The difficulty with being a geologist was that, although a great deal was known about the structure of the Earth, not much of it seemed useful in predicting events. Plenty of instrumentation was deployed. Delicate strain gauges measured the forces between the sides of geological faults. Theodolites and lasers gauged the almost invisible tilting of the ground as it humped itself up into wide domes…and then, sometimes, relaxed again; and, other times, exploded in tectonic violence. That great bloat in Palmdale had been rising and falling like a sleeping man’s diaphragm, and every lift and fall had been metered for decades. But what did it mean? Could he, or anyone else alive, say that there was going to be a shattering earthquake along the San Andreas fault? Of course they could!—as long as no one asked embarrassing questions about time. It would surely happen. There was simply no question about it. But you could also say that about almost any point on the surface of the earth, even where no faults existed: sooner or later Chicago and Minneapolis would feel the ground shake beneath them and their structures sway into rubble, although it might be tens of millions of years in the future. For Southern California it would surely not be millions of years, and might not even be tens; but the social clock ran so much faster than the geological that pinpointing it within a few decades was not close enough to be of any help. Even less help in estimating damage. The best federal study had guessed at a major quake within thirty years, probably, with a loss of life in the tens of thousands, most likely, and property damage in the hundreds of millions. At least.
And no one had listened.
At least, no one had listened—he fumbled for the word he wanted—had listened purely. The only ones who had heard were the ones who had polluted the message with their own poisons, the quacks and the charlatans, the politicians and the greedy pirates like Danny Deere.
Why would no one hear what he had to say?
He slammed on the brakes, swearing to himself.
He had been deep in his own thoughts, and had not seen what was going on. A mile back slickered emergency crews had warned him that he was proceeding at his own risk, and now suddenly he saw how great that risk was. Just ahead of him, on the canyon road that led to Rainy’s apartment complex, the road seemed to be in the process of closing itself. A delta of glistening red-brown slime was building up on the roadway itself, and the gutters along the sides had become mud rivers.
And something worse was very near to happening.
Up on the hill was someone’s estate. They had obviously had experience of mud slides before, and so they had taken steps against them. They had built a cement tennis court, anchored to piles sunk into the hillside, to protect its border.
But it hadn’t worked! Now the wash from the hillside had undercut the cement. The reinforced concrete beams that held it together were visible in his headlights, and they were bare. All the earth had been washed away, and only the pillars held it. One of the pilings, once eight feet deep in the ground, was now not touching earth at all; it hung in air over a gulley. Tib swallowed and eased the car past, watching the pillars for movement. He didn’t stop shaking until he had reached Rainy’s apartment, passed the doorman and was actually standing at her door.
And, wouldn’t you know it, she was agitated about something herself, and obviously not very interested in what was agitating him. But what was agitating him should also have agitated her, so he spoke over whatever it was she was saying: “They’re closing off the canyon road. They only let me in because I said I was going to evacuate my mother.”
She stopped, regarding him. “Your mother?”
People who have been told that their senses of humor are deficient dislike explaining their jokes. Tib was annoyed; it was not a big joke, he conceded to himself, but it wasn’t a bad one. And for this he had driven eighty-five minutes through the worst weather of the year!
But he could see that Rainy was deeply disturbed. “It does not matter,” he said, taking off his wet coat. “Please tell me what is the trouble.”
“Those F.B.I, people! They’ve been here again and, listen, you won’t believe this, now they think I’m in some sort of conspiracy with the Russians!” She repeated the conversation with the agents, and waited for Tib’s response. He sat with his rubbers in his hand, not noticing that he was dripping mud on the new rug. His face was gray. “I thought you might think it was funny,” she said. “I mean—I didn’t. But I was hoping you’d talk me into it.”
He sighed and put the rubbers in the bathroom. “Naturalized citizens from Eastern Europe have trouble thinking such charges are funny,” he said. “I am sorry. It is not funny. It strikes me that everything is getting terribly unfunny at once.”
Sunday, December 27th. 10:40 a.m.
In a trailer on one of the access roads to Yellowstone Park, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist pondered a question of timing. His observations showed that the park was swell ing like a balloon, as liquid rock squeezed its way up to the surface. Rock cores revealed that the entire Yellowstone area had erupted in the past in scores of immense volcanic explosions, scattering ejecta over millions of square miles; there had been major eruptive outbreaks every few million years, and it had been several million years since the last one. Clearly, another vast eruption was due at any time, geologically speaking. The question in his mind was, did “any time” mean within the next million years? Or the next hundred? Or next week?
Although Meredith was really sick with anger and pity, when she allowed herself to think about it, her old man was taking it harder than she. He had been a day and a half alternately raging and grieving, and his emotional binge seemed to grow stronger, not less. To be sure, there was always a way of soothing him down when upset, equally good for herself; but it had worked three times already, and only temporarily.
