by Larry Niven
“FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” someone’s voice shouted.
“Where was that?” Forrester called. His voice was just loud enough to go over the babble in the room.
“Apollo recovery fleet,” came the answer. “And we’ve lost communications with them. Last words we got were: ‘Fireball southeast.’ Then ‘Fireball overhead.’ Then nothing.”
“Thank you,” Forrester said.
“Houston, HOUSTON, THERE IS A LARGE STRIKE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO; I SAY AGAIN, LARGE STRIKE THREE HUNDRED MILES SOUTHEAST OF YOU. REQUEST YOU SEND A HELICOPTER FOR OUR FAMILIES.”
“Jesus, how can Baker be so calm about it?” someone demanded.
What damn fool is that? Sharps wondered. New man. Never heard the astronauts when there’s a real problem. He glanced over to Forrester.
Dan Forrester nodded. “The Hammer has fallen,” he said.
Then all the TV screens went blank, and the loudspeakers hissed with static.
Two thousand miles northeast of Pasadena, in a concretelined hole fifty feet below ground, Major Bennet Rosten idly fingered the .38 on his hip. He caught himself and put his hands on the Minuteman missile-launch-control console. They strayed restlessly for a moment, then one went to the key on its chain around his neck. Bloody hell, Rosten thought. The Old Man’s got me nervous.
He had justification. The night before, he’d got a call direct from General Thomas Bambridge, and the SAC Commander in Chief didn’t often speak personally to missile squadron commanders. Bambridge’s message had been short. “I want you in the hole tomorrow,” he’d said. “And for your information, I’ll be up in Looking Glass myself.”
“Goddam,” Major Rosten had answered. “Sir… is this the Big One?”
“Probably not,” Bambridge had answered, and then he’d gone on to explain.
Which wasn’t, Rosten thought, very reassuring. If the Russkis really thought the U.S. was blind and crippled…
He glanced to his left. His deputy, Captain Harold Luce was at another console just like Rosten’s. The consoles were deep underground, surrounded by concrete and steel, built to withstand a near miss by an atomic bomb. It took both men to launch their birds: Both had to turn keys and punch buttons, and the timing sequence was set so that one man couldn’t do it alone.
Captain Luce was relaxed at his console. Books were spread out in front of him: a correspondence course in Oriental art history. Collecting correspondence degrees was the usual pastime for men on duty in the holes, but how could Luce do it, today, when they were unofficially on alert?
“Hey, Hal…” Rosten called.
“Yo, Skipper.”
“You’re supposed to be alert.”
“I am alert. Nothing’s going to happen. You watch.”
“Christ, I hope not.” Rosten thought about his wife and four children in Missoula. They’d hated the idea of moving to Montana, but now they loved it. Big country, open skies, no big-city problems. “I wish—”
He was interrupted by the impersonal voice from the wiregrill-covered speaker above him. “EWO, EWO,” the voice said. “EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. THIS IS NO DRILL. AUTHENTICATION 78-43-76854-87902-1735 ZULU. RED ALERT. RED ALERT. YOUR CONDITION IS RED.”
Sirens screamed through the concrete bunker. Major Rosten hardly noticed as a sergeant came down the steel ladder to the entrance and slammed shut the big Mosler Safe Company bank-vault door. The sergeant closed it from the outside and twirled the combination dial. No one would get into the hole without blasting.
Then, as regulations required, the sergeant cocked his submachine gun and stood with his back to the big safe door. His face was hard, and he stood rigidly, swallowing the sharp knot of fear.
Inside, Rosten punched the authentication numbers into his console, and opened the seals on an envelope from his order book. Luce was doing the same thing at his console. “I certify that the authentication is genuine,” Luce said.
“Right. Insert,” Rosten ordered.
Simultaneously they took the keys from around their necks and put them into the red-painted locked switches on their consoles. Once inserted and turned to the first click, the keys couldn’t be withdrawn without other keys neither Luce nor Rosten had. SAC procedure…
“On my count,” said Rosten. “One. Two.” They turned the keys two clicks. Then they waited. They did not turn them further. Yet.
