Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [197]
Some people are strong in a crisis. Harvey Randall is. I thought I was. Now I know better. "Harvey, I'm scared." Now why did I say that?
She'd expected him to say something comforting. To be reassuring, as George would be. It would be a lie, but—
She hadn't expected hysterical laughter. She stared as Harvey Randall giggled, bubbled, laughed insanely. "You're scared," he gasped. "Lord God above, you haven't seen anything to be scared of!" He was shouting at her. "Do you know what it's like out there? You can't know. You haven't been outside this valley." Visibly he fought for control of himself. She watched fascinated, as he slowly won the struggle for calm. The laughter died away. Then, amazingly, the stranger was sitting there again, as if he hadn't moved. "Sorry about that," he said. The phrase was flippantly conventional, but it didn't come out that way. It came out as a genuine apology.
She stared in horror. "You too? It's only a big act? All this masculine calm, this—"
"What do you expect?" Harvey asked. "What else can I do? And I really am sorry. Didn't mean to crack like that … "
"It's all right."
"No, it isn't all right," Harvey said. "The only damned chance we've got, any of us has got, is to go on trying to act rationally. And when one of us cracks, it makes it that much harder for the rest. That's what I'm sorry about. Not that it gets to me, out of the blue sometimes, wham! I'm learning to live with that. But I shouldn't have let you see it. It can't make things easier for you—"
"But it does," she said. "Sometimes you've got to … to say confession." They sat silently for a moment, listening to the wind and rain, the crackle of thunder in the mountains. "We'll swap," Maureen said. "You tell me, I'll tell you."
"Is that wise?" he asked. "Look, I haven't forgotten the last time we met up here on this ridge."
"I haven't either." Her voice was small and thin. She thought he was about to move, to get up, and she spoke quickly. "I don't know what to do about that. Not yet."
He sat, unmoving, so that she wasn't sure that he'd been about to get up after all. "Tell me," he said.
"No." She couldn't quite make out his face. There was a stubble of beard, and the light was very bad in the shelter. Sometimes lightning struck near enough to throw a brilliant flash, eerily green from the color of the plastic bags, but that only blinded her for an instant and she still could not see his expression. "I can't," she said. "It's horrible to me, but it would sound trivial—"
"And what if it does?"
"They hope," she said. "They come to the house, or I go to theirs, and they believe we can save them. That I can save them. Some of them are crazy. There's a boy in town, Mayor Seitz's youngest boy. He's fifteen, and he wanders around naked in the rain unless his mother brings him in. There are five women whose husbands never came back from a hunting trip. There are old people and children and city people and they all expect us to come up with a miracle—and, Harvey, I just don't have any miracles, but I have to go on pretending that I do."
Almost she told him the rest: of her sister Charlotte, sitting alone in her room and staring at the walls with vacant eyes, but then she'd come alive and scream if she couldn't see the children; of Gina, the black woman from the post office, who'd broken a leg and lay in a ditch until somebody found her and then she died of gas gangrene and nobody could help her; of the three children with typhus that nobody could save; of the others who'd gone mad. They wouldn't sound trivial. But they were. She could face horror. "I can't go on giving people false hopes," she said at last.
"You have to," Harvey said. "It's the most important thing in the world."
"Why?"
He spread his hands in astonishment. "Because it is. Because there are so few of us left."
"If life wasn't important before, why should it be now?"
"It is."
"No. What's the difference between meaningless survival in Washington and meaningless survival here? None of that means anything."