Lucifer's Hammer

Hammerfall Morning

Rick Delanty woke on a wonderful morning, with a rectangle of hot sunlight crawling across his arm. The wonderful mornings came every hour and a half aboard Hammerlab, and he hadn’t tired of them yet. He used the tube and crawled out of the Apollo.

The larger windows in Hammerlab were filled with telescopes and cameras and other instruments. You had to crane around them, holding on to handholds on the bulkheads, swimming across open spaces.

Baker and Leonilla Malik were feeding data into the onboard computer. She looked up and said quickly, “Hello, Rick,” but turned back to work too quickly to see his quick grin.

It was time for work, but Rick Delanty was still partly tourist, and his eagerness was for the dawning of the comet. He found an observation scope unused at the moment, it had a big sun shield built into the optics, so that he could look at the comet without going blind.

The view was something like a stylized sunburst done in Day-Glo, and something like falling down a deep well while high on LSD. The gay streamers of the tail flowed outward as sluggishly as a lunar eclipse. There at the heart of the beast was a hint of graininess.

“Roger, Houston. We do have sideways motion relative to us. It should be coming onto your telemetry right now,” Baker was saying. “And there’s still activity, although that’s been dying out ever since the Hammer rounded the Sun. We got only one explosive event last watch, nothing big, not like the monster we observed yesterday.”

“Hammerlab, there appears to be something wrong with the Doppler data. JPL requests you get optical tracking on the largest piece you can find. Can do?”

“Can try, Houston.”

“I’ll get it, Johnny,” Rick said. He cranked up the resolution on the telescope and peered into the murk. “Leonilla, can you lend a hand? Slave the output onto the telemetry—”

“Right,” she said.

“Mark, mark, I’m off, mark, mark…”

Baker continued his report. “Houston, that nucleus is pretty well spread out, and the coma is huge. I fed the angular diameter into the computer and I get a hundred and forty thousand kilometers. As big as Jupiter. It could envelope the Earth without noticing.”

“Don’t be silly,” a familiar voice crackled. “Gravity… rip it to pieces…” Charlie Sharps’s voice began to fade.

“Houston, we’re losing you,” Baker said.

“That’s not Houston, that’s Sharps at JPL,” Rick said without looking up from the scope. “Mark, mark…”

“It comes through Houston. Damn. The comet stuff is playing pure hell with the ionosphere. We’re going to have communications problems until that thing’s past. Better record every observation we can get, just in case they’re not going through.”

“Rojj,” Delanty said. He continued to stare into the telescope. Hamner-Brown’s nucleus was spread out before him. He was having trouble keeping the cross hairs exactly centered on the mass he’d picked. There wasn’t enough contrast to use an automatic tracking system; it had to be done by eye. Delanty smiled. Another blow for man-in-space. “Mark, mark… ~’

He saw thick, glowing dust in sluggish motion, and a handful of flying mountains, and many more smaller particles, all jumbled, without order, parts moving in random patterns as they responded to light pressure and continuing chemical activity. It was the primal stuff of chaos. His mouth watered with the need to take a spacecraft into that, land on one of the mountains and walk out for a look around. The fifty-mile per-second velocity of those mountains was not evident. But it would be decades before NASA could build manned ships that good. If anyone built them at all. And when it was done, Rick Delanty would be a tired old man.

But this won’t be my last mission. We’ve got the Shuttle coming up, if those goddam congresscritters don’t turn it into pork for their own districts…

Pieter Jakov had been working with a spectroscope. He finished his observations and said, “They have set us a hectic schedule for this morning. I see that extravehicular activity for final check of external instruments is optional. Should we? There are two hours left.”

“Crazy Russian. No, we’re not going to EVA into that. A snowflake at that speed can’t hole the Hammerlab, but it can sure as hell leave a hole in your suit the size of your fist.” Baker frowned at the computer readouts. “Rick, that last optical. What did you pick?”

“A big mountain,” Rick said. “About the center of the nucleus, just as they asked. Why?”

“Nothing.” Baker thumbed the microphone. “Houston, Houston, did you get the optical readings?”

“…squeal… negative, Hammerlab, send again…”

“What the hell is it, Johnny?” Rick demanded.

“Houston and JPL get a miss distance of nine thousand kilometers,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “I don’t. Feeding your data into the onboard I come up with about a quarter of that. They’ve got more computing power down there, but we’ve got better data.”

— “Hell, two thousand kilometers is two thousand kilometers,” Delanty said. He didn’t sound confident.

“I wish we didn’t have a glitch in the main Doppler antenna,” Baker said.

“I will go out and work on it,” Jakov said.

“No.” Baker’s answer was abrupt; the commander speaking. “We haven’t lost anyone in space yet, and why start now?”

“Shouldn’t we ask ground control?” Leonilla asked.

