Steve Cox went to the podium and rapped for attention, while Hardy led Tim over and a dozen hands helped him up on the platform. Someone moved the Senator’s chair to the doorway so that he could hear. The Mayor and Chief Hartman stood behind him, leaning forward. Tim couldn’t see Maureen.
He braced himself on the lectern, facing hundreds of eyes, and drank more scotch. It warmed him. The room was almost quiet: no talking, except for newcomers crowding in by the door, and shushing noises from those already inside; He had never spoken before a live audience in real life… before the comet fell. They were too close, too real; he could smell them. He saw George Christopher making his way through the crowd like an icebreaker, moving triumphantly, like Beowulf displaying the arm of the monster Grendel, and hell, they all looked like that. Triumphant. And waiting expectantly.
“Good news first,” he said. “The power plant’s still running. We were attacked. This afternoon. We beat them, but it was close. Some of us are dead and some of us are wounded and more will die of the wounds. You already know that most of the Brotherhood wasn’t even there—”
Applause and triumphant laughter erupted. Tim should have expected that, from the warriors who’d decimated the New Brotherhood’s main force, but he hadn’t. He was jolted. Where did these yahoos get off, drinking and dancing and bragging while the men and women Tim Hamner had left behind waited to die? When quiet came he spoke in anger.
“General Baker is dead. The New Brotherhood isn’t,” Tim said. He watched the reaction. Anger. Incredulity.
“They won’t come here again,” someone shouted. There were more cheers.
“Let him talk. What happened?” George Christopher demanded. The room was silent again.
“The Brotherhood came at us with boats, the first time,” Tim said. “It wasn’t hard to drive them off. Then we heard on the radio that you were fighting them, and we figured that would be the end of it, when you said you’d won.” He gripped the lectern, remembering the shouting celebration they’d held in the San Joaquin plant after news of the Stronghold victory.
“But they did come back. Today. They had a big raft. Sandbags around it. Mortars. They stayed out of range of anything we had, and they were blowing us apart. One of the shells got a steam line, live steam, and Price’s people had a hell of a time putting it back together. Another shell got Jack Ross.”
Tim watched George Christopher lose his triumphant grin.
“Jack was alive when we took him off the boat and put him in the van. But he was dead when we got here,” Tim said. “Another mortar went off just in front of me. It hit the sandbags we’d put on top of the cooling tower, where we had the radio. It killed the guy next to me and blew the radio apart, and it punched a piece of shrapnel into my hipbone. It’s still there.
“They kept that up. Standing off where we couldn’t shoot back. Price’s people had made some cannon. Muzzle-loaders, made out of pipe, powered by compressed air. They weren’t accurate enough. We couldn’t hit the barge. And the damned mortar shells kept dropping on us. Baker took some troops out in boats. That didn’t do any good either. The Brotherhood had machine guns and the boats couldn’t get close enough — they had those sandbags anyway. Finally Baker brought the boats back. He put everybody off.”
In the corner of his eye Tim saw Maureen in the doorway of the Mayor’s office. She stood behind her father, her hand on his shoulder. Eileen was near her.
“We had a racing boat we used as a tug,” Tim said. “Cindy Lu. Johnny told Barry Price, ‘I used to be a fighter pilot. They always taught us there was one way not to miss.’ Then he took Cindy Lu out at top speed and rammed her right into the barge. Covered the raft with burning gasoline. He’d carried some extra gasoline and thermit on the deck. After that the Brotherhood came on with their other boats, but they had to come in range of our stuff, and we did some damage. Finally they left.”
“Ran away,” George Christopher said. “They always run.”
“They didn’t run,” Tim said. “They retreated. There was some crazy white-haired guy standing in plain sight on one of the boats. We kept shooting at him, but we never hit him. He was shouting at them to kill us. Last I heard, he still was. They’ll be back.”
Tim paused to see what effect he’d had. Not enough. He’d killed the gay mood of the party, but all he saw was resentment and sorrow. Nothing else.
“They killed fourteen of us, counting Jack. Hit maybe three times that many, and a lot of them will die. There’s a nurse and some medicines, but no doctor. We need one. We need another radio.” Their looks: anger, sorrow, resentment. They knew what he’d say next. He went doggedly on. “What we need most is reinforcements. We can’t take another attack like that one. I don’t think gas bombs will do it either. We need guns. Machine guns you took from the New Brotherhood would help. But mostly we need men, because it takes just about all the power-plant staff on standby just to keep the place going in case there’s a hit on the plant. Price’s people are…” He fumbled for words. Hell, it would sound corny. So what? “They’re magnificent. I saw a guy wade into a cloud of live steam. Live steam. He walked right into it to turn a valve, to turn the steam off. He was still alive when I left, but there wasn’t any point in bringing him here.
“Another of the power workers spliced live wires. Thousands of volts, and he worked on it hot while mortar bombs fell around him. Baker’s dead. They’re still alive. And they need help. We need help. I’m going back.” He couldn’t look at Eileen as he said that.
He felt someone behind him. Al Hardy had climbed onto the podium. He came to the left side of the lectern and stood there with his hand held up for attention. When he spoke, it was with an orator’s voice that rolled about the large room. “Thank you, Tim,” he said. “You are persuasive. Of course you want to go back. But the question is, have we anything to gain? How many people are there at the nuclear plant? Because we have boats, and now we have food, and we can bring all of them here. It will not be hard to evacuate that plant, and I’m sure we will have no trouble getting volunteers for the job.”
Harvey Randall came in from the hospital in time to hear Tim’s report begin. He’d come in the back way, through the Mayor’s office, and he found himself next to Maureen. When Tim told of what had happened to Baker, he was there, with his hand on her arm, but lightly. She wasn’t going to faint or scream; she may have been crying, but even that wasn’t obvious. And Harvey didn’t want to be obtrusively present, not now.
He was thinking: Son of a bitch! Maureen was taking it better than Delanty. The black astronaut seemed ready to murder. Well, that figured. Baker’s other two companions weren’t in the room. Leonilla was operating on the gut-shot policeman, with Comrade helping her.
(They called him Comrade now. Brigadier Pieter Jakov was the last Communist, and proud of it, and it avoided the difficulty of his name.)
The Senator’s face was ashen gray and his hands were clasped tightly in his lap. There went one of his plans, Harvey thought. It struck him, then: One prince was dead, and one was enthralled by a witch.
George Christopher wasn’t alone. Marie stood with him: Marie, the only woman in the room in stockings and heels as well as skirt and sweater and simple jewelry; and she and George stood as a couple, not as two single people. Whenever anyone got too close to Marie or ogled her too suggestively, George’s face clouded.
Three princes. One was killed by ogres. One was spellbound by a witch. The third was standing beside the princess, and the enemy had been defeated. The need for fighting men was not over, but it was no longer critical. Now the Stronghold needed builders — and that Harvey Randall could do. I’m crown prince now, he thought. Son of a bitch.