The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  “My God,” said Eddie, “we’ll lose it all.”

  George broke in: “Henry, we’re in the middle of something.”

  “Now, George. I want everybody back here within thirty minutes. Please acknowledge to Andi. Don’t worry about securing equipment. Frank, what’s the status on the sub?”

  Carson was enraged. “It’s loaded. We were just getting ready to head for the pier.”

  “Forget it. Is Tommy with you?”

  “Yes.”

  Eddie climbed onto the cart. “Get going,” he said to Hutch.

  “Tommy.” Henry sounded calm. “Take the sub and head straight out to sea. Go as far as you can.”

  “Why not leave it where it is?” asked Carson.

  “Because it’s safer in deep water. We don’t know what’ll happen here. Frank, I need you and Hutch to find the wave. I want to know where it is, how big it is, and how fast it’s coming.”

  Carson acknowledged.

  “One more thing. It’s going to be hard to see. Tidal waves are small when they’re in deep water. Maybe only a meter or two high. But it’s long. There might be a kilometer or two between the crest and the trough.”

  Hutch and Eddie rolled into the sub bay.

  “I’m not sure what constitutes safe cover for something like this,” Henry continued. “If we have time, I’m going to get everybody ashore, out of the way of this goddam thing.”

  “Then you’ll need the sub,” Carson said.

  “It’ll take too long. We’d need time to unload it, and then a couple of trips to get everyone out. And then another three quarters of an hour to get to high ground. No, we’ll use the jetpacks if there’s time. You find out what the situation is. Where is it? How bad? When will it get here?”

  “Don’t forget,” Andi added, “to get both shuttles away from the dock.”

  Eddie jumped off the side of the cart as Carson closed the cargo hatch. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Carson blinked at the question. “Getting underway.” “You’ve got room for more.” He was trying to direct Hutch to pull closer to the sub.

  “Forget it, Ed.”

  “Anyway,” added Hutch, “the sub’s going out to meet a tidal wave. Last thing you want is a lot of ballast. It’s probably already overloaded.”

  That brought a worried reaction from Tommy. “Maybe we should unload some of this stuff.”

  “Listen,” said Eddie, “this place might get wrecked. We’ve got to save what we can.”

  “Seapoint’ll be fine,” said Carson, but he threw a worried glance toward Hutch. “Let’s get going.”

  Before they were clear of the base, Hutch had used her remote to start Alpha inland. Five minutes later, she and Carson rode the Temple shuttle into a dripping sky.

  Below, Tommy, frightened and alone, headed out to sea.

  George, deep in the Lower Temple, was also reluctant to adjust his priorities. “Henry,” he pleaded, “we can have it out of here in an hour.”

  Maggie, wherever she was, joined in: “Henry, this is critical. We can’t take a chance on losing it.”

  They were on the common channel. Hutch had been distracted, hadn’t heard enough to know what it was. “We may not have an hour,” Henry said. “Don’t argue with me; I’ve got too much to do. George, get back here.”

  Hutch stared at the ocean. It looked peaceful enough. “This kind of screw-up,” she said to Carson, “intentional or not, should cost her her career.”

  “Who?”

  “Truscott.”

  “That’s a joke. We’re politically unpopular right now. They’ll give her a medal.”

  Scanners are specialized. Those mounted on the Temple shuttle, intended for archeology, were designed to penetrate subsurface objects and provide detail at short range. What Hutch needed was the broad sweep of her own instruments. “We took the wrong shuttle,” she said.

  “Too late now. It’ll have to do.”

  It was still snowing.

  Hutch looked at her screens. “The wave might be only a meter or so high. I’m not sure that’s going to show up.”

  Carson frowned. “What if we go lower?”

  She responded by taking it down on the deck. But she kept air speed at three hundred until Carson grumbled. “We’ve got to make better time than this.”

  “We won’t find it at all if we aren’t careful. There are a lot of waves out there.”

  Carson shook his head. “This drives me right up the wall. Tidal waves are supposed to be easy to see. You sure Henry knows what he’s talking about?”