It was mid-morning in California; it was evening in the Greek isles. The last of the sun’s disk had vanished as two men reached the top of the granite knob. In the east a first star showed. Far below them, Greek peasants were driving overloaded donkeys through a maze of low stone walls and vineyards.
The town of Akrotira lay in twilight. Incongruities: white mudwalled houses that might have been created ten thousand years ago; the Venetian fortress at the top of its hill; the modern school near the ancient Byzantine church; and below that, the camp where Willis and MacDonald were uncovering Atlantis. The site was almost invisible from the hilltop. In the west a star switched on and instantly off, blink. Then another. “It’s started,” MacDonald said.
Wheezing, Alexander Willis settled himself on the rock. He was mildly irritated. The hour’s climb had left him breathless, though he was twenty-four years old and considered himself in good shape. But MacDonald had led him all the way and helped him over the top, and MacDonald, whose dark red hair had receded to expose most of his darkly tanned scalp, was not even breathing hard. MacDonald had earned his strength; archeologists work harder than ditchdiggers.
The two sat crosslegged, looking west, watching the meteors,
They were twenty-eight hundred feet above sea level on the highest point of the strange island of Thera. The granite knob had been called many things by a dozen civilizations, and it had endured much. Now it was known as Mount Prophet Elias.
Dusk faded on the waters of the bay far below. The bay was circular, surrounded by cliffs a thousand feet high, the caldera of a volcanic explosion that destroyed two thirds of the island, destroyed the Minoan Empire, created the legends of Atlantis. Now a new black island, evil in appearance and barren, rose in the center of the bay. The Greeks called it the New Burnt Land, and the islanders knew that some day it too would explode, as Thera had exploded so many times before.
Fiery streaks reflected in the bay. Something burned blue-white overhead. In the west the golden glow faded, not to black, but to a strange curdled green-and-orange glow, a back drop for the meteors. Once again Phaethon drove the chariot of the sun…
The meteors came every few seconds! Ice chips struck atmosphere and burned in a flash. Snowballs streaked down, burning greenish-white. Earth was deep in the coma of Hamner-Brown.
“Funny hobby, for us,” said Willis.
“Sky watching? I’ve always loved the sky,” MacDonald said. “You don’t see me digging in New York, do you? The desert places, where the air’s clear, where men have watched the stars for ten thousand years, that’s where you find old civilizations. But I’ve never seen the sky like this.”
“I wonder what it looked like after you-know-what.”
MacDonald shrugged in the near-dark. “Plato didn’t describe it. But the Hittites said a stone god rose from the sea to challenge the sky. Maybe they saw the cloud. Or there are things in the Bible, you could take them as eyewitness accounts, but from a long way away. You wouldn’t have wanted to be near when Thera went off.”
Willis didn’t answer, and small wonder. A great greenish light drew fire across the sky, moving up, lasting for seconds before it burst and died. Willis found himself looking east. His lips pursed in a soundless Oh. Then, “Mac! Turn around!”
MacDonald turned.
The curdled sky was rising like a curtain; you could see beneath the edge. The edge was perfectly straight, a few degrees above the horizon. Above was the green-and-orange glow of the comet’s coma. Below, blackness in which stars glowed.
“The Earth’s shadow,” MacDonald said. “A shadow cast through the coma.
I wish my wife had lived to see this. Just another year…”
A great light glared behind them. Willis turned. It sank slowly — too bright to see, blinding, drowning the background . — Willis stared into it. God, what was it? Sinking… faded.
“I hope you hid your eyes,” MacDonald said.
Willis saw only agony. He blinked; it made no difference. He said, “I think I’m blind.” He reached out, patted rock, seeking the reassurance of a human hand.
Softly MacDonald said, “I don’t think it matters.”
Rage flared and died. That quickly, Willis knew what he meant. MacDonald’s hands took his wrists and moved them around a rock. “Hug that tight. I’ll tell you what I see.”
“Right.”
