by Larry Niven
There was a jack, and a few flares, and an old raincoat, oil-soaked as if it had been used to wipe the engine. Eileen took out the jack handle. “Use that. Tim, we don’t have much time—”
“I know.” Hamner took the thin metal rod and went over to the fence. He stood helplessly, pounding the jack handle into his right hand. The task looked hopeless. He heard the trunk lid slam, then the car door. The starter whirred.
Tim looked around, startled, but the car wasn’t moving. He couldn’t see Eileen’s face through the driving rain and wet glass. Would she leave him here?
Experimentally he put the jack handle between the wire and a fence post and twisted. Nothing happened. He strained, throwing his weight onto the handle, and something gave. He slipped and fell against the fence, and felt his wet clothing tear as a jagged point snagged him. It cut him, and the salt on his clothes was in the wound. He hunched his shoulders against the pain and hopelessness, and stood, helpless again.
“Tim! How are you doing?”
He wanted to turn and call to her. He wanted to tell her it was no use, and that he was miserable, and he’d torn his clothes, and…
Instead, he crouched and inserted the jack handle again, twisting and prying at the wire, until it broke free of the post. Then again, and again, and suddenly the whole length of fence was loose there. He went to the next post and began his work.
Eileen gunned the car. The horn sounded, and she called, “Stand aside!” The car left the road and came at the fence rammed it, tore it loose from another post and flattened it onto the grass, and the car drove over it. The car motor raced. “Get in,” she called.
Tim ran for it. She hadn’t stopped completely, and now it seemed she wasn’t going to stop at all. He ran to catch up and tugged open the door, threw himself onto the seat. She gunned the car across the fairway, leaving deep ruts, then came to a green. She drove across it. The car tore at the carefully manicured surface.
Tim laughed. There was a note of hysteria in it.
“What?” Eileen asked. She didn’t take her eyes off the grassy fairway ahead.
“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…”
She didn’t say anything, and Tim stared moodily ahead again. How many man-hours had gone to produce that perfect grassy surface? Would anyone ever again bother? Tim had another wild impulse to laughter. If there were golf clubs in the car, he could get out and tee off on a green…
Eileen went completely across the golf course and back to the blacktop road up into the hills. Now they were in wilderness, high hills on either side of them. They passed a picnic ground. There were Boy Scouts there. They had a tent set up, and they seemed to be arguing with the scoutmaster. Tim opened the car window. “Stay on high ground,” he shouted.
“What’s happened below?” the scoutmaster asked.
Eileen slowed to a stop.
“Fires. Floods. Traffic jams,” Tim said. “Nothing you’ll want to go into. Not for awhile.” He motioned the adult closer. “Stay up here, at least for the night.”
“Our families…” the man said.
“Where?”
“Studio City.”
“You can’t get there now,” Tim said. “Traffic’s not moving in the valley. Roads closed, freeways down, lot of fires. The best thing you can do for your families is to stay up here where you’re safe.”
The man nodded. He had big brown eyes in a square, honest face. There was a stubble of red beard on his chin. “I’ve been telling the kids that. Julie-Ann, you hear that? Your mother knows where we are. If things were really bad down there, they’d send the cops after us. Best we stay here.” He lowered his voice. “Lot of rebuilding to do after that quake, I guess. Many hurt?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. He turned away. He couldn’t look into the scoutmaster’s eyes.
“We’ll stay another day, then,” the scoutmaster said. “They ought to have things moving again by tomorrow. Kids aren’t really prepared for this rain, though. Nobody expects rain in June. Maybe we ought to go down into Burbank and stay in a house. Or a church. They’d put us up—”
“Don’t,” Tim said. His voice was urgent. “Not yet. Does this road go on over the top?”
“Yes.” The man brought his face close to Tim’s. “Why do you want to go up into that?” He waved toward the lightning that flashed on the peaks above. “Why?”
“Have to,” Tim said. “You stay here. For the night, anyway. Let’s go, Eileen.”
