Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [212]
"If you have oil, I'd think you'd be in good shape," Rick Delanty said.
Wilson waved expansively. "How do we hold onto this place? No borders. No rock piles to make into fortresses. No time to build. No way to keep refugees from coming in and looting what we haven't got to yet. You want to lock that thing up? I'd rather not have this many people standing around. There's work to do. Always work to do."
"Yes. The records should be safe." Pieter climbed onto the Soyuz and closed the hatch.
"No electricity," Johnny Baker said. "What about nuclear plants? The one near Sacramento?"
Wilson shrugged. "Sacto used to be about twenty-five feet above sea level. Things got shifted in the quakes. That plant could be underwater. Maybe not. I just don't know. There's better than two hundred and fifty miles of swamp and lake between here and there, and most of the valley's under deep water. Got that locked up? Let's go."
They walked up the hill toward the farmhouse. When they got closer, Baker saw the sandbags and foxholes dug in around the buildings. Women and children worked to add to the fortifications.
Wilson looked thoughtful. "General, you ought to be doing something better than digging foxholes, but I don't know what it would be."
Johnny Baker didn't say anything. He was overwhelmed by what he'd seen and learned. There was no civilization here at all, only desperate farmers trying to hold a few acres of ground.
"We can work," Rick Delanty said.
"You'll have to," Wilson said. "Look, in a few weeks we'll hear from the Senator. I'll give word that you're here. Maybe he'll want you. Maybe he'll want you bad enough to think he owes us for sending you. I could use him owing us."
Fourth Week: The Prophet
Of all states that is the worst whose rulers no longer enjoy an authority sufficiently extensive for everyone to obey them with good grace, but in which their authority over a part of their subjects is sufficiently large to enable them to constrain others.
Bertrand de Jouvenal, Sovereignty
There had been a crazy world. It was vivid in Alim Nassor's memory. Once the honkies had poured bread into the ghettos, bribes to stop riots, and Alim had taken his share. Not just money; there was power, and Alim was known in City Hall, was headed for something bigger.
Then a black Tom was Mayor, and the money stopped, the power vanished. Alim couldn't stand that. Without money and the symbols you could buy with it, you were nothing, less than the pimps and the pushers and the other garbage that made their living out of the ghettos. He'd lost his power and had to have it back, but then he was caught ripping off a store, and the only way to get off was to pay a bondsman and a lawyer, both honkies. They got him out on bail, and then to pay them he had to rip off another store. Crazy!
Then hundreds of the richest honkies had run for the hills. Doom was coming from the sky! Alim and his brothers had been set to make themselves rich forever. They'd been rich, they'd had truckloads of what the fences paid money for, and then …
Crazy, crazy. Alim Nassor remembered, but it was like a dope dream, the time before the Hammer. He'd done his best to protect the brothers who would listen to him. Four of the six burglary teams had made it through the rain and the quakes and the refugees, all those people! But they'd made it to the cabin near Grapevine. The engine in one of the trucks had a death rattle. They'd stripped it and siphoned off the gas and ditched it. They'd dumped all that electrical stuff, too: TVs, hi-fi's, radios, the small computer. But they'd kept the telescope and binoculars.
And they'd been all right for awhile. There was a ranch not far from the cabin, and there'd been cattle and some other food, enough to last two dozen brothers a long time. They hadn't even had to fight for it. The rancher was dead under his collapsed roof, leg broken, and he'd starved or bled to death. But then a lot of honkies with guns came and took it away, and eighteen brothers in three trucks had to take off