MacDonald’s speech seemed hurried. “When the light went out I opened my eyes. For a moment I think I saw something like a violet searchlight beam going up, then it was gone. But it came from behind the horizon. We’ll have some time.”
“Thera’s a bad luck island,” Willis said. He could see nothing, not even darkness.
“Did you ever wonder why they still build here? Some of the houses are hundreds of years old. Eruptions every few centuries. But they always come back. For that matter, whattre we doing — Alex, I can see the tidal wave. It gets taller every second. I don’t know if it’ll reach this high or not. Brace yourself for the air shock wave, though.”
“Ground shock first. I guess this is the end of Greek civilization.”
“I suppose so. And a new Atlantis legend, if anyone lives to tell it. The curtain’s still rising. Streamlines from the nucleus in the west, Earth’s black shadow in the east, meteors everywhere…” MacDonald’s voice trailed off.
“What?”
“I closed my eyes. But it was northeast! and huge!”
“Greg, who named Mount Prophet Elias? It’s too bloody appropriate.”
The ground shock ripped through and beneath Thera, through the magma channel that the sea bed had covered thirty-five hundred years before. Willis felt the rock wrench at his arms. Then Thera exploded. A shock wave of live steam laced with lava tore him away and killed him instantly. Seconds later the tsunami rolled across the raw orange wound.
Nobody would live to tell of the second Thera explosion.
Mabel Hawker fanned her cards and smiled inwardly. Twenty points: Her hand was a good one. Her partner, unfortunately, wasn’t. The way Bea Anderson was bidding, they’d be out a hundred dollars by the time the plane landed at JFK.
The 747 was high above New Jersey in its descent into New York. Mabel and Chet and the Andersons were seated around a table in the first-class section, too far from the windows to see anything. Mabel regretted the bridge game. She’d never seen New York from the air; but she didn’t want the Andersons to know that.
The windows flashed again.
“Your bid, May,” Chet said.
People in the window seats were craning out. First class buzzed with voices, and Mabel heard the fear that lies buried in every passenger’s mind. She said, “Sorry. Two diamonds.”
“Four hearts,” Bea Anderson said, and Mabel cringed.
There was a soft ping. The sign lit: “FASTEN SEAT BELTS.”
“This is Captain Ferrar,” said a friendly voice. “We don’t know what that flash was, but we’ll ask you to fasten your seat belts, just in case. Whatever it was, it was a long way behind us.” The pilot’s voice was very calm and reassuring.
Did Bea have a jump bid? Oh, Lord, did she even know what an opening “two diamonds” meant? Have to bull it through. …
There was a sound: like something very large being slowly torn in two. Suddenly the 747 was laboring, surging forward.
She’d read that experienced travelers kept their seats belts fastened loosely, so she had done that. Now Mabel deliberately unfastened the belt, laid her cards face-down, and lurched toward a pair of empty window seats.
“Mother, should you do that?” Chet asked.
Mabel winced. She hated being called “Mother.” It sounded country hick. She sprawled across the seats and looked out.
The big plane nosed down, diving, as the pilots tried to compensate for a sudden tail wind moving nearly with the speed of the plane. The wings lost all lift. The 747 fell like a leaf, yawing, lurching, as the pilots fought to hold her.
Mabel saw New York City ahead in the distance. There was the Empire State Building, there the Statue of Liberty, there the World Trade Center, looking just as she’d imagined them, but poking out of a landscape tilted at forty-five degrees. Somewhere out there her daughter would be going to JFK to meet her parents and introduce the boy she was going to marry. …
Flaps were sliding from the wing’s trailing edge. The plane lurched and shuddered, and Mabel’s cards flew like startled butterflies. She felt the plane surging upward, pulling out of its dive.
Far above, black clouds ran like a curtain across the sky, faster than the plane, sparking with lightning as they moved. Lightning everywhere. An enormous bolt struck the Statue of Liberty and played along the grande dame’s upraised torch Then lightning struck the plane.
Beyond Ocean Boulevard there was a bluff. At the bottom of the bluff, the Pacific Coast Highway, and then the sea. At the edge of the bluff the bearded man watched the horizon with a look of surpassing joy.