She drove off without saying anything. They rounded a bend, leaving the scoutmaster standing in the road. “I couldn’t tell him either,” Eileen said. “Are they safe there?”
“I think so. We seem to be pretty high.”
“The top is about three thousand feet,” Eileen said.
“And we’re no more than a thousand below it. We’re safe,” Tim said. “Maybe it would be better to wait here, until the lightning stops. If it ever does stop. Then we can go on or go back. Where do we get if we go over?”
“Tujunga,” Eileen said. “It’s a good eighteen hundred, two thousand feet elevation. If we’re safe, Tujunga should be.” She continued to drive, winding further into the hills.
Tim frowned. He had never had a good sense of direction, and there were no maps in the car. “My observatory is up Big Tujunga Canyon — at least, you can get to it by going up that road. I’ve done it. And the observatory has food, and emergency equipment and supplies.”
“Hammer Fever?” Eileen teased. “You?”
“No. It’s remote up there. I’ve been snowbound more than once, a week at a time, more. So I keep plenty of supplies. Where are we going? Why don’t you stop?”
“I’m — I don’t know.” She drove on, more slowly, almost crawling along. The rain had slackened off. It was still pouring down, hard for Los Angeles, unheard of for summer, but just then it was only rain, not bathtubs of water pouring out of the sky. In compensation the wind rose, howling up the canyon, screaming at them so that they were shouting at each other, but the wind was such a constant companion that by now they didn’t notice.
They came around another bend, and they were on a high shelf looking south and westward. Eileen stopped the car, despite the danger of slides from above them. She turned off the motor. The wind howled, and lightning played above and ahead. The rain beat down so that the San Fernando Valley was obscured, but sometimes the wind whipped the rain in a thinner pattern and they could see blurred shapes out there. There were bright orange flares down on the valley floor. Dozens of them.
“What are those?” Eileen wondered aloud.
“Houses. Filling stations. Power-plant oil storage. Cars, homes, overturned tank trucks — anything that can burn.”
“Rain and fire.” She shivered, despite the warmth inside the car. The wind howled again.
Tim reached for her. She held back a moment, then came to him, her head against his chest. They sat that way, listening to the wind, watching orange flames blur through driving rain.
“We’ll make it,” Tim said. “The observatory. We’ll get there. We may have to walk, but it’s not that far. Twenty, thirty miles, no more. Couple of days if we walk. Then we’ll be safe.”
“No,” she said. “No one will ever be safe. Not again.”
“Sure we will.” He was silent a moment. “I’m… I’m really glad you found me,” he said. “I’m not much of a hero, but—”
“You’re doing fine.”
They were quiet again. The wind continued to whistle, but gradually they became aware of another sound — low, rumbling, building in volume, like a jet plane, ten jets, a thousand jets roaring for takeoff. It came from the south; and as they watched, some of the orange flares ahead of them went out. They didn’t flicker and die; they went out suddenly, snuffed from view in an instant. The noise grew, rushing closer.
“Tsunami,” Tim said. His voice was low, wondering. “It really did come. A tidal wave, hundreds, maybe thousands of feet high—”
’’Thousands?” Eileen said nervously.
“We’ll be all right. The waves can’t move far across land. It takes a lot of energy to move across land. A lot. Listen. It’s coming up the old Los Angeles River bed. Not across the Hollywood Hills. Anyone up there is probably safe. God help the people in the valley…”
And they sat, holding each other, while lightning played around and above them, and they heard the rolling thunder of lightning and above the thunder the roar of the tsunami, as one by one the bright orange fires went out in the San Fernando Valley.
Between Baja California and the west coast of Mexico is a narrow body of water whose shoreline is like the two prongs of a tuning fork. The Sea of Cortez is as warm as bathwater and as calm as a lake, a playground for swimmers and sailors.
