Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [163]
Muchos Nombres was thirty acres of hilly pastureland dotted with the usual great white boulders. Of the four families who jointly owned it, two would sometimes invite Harry in for coffee. The result was diffidence on Harry's part. He never knew whose turn it was. The families each owned one week in four, and they treated the ranch as a vacation spot. Sometimes they traded off; sometimes they brought guests. The oversupply of owners had been unable to agree on a name, and had finally settled for Muchos Nombres. The Spanish fooled nobody.
Today Harry was fresh out of diffidence. He yelled his "Mail call!" and waited, expecting no answer. Presently he opened the gate and went on in.
He reached the front door like something dragged from an old grave. He knocked.
The door opened.
"Mail," said Harry. "Hullo, Mr. Freehafer. Sorry to be so late, but there are some emergencies going."
Freehafer had an automatic pistol. He looked Harry over with some care. Behind him the living room danced with candlelight, and it looked crowded with wary people. Doris Lilly said, "Why, it's Harry! It's all right, Bill. It's Harry the mailman."
Freehafer lowered the gun. "All right, pleased to meet you, Harry. Come on in. What emergencies?"
Harry stepped inside, out of the rain. Now he saw the third man, stepping around a doorjamb, laying a shotgun aside. "Mail," said Harry, and he set down two magazines, the usual haul for Many Names. "Somebody shot at me from Carrie Roman's place. It wasn't anyone I know. I think the Romans are in trouble. Is your phone working?"
"No," said Freehafer. "We can't go out there tonight."
"Okay. And my mail truck went off a hill, and I don't know what the roads are like. Can you let me have a couch, or a stretch of rug, and something to eat?"
The hesitation was marked. "It's the rug, I'm afraid," Freehafer said. "Soup and a sandwich do you? We're a little short."
"I'd eat your old shoes," said Harry.
It was canned tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, and it tasted like heaven. Between bites he got the story: how the Freehafers had started to leave on Tuesday, and seen the sky going crazy, and turned back. How the Lillys had arrived (it being their turn now) with the Rodenberries as guests, and their own two children. The end of the world had come and gone, the Rodenberries were on the couches, and nobody had yet tried to reach the supermarket in town.
"What is this with the end of the world?" Harry asked.
They told him. They showed him, in the magazines he'd brought. The magazines were damp but still readable. Harry read interviews with Sagan and Asimov and Sharps. He stared at artists' conceptions of major meteor impacts. "They all think it'll miss," he said.
"It didn't," said Norman Lilly. He was a football player turned insurance executive, a broad-shouldered wall of a man who should have kept up his exercises. "Now what? We brought some seeds and farm stuff, just in case, but we didn't bring any books. Do you know anything about farming, Harry?"
"No. People, I've had a rough day—"
"Right. No sense wasting candles," said Norman.
All of the beds, blankets and couches were in use. Harry spent the night on a thick rug, swathed in three of Norman Lilly's enormous bathrobes, his head on a chair pillow. He was comfortable enough, but he kept twitching himself awake.
Lucifer's Hammer? End of the world? Crawling through mud while bullets punched into his mailbag and the letters inside. He kept waking with the memory of a nightmare, and always the nightmare was real.
Harry woke and counted days. First night he slept in the truck. Second with the Millers. Last night was the third. Three days since he'd reported in.
It was definitely the end of the world. The Wolf should have come looking for him with blood in his eye. He hadn't. The power lines were still down. The phones weren't working. No county road crews. Ergo, Hammerfall. The end of the world. It had really happened.
"Rise and shine!" Doris