The Hammer of Eden

bones. Someday, Priest realized, Mario might come back to haunt him. But he had done all he could to conceal the evidence of his crime.

Now he had to steal the seismic vibrator.

He turned away from the burning body and started walking.

* * *

At the commune in Silver River Valley, there was an inner group called the Rice Eaters. There were seven of them, the remnants of those who had survived the desperate winter of 1972–73, when they had been isolated by a blizzard and had eaten nothing but brown rice boiled in melted snow for three straight weeks. On the day the letter came, the Rice Eaters stayed up late in the evening, sitting in the cookhouse, drinking wine and smoking marijuana.

Song, who had been a fifteen-year-old runaway in 1972, was playing an acoustic guitar, picking out a blues riff. Some of the group made guitars in the winter. They kept the ones they liked best, and Paul Beale took the rest to a shop in San Francisco, where they were sold for high prices. Star was singing along in a smoky, intimate contralto, making up words, “Ain’t gonna ride that no-good train …” She had the sexiest voice in the world, always did.

Melanie sat with them, although she was not a Rice Eater, because Priest did not care to throw her out, and the others did not challenge Priest’s decisions. She was crying silently, big tears streaming down her face. She kept saying: “I only just found you.”

“We haven’t given up,” Priest told her. “There has to be a way to make the governor of California change his damn mind.”

Oaktree, the carpenter, a muscular black man the same age as Priest, said in a musing tone: “You know, it ain’t that hard to make a nuclear bomb.” He had been in the marines, but had deserted after killing an officer during a training exercise, and he had been here ever since. “I could do it in a day, if I had some plutonium. We could blackmail the governor — if they don’t do what we want, we threaten to blow Sacramento all to hell.”

“No!” said Aneth. She was nursing a child. The boy was three years old: Priest thought it was time he was weaned, but Aneth felt he should be allowed to suckle as long as he wanted to. “You can’t save the world with bombs.”

Star stopped singing. “We’re not trying to save the world. I gave that up in 1969, after the world’s press turned the hippie movement into a joke. All I want now is to save this, what we have here, our life, so our children can grow up in peace and love.”

Priest, who had already considered and rejected the idea of making a nuclear bomb, said: “It’s getting the plutonium that’s the hard part.”

Aneth detached the child from her breast and patted his back. “Forget it,” she said. “I won’t have anything to do with that stuff. It’s deadly!”

Star began to sing again. “Train, train, no-good train …”

Oaktree persisted. “I could get a job in a nuclear power plant, figure out a way to beat their security system.”

Priest said: “They would ask you for your resume. And what would you say you had been doing for the last twenty-five years? Nuclear research at Berkeley?”

“I’d say I been living with a bunch of freaks and now they need to blow up Sacramento, so I came here to get me some radio-friggin’-activity, man.”

The others laughed. Oaktree sat back in his chair and began to harmonize with Star: “No, no, ain’t gonna ride that no-good train …”

Priest frowned at the flippant air. He could not smile. His heart was full of rage. But he knew that inspired ideas sometimes came out of lighthearted discussions, so he let it run.

Aneth kissed the top of her child’s head and said: “We could kidnap someone.”

Priest said: “Who? The governor probably has six bodyguards.”

“What about his right-hand man, that guy Albert Honeymoon?” There was a murmur of support: they all hated Honeymoon. “Or the president of Coastal Electric?”

Priest nodded. This could work.

He knew about stuff like that. It was a long time since he had been on the streets, but he remembered the rules of a rumble: Plan carefully, look cool, shock the mark so badly he can hardly think, act fast, and get the hell out. But something bothered him. “It’s too … like, low-profile,” he said. “Say some big shot gets kidnapped. So what? If you’re going to scare people, you can’t pussyfoot around, you have to scare them shitless.”

He restrained himself from saying more. When you’ve got a guy on his knees, crying and pissing his pants and pleading with you, begging you not to hurt him anymore, that’s when you say what you want; and he’s so grateful, he loves you for telling him what he has to do to make the pain stop. But that was the wrong kind of talk for someone like Aneth.

At this point, Melanie spoke again.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against Priest’s chair. Aneth offered her the big joint that was going around. Melanie wiped her tears, took a long pull on the joint, and passed it up to Priest, then blew out a cloud of smoke and said: “You know, there are ten or fifteen places in California where the faults in the earth’s crust are under such tremendous, like, pressure that it would only take a teeny little nudge, or something, to make the tectonic plates slip, and then, boom! It’s like a giant slipping on a pebble. It’s only a little pebble, but the giant is so big that his fall shakes the earth.”

Oaktree stopped singing long enough to say: “Melanie, baby, what the fuck you talking about?”

“I’m talking about an earthquake,” she said.

Oaktree laughed. “Ride, ride that no-good train …”

Priest did not laugh. Something told him this was important. He spoke with quiet intensity. “What are you saying, Melanie?”

“Forget kidnapping, forget nuclear bombs,” she said. “Why don’t we threaten the governor with an earthquake?”

“No one can cause an earthquake,” Priest said. “It would take such an enormous amount of energy to make the earth move.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It might take only a small amount of energy, if the force was applied in just the right place.”

Oaktree said: “How do you know all this stuff?”

“I studied it. I have a master’s in seismology. I should be teaching in a university now. But I married my professor, and that was the end of my career. I was turned down for a doctorate.”

Her tone was bitter. Priest had talked to her about this, and he knew she bore a deep grudge. Her husband had been on the university committee that turned her down. He had been obliged to withdraw from the meeting while her case was discussed, which seemed natural to Priest, but Melanie felt her husband should somehow have made sure of her success. Priest guessed that she had not been good enough to study at doctoral level — but she would believe anything rather than that. So he told her that the men on the committee were so terrified of her combination of beauty and brains that they conspired to bring her down. She loved him for letting her believe that.

Melanie went on: “My husband — soon to be my ex-husband — the stress-trigger theory of earthquakes. At certain points along the fault line, shear pressure builds up, over the decades, to a very high level. Then it takes only a relatively weak vibration in the earth’s crust to dislodge the plates, release all that accumulated energy, and cause an earthquake.”

Priest was captivated. He caught Star’s eye. She nodded somberly. She believed in the unorthodox. It was an article of faith with her that the bizarre theory would turn out to be the truth, the unconventional way of life would be the happiest, and the madcap plan would succeed where sensible proposals foundered.

Priest studied Melanie’s face. She had an otherworldly air. Her pale skin, startling green eyes, and red hair made her look like a beautiful alien. The first words he had spoken to her had been: “Are you from Mars?”

Did she know what she was talking about? She was stoned, but sometimes people had their most creative ideas while doping. He said: “If it’s so easy, how come it hasn’t already been done?”

“Oh, I didn’t say it would be easy. You’d have to be a seismologist to know exactly where the fault was