But now the pieces of Hamner-Brown’s nucleus sink through Earth’s atmosphere like tiny blue-white stars. One drops toward the mouth of the Sea of Cortez until it touches water between the prongs. Then water explodes away from a raw orange-white crater. The tsunami moves south in an expanding crescent;. but, confined between two shorelines, the wave moves north like the wave front down a shotgun barrel. Some water spills east into Mexico; some west across Baja to the Pacific. Most of the water leaves the northern end of the Sea of Cortez as a moving white-peaked mountain range.
The Imperial Valley, California’s second largest agricultural region, might as well have been located in the mouth of a shotgun.
The survivors crawled toward each other across the broken JPL parking lot. A dozen men, five women, all dazed, crawling together. There were more people below, in the wreckage of the buildings. They were screaming. Other survivors went to them. Sharps stood dazed. He wanted to go below and help, but his legs wouldn’t respond.
The sky was boiling with clouds. They raced in strange patterns, and if there was daylight coming through the swirling ink, it was much dimmer than the continual flash of lightning everywhere.
Wonderingly, Sharps heard children crying. Then a voice calling his name.
“Dr. Sharps! Help!”
It was Al Masterson. The janitor in Sharps’s building. He had gathered two other survivors. They stood beside a station wagon that rested against a big green Lincoln. The station wagon was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, two wheels on the blacktop, two above it. The crying children were inside it. “Hurry, please, sir,” Masterson called.
That broke the spell. Charlie Sharps ran across the parking lot to help. He and Masterson and two other men strained at the heavily loaded station wagon until it tilted back to vertical. Masterson threw open the door. There were two young faces, tearstained, and an older one, June Masterson. She wasn’t crying.
“They’re all right,” she was saying. “I told you they were all right…”
The station wagon was packed to the roof and beyond. Food, water, cans of gas lashed to its tailgate; clothing, shotgun and ammunition; the stuff of survival, with the children and their blankets fitted in somehow. Masterson was telling everyone who would listen, “I heard you say it, the Hammer might hit us, I heard…”
A corner of Sharps’s mind giggled quietly to itself. Masterson the janitor. He’d heard just enough from the engineers, and of course he hadn’t understood the odds against. So: He’d been ready. Geared to survive, with his family waiting in the parking lot, just in case. The rest of us knew too much…
Family.
“What do we do, Dr. Sharps?” Masterson asked.
“I don’t know.” Sharps turned to Forrester. The pudgy astrophysicist hadn’t been able to help right the car. He seemed to be lost in thought, and Sharps turned away again. “I guess we do what we can for survivors — only I’ve got to get home!”
“Me too.” There was a chorus of voices.
“But we should stay together,” Sharps said. “There won’t be many people you can trust—”
“Caravan,” Masterson said. “We take some cars, and we all go get our families. Where do you all live?”
It turned out there was too much variety. Sharps lived nearby, in La Canada. So did two others. The rest had homes scattered as far as Burbank and Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley. The valley people had haunted eyes.
“I wouldn’t,” Forrester said. “Wait. A couple of hours…”
They nodded. They all knew. “Four hundred miles an hour,” Hal Crayne said. A few minutes ago he’d been a geologist.
“More,” Forrester said. “The tsunami will arrive about fifty minutes after Hammerfall.” He glanced at his watch. “Less than half an hour.”
“We can’t just stand here!” Crayne shouted. He was screaming. They all were. They couldn’t hear their own voices.
Then the rain came. Rain? Mud! Sharps was startled to see pellets of mud splatter onto the blacktop. Pellets of mud hard and dry on the outside, with soft centers! They hit the cars with loud clatters. A hail of mud. The survivors scrambled for shelter: inside cars, under cars, in the wrecks of cars.
“Mud?” Sharps screamed.
“Yes. Should have thought of it,” Forrester said. “Salt mud. From the sea bottom, thrown up into space, and…”
The strange hail eased, and they left their shelters. Sharps felt better now. “All of you who live too far to get to your homes, go down and help the survivors in the building area. The rest of us will go get our families. In caravan. We’ll come back here if we can. Dan, what’s our best final destination?”
