Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  “Late strike.” The lie was thick on his tongue, for Hamner-Brown was two hours past and his eyes were already searching for the others. He found two small mushroom-shaped clouds and a tiny sun that blossomed as he watched. “Jesus,” he said, “the whole world’s gone crazy.”

  “Gilding the lily,” Rick Delanty said. “Not enough to get hit by a comet. Some son of a bitch pushed the button. Aw, shit.”

  All four now watched the scene below: the rising fireflies of Soviet rockets, and the sudden blue-white glares across what had been European Russia. Whatever industry might have survived the comet was…

  Madness, Johnny Baker thought. Why, why, WHY?

  “I don’t think we’ll be welcome down there,” Rick Delanty said. His voice was strangely calm, and Johnny wondered if Rick had gone crazy too. He couldn’t look at Leonilla.

  Finally Rick snarled deep in his throat. Just a sound. It had no meaning and was directed at no one. Then he turned and kicked himself away from them all, down the length of Hammerlab. Jakov was at the other end, near the airlock to the Soyuz, and Johnny Baker had the insane thought that the Russian was going for a concealed weapon.

  That’s what we need. A pistol fight in orbit. Why not? Madness and revenge were fine old traditions where Jakov came from.

  “That’s that,” Johnny said quietly. “It would have been nice to stick together. The last of the astronauts. But I guess not. Rick?”

  Rick was down at the Apollo airlock, and he was cursing, quietly, but loud enough that they could hear.

  Johnny turned back to watch Jakov. The Russian made, no move to open the airlock to the Soyuz. He hung in space, poised as if ready to do something, but he didn’t move at all. He was staring down at the stricken Earth below.

  Rick’s bellow echoed the length of the cabin. “Shit!” Then, “Sir. The Apollo’s in vacuum. Shall I close up my hat and go see if the heat shield’s damaged?”

  “Don’t bother. Shit!” A hole anywhere in the Apollo would kill them during reentry. They were back to one spacecraft. Johnny turned back to Pieter Jakov, who was still watching through the viewport.

  A blow to the back of General Jakov’s neck, right now, before he expects it. Or go back to Russia. As prisoners of war? Hardly. Johnny Baker remembered scenes from the Gulag Archipelago. His hand arched to strike. Rick could handle Leonilla, and they’d have…

  He thought it, but he did nothing. And Pieter Jakov turned toward them all and said, carefully, “They’re moving east. East.”

  They stared at each other, Baker and Jakov, for a moment that stretched endlessly, then both dived frantically toward the communication panel.

  “Roger, Looking Glass, White Bird out,” Johnny Baker said.

  “You got through?” Rick demanded.

  “Yeah. At least somebody acknowledged.” Johnny Baker looked down at the roiling mess below. “I think God hears us pretty well up here. I don’t see any other way we could have got a message through that.”

  “Skip distances. Random ionization patterns,” Jakov said.

  Johnny Baker shrugged. He wasn’t interested in arguing theology. The capsule fell silent as they watched the flight of the missiles. The sparks were going out now as they reached their trajectories. They would light again, but far more brightly…

  But before the flames died, it had been easy to see that the missiles were not rising to curve over the North Pole. A slim crescent of Earth showed, more than enough to let them orient themselves, and the missiles were plainly moving east, toward China.

  And there had been the nuclear explosions over Russia. The Chinese had attacked first, and what the Hammer had spared was now radioactive hell.

  Pieter’s family was down there, Johnny Baker thought. And Leonilla’s, if she has any. I don’t think she does. Jesus, I’m lucky. Ann left Houston weeks ago.

  Johnny laughed quietly to himself. Ann Baker had no reason to stay in Texas. She’d taken the kids to Las Vegas for a divorce that had probably saved her life. As for Maureen…Yeah, Maureen. If any woman could have survived Hammerfall on brains and determination, it was Maureen. She’d said she was going to California with her father.

  “There is much to be done.” Pieter Jakov was a study in professional detachment, except for the quiet edge in his voice. “We cannot survive here more than a few weeks at most. General, we have no onboard computer. You must use your equipment to compute our reentry.”

