said.

They’d said Senator Jellison died of a heart attack.

The Surfer said, “I hit the desk coming down. Banged my head. Are well all dead? All of us?”

And they were all looking at Monte. Monte struggled to speak…but agony ran through his limbs, and he screamed instead.

Tim Hamner was gaping at him.

“Cramps,” he said. “Sorry. It was a long flight. You can’t relax when you’re flying a fanribbon.”

Hamner said. “You okay now? We just let you sleep, but you could have the rug and a pillow.”

“Yeah, thanks.” He was trying to walk off the cramps. His calves wouldn’t relax. “God I had nightmares. Dead persons all around me.”

“Survivor guilt. Ashamed of being alive when so many are dead. We all get it sometimes,” Tim Hamner said and handed him a pillow.