Forrester looked unhappy. “North. Not low ground. The rain… could last for months. All the old river valleys may be filled with water. There’s no place in the Los Angeles basin that’s safe. And there will be aftershocks from the earthquake…”
“So where?” Sharps demanded.
“The Mojave, eventually,” Forrester said. He wouldn’t be hurried. “But not at first, because there’s nothing growing there now. Eventually—”
“Yes, but now!” Sharps demanded.
“Foothills of the Sierras,” Forrester said. “Above the San Joaquin Valley.”
“Porterville area?” Sharps asked.
“I don’t know where that is…”
Masterson reached into his station wagon and fished in the glove compartment. The rain was falling heavily now, and he kept the map inside the car. They stood outside, looking in at June Masterson and her children. The children were quiet. They watched the adults with awed eyes.
“Right here,” Masterson said.
Forrester studied the map. He’d never been there before, but it was easy to memorize the location. “Yes. I’d say that’s a good place.”
“Jellison’s ranch,” Sharps said. “It’s there! He knows me, he’ll take us in. We’ll go there. If we get separated, we’ll meet there.” He pointed on the map. “Ask for Senator Jellison’s placer Now, those that aren’t coming with us immediately, get down and help survivors. Al, can you get any of these other cars started?”
“Yes, sir.” Masterson looked relieved. So did the others. They’d been used to taking orders from Sharps for years; and it felt right to have him in command again. They wouldn’t obey him like soldiers, but they needed to be told to do what they wanted to do anyway.
“Dan, you’ll come on the caravan with us,” Sharps said. “You wouldn’t be much use down below—”
“No,” Forrester said.
“What?” Sharps was certain he’d misunderstood. The thunder was continuous, and now there was the sound of rising wind.
“Can’t,” Forrester said. “Need insulin.”
It was then that Sharps remembered that Dan Forrester was a diabetic. “We can come by your place—”
“No,” Forrester screamed. “I’ve got other things to do. I’d delay you.”
“You’ve got—”
“I’ll be all right,” Forrester said. He turned to walk off into the rain.
“The hell you will!” Sharps screamed at Dan’s retreating back. “You can’t even get your car started when the battery’s dead!”
Forrester didn’t turn. Sharps watched his friend, knowing he’d never see him again. The others pressed around. They all wanted advice, orders, some sense of purpose, and they expected Charles Sharps to provide it. “We’ll see you at the ranch!” Sharps called.
Forrester turned slightly and waved.
“Let’s move out,” Sharps said. “Station wagon in the middle.” He looked at his tiny command. “Preston, you’ll be with me in the lead car. Get that shotgun and keep it loaded.” They piled into their cars and started across the broken lot, moving carefully to avoid the huge cracks and holes.
Forrester’s car had survived. He’d parked it at the very top of the lot, well away from any others, well away from trees and the edge of the bluff — and he’d parked it sideways to the tilt of the hill. Sharps could just make out Forrester’s lights following them down to the street. He hoped Dan had changed his mind and was following them, but when they got to the highway, he saw that Dan Forrester had turned off toward Tujunga.
The fire road narrowed to a pair of ruts tilted at an extreme angle, with a sloping drop of fifty feet or more to their right. Eileen fought for control of the car, then brought it to a stop. “We walk from here.” She made no move to get out. The rain wasn’t quite so bad now, but it was colder, and there was still continuous lightning visible all around them. The smell of ozone was strong and sharp.
“Let’s go, then,” Tim said.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I don’t know, but let’s do it.” Tim couldn’t have explained. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself. To Hamner, life was civilized, and relatively simple. You stayed out of the parts of town where money and social position weren’t important, and everywhere they were, you hired people to do things, or bought the tools to do them with.
Intellectually he knew that all this was ending as he sat. Emotionally… well, this couldn’t be Ragnarok. Ragnarok was supposed to kill you! The world was still here, and Tim wanted help. He wanted courteous police, briskly polite shopkeepers, civil civil servants; in short, civilization.