  “Sure,” Johnny said.

  “We will need both of you.” Jakov tilted his head toward the other end of the capsule, where Rick Delanty seemed huddled in on himself.

  “He’ll help when we need him,” Baker said. “He’s got to take this pretty hard. Even if his wife and kids are still alive, even if they got them out, he’ll never know it.”

  “Not knowing is better,” said Pieter. “Much better.”

  Johnny remembered Moscow, doubly destroyed, and nodded.

  “Perhaps Dr. Malik should administer a tranquilizer,” Jakov was saying.

  “I told you, Colonel Delanty will be all right,” Johnny Baker said. “Rick, we need a conference.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?” Jakov demanded. “Why did they do it?”

  The sudden question did not surprise Baker. He’d been wondering when Jakov would say something.

  “You know why,” Leonilla Malik said. She left her place at the viewport. “Our government had already coveted China. With the threat of glaciers coming, Russians have only one place to go. Europe has been destroyed, and there is very little to the south. If we can reach that conclusion, the Chinese can also.”

  “And so they attacked,” Jakov said. “But not in time. We were able to launch our own strike.”

  “So where will we land?” Leonilla asked.

  “You are very calm about this,” Jakov said. “Do you not care that your country has been destroyed?”

  “I care both less and more than you think,” she said. “It was my homeland, but it was not my country. Stalin killed my country. In any event we cannot go there now. We would land in the middle of a war, if we could find a place to land at all.”

  “We are officers of the Soviet Union, and this war is not over,” Jakov said.

  “Balls.” They all turned toward Rick Delanty. “Balls,” he said again. “You know damn well there’s nothing you can do down there. Where would you go? Into China to wait for the Red Army? Or down into the fallout to wait for glaciers? For Christ’s sake, Pieter, that war’s not your war, even if you’re crazy enough to believe it’s still going on. It’s over for you.”

  “So where do we go?” Jakov demanded.

  “Southern Hemisphere,” Leonilla said. “Weather patterns do not usually cross the equator, and most of the strikes were in the Northern Hemisphere. I believe we will find that Australia and South Africa are undamaged industrial societies. Australia would be difficult to achieve from this orbit. We would have little control over where we landed, and we would starve if we came down in the outback. South Africa—”

  Johnny’s laugh was bitter. Rick said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stay here.”

  They all laughed. Baker felt the tension easing slightly. “Look,” he said, “we could probably manage South America, and we wouldn’t find much damage there, but why bother? We’d be four strangers, and none of us speaks the language. I suggest we go home. Our home. We can set down pretty close to where we aim for, and you’ll be two strangers with native guides. And you know English.”

  “Things are pretty bad,” Delanty said.

  “Sure.”

  “So where?”

  “California. High farming country in California. There won’t be glaciers there for a long time.”

  Leonilla said nothing. Pieter said, “Earthquakes.”

  “You know it, but they’ll be over before we can land. The shock waves must have triggered every fault there is. There won’t be another earthquake in California for a hundred years.”

 
“Whatever we do, it must be quickly,” Pieter said. He pointed to the status board. “We are losing air and we are losing power. If we do not act quickly we will be unable to act at all. You say California. Will two Communists be welcome there?”

  Leonilla looked at him strangely, as if she were about to say something, but she didn’t.

  “Better there than other places,” Baker said. “We wouldn’t want the South or the Midwest—”

  “Johnny, there’s going to be people down there who think this was all a Russki plot,” Rick Delanty said.

  “Yes. Again, more in the Midwest and South than in California. And the East is gone. What else is left? Besides, look, we’re heroes, all of us. The last men in space.” If he was trying to convince himself, it wasn’t working.

  Leonilla and Pieter exchanged glances. They spoke softly in Russian. “Can you imagine what the KGB would do if we came down in an American space capsule?” Leonilla asked. “Are the Americans such fools as well?”

  Rick Delanty’s reply was a soft, sad chuckle. “We’re not in quite the same boat,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about the FBI. It’s the righteous patriotic citizens…”

  Leonilla frowned the question.

