Lucifer's Hammer

Megatons of live steam begin to cool. Water condenses first around dust and larger particles. What falls out of the pattern are the heavier globules of mud. Some join as they fall. They are still hot. In the drier air below, some water evaporates.

Hammerfall: Two

The TV store was closed. It wouldn’t open for an hour. Tim Hamner searched frantically — a bar, a barbershop, anyplace that might have TV — but he saw nothing.

He thought fleetingly of taxis, but that was silly. Los Angeles taxis didn’t cruise. They’d come if you called them, but it might be forever. No. He wasn’t going to get to JPL — and Hamner-Brown’s nucleus must be passing right now! The astronauts would see it all, and send their films down to Earth, and Tim Hamner wouldn’t see any of it.

The police had removed some of the Wardens, but that had no effect on the traffic jam. Too many abandoned cars. And now what? Tim thought. Maybe I can…

It was as if a flashbulb had gone off behind him: blink and gone. Tim blinked. What exactly had he seen? There was nothing to the south but the green-brown hills of Griffith Park, with two horseback riders trotting along the trail.

Tim frowned, then thoughtfully walked back toward his car. There was a telephone in it, and he might as well summon a taxi.

Two white-robed Wardens, one with red trim on a tailormade robe, came toward him. Tim avoided them. They stopped another pedestrian. “Pray, ye people! It is even now the hour, but it is not yet too late …”

The horns and shouts of anger had reached a crescendo when he got to his car—

The earth moved. A sudden, sharp motion, then something more gentle. Buildings shook. A plate-glass window crashed somewhere nearby. There were more sounds of falling glass. Tim could hear them because the car horns were suddenly quiet. It was as if everyone were frozen in place. A few people came out of the supermarket. Others stood in doorways, ready to get outside if it continued.

Then nothing. The horns began. People were yelling and screaming. Tim unlocked the car and reached inside for the radiophone—

The earth moved again. There were more sounds of falling glass, and someone screamed. Then, once again, silence. A flight of crows came winging out of the wooded patch at the corner of the Disney lot. They screamed at the people below, but no one paid any attention. The seconds stretched on, and the horns were once again begi

This time it didn’t stop. The ground shook and rolled and shook again, and whenever Tim tried to get up he was thrown down again, and it seemed that it would never stop.

The chair was on its back under a pile of catalogs, and Eileen was in it. Her head hurt. Her skirt was around her hips.

She rolled out of the chair very slowly and carefully, because there was shattered glass all the hell over the place, and pulled her skirt down. Her nylons were in ruins. There was a long, thin smear of blood along her left calf, and she watched afraid to touch the spot, until she was certain there was no more blood coming out of her leg.

The front office was a chaos of catalogs, broken glass coffee table, tumbled shelving and the remains of the big plate-glass window. She shook her head dizzily. Silly thoughts boiled in her head. How could one window have had so much glass? Then, as her head cleared, she realized that each of those heavy shelves and their books had missed her head as it fell. She sagged against the receptionist’s desk, dizzy.

She saw Joe Corrigan.

The plate-glass window had fallen inward, and Corrigan had been sitting next to it. Pieces of glass lay all about him. Eileen staggered to him and knelt, cutting her knee on a glass sliver. A-dagger-size glass lance had gouged his cheek and bitten deep into his throat. Blood pooled beneath the wound but there was no more flowing out. His eyes and mouth were wide open.

Eileen pulled the glass splinter free. She covered the wound with her palm, surprised that it wasn’t bleeding more. What do you do about a throat wound? There were police outside, one of them would know. She took a deep breath, made ready to scream. Then she listened.

There were plenty of people screaming. Others were shouting. The noises from outside were chaotic. People, and rumbling sounds, as if buildings were still falling. Automobile horns, at least two, jammed on, not quite steady, wavering in mechanical agony. Nobody was going to hear Eileen call for help.

She looked down at Corrigan. She couldn’t feel a pulse. She probed at the other side of his neck. No pulse there. She found a tuft of fuzz from the rug and put it on his nostrils. It didn’t even quiver. But that’s crazy, she thought. The neck wound couldn’t have killed him, not yet! He was dead, though. Heart attack?

She got up slowly. Salt tears rolled down her cheek. They had the taste of dust. Automatically she brushed at her hair and her skirt before going outside, and she felt an impulse to laugh. She choked it down. If she started that, she wouldn’t stop.

There were more sounds from out there. Ugly sounds, but she had to get outside. There were police outside, and one was Eric Larsen. She started to call to him, then she saw what was happening and she stood quietly in the ruined doorway.

Patrolman Eric Larsen was from Kansas. To him the earthquake was completely disorienting, completely terrifying. His urge was to run in circles, flapping his arms and squawking. He couldn’t even get to his feet. He tried, and was thrown down each time, and presently decided to stay there. He put his head in his arms and closed his eyes. He tried to think of the TV script he could write when this was over, but he couldn’t concentrate.

There was noise. The Earth groaned like an angry bull. That’s a poetic image, where did I hear it? But there was more, cars crashing, buildings crashing, concrete falling, and everywhere people screaming, some in fear, some in rage, some just screaming. Eventually the ground stopped moving. Eric Larsen opened his eyes.

His world had come apart. Buildings were broken or tilted, cars wrecked, the street itself buckled and crumpled. The parking lot was a jigsaw of asphalt at crazy angles. The supermarket across the street had fallen in on itself, walls collapsing, roof tumbled. People dragged themselves out of it. Still Eric waited, willing to take his lead from the natives. Tornadoes in Kansas, earthquakes in California: The natives would know what to do.

But they didn’t. They stood, those few remaining, blinking in the bright, cloudless summer day, or they lay on the ground in bloody heaps, or they screamed and ran in circles.

Eric looked for his partner. Regulation blue trousers and black shoes protruded from under a load of plumbing supplies fallen from a truck. A crate labeled “Silent Plush” stood where the head should have been. The crate was very flat on the ground. Eric shuddered and got to his feet. He couldn’t go near that crate. Not just yet. He started toward the supermarket, wondering when the ambulances would come, looking for a senior officer to tell him what to do.

Three burly men in fla