by Larry Niven
“That I’ll go along with,” Christopher told them. “My neighbors. My friends. But I won’t put myself out for a lot of flatlanders. Not if they’re finished anyway.” The big man seemed to have trouble expressing himself. “Look, I got as much Christian charity as anybody here, but I won’t starve my own people to help them.” He started to leave.
“Where are you going, George?” Chief Hartman demanded.
“Senator’s got a good idea. I’m getting my brother and heading for the flats with my truck. Lots of stuff down there we’re going to need. No sense in letting the dam break on it.” He went out before anyone could say more to him.
“You’re going to have trouble with him,” Mayor Seitz said.
“I am?” Jellison said.
“Sure, who else? I’m a feedstore owner, Senator. I can call myself Mayor, but I’m not ready for this. I expect you’re in charge here. Right?”
There was a chorus of agreement from the others. It surprised no one.
George Christopher and his brother Ray drove down the highway toward Porterville. Lake Success lay on their right high banks rose to the top of the ridgeline on their left. Rain fell steadily. Already the lake had risen nearly to the bridge where the highway crossed. Chunks of mud washed down from the ridge above and covered the road. The big farm truck went through the mud patches without slowing.
“Not much traffic,” Ray said.
“Not yet.” George drove grimly, his mouth a set line, his bull neck arched toward the steering wheel. “But it won’t be long. All those people. They’ll come up the road looking for high ground—”
“Most’ll stop in Porterville,” Ray said. “It’s a couple of hundred feet higher than the San Joaquin.”
“Was,” George said. “With those quakes you can’t tell. Land shifts, raises up and down. Anyway, when the dam goes, Porterville goes. They won’t stay there.”
Ray didn’t say anything. He never argued with George. George was the only one in the family who’d gone to college. GI Bill. He hadn’t finished, but he’d learned something while he was there.
“Ray, what do they eat?” George asked suddenly.
“I don’t know—”
“You ready to see your kids starve?” George demanded.
“It won’t come to that.”
“Won’t it? People all over the place. Salt rain running out in the San Joaquin. Lower San Joaquin fills up. Porterville washes out when the dam goes. People headed for high ground, and that’s us. We’ll have ’em everywhere, camped on the roads, stuffed into the schoolhouse, in barns, everywhere. All hungry. Plenty of food at first. Enough for everybody for awhile. Ray, you can’t look at a hungry kid and not feed him.”
Ray didn’t say anything.
“Think about it. While there’s food, we’ll feed people. Would you turn people away while you’ve still got livestock? Ready to stew your dogs to feed a bunch of Porterville hippies?”
“There aren’t any hippies in Porterville.”
“You know what I mean.”
Ray thought it through. They would come through Porterville. To the north and south were cities of ten million each, and if only one in ten thousand of them lived long enough to reach Porterville and turn east…
Now Ray’s mouth formed a grim line like his brother’s. Muscles stood out of his neck like thick cords. They were both big; the whole family ran big. When they were younger, George and Ray sometimes went to the tough bars looking for fights. The only time they’d ever been beaten, they’d gone home and come back with their two younger brothers. After that it was almost impossible to find a fight.
And they thought alike, though Ray thought more slowly. Now he saw it: thousands of strangers spread across the land like a locust plague, in all sizes and shapes and ages — college professors, social workers, television actors and game-show moderators and writers, brain surgeons, architects of condominiums, fashion designers, and the teeming hordes of the forever unemployed… all landless people without jobs or skills or tools or homes. Like locusts, and locusts could be fought. But what about the children? Strangers could be turned away, but children?
“So what do we do?” Ray asked finally.
“If they don’t get here, they can’t cause problems,” George said. He eyed the hills above the road. “If about a hundred tons of rock and mud came down on the road just up ahead, nobody’d get into the valley. Not easy, anyway.”
“Maybe we should pray for a hard rain,” Ray said. He looked out at the driving rain pouring from the sky.
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.
“And salt rain,” Jellison said. “And the earthquake. The last words I heard out of JPL were ‘The Hammer has fallen.’ I’d like to talk to somebody who was in the hills above L.A. when it happened, but what I’ve got adds up. The Hammer hit us, and bad. We can be sure of it.”
No one said anything. They’d all known it. They’d hoped to find out something different, but they knew better. They were farmers and businessmen, tied closely to the land and the weather, and they lived in the foothills of the High Sierra. They’d known disaster before, and they’d done their crying and cursing at home. Now they were worried about what to do next.
