Lucifer's Hammer

“You were in L.A. You saw it?”

“Mark and Joa

“Information is worth a meal and a drink. You’re telling me if I let you in, the others stay too.”

“Yes. I’m afraid that’s it. We’ll do our share, assuming you can feed us.”

Jellison looked thoughtful. “You’ve got one vote,” he said. “Maureen’s. But it’s mine that counts.”

“I figured that. I gather you aren’t exactly welcoming refugees. The bridge and all—”

“Bridge?”

’The big one over an arm of the lake. Just after the dam went—”

“Dam’s gone?” Jellison frowned. “Al!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir?” Hardy came in quickly. His hand was in his raincoat pocket. It bulged. He relaxed at the sight of the three men seated in chairs, drinking calmly.

“He says the dam’s gone,” Jellison said. “Any word brought in on that?”

“Not yet.”

“Yeah.” Jellison nodded significantly. Hardy seemed to understand what he meant. “Now tell me about the bridge,” Jellison said.

“Two men blew it up, just after the dam went. Dynamite, both ends.”

“I will be dipped in shit. Describe the men.” Jellison listened, then nodded. “Right. Christophers. We may have trouble with them.” He turned toward Mark. “Army?” he asked.

“Navy,” Mark said.

“Basic? Can you shoot?”

“Yes, sir.” Mark began one of his tales about ’Nam. It might or might not have been true, but Jellison wasn’t listening.

“Can he?” he asked Randall.

“Yes. I’ve seen him,” Harvey said. He began to relax, to feel the knots unwind in his neck. It looked good, it looked as if the Senator might want him…

“If you stay here, you’re on my team,” Jellison said. “Nobody else’s. Your loyalty is to me.”

“Understood,” Harvey said.

Jellison nodded. “We’ll give it a try.”

As the Mediterranean waters recede from the drowned cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, rainstorms lash the highlands of the Sudan and Ethiopia. Floodwaters cascade down the Nile to smash against the High Aswan Dam, already weakened by the earthquakes following Hammerfall. The dam bursts, joining 130 million acre-feet of water to the flooded river. The waters smash across the Nile Delta, through the ancient cities, across Cairo. The Great Pyramid is undermined and falls beneath the torrent.

Ten thousand years of civilization are scooped up and carried with the water. From the First Cataract to the Mediterranean Sea, nothing lives in the Delta of the Nile.

Beggar Man

Eileen slept with her seat tilted back to horizontal, her seat belt loose about her. She rolled with the motion of the car. Once Tim heard the begi

He remembered his driver had done that in Greece. Everyone coasted down hills in Greece. Even down the twisted narrow road from Delphi across Parnassus to Thermopylae. That had been terrifying, but the driver insisted. Greece had the most expensive gasoline in the world.

Where was Thermopylae now? Had the waters washed away the grave of the Three Hundred? The waves wouldn’t have reached Delphi, or been as high as the Acropolis. Greece had lived through disasters before.

The road twisted and tilted and Tim eased the Blazer around the turn, using the brakes warily. A long straight stretch was ahead, down all the way, then more downhill on a wet and broken and twisting road, and riding with Eileen had made him realize just how good a driver he wasn’t.

The mountains had shifted.

Here the road ended in space. Tim braked sharply and came to a stop. He walked forward through the soft rain. It tasted sweet. No more salt rain, anyway. The road, and the steep bank of cut rock, and this part of the mountain itself had sheared and dropped twenty feet or more. Mud had piled up below, so that there were places where the drop was no more than four or five feet.

Cars went over longer drops than that in TV commercials. One pickup ad had shown clips from a movie with that truck jumping over ditches, flying over banks, and the a

Would the Blazer take it?

Was there any choice? The drop looked as if it ran for miles. Tim got back in and backed up fifty yards. He thought through the physics of the situation. If the car fell over the edge it would land on its nose, and they’d be dead. It had to go over horizontally, and that meant speed. Easing it over would kill them.

He set the brake and walked back to the edge again. Wake Eileen? She was dead out of it. Headlights behind him, dim in the rain, decided it for him. He didn’t know who that would be and he didn’t want to know. He walked back toward the Blazer. His mind worked the equation: Call the Blazer fifteen feet long; it would fall at one G. He got in and started the car. If the front end shouldn’t fall more than two feet before the rear left the pavement and also began to fall, then the whole car should be over in about a third of a second, which meant fifteen feet in a third of a second or forty-five feet per second, and forty-four feet per second was thirty miles per hour, so about thirty miles per hour ought to do it and here we GO…

The car fell about six feet all told. His instinct was to hit the brake but he didn’t.

They hit hard, landing on the mud, rolling down the-mud ramp onto the road itself. Amazingly that was all. They were rolling down the road as if nothing had ever happened.

Eileen bounced and rolled hard against the seat belt. She shook herself, sat partly upright and looked out. The wet countryside flowed past. She blinked, and then, satisfied, went back to sleep.

Slept right through the best driving I’ll ever do, Tim thought. He gri

An hour later she was still asleep. He envied her. He’d heard of people who slept most of the time: shell-shocked, or bitterly disappointed in their waking lives. He could understand the temptation. But of course that wasn’t Eileen. She needed sleep. She’d be all the more alert when she was needed.

Here the road had shattered to discrete plates. Tim switched on the engine and kept the speed up, moving as if from island to concrete island. He remembered a TV program about the Baja race. One driver said the way to take a bad road was fast — that way you didn’t touch the bumps but flew over them. It hadn’t seemed like a very good idea when he heard it, but now there didn’t seem to be much else to do. The plates lurched under the car’s weight and impact. Tim’s knuckles were white on the wheel, but Eileen smiled in her sleep, as if rocked in a cradle.

Tim felt very lonely.

She had not deserted him. At the risk of her life she had stayed with him. But she was sleeping and he was driving, and the rain pounded constantly on metal an inch over his head, and the road kept doing strange things. Here it lifted in a graceful arc, like a futuristic bridge, and a new stream ran beneath it. The concrete ribbon hadn’t shattered under its own weight, not yet, but it for damn sure wouldn’t hold a car. Tim drove around it, through the flood. The wheels kept moving and the motor didn’t die, and he pulled back onto the road where he could.

He had been deserted by everything and everyone but Eileen. He could understand that money and credit cards were worthless; sure. A bullet through the windshield was something else. Driving across the green of a country club felt like vandalism! The observatory… but Tim didn’t want to think about that. He’d been thrown off his own land, and his ears burned with the memory. Cowardice. It felt like cowardice.