“Mushroom salad.” said Gillcuddy.
“Bouillabaisse. With a chilled Moselle,” Tim said. They talked of meals they’d never eaten and now never would.
“And I missed most of my chances,” Hugo Beck said. “I had to start a goddam commune. Fellows, let me tell you, it doesn’t work.”
“I’d never have guessed,” Jason said. Hugo Beck retreated from the irony in Gillcuddy’s voice, and the writer said quickly, “Anyway, we carry miracles. I think.” He kicked a large sack that lay in the bottom of the boat. “Will this stuff work?”
“Forrester says it will,” Mark said, “especially if you give it a good kick. But we don’t have much with us. Hardy bargains hard.”
Horrie Jackson looked back from his place at the wheel “Jesus, I’ll say he does. I’m here.”
The drizzle turned gray and lighter gray. Ninety-three million miles eastward, the Sun must be placidly unaffected by the greatest disaster in written history. The boats floated on an endless sea dotted with debris. The corpses of men and animals were gone now. Horrie Jackson increased speed, but not by a lot. There were logs and bits of houses, inflated tires, the jetsam of civilization. Treetops showed like rectangular arrays of puffy bushes; but there were single trees, and some were just submerged. Any of that could tear the bottom out of their boat.
Hugo Beck called across the boat, “Hey, Mark. What would you do for a Silva Thin?”
“Get your hand off my knee and I’ll tell you.”
Jackson steered by compass through the gloomy dawn. There was no one else on the lake, only the small flotilla. Cindy Lu labored in the rear, a big motor with a tiny boat molded around her, roaring her frustration at the weight she must pull. Horrie bellowed above the sound of his own motor, “I’ll come back with a boatload of fish, enough to feed everyone in that power plant. What I want in return is enough of those corn things to fill that gunnysack the fish was in. Now, it’s not that big a sack…”
Tim Hamner peered ahead into the rain. Something ahead? At first he saw an island with rectangular shapes jutting upward. Not unusual… but as they got closer he saw that some of the shapes were cylinders, and big. He looked for motion, human shapes. They had to have heard Cindy Lu’s roar.
Alim Nassor found Hooker and Jerry Owen in the command post. Maps were spread across the table, and Hooker was moving small cardboard units on them. A voice cut through the fabric wall to thunder in Alim’s ear.
“For their pride is the pride of the magicians of old, who thought to force all Nature to their bidding. But ours is the pride of those who trust in the Lord. Our need is not for the magicians’ weapons, but only for the Lord’s favor…”
Hooker looked up in disgust. “Crazy bastard.”
Alim shrugged.
They needed Armitage, and despite the cynical talk they used when Armitage wasn’t around, most of them at least partly believed in the preacher’s message. “Well, I got nothing against wrecking the damn power plant,” Hooker said. “It’s got to go, I can see that. But it’s—”
“Sure! It takes a lot of industry to support something like that.” Jerry Owen spoke with no idea that he was interrupting. “If we have that plant, we’ll want to use the electricity. First because it’s convenient, then because we need it, and then it’s too later Then we’ll need all the other industry to keep the nuclear plant running. Industrial society all over again, and that’s the end of freedom and brotherhood, because we’ll need wage slavery to—”
“I said I believe you. Just for God’s sake stop with the fucking speeches.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Owen asked.
“Well, the plant isn’t going anywhere, is it? It’ll wait till we’re ready. The question is when?” Hooker said. “Look, when we started off all we wanted was a place to hide. Like the goddam Senator has, someplace we can defend. Someplace ours. Well, we can’t do that.”
“You gave that up the first time you stewed a man.”
“Think I don’t know that, motherfucker?” Hooker’s voice had a tightly controlled edge to it. “So now we’re on a roller coaster. We can’t stop. We have to keep growing. Take the whole goddam state. Maybe more. But we sure as hell can’t stop now.”
He pointed to the map. “And the Senator’s valley sits right here. We can’t go north of that till we take his place. Hell, we can’t even hold White River and those hills as long as the Senator’s people can come raiding our territory anytime they want to. One thing we learned in ’Nam: You leave the enemy a place to retreat and get organized, what they call a sanctuary, and you cannot beat him. And you know what that Senator is doing?” Hooker ran his finger along the line of hills to the east of the San Joaquin Sea. “He’s sent fifty men on horses up in there. They’re recruiting. On our flanks. Now I don’t know how many there are up in those hills, but if they all get together they can do us trouble. So. We don’t give ’em a chance to do it. We hit the Senator, and we do it now, before he gets organized.”
“I see,” said Jerry Owen. He stroked his blond beard. “And the Prophet wants us to go after the power plant—”
“Right,” Hooker said. “Pull the whole army south. You see what that does to us? But how the hell do I talk that crazy bastard into letting me finish off the Senator’s place before we go after that power plant?”
Owen looked thoughtful. “Maybe you don’t. You know, I don’t think they’d have more than fifty, sixty people in that plant. Not fighting people. They could have a lot more women and kids, but they won’t have much of an army. And they’re on an island out there, they can’t have much food. Not much ammunition. No real defenses…”
“You saying it will be easy to knock off?” Alim Nassor said.
“How easy?” Hooker asked. “How many?”
Jerry shrugged. “Give me a couple of hundred men. And some of the artillery. Mortars. Hit the turbines with mortars and that finishes the electricity. They can’t operate the nuclear reactor without electricity. They need it for the pumps. Hit the turbines, and the whole thing melts down—”
“Will it blow up?” Alim asked. The idea excited him and scared him. “Big mushroom cloud? What about fallout? We’d have to get out from under that fast, wouldn’t we?”
Jerry Owen looked at him with amusement. “Nope. No great white light. No big mushroom cloud. Sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” Hooker said. “Once we get that place, can you make me some atom bombs?”
“No.”
“You don’t know how?” Hooker showed his disappointment. Owen had been talking like he knew it all.
And Owen was offended. “Nobody does. Look, you can’t make atom bombs out of nuclear fuel. Wrong stuff. It wasn’t designed for that. Wasn’t designed to blow up, either. Hell, we probably won’t get a real melt-down. They put safety precautions on their safety precautions.”
Alim said, “You guys always said they weren’t safe.”
“No, of course they’re not, but safe compared to what?” Jerry Owen waved north toward the ruined dam and the drowned city of Bakersfield: cubistic islands rising from a filthy sea. “That was a hydroelectric plant. Was that safe? People who wouldn’t go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams.”
“So why do you hate that place?” Hooker asked. “Maybe… maybe we ought to save it.”
“Goddammit, no,” Jerry Owen said.
Alim shot Hooker a look. Now you’ve started him off again, it said.
“It’s too much, don’t you see that?” Owen demanded. “Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology. Bigger and bigger. More quick fixes. You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you’re ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth. Pollution. Cities so big they rot in the center. Ghettos. Don’t you see? Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature. For awhile. Until finally you can’t get back in balance. The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth…”