“We got five truckloads of feed and hardware and two of groceries out of Porterville today,” Jellison said. “And there’s the stock in our local stores. And what you have in your barns. I doubt there’ll be much else that we don’t make or grow ourselves.”
There were murmurs. One of the farmers said, “Not ever, Senator?”
“Might as well be never,” Jellison said. “Years, I think. We’re on our own.”
He paused to let that sink in. Most of these people prided themselves on being on their own. Of course that wasn’t true, hadn’t been true for generations, and they were smart enough to know it, but it would take them time to realize just how dependent they’d been on civilization.
Fertilizers. Breeding stock. Vitamins. Gasoline and propane. Electricity. Water — well, that wouldn’t be much of a problem for awhile. Medicines, drugs, razor blades, weather forecasts, seeds, animal feed, clothes, ammunition… the list was endless. Even needles and pins and thread.
“We won’t grow much this year,” Stretch Tallifsen said. “My crops are in bad shape already.”
Jellison nodded. Tallifsen had gone down the road to help his neighbors harvest tomatoes, and his wife was working to can as many as she could. Tallifsen grew barley, and it wouldn’t last the summer.
“Question is, do we pull together?” Jellison said.
“What do you mean, ‘pull together’?” Ray Christopher asked.
“Share. Pool what we’ve got,” Jellison answered.
“You mean communism,” Ray Christopher said. This time the hostility showed through in his voice.
“No, I mean cooperation. Charity, if you like. More than that. Intelligent management of what little we have, so we avoid waste.”
“Sounds like communism—”
“Shut up, Ray.” George Christopher stood. “Senator, I can see how that makes sense. No point in using the last of the gasoline to plant something that won’t grow. Or feeding the last of the soybeans to cattle that won’t last the winter anyway. Question is, who decides? You?”
“Somebody has to,” Tallifsen said.
“Not alone,” Jellison said. “We elect a council. I will point out that I’m probably in better shape than anybody else here, and I’m willing to share—”
“Sure,” Christopher said. “But share with who, Senator? That’s the big question. How far do we go? We try to feed Los Angeles?”
“That’s absurd,” Jack Turner said.
“Why? They’ll all be here, all that can get here,” Christopher shouted. “Los Angeles, and the San Joaquin, and what’s left of San Francisco… not all of ’em, maybe, but plenty. Three hundred last night, and that’s just for starters. How long can we keep it up, lettin’ those people come here?”
“Be niggers too,” someone shouted from the floor. He looked self-consciously at two black faces at the end of the room. “Okay, sorry — no. I’m not sorry. Lucius, you own land. You work it. But city niggers, whining about equality — you don’t want ’em either!”
&nb
sp; The black man said nothing. He seemed to shrink away from the group, and he sat very quietly with his son.
“Lucius Carter’s all right,” George Christopher said. “But Frank’s right about the others. City people. Tourists. Hippies. Be here in droves pretty soon. We have to stop them.”
I’m losing it, Jellison thought. Too much fear here, and Christopher’s put his finger on it. He shuddered. A lot of people were going to die in the next months. A lot. How do you select the ones to live, the ones to die? How do you be the Chooser of the Slain? God knows I don’t want the job.
“George, what do you suggest?” Jellison asked.
“Roadblock on the county road. We don’t want to close it, we may need it. So we put up a roadblock and we turn people away.”
“Not everyone,” Mayor Seitz said. “Women and children—”
“Everybody,” Christopher shouted. “Women? We have women. And kids. Plenty of our own to worry about. We start takin’ in other people’s kids and women, where do we stop? When our own are starving come winter?”
“Just who is going to man this roadblock?” Chief Hartman asked. “Who’s tough enough to look at a car full of people and tell a man he can’t even leave his kids with us? You’re not, George. None of us are.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“And there are special skills,” Senator Jellison said. “Engineers. We could use several good engineers. Doctors, veterinarians. Brewers. A good blacksmith, if there is any such thing in this modern world—”
“Used to be a fair hand at that,” Ray Christopher said. “Shod horses for the county fair.”
“All right,” Jellison said. “But there are plenty of skills we don’t have, and don’t think we won’t need them.”
“Okay, okay,” George Christopher said. “But dammit, we can’t take in everybody—”
“And yet we must.” The voice was very low, not really loud enough to carry through the babble and the thunder, but everyone heard it anyway. A professionally trained voice. “I was a stranger, and ye took me not in. I was hungry, and ye fed me not. Is that what you want to hear at Judgment?”