Lucifer's Hammer

The road curled out of the mountains, widened and became a smooth straight line leading away. Where? No compass. Nothing to do but drive on. And the rain became a furious lashing attack. Tim started the motor and dared to increase speed to twenty mph.

Eileen asked, “How are we doing?”

“Out of the mountains. It’s a straightaway, no breaks visible. Go back to sleep.”

“Good.”

When he looked she was asleep again.

He saw a freeway ahead. A sign told him HIGHWAY 99, NORTH, He went up the ramp. Now he could go forty. He passed cars stalled in the rain, both on and off the highway. People, too. Tim hunched low whenever he saw anything that could be a gun. Once it was real: Two men stepped out from either side of the highway and raised a pair of shotguns. They gestured: Stop. Tim hunched low, stamped on the accelerator, aimed for one of the men. The man leaped unhesitatingly into the muddy darkness. Tim listened for the guns with every nerve, but they did not speak. Presently he straightened up.

Now, what was that about? Were they afraid to waste ammunition? Or were the guns too wet to fire? He said to himself, softly, “If you can’t stand not knowing…” Harv Randall’s words.

They still had gas, they were still moving. The highway was awash with water; it must have stopped lesser cars than this one. Tim gri

The rain hurled a sea of water across the land in one ferocious blast, then stopped just as suddenly.

For a long moment Tim had an unbroken view ahead. He hit the brakes as the rain slashed down again. The car achieved a marvelous floating sensation before it coasted to a stop.

They had come to the end.

Eileen sat up. She pulled the seat back up behind her and smoothed her skirt with automatic gestures.

“We’ve hit an ocean,” said Tim.

She rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”

Tim turned on the roof light. He spread the map across their laps. “I kept working north and west and downhill,” he said. “Until we got out of the mountains. There were a lot of them. After a while I couldn’t tell directions anymore, so I just went downhill. Eventually I came to Highway Ninetynine.” Tim spoke proudly: With his lousy sense of direction they might have ended up anywhere. “Ninety-nine’s been good. No more breaks. You missed a couple of guys with shotguns, and a lot of cars that weren’t ru

She had raked the map with her eyes, once. Now she was peering ahead through the rain, along the beam of the headlamps, piecing out the view from subliminal cues and imagination. For as far as they both could see in the gray twilight there was nothing but a silver-gray expanse of rain-spattered water. No lights anywhere. Nothing.

“See if you can back up,” she said. She fell to studying the map. Tim inched backward, out of the water, until it was only hubcap-deep.

“We’re in trouble,” Eileen said. “Have we passed Bakersfield?”

“Yes.” There had been freeway signs, and the ghosts of dark buildings, a mountain range done all in right angles. “Not long ago.”

She frowned and squinted at tiny print. “It says Bakersfield is four hundred feet above sea level.”

Tim remembered the fallen mountains. “I wouldn’t rely on elevations any longer. I seem to remember the entire San Fernando Valley dropped thirty feet during the Sylmar quake. And that was a little one.”

“Well, everything gets lower and lower from here on. We’re in the lowlands.” And we’re sinking in the lowlands, lowlands, low… “Tim, no tidal wave could have gotten this far. Could it?”

“No. But it’s raining.”

“Raining. Ye gods, how it must have rained, and it’s still coming! This wasn’t all in the comet head, was it?” She shushed him when he started to explain. “Skip it. Let’s rethink from scratch. Where do we want to go?”

Back to high ground. “Well,” Tim said, “that’s a problem too. I know where we want to be. The high farming country, say around Sequoia National Forest. What I don’t know is why anyone would want us there.” He didn’t dare say anything else.

She didn’t say anything at all. She was waiting.

Tim worked on his nerve. “I did have one idea…”

She waited.

Damn, it was evaporating even as he tried to speak it! Like the restaurants and good hotels that waited in Tujunga: Speak your wish and they were gone. He said it anyway, a little desperately. “Senator Jellison’s ranch. I contributed a lot of money to his campaign. And I’ve been to his ranch. It’s perfect. If he’s there, he’ll let us in. And he’ll be there. He’s that smart.”

“And you contributed money to his campaign.” She chuckled.

“Money was worth good money then. And, honey, it’s all I’ve got.”

“Okay. I can’t think of a single farmer who owes me anything. And the farmers own it all now, don’t they? Just like Thomas Jefferson wanted it. Where is this ranch?”

Tim tapped the map between Springville and Lake Success, just below the mountainous Sequoia National Park. “Here. We go underwater for a way, then we turn right and resume breathing.”

“Maybe there’s a better way. Look to your left. Do you see a railroad embankment?”

He turned off the roof light, then the headlights. A little time for his eyes to adjust, and… “No.”

“Well, it’s there.” She was looking at the map. “Southern Pacific Railroad. Swing us around and point the headlights that way.”

Tim maneuvered the car around. “What are you thinking of? Catching a train?”

“Not exactly.”

The headlights didn’t reach far through the rain. They showed nothing but rain-stippled sea in all directions.

“We’ll have to take the embankment on faith,” Eileen said. “Slide over.” She climbed over him to reach the steering wheel. He couldn’t guess what she had in mind, but he strapped down while she started the motor. Eileen turned south, back the way they had come.

“There are people back there,” he said. “Two of them have shotguns. Also, I don’t think we’ve got a siphon, so we shouldn’t use up too much gas.”

“Good news from all over.”

“I’m just telling you,” said Tim. He noticed that the water was no longer hubcap-deep. Off to the west, higher ground made black humps in the shallow sea. Here was a grove of almond trees, there a farmhouse; and Eileen turned sharp right where there was no road. The car settled as it left 99, then shouldered forward through water and mud.

Tim was afraid to speak, almost afraid to breathe. Eileen wove a path that crossed one and another of the black humps of rising ground, but they weren’t continuous. It was an ocean with islands, and they drove through it in an endless rainstorm. Tim waited, with both hands braced on the dashboard, for the car to plunge into some two-foot dip and die.

“There,” Eileen muttered. “There.”

Was the horizon slightly higher ahead? Moments later Tim was sure: The land humped ahead of them. Five minutes later they were at the base of the railroad embankment.

The car wouldn’t climb it.

Tim was sent out into the rain with the tow rope. He looped it under a rail and pulled back on it, leaning his weight above the embankment, while Eileen tried to drive up sloping mud. The car kept sliding back. Tim looped the rope again around the other rail. He took in slack, inches at a time. The car would surge upward and start to fall back, and Tim would take up the slack and heave. One wrong move would cost him one finger. He had stopped thinking. It was easier that way, in the dull misery of rain and exhaustion and the impossible task. His earlier triumphs were forgotten, useless…

It came to him, slowly, that the car was up on the embankment, almost level, and Eileen was leaning on the horn. He detached the rope and coiled it and trudged back to the car.