  “Well,” Rick said, “what’s to worry? We’re coming down in a Soviet spacecraft plainly marked with a hammer and sickle and that big CCCP…”

  “Better that than a Mars symbol,” Johnny Baker said.

  No one laughed.

  “Hell,” Rick said. “If we had any choice, that wouldn’t be the world we’d land on. You’d think people would get together after this. But I doubt they will.”

  “Some will,” Baker said.

  “Sure. Look, Johnny, half the people are dead, and the rest will be fighting over what’s left of the food. Strange weather ruins crops. You know that. A lot of the survivors won’t get through another winter.”

  Leonilla shivered. She had known people who lived—barely—through the great famine in the Ukraine that followed Stalin’s ascension to the throne of the czars.

  “But if there’s any civilization left down there, anybody who cares about what we’ve done, it’ll be in California,” Rick Delanty said. “We’ve got the records from Hamner-Brown. Last space mission for—”

  “For a long time,” Pieter said.

  “Yeah. And we’ve got to save the records. So it will mean something.”

  Pieter Jakov seemed relieved, now that there were no more difficult choices. “Very well. There are atomic power plants in California? Yes. Perhaps they will survive. Civilization will form around electrical power. That is where we should go.”

  ■

  SAC communications are designed to survive. They are intended to operate even after an atomic attack. They were not designed for planetwide disaster, but they contain so much redundancy and so many parallel systems that even under the impact of the Hammer, messages got through.

  Major Bennet Rosten listened to the chatter on his speaker. Most of it was not intended for him, but he got it anyway; if communications ever stopped, Major Rosten would own his missiles, and, after the timers ran out, could launch them. It was better that he knew too much than too little.

  “EWO EWO, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. ALL SAC COMMANDERS, THIS IS CINC SAC.”

  General Bambridge’s voice came through heavy static. Rosten could barely understand him.

  “THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD. HELICOPTER ACCIDENT; I SAY AGAIN, THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD IN A HELICOPTER ACCIDENT. WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF HOSTILE ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES. WE HAVE NO COMMUNICATION WITH HIGHER AUTHORITY.”

  “Christ on a crutch,” Captain Luce muttered. “Now what do we do?”

  “What we’re paid for,” Rosten said.

  Static overlay the speaker’s voice. “…NO REPORT FROM B-MEWS…HURRICANE WINDS OVER…SAY AGAIN…TORNADOES…”

  “Jesus,” Luce muttered. He wondered about his family up at ground level. There were shelters at the base. Millie would have sense enough to get to them. Wouldn’t she? She was an Air Force wife, but she was young, too young and—

  “…CONDITION REMAINS RED; SAY AGAIN, CONDITION REMAINS RED. SAC OUT.”

  “We will unlock the target cards,” Rosten said.

  Harold Luce nodded. “Guess that’s best, Skipper.” Then, as he’d been trained to do, Luce noted the time in the log: “On orders of the CO the targeting cards and interpretations were removed at 1841 ZULU.” Luce used his keys, then turned the combination panel. He took out a deck of IBM cards and laid them on the console. They gave no indication of what they were, but there was a code book that could interpret them. Under normal circumstances neither Luce nor Rosten knew where their missiles were aimed. Now, though, with good prospects that they’d own the birds, it seemed better to know.

  Time went by. The speaker blared again. “APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILE LAUNCH…SAY AGAIN…MASSIVE…FIVE HUNDRED…TYARA TAM…”

  “The bastards!” Rosten shouted. “Lousy red sons of bitches!”

  “Calm, Skipper.” Captain Luce fingered the cards and code book. He looked up at his status board. Their missiles were still sealed; they couldn’t launch anything if they wanted to, not without orders from Looking Glass.

  “LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. WE HAVE MESSAGES FROM SOVIET PREMIER. SOVIETS CLAIM CHINESE ATTACK ON SOVIET UNION HAS BEEN MET BY MISSILE LAUNCHES. SOVIETS REQUEST U.S. ASSISTANCE AGAINST CHINESE UNPROVOKED ATTACK.”