  “He’s your boss. What do you think?”

  Richard was helping Janet pack rations. The rest of the Academy team trooped in, in twos and threes. Henry plowed back and forth through the community room, head bent, hands locked behind his back.

  Carson’s voice came over the link. “We’re at one hundred kilometers. Nothing yet.”

  Tri and George came in. That made thirteen people present. All accounted for.

  “Okay, people,” Henry said. “Now that we’re all here, I think you should know what we intend to do. Let me say first that I think Seapoint will be safe. But there’s no way to be sure. If we have sufficient time, we’ll evacuate. Karl has brought up some light cable. We’ll form a human chain, and use the jets to go ashore. Once there we’ll head immediately up the pass. There’s accessible high ground there, and we should be able to get well out of harm’s way within a half hour or so after we get to the beach.”

  “How long,” asked Andi, “is ‘sufficient time’?”

  “Two hours,” he said. “If we don’t get two hours to clear out, we’ll stay here.”

  Art Gibbs stood. He looked uncertain and nervous. “Maybe we should put this to a vote, Henry.”

  Henry’s eyes hardened. “No,” he said. “No votes. I won’t have anyone killed over democratic principles.”

  “Maybe there is no wave,” said Carson. “Maybe it’s a gag.”

  “Could be,” Hutch said.

  Henry’s voice broke through the gloom. “Nothing yet, Frank?”

  Carson looked pained. “Negative, Henry. Everything’s calm out here.”

  “I don’t think we’re going about this right,” said Henry. “You’re moving too slowly. If it’s in close it won’t matter if you find it because we’ll ride it out here anyway. What we need to know is whether it’s far enough away to allow us time to get to shore. Why not take it up to top speed? If you find it far enough out, we’re in business. If not, nothing lost.”

  “No,” said Hutch. “I don’t know much about tsunamis, but I do know they come in packs. Even if we hustled out and found a wave, we couldn’t be sure there weren’t others in close. We’re not looking for one wave. We’re looking for the nearest.”

  At two hundred kilometers, they ran out from under the storm. The sea was choppy, moonlit, restless. Icebergs drifted everywhere.

  They flew on and watched the screens and the ocean. They began to sense that Henry had also begun to hope it was a false alarm.

  In the glow of their navigation lights, an enormous black fluke rose out of the water. “Whale?” she asked.

  “No whales on Quraqua.” Carson looked down. “It has to be a fish. But I don’t know that much about local wildlife.” Then, without changing his tone, he said, “There’s the wave.”

  It was long and straight, a ripple extending unbroken toward the horizon. It was not high, perhaps two meters. And not at all ominous. Just a surge of water trailing a black, polished wake. “You sure?” she asked.

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Henry, this is Hutch. We’ve got it.”

  “Where?”

  “Four hundred kilometers. It’s moving at five-fifty.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll stay here.”

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look bad.”

  Tommy Loughery was running on the surface. He had heard them pass overhead, outbound, although he’d seen nothing in
the clouds.

  “Tommy.” Andi’s voice.

  “Go ahead, Andi.”

  “You heard everything?”

  “Sure did.”

  “When it gets near, go deep. It should be easy to get below the turbulence.”

  “I will,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “You too. But I think we’ll be okay.”

  He agreed. He’d seen the pictures transmitted from the shuttle, and it now seemed to him like a needless panic. His scanners were watching for the wave. If it grew enough to become a hazard, he would have plenty of time to get down. Truth was, he was grateful to spend a few hours in the storm, watching the snow come down, listening to the sounds of the ocean. The Temple had become claustrophobic, and oppressive, and grim. He wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but he was almost glad that Kosmik had pushed them off. He’d been here only a semester, and he was scheduled for another. It had begun to seem endless. Better to get back to a world filled with women and lights and old friends and good restaurants. It would not have helped his career to break his contract and leave early. But now, he could return to D.C., and take advantage of his field experience to land a teaching job. In the future he’d leave the long-distance travel to others.

