Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [291]
Pudgy Galadriel from the Shire swung her sling round and round, stepped forward and sent a bottle of nerve gas flying far down the hill. A moment too long on the follow-through, and Galadriel stood poised like Winged Victory, with her head gone. Maureen saw black spots before her eyes. She leaned against a boulder and managed to stay upright.
It was one thing to stand on a clifftop and contemplate (at her leisure) jumping off (but would she have had the nerve? or was it all an act? Now she'd never know). It was quite another to watch poor, homely Galadriel crumple with the stump of her neck spitting blood, and then, without looking to see if anyone was actually watching her, to pick up her sling and a bottle of nerve gas and swing the deadly, evil thing round and round her head and, remembering at the last second that the damn thing would fly at a tangent and not in the direction the sling was pointing when she let go, sling it down into the cannibal horde that was still coming up at them. Suddenly Maureen Jellison had found quite a lot to live for. The gray skies, cold winds, brief snow flurries, the prospect of hunger in winter; all of that faded away. First there was a simple realization: If you could feel terror, you wanted to live. Strange that she'd never understood that before.
She dressed quickly and went outside. The bright sun was gone. She could not see the sun at all, but the sky overhead was bright, and the clouds seemed much thinner than usual. Had the sunlight been a final dream? It didn't matter. The air was warm, and there was no rain. The small creek below the house was very high, and the water gurgled happily. It would be cold water, just right for trout. Birds dipped low into the stream and cried loudly. She walked down the drive to the highway.
There was no traffic. There had been, earlier, when the Stronghold's wounded had been taken to the former county convalescent home that served as the valley's hospital, and later there would be more when the less critically injured were brought in horse-drawn wagons, but for now the road was clear. She walked steadily on, aware of every sight and sound: the ring of an ax in the hills above; the flash of red as a red-winged blackbird darted into the brush nearby; the shouts of children herding the Stronghold's pigs through the woods.
The children had adjusted quickly to the new conditions.
One elderly adult as teacher, a dozen or more children, two working dogs and a herd of swine school and work. A different sort of school with different lessons. Reading and arithmetic, certainly, but also other knowledge: to lead the pigs to dog droppings (the dogs in turn ate part of the human sewage); and always to carry a bucket to collect the pig manure, which must be brought back at night. Other lessons: how to trap rats and squirrels. Rats were important to the new ecology. They had to be kept out of the Stronghold's barns (cats did most of that), but the rats were themselves useful: They found their own food, they could be eaten, their fur made clothing and shoes, and their small bones made needles. There were prizes for the children who caught the most rats.
Closer to town was the sewage works, where the animal and human wastes were shoveled into boilers with wood chips and sawdust. The heat of fermentation sterilized everything, and the hot gases were led out through pipes that ran under City Hall and the hospital to form part of the heating system, then condensed. The resulting methanol, wood alcohol, ran the trucks that collected the wastes, with some left over for other work. The system wasn't complete—they needed more boilers, and more pipes and condensers, and the work absorbed too much skilled labor—but Hardy could be deservedly proud of the start they had made. By spring they'd have a lot of high-nitrogen fertilizer from the