  “ALL UNITS, THIS IS SAC. APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILES HEADED EAST; REPEAT…NO…AS FAR AS WE KNOW…”

  “SQUADRON COMMANDERS, THIS IS LOOKING GLASS. NO SOVIET ATTACK ON UNITED STATES; I SAY AGAIN, SOVIET ATTACK ON CHINA ONLY, NOT ON UNITED STATES…”

  The speakers went dead. Luce and Rosten looked at each other. Then they looked at their target cards.

  Red flags dropped over lights on their status board, and a new digital timer began ticking off seconds.

  In four hours they would own their birds.

  ■

  A handful of glowing coals scattered across Mexico and the eastern United States: the land strikes of the Hammer. Columns of superheated air stream up into the stratosphere, carrying millions of tons of dust and vaporized soil. Winds rush inward toward the rising air; as they cross the turning world their paths are deflected into half a dozen counterclockwise spirals. Eddies form in the spirals and are thrown off as hurricanes.

  A mother hurricane forms over Mexico and moves eastward across the Gulf, gaining heat energy from the boiling seawater that covers the Gulf Strike. The hurricane moves north, from sea to land, and spawns tornadoes as it goes. Hurricane winds drive floodwaters further up the Mississippi valley.

  As heated wet air rises above the oceans, cold winds pour down from the Arctic. An enormous front forms along the Ohio valley. Tornadoes bud and break free and scatter. When the front moves past, another forms, and another behind it, spewing out a hundred, then a thousand tornadoes to dance out their fury on the graves of the ruined cities. The fronts move east. More form in the Atlantic, above Europe, across Africa. Rain clouds cover the Earth.

  3

  ------------

  THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

  Day of wrath, and doom impending,

  David’s word with Sibyl’s blending:

  Heaven and earth in ashes ending.

  What shall I, frail man, be pleading?

  Who for me be interceding,

  When the just are mercy needing

  Dies Irae

  Rich Man, Poor Man

  The value of a thing is what that thing will bring.

  Legal maxim

  Tim led Eileen over the slippery crest. They stopped to gape down at Tujunga.

  Tujunga still lived! There was electricity: yellow lights shining from houses that still stood; bright bluish-white fluorescent light from stores with unbroken glass in their windows.

  Cars moved down Foothill Boulevard. They drove with their lights on in the afternoon gloom, through the windy, rain
swept streets, across foot-thick mud that ran in rivulets across the road. Not many, but they were cars, and they moved. There were police cars in the supermarket parking lot across from Tim and Eileen.

  There were also armed men, in uniform. When Tim and Eileen got closer they saw that the uniforms were of all styles and ages, and many didn’t fit any longer. It was as if everyone who had a uniform had gone home and put it on. The weapons were random: pistols, shotguns, .22 rifles, Mauser hunting pieces, a few military rifles carried by men in National Guard fatigues.

  “Food!” Tim shouted. He took Eileen’s hand and they ran toward the shopping center with a new spring in their walk. “I told you,” Tim cried. “Civilization!”

  Two men in outdated Army uniforms blocked the supermarket door. They didn’t stand aside as Tim and Eileen tried to go in. One of the men had sergeant’s stripes. He said, “Yeah?”

  “We need to buy something to eat,” said Tim.

  “Sorry,” the sergeant said. “All confiscated.”

  “But we’re hungry.” Eileen sounded plaintive, even to herself. “We haven’t eaten all day.”

  The other uniformed man spoke. He didn’t talk like a soldier. He sounded like an insurance salesman. “There’ll be ration cards issued at the old City Hall. You’ll have to go there to register. I understand they’ll be setting up a soup line too.”

  “But who’s inside the store?” Eileen pointed an accusing finger at aisles bathed in electric light, where people were piling goods into shopping carts. Some wore uniforms, some didn’t.

  “Our officers. The supply crew,” the sergeant said. He had been a clerk in a hardware store until that morning. “They’ll tell you all about it at City Hall.” He looked at their muddy clothes, and something dawned on him. “You come from over the hills?”

  Tim said, “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” the sergeant said.

  “Many more make it out?” the other man asked.