Beef jerky is too limited a diet to keep a human being alive forever. The time can be greatly extended with vitamin supplements, but it’s still dull. So? If the Hammer fell, boredom would not be the major cause of death…
For bulk and carbohydrates, Harvey had grits. Nobody else in Beverly Hills, it seemed, had thought of them, and yet several of the stores carried them. He’d also found a sack of cornmeal, although there’d been no wheat or rye flour.
The fat from the beef he pounded into pemmican, mixing it with the little sugar they had around the house, with salt, with pepper, and some Worcestershire sauce for a bit of flavor. That he’d partly cook, keeping the fat that melted out for more pemmican, and to store bacon in. Bacon covered with fat and kept protected from air will keep a long time before going rancid.
So much for food, he decided. Now for water. He went out to the swimming pool. He’d started emptying it last night. It had almost drained, and he began filling it again. This time it wouldn’t get chlorine. When it was filling well he put the cover over it to keep leaves and dirt out.
Take a long time to drink all that, he thought. And there’s the contents of the hot-water heater at any given time. And… He rooted around in the garage until he found a number of old plastic bottles. Several had held bleach and still smelled of it. Perfect. He filled them without rinsing. The others he washed out carefully. Now, even if the pool went, there’d be some water.
Eat, drink. What’s next? Sleep. That one was easy. Harvey Randall never threw anything away, and he had, in addition to his regular backpacking bag, a U.S. Army Arctic sleeping bag, a summer-weight bag, bag liners, Andy’s discarded bag, and even the one he’d bought that only time Loretta had tried a hike. He took them all out and hung them on the back clothesline. Solar heat. The simplest and most efficient solar power system known to man: Hang your clothes out to dry, rather than use an electric or gas dryer. Of course not many “conservationists” did it; they were too busy preaching conservation. And I’m being unfair, and why?
Because I’ve got Hammer Fever, and my wife knows it. Loretta thinks I’ve gone crazy — and I’m scaring her, too. She’s convinced I think it’s going to hit.
And the more he did to prepare for Hammerfall, the more real it became. I’m even scaring myself, he thought. Have to remember that for the book. Hammer Fever. “Hey, hon…”
“Yes, darling?”
“Don’t look so worried. I’m doing research.”
“On what?” She brought him a beer.
“Hammer Fever. I’m going to write a book on it, once the comet’s gone past. I’ve done all the work. It might even be a best seller.”
“Oh. I’d love it if you had a book. People look up to an author.”
Which, Harv thought, they do. Sometimes. Okay. Now we can eat, drink and sleep. That leaves fight and run.
Fight. Not so good. He had no faith in his skill with guns; either the shotgun or the target pistol. No gun would have given him real confidence. There was no limit to how good a weapon the other guy might have, or how skillful he might be with it, and Harvey Randall had spent the war as a correspondent, not as a soldier.
But there’s also bribe. The liquor and spices might buy my way out of trouble. And if I can hang on to them, in a few years they’ll be literally priceless, providing there’s any surplus food left for luxuries, and there usually is, for someone. For centuries the price of black pepper was fixed, all across Europe, at its own weight in gold, ounce for ounce, and not everybody’s going to have thought of hoarding pepper.
Harvey was proud of that idea.
So. That leaves running, and the TravelAll’s in as good a shape as I can get it. Bicycles will fit on top, if, as and when. And there’s Sunday to go for things I haven’t thought of.
Harvey went in, exhausted, but with a feeling of satisfaction. He wasn’t exactly ready, but at least he could pretend to be prepared. And a lot better than most. Loretta had waited up for him, and she had the Ben-Gay out. She didn’t bug him with a lot of questions; she just rubbed him down good, decided he wasn’t interested in anything more intimate and let him get to sleep.
As he dropped off he thought about how much he loved her.
June: Four
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
It was night below on Earth. Every ninety minutes Hammerlab passed through day and night; time aboard was kept by a clock, not by light and dark outside.
Cities glowed across Europe at the world’s edge, but the black face of the Atlantic covered half the sky, hiding nucleus and coma of Hamner-Brown. In the other direction stars blazed through thin mist. The comet’s tail streamed up from the horizon on all sides, doming the black Earth with luminous blues and oranges and greens streaming upward to the dome’s star-pierced dark apex. Far off to the side the half-moon floated in a matrix of shock waves, like diamond patterns in a still photograph of rocket flame. It was a sight that no one could tire of.
They had broken off work for dinner. Rick Delanty ate steadily, his attention on the glory beyond the windows. They had all lost weight — they always did — but Rick was already nine pounds light, and was trying to make up for it. (Considerable ingenuity had gone into devising a gadget to find a human’s weight in null-gravity.)
“So long as you’ve got your health,” Rick said, “you’ve got everything. Wow, it’s good not to vomit.”
He got puzzled looks from the kosmonauts, who had never watched American TV commercials. Baker ignored him. The Sun exploded over the world’s edge. Rick closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them to watch dawn’s blue-and-white arc roll toward them. Yesterday’s hurricane pattern still squatted on the Indian Ocean like a sea monster on an ancient map. Typhoon Hilda. Far to the left was Everest and the Himalaya massif. “That’s a sight I’m never going to get tired of.”
“Yes.” Leonilla joined him at the viewport. “But it seems so very fragile. As if I could reach out and… run my thumb across the land, leaving a path of destruction hundreds of kilometers wide. That is an uneasy feeling.”
Johnny Baker said, “Hold that thought. The Earth is fragile.”
“You are worried about the comet?” Her expression was hard to read. Russian face and body language is not quite the same as American.
“Forget the comet. The more you know, the more fragile we are,” said Johnny. “A nearby nova could sterilize everything on Earth except the bacteria. Or the Sun might flare up. Or cool off a lot. Our galaxy could become a Seyfert galaxy, exploding and killing everything.”
Leonilla was amused. “We need not worry for thirty-three thousand years. Speed of light, you know.”
Johnny shrugged. “So it happened thirty-two thousand, nine hundred years ago. Or we could do it to ourselves. Chemical garbage killing the ocean, or heat pollution—”
Rick said, “Not so fast. Heat pollution could be the only thing saving us from the glaciers. Some people think the next Ice Age started a few centuries back. And we’re running out of coal and oil.”
“Sheesh! You can’t win.”
“Atomic wars. Giant meteor impacts. Supersonic aircraft destroying the ozone layers,” said Pieter Jakov. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because we aren’t safe down there,” Baker said.
“The Earth is large, and probably not as delicate as it looks,’ Leonilla said. “’But man’s ingenuity… sometimes that is what I fear.”
“Only one answer,” Baker said. He was very serious now. “We’ve got to get off. Colonize the planets. Not just here, planets in other systems. Build really big spacecraft, more mobile than planets. Get our eggs into a lot of baskets, and it’s less likely that some damn fool accident — or fanatic — will wipe us out just as the human race is becoming something we can admire.”