Lucifer's Hammer

“And we’re no more than a thousand below it. We’re safe,” Tim said. “Maybe it would be better to wait here, 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 thi

“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’s 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, tearstained, 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’s 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.”