Maybe food? While Sam took his mood off to exercise it on the telephone she considered making him something to eat. Something hearty. Something he liked. She opened the refrigerator and peered into the snowfield that was her frozen food locker. Of course! She took out a frozen package of creamed chipped beef, scraped off the frost and puzzled over the instructions on the package.
Even by Meredith’s own standards, she was not concentrating on cooking tonight. Her concerns were both personal and professional. Personal: Sam Houston Bradison had been the light of her life since they were both twenty, a long time ago, and she had never seen him so upset. The death of Myrna Licht had hit him hard. Not only because she had been his own student; because she had been a good one; because she had wasted her skills with those conniving Pedigrues; because, most of all, she had died of it in the long run.
And professionally, the storm was looming ever larger in her mind. The radio was full of it—when it was not lull of stale details and gossipy speculations about the death of Myrna Licht. There was nothing really unusual about heavy rains and mud damage at this time of year. Almost every year it happened. Almost every year the media went into a flap and a largish number of Californians went through a season of misery, and then it went away. It was like everything else about Los Angeles. Los Angelenos knew that car exhaust was strangling them, but they kept their cars. They knew that earthquakes were inevitable, but they built homes under earthfill dams. They knew that brush fires took an annual toll, but they moved into the chapparal. And they knew that every winter the rains came. This was no worse than other years, really. Not as bad, so far anyway, as, say, February of 1980; and that not nearly as bad as some of the real destroyers. There had been a winter way back during the Civil War when a warm hurricane from the Pacific struck and stayed. The combination of the downpour with the snow melt from the warm winds had filled the entire valley with water from mountains to mountains—what would they say if that happened again?
She wished Sam would get off the phone so she could check the latest reports from the Weather Bureau, just to reassure herself that this storm was only a normal winter rain, maybe a little early, but not unprecedented; and certainly nothing to do with Jupiter!
She realized she was standing there with the frozen chipped beef in her hand and the refrigerator standing open as Sam came morosely back into the kitchen. “Your friend Tib doesn’t answer, and Rainy Keating’s phone is out, and the governor is supposed to be coming down here to ‘inspect the emergency’. So I can’t get anybody at all. What the devil are you doing with that stuff?”
Guiltily she closed the fridge. “I thought you might be hungry, dear.”
“I’m too mad to be hungry.” He snapped on the television set irritably, switching from one newscast to another without listening to any. He was wearing the hapi coat she had brought back for him from a conference in Japan, and his bony knees were bare; after the last time she had applied her sovereign remedy for stress it had not seemed worthwhile to dress again. “I’ve got political IOUs to pick up all over this state,” he declared. “I’m going to see that the governor does something!”
He plucked a Christmas card off the tree and began scribbling on the back of it—names of his protégés and allies, the political family he had built up over forty years of teaching and working. There were four former students in the state legislature, and a dozen more in government jobs. At least as many more in the even more powerful position of lobbyists or special-interest pleaders. “I’m not going to let this pass,” he said, and then, “Now who the hell’s that?”
It was nearly midnight, no time for the doorbell to ring. Meredith peered through the spyhole anxiously before she opened the door, but of course there was nothing to be seen but formless wet shapes on the patio. A muffled voice called, “Hello, Grandmerry.”
It was Dennis, and there was someone with him—good heavens, that black man from the Jupes; good heavens ‘ again! and with a little girl holding his hand. She opened the door and, without entering, her grandson asked, “Can I ask you for a favor?”
Sam got up and peered to the door. “Come inside and ask it, boy! You’re going to drown out there.”
They came in, Dennis looking worried, the black man self-possessed and wary, the little girl even more self-possessed and not wary at all. “I wasn’t sure you’d let me in,” Dennis told his grandfather, who grunted without answering. “But that place we’ve been living in is no good now—”
“It never was any good!”
“—anyway, we can’t leave Afeefah there now. They’ve been asking for emergency volunteers on the radio, and Saun and I want to go out and help. So can we leave Feef here for the night?”
“Well, of course you can!” cried Meredith, smiling at the little girl, who studied her thoughtfully before allowing her a small smile in return.
Saunders Robinson patted his daughter on the head and steered her toward the woman. “We appreciate that a lot. And, look, I’m really sorry about what happened at the TV station. We had no idea.”
Sam Houston Bradison was not a person to hold a grudge. “It wasn’t your fault, although—” He stopped himself and changed what he was going to say. “If you two are going out to dig ditches you’ll want better clothes than you’ve got on. Come on, let’s see what we can find.”
Meredith felt her heart warm toward her grandson. Was it a sort of penance Dennis was paying, for having been part of that lunatic bunch? If so, she approved it. And she realized what it meant: they would be out all the night, building dikes, cleaning runoff channels; no fun for anyone.
“What you got to do is, you got to put it in the boiling water, you know?”
Meredith realized she was still holding the packet of frozen chipped beef. “My mind was wandering—Feef? Am I saying it right?”
“My name is Afeefah, and it means ‘chaste’. But you can call me Feef. “
“I thought I’d better make you something to eat.”
