Lucifer's Hammer

“We can’t just stand here!” Crayne shouted. He was screaming. They all were. They couldn’t hear their own voices.

Then the rain came. Rain? Mud! Sharps was startled to see pellets of mud splatter onto the blacktop. Pellets of mud hard and dry on the outside, with soft centers! They hit the cars with loud clatters. A hail of mud. The survivors scrambled for shelter: inside cars, under cars, in the wrecks of cars.

“Mud?” Sharps screamed.

“Yes. Should have thought of it,” Forrester said. “Salt mud. From the sea bottom, thrown up into space, and…”

The strange hail eased, and they left their shelters. Sharps felt better now. “All of you who live too far to get to your homes, go down and help the survivors in the building area. The rest of us will go get our families. In caravan. We’ll come back here if we can. Dan, what’s our best final destination?”

Forrester looked unhappy. “North. Not low ground. The rain… could last for months. All the old river valleys may be filled with water. There’s no place in the Los Angeles basin that’s safe. And there will be aftershocks from the earthquake…”

“So where?” Sharps demanded.

“The Mojave, eventually,” Forrester said. He wouldn’t be hurried. “But not at first, because there’s nothing growing there now. Eventually—”

“Yes, but now!” Sharps demanded.

“Foothills of the Sierras,” Forrester said. “Above the San Joaquin Valley.”

“Porterville area?” Sharps asked.

“I don’t know where that is…”

Masterson reached into his station wagon and fished in the glove compartment. The rain was falling heavily now, and he kept the map inside the car. They stood outside, looking in at June Masterson and her children. The children were quiet. They watched the adults with awed eyes.

“Right here,” Masterson said.

Forrester studied the map. He’d never been there before, but it was easy to memorize the location. “Yes. I’d say that’s a good place.”

“Jellison’s ranch,” Sharps said. “It’s there! He knows me, he’ll take us in. We’ll go there. If we get separated, we’ll meet there.” He pointed on the map. “Ask for Senator Jellison’s placer Now, those that aren’t coming with us immediately, get down and help survivors. Al, can you get any of these other cars started?”

“Yes, sir.” Masterson looked relieved. So did the others. They’d been used to taking orders from Sharps for years; and it felt right to have him in command again. They wouldn’t obey him like soldiers, but they needed to be told to do what they wanted to do anyway.

“Dan, you’ll come on the caravan with us,” Sharps said. “You wouldn’t be much use down below—”

“No,” Forrester said.

“What?” Sharps was certain he’d misunderstood. The thunder was continuous, and now there was the sound of rising wind.

“Can’t,” Forrester said. “Need insulin.”

It was then that Sharps remembered that Dan Forrester was a diabetic. “We can come by your place—”

“No,” Forrester screamed. “I’ve got other things to do. I’d delay you.”

“You’ve got—”

“I’ll be all right,” Forrester said. He turned to walk off into the rain.

“The hell you will!” Sharps screamed at Dan’s retreating back. “You can’t even get your car started when the battery’s dead!”

Forrester didn’t turn. Sharps watched his friend, knowing he’d never see him again. The others pressed around. They all wanted advice, orders, some sense of purpose, and they expected Charles Sharps to provide it. “We’ll see you at the ranch!” Sharps called.

Forrester turned slightly and waved.

“Let’s move out,” Sharps said. “Station wagon in the middle.” He looked at his tiny command. “Preston, you’ll be with me in the lead car. Get that shotgun and keep it loaded.” They piled into their cars and started across the broken lot, moving carefully to avoid the huge cracks and holes.

Forrester’s car had survived. He’d parked it at the very top of the lot, well away from any others, well away from trees and the edge of the bluff — and he’d parked it sideways to the tilt of the hill. Sharps could just make out Forrester’s lights following them down to the street. He hoped Dan had changed his mind and was following them, but when they got to the highway, he saw that Dan Forrester had turned off toward Tujunga.

The fire road narrowed to a pair of ruts tilted at an extreme angle, with a sloping drop of fifty feet or more to their right. Eileen fought for control of the car, then brought it to a stop. “We walk from here.” She made no move to get out. The rain wasn’t quite so bad now, but it was colder, and there was still continuous lightning visible all around them. The smell of ozone was strong and sharp.

“Let’s go, then,” Tim said.

“What’s the hurry?”

“I don’t know, but let’s do it.” Tim couldn’t have explained. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself. To Hamner, life was civilized, and relatively simple. You stayed out of the parts of town where money and social position weren’t important, and everywhere they were, you hired people to do things, or bought the tools to do them with.

Intellectually he knew that all this was ending as he sat. Emotionally… well, this couldn’t be Ragnarok. Ragnarok was supposed to kill you! The world was still here, and Tim wanted help. He wanted courteous police, briskly polite shopkeepers, civil civil servants; in short, civilization.

A towering wall of water sweeps eastward through the South Atlantic Ocean. Its left-hand edge passes the Cape of Good Ho pe, scouring lands which have been owned in turn by Hottentots, Dutch, British and Afrikaaners, sweeping up to curl at the base of Table Mountain, foaming up the wide valley to Paarl and Stellenbosch.

The right-hand edge of the wave impacts against Antarctica, breaking of] glaciers ten miles long and five wide. The wave hursts through between Africa and Antarctica. When it reaches the wider expanse of the Indian Ocean the wave has lost half its force: Now it is only four hundred feet high. At four hundred and fifty miles an hour it moves toward India, Australia and the Indonesian islands.

It sweeps across the lowlands of southern India, then, focused by the narrowing Bay of Bengal, regains much of its strength and height a’ it breaks into the swamplands of Bangladesh. It smashes northward through Calcutta and Dacca. The waters finally come to halt at the base of the Himalayas, where they are met by the floods pouring out of the Ganges Valley. As the waters recede, the Sacred Ganges is choked with bodies.

They trudged through the mud, climbing steadily. The fire road went over the top of the hill in a saddle, not far below the peaks, but far enough; the lightning stayed above them.

Their shoes picked up huge gobs of mud, and soon weighed three or four times what they should. They fell in the mud and got up again, helped each other when they could, and staggered up over the top and down the other side. The world condensed into a series of steps, one step at a time, no place to stop. Tim imagined the town ahead: undamaged, with motels and hot water and electric lights and a bar that sold Chivas Regal and Michelob…

They reached blacktop pavement, and the going was easier.

“What time is it?” Eileen asked.

Tim pressed the button on his digital watch. “Just about noon.”

“It’s so dark — ” She slipped on wet leaves and tumbled onto the blacktop. She didn’t get up.

“Eileen…” Tim went over to help her.

She was sitting on the pavement, and she didn’t seem hurt, but she wasn’t trying to get up. She was crying, quietly.

“You’ve got to get up.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t carry you very far.”

Almost she laughed; but then her face sank into her hands and she sat huddled in the rain.

“Come on,” said Tim. “It’s not that bad. Maybe everything’s all right up here. The National Guard will be out. Red Cross. Emergency tents.” He felt it evaporating as he named it: the stuff of dreams; but he went on, desperately. “And we’ll buy a car. There are car lots ahead, we’ll buy a four-wheel drive and take it to the observatory, with a big bucket from Colonel Chicken sitting between us. You buying all this?”