  Because the craft was designed to lie low in the water, Tommy’s sensors gave him good range only when he topped the crest of a wave. But that happened often enough to keep him aware of anything coming his way.

  He drifted, watching the sea and thinking about better days. After a while, he heard the shuttle return, and a few minutes later his sensors gave him an unusual blip at sea level. Range twenty-two kilometers. Decreasing very rapidly. “Andi.”

  “Go ahead, Tommy.”

  “I see it. Estimate speed five hundred. It just looks like a long wave.”

  “Thanks, Tom. Take the sub down.”

  “I’m forty kilometers out. And diving.” But he waited on the surface. It did not appear dangerous. He’d seen bigger along the Carolina coast. He maneuvered the sub until he had the prow pointed directly at the surge, and then he moved slowly forward.

  The blue line on his screens grew.

  Lightning flickered silently overhead.

  He turned on his spotlights, but he could see nothing except rain. The prow tilted abruptly, and he rode up. For a breathless moment, he thought he was going to be flipped. The sub pitched and righted itself and moved again through smooth water. “No sweat,” he said, under his breath.

  “Look at that son of a bitch,” murmured Carson.

  The wave raced in graceful silence through the night. In their lights, it was black and clean and elegant. “It’s slowing down,” said Hutch. “It’s under four hundred now.” It was also expanding: it was still a solid front, without a crest, but it had begun to uncoil. To grow.

  “Shallow water, Hutch.” They were both looking at the data displays. “They lose velocity as they approach beaches. Thank God for small favors.”

  “Frank, how deep is Seapoint?”

  “At high tide, which we are approaching, it’s thirteen meters. Should be enough.”

  Carson reported to Andi. She sounded frightened.

  The shuttle was running before the wave, close down on the water to facilitate measurement. “I just thought of something,” said Hutch.

  “What’s that?”

  “The monkeys. Are they on the beach at night?”

  “They’re going to have to worry about themselves, Hutch. But no, they aren’t. Usually. Some come down, occasionally, after dark, just to watch the sea. When a study was done of them several years ago, it was one of the characteristics the researchers found most interesting.”

  The Towers came up on the monitor.

  Behind them, the wave was a whisper barely audible over the roar of the sea.

  They wheeled through the Towers. The tide was out. Hutch remembered that big waves were supposed to do that, suck coastlines dry and then deliver the water back in.

  The wave rose, and mounted, and entered the shallows. It was not breaking; rather, the sea seemed to be hurling itself, dark and glittering and marble-smooth, against the ancient Towers and the rocky coastline beyond.

  Seapoint. Wednesday; 0320 hours.

  Radio and laserburst transmissions were relayed to Seapoint through a communications package mounted on a buoy which floated serenely on the surface directly above the cluster of sea domes. It was now forwarding the shuttle’s images of the oncoming wave. Those images were displayed below on eleven monitors, in five different locations. But the one that had everybody’s attention was located at the main diving port, a room of substantial size, with a large pool in its center. This was the chamber through which heavy equipment could be moved into the sea. It was advantageous under the present circumstances because there was no loose gear nearby, no cabinets, nothing that could injure anyone. Moreover, the pool was bordered by a handrail, to which they could attach themselves when the time came. There had been considerable discussion as to whether they wouldn’t be safer seated in chairs with their backs to walls that faced the oncoming wave. But the sense that there might be a need to get out quickly overcame all other considerations.

  They had sealed off the pool by closing the sea doors, after testing once to determine that the weakest among them (thought to be Maggie Tufu, who thereby became irate) could open them manually.

  The atmosphere then became almost that of a picnic. The images of the oncoming wave revealed a disturbance so essentially moderate and quiescent that none could take it seriously. The men, for the most part, made it their business to look bored throughout the exercise, while the soft laughter of the women echoed across the pool.