The little girl shook her cornrows. “We ate. We been eating, one place or another, last couple hours, nowhere else to go.”
“Sure you had a place to go, Afeefah. You’re very welcome here! How about a glass of milk?”
She shook her head again. “Black people can’t ‘tabolize milk,” she said seriously. “Anyway, there’s somebody in your driveway.”
“Oh, really?” Meredith peered out the kitchen window, but there was only Dennis’s car to see. Still, she could hear a motor. “Somebody lost and turning around, I guess. I Well! Let’s make up a bed for you, shall we? I bet you’re tired, this time of night. “
Afeefah corrected her politely, “I most usually stay up later than this.” But she trailed along happily enough as Meredith pulled out clean sheets and pillowcases. It was really very pleasant having her around, poor little thing! They could hear the men moving around in the mud room, finding boots and heavy-duty pants, but Afeefah did not seem anxious to be with her father, or worried about staying all night with total strangers—white strangers, to boot. And helpful, too. She stretched across the bed to catch one side of the sheet and carefully tucked it in, then, without being told, began stuffing pillows into the cases.
Meredith sought for a compliment. “How pretty your hair looks.”
The girl acknowledged the validity of the remark. “I done it myself,” she pointed out, in the interests of accuracy.
“You did it beautifully. Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to eat?”
It took only a moment to establish that Afeefah was really fond of Twinkies, and of course there was always plenty of that sort of thing in Meredith’s larder. It was good having a child in the house again, Meredith thought after she had told Afeefah where to find the junk food. At least twice a month she and her husband had debated getting rid of this house and moving to something smaller, now that there so seldom was anyone to occupy any of the children’s, or later the grandchildren’s, rooms; but at times like this she was grateful for them. She switched on the bedside radio, not so much for company as to make sure it worked in case Afeefah wanted it, and, of course, got a weather report. She paused with the coverlet in her hands to listen. The wind was from the south at fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, pumping up moisture from the sea; the system was stalled. But at least—for the first time in many days—there did not seem to be another storm waiting its turn out over the Pacific. There was a worrisome low far out past the International Date Line, but with any luck at all it might not hit. At least, the coast would have a chance to dry out a little.
So the governor might make it through in the morning after all—sometime tomorrow, anyway. And then Sam would have a chance to—to do what, exactly? Her husband’s discipline was political science. It was a good enough thing to study, but it led you to assume that everything wrong in the world could be made right by the right kind of election or the right kind of laws. And was there really any way to make storms and earthquakes illegal? Or was he just out for the blood of the Pedigrues?
She pulled the coverlet straight—more or less straight—and then stood up. Had that been the doorbell? Again? At this time?
Afeefah was there before her. As Meredith was hurrying to answer it Feef met her with a soggy brown-paper package in her hand. “He didn’t want to come in,” she said. “He just says to give this to this lady—” pointing to the name on the envelope.
It said in crabbed, foreign-looking printing: MRS RAINEY KETING PERSONAL. “How very strange,” said Meredith. Outside she heard a car door slap tinnily closed, and when she looked out the little sports car was backing carefully out into the streaming street.
Lev Mihailovitch looked up at the house as he turned toward the freeway, hoping he had done the right thing. Was this Mrs. Dr. Bradison a black person? If not, was this child her maid’s, perhaps?
But he didn’t have any choice; the document was not truly of sensitive importance, but there were persons somewhere who thought it was. He could not simply mail it. And he had been turned away from the road to Mrs. Dr. Keating’s apartment, and her telephone had not seemed to work—it did not matter; it was done. He concentrated on driving. This weather was unpleasant, although Moscow’s winters were of course far worse. The car
was even more unpleasant. At the rental place at the airport it had looked enough like the special-order car they had made for him at the Togliatti works in the Soviet Union to tempt him, but it was not the same; the shift did not operate in the same way, the windshield wipers were automatic instead of being turned with one hand while he drove with the other; all of its parts were strange. In any case, driving in Los Angeles was a terror.
He paused at a traffic light to look again at the map, and confirmed his belief that he was going the best way. The Ventura Freeway. Straight over to the San Diego, then down Century Boulevard to the airport. In decent weather, no more than forty minutes. Today—One could not say, but surely before his plane was due to take off. If any planes were taking off. Even if they did not, it had been irregular for him to leave the airport at all between planes, and it was best not to keep his “companion” waiting at the check-in counter.
Of course, Lev Mihailovitch had much less fear of “companions” than any ordinary Soviet citizen. He was not ordinary. He was a cosmonaut, and cosmonauts were next to God. Cosmonauts were allowed to order special little sports cars and drive them at eighty kilometers an hour all over the city, with the traffic militiamen waving them on. Cosmonauts got five-room apartments on Gorky Street; cosmonauts got to buy at the best of the special stores. It was not a bad life, being a cosmonaut. It was even permitted for a cosmonaut to disappear from his party for a little while, now and then. Even if some attractive young capitalist woman was involved—cosmonauts, after all, were men!
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