Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  The tower, the large central building of JPL, was gone. In its place there was a crumpled mass of glass, concrete, twisted metal, broken computers. The Von Karman Center was similarly in ruins. One wall had fallen, and through it Sharps saw the first unmanned lunar lander, the metal spider that had gone to the Moon to scoop up its surface. The spacecraft was helpless under the falling roof. Then the walls collapsed as well, burying the spacecraft, and burying the science press corps.

  “End! When will it end?” someone was screaming. Sharps could barely hear the words.

  Finally the quake began to die. Sharps stayed down. He would not tempt the fates. What remained of the parking lot was tilted downslope and bulged in the middle. Now Sharps had time to wonder who had been on the stairway behind the cameramen. Not that it mattered; they were gone, the camera people were gone; everyone who had been within fifty feet of the stairwell had vanished into the mass below, covered by the hillside and the mangled remains of cars.

  The day was darkening. Visibly darkening. Sharps looked up to see why.

  A black curtain was rolling across the sky. Within churning black clouds the lightning flared as dozens, scores, hundreds of flashbulbs.

  ■

  Lightning flared and split a tree to their right. The instantaneous thunder was deafening, and the air smelled of ozone. More lightning crashed in the hills ahead.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Tim Hamner demanded.

  “No.” Eileen drove on, speeding through empty; rain-washed streets. “There’s a road up into the hills here somewhere. I’ve been up it a couple of times.”

  To their left and behind them were more houses, mostly intact. To the right were the Verdugo Hills, with small side streets penetrating a couple of blocks into them, each street with its “Dead End” sign. Except for the rain and lightning, everything seemed normal here. The rain hid everything not close to them, and the houses, mostly older, stucco, Spanish-style, stood without visible damage.

  “Aha!” Eileen cried. She turned hard right, onto a blacktop road that twisted its way along the base of a high bluff, a protruding spur of the lightning-washed mountains ahead. The road twisted ahead, and soon they saw nothing but the hill to the right, the brooding mountains looming above and a golf course to their left. There were neither cars nor people.

  They turned, turned again, and Eileen jammed on the brakes. The car skidded to a halt. It stood face-to-face with a landslide. Ten feet and more of flint and mud blocked their way.

  “Walk,” Tim said. He looked out at the lightning ahead and shuddered.

  “The road goes a lot further,” Eileen said. “Over the top of the hills, I think.” She pointed to her left, at the golf course protected by its chain link fence. “Tear a hole in the fence.”

  “With what?” Tim demanded, but he got out. Rain soaked him almost instantly. He stood helplessly. Eileen got out on the other side and brought the trunk keys.

  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 a while.” 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 her
e, 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’ 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, tear-stained, 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’ 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 c
ars 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 place! Now, those that aren’t coming with us immediately, get down and help survivors. Al, can you get any of these other cars started?”