Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [260]
"And see what you can salvage out in the valley," Hardy said. "We can't let all this manpower and gasoline go to waste."
A rancher put his head in the door. "Scouts are back," he said. "It's okay. We have the boats."
Hardy nodded. "All right. Hamner, get your goodbyes said. Now I'll go find out exactly what all this cost us," he said, with distaste. He went.
Under the black beard Dan Forrester's lips were a hard, thin line. Forrester didn't always show his anger. It showed now only in the way he fumbled for words before saying, "Giving up the power plant would not turn out to be an optimum solution."
"We'll save it. You guard the home front." Tim went back out into the cold night. Four hours until dawn.
Maureen blinked back tears as the truck drove away. She watched the taillight dwindle and vanish on the highway south, and stood in the cold wind long after she couldn't see it any longer.
It all made sense. If they had to send off an expedition, Johnny Baker was the logical man to lead it. People knew who he was. They'd recognize him, or at least know of him, and nobody else in the Stronghold qualified that way. George Christopher and the others on horses could move down the east side of the valley, staying up in the hills, looking for ranchers, organized valleys, anyone to recruit for the attack on the cannibals, but no one across the Sea would have heard of the Christophers, and everyone knew Johnny Baker. Johnny was a hero.
She didn't want to go inside. In there Al Hardy and Harvey Randall would be working with Dr. Forrester, planning tomorrow's work, locating supplies and chemicals that Forrester could use. Her father might be there, too. She didn't want to see Harv just then, and she didn't want to see her father.
"I'm a goddam prize in a goddam contest," she said aloud, "in a goddam fairy tale. Why doesn't anyone ever speak for the princess?" She could hardly blame her father for the symmetry of it all, though she was tempted. But it was all so pat, it made so much sense.
The Stronghold had to have allies. People who might join to fight the cannibals were in the hills, where men could go only on foot or horseback. They would be locals, most of them. It made good sense to send twenty locals into the hills on horseback, led by a local, a farmer, a fine horseman: George Christopher.
And the power plant had to be saved, thanks to Forrester's gentle extortion. But, cut off from events by the sea around them, how were the defenders to know their friends from their enemies? Best to send a man with some military authority, a man any adult American would recognize in a fog on a moonless night: General Johnny Baker.
Which left Harvey Randall free to work with Dr. Forrester, whom he had known in a previous life, on the weapons to defend the Stronghold.
So the knights were riding off in three directions, and he who came back with the prize—his life—would inherit the princess and half the kingdom. They could all come back. It could happen. But when did the princess ever get her choice?
"Hello."
She didn't turn to look. "He's so damn visible."
"Yeah," Harv said. He wondered, but in silence, how the Angels who hated the atomic plant so much would feel about the space program. Someone like Jerry Owen would recognize Baker as fast as any power-plant operator would. "That's why he's there," he said. When she didn't answer, didn't even turn, he went back inside.
There were four boats for twenty men. Two were cabin cruisers, small fiberglass boats used in inland lakes, powered by outboards. There was a twenty-foot open dory, also with an outboard; and there was the Cindy Lu. She was a bomb. Twenty feet long, and only wide enough for two people to sit in the tiny cockpit. The rest of the boat was an enormous inboard engine covered with bright chrome.
Cindy Lu had lost most of her bright tangerine metallic-flake paint. The chrome didn't glow when Johnny Baker played a flashlight across her. She was a nautical drag-racer, but she wouldn't go very fast with an oil-drum barge hooked behind