Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [77]
There were also the Comet Wardens, a Southern California sect who were putting on white robes and praying the comet away. They'd staged a couple of stunts to get publicity, and about half their leaders were out on bail for blocking traffic or getting into the outfield during televised baseball games. That had stopped; a judge had ordered that no more be released on bail until next Wednesday …
Hell, I could write a book, Harvey thought. I ought to. I never wanted to before, but I'm literate, and I've done the research. I'm way ahead of the flock. The Day After the World Didn't End. No. No good. Too long, for one thing. I can call mine Hammer Fever. And of course there'll be plenty of publicity, we'll have a show on the air just afterward.
I could even make some money on this. A lot of money. Enough to pay off the bills and take care of the tuition at Harvard School for Boys and …
Hammer Fever. I like it.
Only one problem. It's real. Like a war scare.
He'd found that everywhere. Coffee, tea, flour, sugar, any staple capable of being hoarded, was in short supply. Freeze-dried foods were gone. Clothing stores reported runs on rain gear (in southern California, with the next rains due in November!). You couldn't find outdoorsman's clothing anywhere, no surplus hiking boots in the stores. And nobody was buying suits, white shirts, or neckties.
They were buying guns, though. There wasn't a firearm to be bought in Beverly Hills or the San Fernando Valley. There wasn't any ammunition, either.
Backpacking stores were sold out of everything from hiking boots to trail food to fishing equipment (more hooks than flies; you could still get dry flies, but only the expensive American-made ones, not the cheap ones from India). There weren't any tents to be had, nor sleeping bags. There was even a run on life jackets! Harvey grinned when he heard that one. He'd never seen a tsunami himself, but he'd read about them. After Krakatoa a great wave had deposited a Dutch gunboat miles inland at an elevation of two hundred feet.
Then there were the mail-order "survival packages" that had been sold for the past few weeks. They'd not be getting any more orders, of course, not this close to Hammerfall. Maybe—just maybe—they weren't intending to deliver? Have to look into that. There were four companies selling them. For from fifty to sixteen thousand dollars you could get anything from just a food supply to the whole thing in one lump. The foods were nonperishable and constituted a more or-less-balanced diet. (Which religious sect was it that required all its members to keep a year's supply of food? They'd been doing that since the Sixties, too. Harvey made another mental note. They'd be worth interviewing, after That Day had passed.)
The cheap outfits were food only. There was progressively more, up to the sixteen-grand package, which included a Land Cruiser, clothing from thermal underwear out, machete, sleeping bag, butane stove and tank, inflatable raft, almost anything you could name. One included membership in a survival club: You were guaranteed a place if you could get there, somewhere in the Rockies. The different companies didn't sell identical items, and none of the four included guns (courtesy of Lee Harvey Oswald; and how many people has the ban on mail-order guns saved or killed, depending on whether or not the Hammer falls?).
But all four companies sold you the same outfit whether you lived on a mountain or a seashore or the High Plains. Harvey grinned. Caveat emptor. The stuff was all overpriced, too. Lord, what fools these mortals be …
The traffic was