  Nevertheless, Richard saw that neither the boredom, nor the laughter, was real. Stiff, somewhat unnerved himself, he strolled among them, trading uneasy banter. And, when it seemed appropriate, giving assurance he did not feel. “I’ve seen worse at Amity Island,” he told Linda Thomas. It was a lie, but it made them both feel better.

  With several minutes remaining, the sub checked in. “No problem here,” Tommy reported. He could not resist admitting that he had ridden over the top of the surge. If the sub had survived that, the wave couldn’t be too serious.

  As it approached, all eyes followed it on the screen. The images were the standard shaded blues of nightlight, and there was no audio, which combined to dampen the effect that Hutch and Carson were experiencing from the shuttle. Maybe it was just as well.

  One by one, they took their places along the guardrail, used belts and lines to secure themselves to it, activated their energy shields, and began breathing from their airpacks. Richard watched the wave shut off the sky. Someone, Andi, noticed that the water level at the Towers had dropped.

  The wave charged across the last kilometer. White water showed along its crest.

  They could feel its approach in the bulkheads. They braced themselves, knelt on the deck, gripped the rail. Then the chamber shook, the lights dipped and went out, and the voice of the beast filled the night. The pool erupted and the screen went blank.

  Someone whimpered, and there was awed profanity. A second blow fell, heavy, immense, delivered by an enormous mallet.

  Richard was thrown against his belt and banged his ribs. Beside him, Linda cried out. Tri was somehow torn loose and flung into the water.

  But nobody was seriously hurt. The shocks continued, with generally decreasing fury, for several minutes. The lights came back. They were startled that it had been so severe after all, but relieved that they were all alive, and they started to laugh. It was nervous, tentative laughter. And Henry released his death grip on the guardrail, and gave them all a thumbs-up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  They came in the spring of the year to tell me you were dead.

  They spoke of war and pride, and how you’d laughed at fear,

  And called my name.

  All the while the sea grew black and still.

/>   Now you lie in a distant land, far from the summer day

  When we left our tracks on the foamy sand—

  Yet in the deeps of the night

  You call my name, your voice in the roar of the tide.

  —Fragment from Knothic Hours

  Translated by Margaret Tufu

  Cambridge University Press, 2202

  10.

  On board Alpha. Wednesday; 0610 hours.

  During the course of an hour, three sea waves struck the Temple site. The first carried away the rear wall of the Temple, blew off the roof, and destroyed the colonnade; the second, which was the largest of the three, demolished two of the Knothic Towers, and buried the Lower Temple; and the third ripped one of Seapoint’s domes from its moorings and deposited it two kilometers inland. Several sets of living quarters and a holographic display center went with it. Perhaps worst of all (since the Temple and the Towers were down to their last few days anyhow), an avalanche of sand and loose rock blocked shafts and passageways throughout the excavation site. The military chapel disappeared in the debris.

  But they hadn’t lost anyone. There were contusions and bruises to go around, and more discouragement. But they were alive. And Karl Pickens summed up one point of view when he suggested they would do well to take the hint and abandon the operation.

  Hutch, listening in the shuttle, agreed. She and Carson were coming in from another sweep of the area. They’d been all the way out to the impact site. The sea was covered with ice, but there were no more tsunamis coming. Carson sat wrapped in alternating moods of gloom and outrage. Henry sounded tired and washed out on the circuit, as if it didn’t matter anymore.

  The floatpier was gone, of course. And Priscilla Hutchins flew above the last of the Towers.

  Melanie Truscott’s message had been delivered.

  Art Gibbs and George Hackett met them with the sub, and they spent the next hour transferring cargo. Without the pier, the task was considerably more difficult. Midway through the operation they dropped a case, and watched it sink slowly out of sight. It was, of course, not beyond recovery, but there was no time to go after it. All in all, it was an awkward, slow business.

  George was surreptitiously watching Hutch, and she enjoyed his mild confusion when she talked to him. Amid the gloom generated by Henry’s people, he alone managed to retain his good humor. “You do what you can do,” he told her, “and forget the rest. No point getting ulcers over things you can’t control.”