Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

A teenage boy used to be an asset. He could work in the fields—drive a team, or even a tractor. The pressure could be shared, shifted to younger shoulders. A man could ease off.

Comets die a little every time they pass near the Sun. They lose all that tail material forever. So each time the tail's smaller, until eventually there's nothing left but the nucleus, and that comes as a handful of rocks. Meteor showers. Some of our best shooting stars are pieces of old comets falling onto Earth."

Adonis passed within a million miles in 1936. So what? Remember the panic in 1968? People, especially in California, took to the hills. Everyone forgot about it a day later— that is, everyone who hadn't gone broke buying survival equipment that wasn't needed.

The big mountains looked untouched, never climbed by humans. Harvey knew that was an illusion. If you stooped to tie your bootlaces on the John Muir Trail, you were likely to be trampled by backpackers.

The easy way to make beef jerky is not the way the Indians used. They employed a slow fire, or a summer sun, and their quality control was poor. Far better to set a modern oven at 100° to 120° and leave the thin strips of beef in for twenty-four hours. The meat isn't supposed to cook; it's supposed to dry. A good strip of beef jerky is bone-dry, and hard enough to kill you if you file the end to a point. It will also keep practically forever.

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.

There were many U-Haul trailers piled high with household possessions, reminding Eileen of news clips from the war: refugees, only no refugees in Asia or Africa ever carried birdcages, Beautyrest mattresses, and stereo sets.

Twenty or thirty men and women in white robes—not all of them bed-sheets—had chained themselves across Alameda from lamppost to telephone pole. They sang hymns! The quality of singing had been pretty good for a while, but the police soon led away their white-bearded leader, and now they were discordant.

"I remember when some lady stepped on the Los Angeles Country Club green with spiked heels," Tim said. "The steward nearly died! I thought I understood Hammerfall and what it meant, but I didn't, not until you drove across the greens…"

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it.

Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan.

Future Shock; Cults of Unreason; Dante's Inferno; Tau Zero…

"Weather patterns do not usually cross the equator, and most of the strikes were in the Northern Hemisphere. I believe we will find that Australia and South Africa are undamaged industrial societies.

Leonilla said nothing. Pieter said, "Earthquakes." "You know it, but they'll be over before we can land. The shock waves must have triggered every fault there is. There won't be another earthquake in California for a hundred years."

Mountain areas that don't have earthquake faults.

There aren't.

Sardine cans last fine. God knows why.

Already prepped for salt?

The crisscross pattern of low walls in New England and Southern Europe had always seemed charming and handsome. Until now Harvey Randall hadn't realized just how much human misery each of those walls represented. They weren't built to be pretty, or to mark boundaries, or even to keep cattle and swine out of the fields. They were there because it was too much work to haul those stones completely out of the fields, and the fields had to be cleared.