Lucifer's Hammer

But Baker stood up suddenly. “All right. We’re here, with our guns and Dr. Forrester’s notes. Tim, you go try on that wet suit. Maybe we can dig up some of what we need to fight with. I wish I knew how much time we’ve got.”

The policeman went up the slanting ladder slowly, carefully, with a fat sandbag balanced on his shoulder. He was sandyhaired and square-jawed, and his uniform was wearing through. Mark followed him with another sandbag. They added the bags to the barricade atop the cooling tower. By now Tim’s radio was nearly walled in.

The man turned to confront Mark. He was Mark’s own size, and angry. “We did not desert our city,” he said.

“That wasn’t what I meant.” Mark resisted the urge to back up. “I only said most of us—”

“We were on duty,” the policeman said. “I know at least a couple of us were watching TV if we could get to one. The Mayor was. I wasn’t. First I knew, one of the girls was yelling that the comet had hit us. I stayed at my post. Then the Mayor came through collecting us. He herded us all into elevators and down to the parking garage and packed the women and some of the men into half a dozen station wagons that were already loaded with stuff. He put us cops on motorcycles for an escort and we headed for Griffith Park.”

“Did you have any—”

“I had no idea what was happening,” Patrolman Wingate said. “We got up into the hills, and the Mayor told us the comet had done some damage and we could ride it out here and go clean up the mess afterward. Oh, boy.”

“Did you see the tidal wave?”

“Oh, boy. Czescu, there just wasn’t anything left to clean up. It was all foam and mist down there, and some of the buildings were still sticking up, and Joh

The policeman stopped. Mark Czescu respected his silence. They watched four boats leaving with Robin Laumer and part of his construction crew. There had been a shouting match when Laumer tried to claim some of the supplies, but the men with guns — including Mark and the Mayor’s police — had won their point.

“We went through the San Joaquin in four hours,” the policeman said, “and let me tell you, that was tricky driving.

We had the sirens, but we spent as much time off the road as on. We had to leave one of the wagons. We got here and it was already over the hubcaps, and that dike was a solid wall. We packed stuff from the wagons on our backs over the levees in the rain. When we’d done that, Price put us to work on the levees. He worked us like donkeys. Next morning it was an ocean out there, and it was six hours more before I got a shower.”

“Shower.”

The policeman turned to look at Mark. “What?”

“You said it so casually. Shower. A hot shower. Do you know how long… ? Skip it. All I ever said was, most of us had to do some ru

The policeman’s nose almost touched Mark’s. It was narrow, prominently bridged, a classic Roman nose. “We did not run. We were in the right place to put the city back together again afterward. Goddammit, there wasn’t anything left! There’s nothing left but this power plant, which the Mayor says is officially part of Los Angeles. We’re here now. Nobody’s going to hurt it.”

“All right.”

The four boats were dwindling with distance. A few of the remaining construction men had climbed the levee to watch them go — wistfully, perhaps. “I expect they’ll be fishermen now,” Mark said.

“Try to imagine how little I care,” the policeman said. “Let’s get to work.”

Horrie Jackson cut the motor and let the boat drift to a stop. “Far as I can tell, Wasco is just under us,” he said. “If it’s not, there ain’t much I can do about it.”

Tim looked at the cold water and shuddered. The wet suit fit him, but there were loose spots, and it was going to be damned cold out there. He tested the air system. It worked. The tanks were fully charged; and that had been impressive, too. When the mechanics at SJNP hadn’t had valves and fittings in stock, they simply went into the machine shop and made them. It was a reminder of another world, a world when you didn’t have to make do with what was around, when you had some control.

“I keep thinking,” Tim said. “If people’s pet goldfish got loose, what happened to the piranhas?”

“Too cold for them,” Jason Gillcuddy said, and he laughed.

“Yeah. Well, here goes.” Tim climbed to the gunwale, sat balanced for a moment, and rolled off backward into the water.

The cold was a shock, but it wasn’t as bad as he expected. He waved at the boat crew, then tried an experimental dive. The water was as black as ink. He could barely see his wrist compass and depth gauge. The gauge was another of the SJNP crew’s miracles, fabricated and calibrated in a couple of hours. Tim turned on the sealed lantern. The beam gave him no more than ten feet of milky visibility.

The sea in Emerald Bay off Catalina had been clear as glass. He had flown through seaweed jungles rich with darting fish… Iong ago.

He kicked down into the white murk, searching for the bottom, and found it at sixty feet. There was no sound but the bubbles from his regulator, the sound of his breathing. A shape loomed up in front of him, monstrous, humpbacked, a Volkswagen, he saw when he got closer. He didn’t look inside.

He followed the road. He passed an Imperial with hordes of fish swarming in and out of the broken windows. No buildings. More cars… and finally a gas station, but it had burned before it was flooded. He kept going. He would be out of air soon.

Finally, civilization: rectangular shadings in the murk. Visibility was too poor to let him be selective. The doors he tried were locked. Locked against the sea… He swam on until he found a smashed plate-glass window. It was frighteningly dark in there, but he forced himself to enter.

He was in a large room; at least it felt large. A dense cloud of white fog to one side proved to be a rack of paperback books turned to mush and floating particles. The mist followed him as he swam away. He found counters and shelves, racks and goods toppled to the floor. He coasted above the floor, finding treasure everywhere — lamps, cameras, radios, tape recorders, Tensor lamps, television sets, nose drops, spray cans of paint, plastic models, tropical fish tanks, batteries, soap, scouring pads, light bulbs, ca

So many things, and mostly ruined. His air supply cut off abruptly; in panic he looked behind for his diving partner, then realized that despite all his training he was diving without a buddy. That was almost fu

He left the store and surfaced. He was a long way from the boat. He waved until he had their attention, and let them come to him. He was exhausted when they hauled him aboard.

“Did you find any food?” Horrie Jackson wanted to know. “We found some food with that scuba stuff before we ran out of air. We get back to Porterville I can show you lots of places where there’s food. You dive for it and we’ll split.”

Tim shook his head. He felt an infinite sadness. “That was a general store,” he said.

“Can you find it again?”

“I think so. It’s right under us.” Probably he could, and there would be much to salvage; but in his exhaustion he could not feel any excitement over his find. He felt only a terrible sense of loss. He turned to Jason Gillcuddy as probably the only man who could understand — if anyone could.