The light had flashed only for a second or two, but blindingly. Its afterimage was a blue balloon in the bearded man’s field of view. A red glow… strange lighting effects outlining a vertical pillar… He turned with a happy smile. “Pray!” he called. “The Day of Judgment is here!”
A dozen passersby had stopped to stare. Mostly they ignored him, though he was a most impressive figure, with his eyes glowing with happiness and his thick black beard marked with two snow-white tufts at the chin. But one turned and answered. “It’s your Day of Judgment if you don’t step back. Earthquake.”
The bearded man turned away.
The black man in the expensive business suit called more urgently. “If you’re on the cliff when it falls, you’ll miss most of Judgment Day. Come on now!”
The bearded man nodded as if to himself. He turned and strolled back to join the other on the sidewalk. “Thank you, brother.”
The earth shuddered and groaned.
The bearded man kept his feet. He saw that the man in the brown suit was kneeling, and now he knelt too. The earth shook, and parts of the bluff fell away. It would have carried the bearded man with it if he hadn’t moved.
“For He cometh,” the bearded man shouted. “For He cometh to judge the Earth…”
The businessman joined in the psalm “…and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with His truth.”
Others joined. The heaving earth buckled and rolled. “Glory be to the Father and—”
A sharp sudden shock threw them to the ground. They scrambled back to their knees. The shaking stopped, and some of the group hurried away, looking for cars, running inland.
“Oh, ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord,” the bearded man cried. Those who had stayed joined in the canticle. The responses were easy to learn, and the bearded man knew all the versicles.
There were surfers out in the water. They had floated through the violent upheavals. Now they were invisible in a blinding curtain of salt rain. Many of the bearded man’s group ran away into the wet darkening. Still he prayed, and others from the apartments across the street joined him.
“Oh, ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him forever.”
The rains came hard, but just in front of the bearded man and his flock a trick combination of winds drove a clear path that let them see down the bluff to the deserted beach. The waters were receding, boiling away to leave small things flopping on the rainy wet sands.
“Oh, ye Whales, and all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord…”
The canticle ended. They knelt in the driving rain and flashing lightning. The bearded man thought he saw, far away, through the rai
n and beyond the receding waters, beyond that to the horizon, the ocean was rising in a hump, a straight wall across the world. “Save us, Oh God: for the waters are come in, even unto my soul,” the bearded man cried. The others did not know the psalm, but they listened quietly. An ominous rumble came from the ocean. “I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is; I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.”
But no, the bearded man thought. The rest of that psalm is not appropriate. Not at all. He began again. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
The water rushed forward. They finished the psalm. One of the women stood.
“Pray now,” the bearded man said.
The noise from the sea drowned out all other words, and a curtain of rain swept over them, warm rain to hide the sea and waves. It came in a rush, a towering wall of water higher than the highest buildings, an onrushing juggernaut of water foaming gray and white at the base, rising as a green curtain. The bearded man saw a tiny object moving across the face of the water. Then the wall swept over him and his flock.
Gil rested face-down on the board, thinking slow thoughts, waiting with the others for the one big wave. Water sloshed under his belly. Hot sunlight broiled his back. Other surfboards bobbed in a line on either side of him.
Jeanine caught his eye and smiled a lazy smile full of promises and memories. Her husband would be out of town for three more days. Gil’s answering grin said nothing. He was waiting for a wave. There wouldn’t be very good waves here at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, but Jeanine’s apartment was near, and there’d be other waves on other days.
The houses and apartments on the bluff above bobbed up and down. They looked bright and new, not like the houses on Malibu Beach where the buildings always looked older than they were. Yet even here there were signs of age. Entropy ran fast at the line between sea and land. Gil was young, like all the young men bobbing on the water this fine morning. He was seventeen, burned brown, his longish hair bleached nearly white, belly muscles like the discrete plates of an armadillo. He was glad to look older than he was. He hadn’t needed to pay for a place to stay or food to eat since his father threw him out of the house. There were always older women.