“They put me in charge,” Johnny Baker said. “And I’ve said no.”

Pieter Jakov said nothing. Rick Delanty remembered that the Soviets had lost men in space: the three Soyuz pilots on reentry that the world knew about, and a number of others, known only by rumors and tales told at night over vodka. He wondered (not for the first time) if NASA had been too cautious. With fewer safety precautions the United States could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a good deal more exploring, learned more — and, yes, created a martyr or two. The Moon had been too expensive in money, but too cheap in lives to gain the popularity it needed. By the time Apollo XI reached it, it was dull. Routine.

Maybe that’s what we ought to do. The picture of Johnny Baker crawling out on the broken Spacelab wing, of a man out in that hostile environment risking the loneliest death ever — that had given the space program almost as big a boost as Neil Armstrong’s giant leap.

There was a ping. Then another, and red warning lights flared on the monitor board.

Rick Delanty didn’t think. He leaped for the nearest redpainted box. A square box, duplicate of others that were put at various places in Hammerlab. He opened it and took out several flat metal plates with goop on one side, then some larger, rubberlike patches. He looked to Baker for instructions.

“Not holed,” Johnny was saying. “Sand. We’re being sandblasted.” He frowned at the status board. “And we’re losing efficiency in the solar cells. Pieter, cap all the optical instruments! We’ll have to save ’em for closest approach.”

“Rojj,” Jakov said. He moved to the instruments.

Delanty stood by with the meteor patches. Just in case.

“It depends on just how large that nucleus is,” Pieter Jakov called from the far end of the space capsule. “And we have yet to get firm estimates of how widely the solid matter extends. I think it highly likely that the Earth — and we — will be hit by high-velocity gravel if nothing worse.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking,” Johnny Baker said. “We’ve been looking for sideways drift. Well, we found it, but is it enough? Maybe we ought to terminate this mission.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Please, no,” Leonilla said.

“I second that,” Rick added. “You don’t want to either. Who does?”

“Not me,” Jakov said.

“Unanimous. But it’s hardly a democracy,” Baker said. “We’ve lost a lot of power. It’s going to get warm in here.”

“You stood it in Spacelab until you got the wing fixed,” Delanty said. “If you could take it before, you can take it now. And so can we.”

“Right,” Baker said. “But you will stand by those meteor patches.”

“Yes, sir.”

Minutes later Hamner-Brown’s nucleus dropped behind the Earth. The Moon rose in its ghostly net of shock waves. Leonilla passed out breakfast.

Dawn found Harvey Randall in an easy chair on the lawn, with a table to hold his cigarettes and coffee and another to hold the portable television. Dawn washed out the once-in-a-lifetime sky show and left him a little depressed, a little drunk, and not really ready to start a working day. Loretta found him in the same state two hours later.

“I’ve gone to work in worse shape,” he told her. “It was worth it.”

“I’m glad. Are you sure you can drive?”

“Of course I can.” That was an old argument.

“Where are you going to be today?”

He didn’t notice the worry in her voice. “I had a hell of a time deciding that. I really want to be everywhere at once. But hell, the regular network science team will be at JPL, and they’ve got a good crew in Houston. I think I’ll start at City Hall. Bentley Allen and staff calmly taking care of the city while half the populace runs for the hills.”

“But that’s all the way downtown.”

Now he heard it. “So?”

“But what if it hits? You’ll be miles away. How can you get back?”

“Loretta, it’s not going to hit us. Listen—”

“You’ve got the swimming pool filled with fresh water and I couldn’t use it yesterday and you covered it up!” Her voice rose. “You made a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of dried beef and you sent our boy into the mountains and you filled the garage with expensive liquor and—”

“Loretta—”

“—and we don’t drink that kind of thing, and nobody could eat that meat unless they were starving to death. So you think we’ll be starving. Don’t you?”

“No. Honey, it’s hundreds to one against—”

“Harvey, please. Stay home today. Just this once. I never make a fuss about you being off somewhere all the time. I didn’t complain when you volunteered for another tour in Vietnam. I didn’t complain when you went to Peru. I didn’t complain when you took three weeks extra in Alaska. I’ve never said anything about having to raise your boy, who’s smarter than I am only he’s seen less of his father than Ralph Harris ever saw of his. I know your job means more to you than I do, but please, Harvey, don’t I mean something to you?”

“Of course you do.” He grabbed her and pulled her to him. “Lord, is that how you feel? The job doesn’t mean more than you do.” It’s just the money, he thought. And I can’t say that. I can’t say that I don’t need the money, you do.

“Then you’ll stay?”

“I can’t. Really can’t. Loretta, these documentaries have been good. Really good. Maybe I’ll get an offer from ABC. They’ll need a new science feature editor pretty soon, and that’s real folding money. And there’s a real chance of a book…”

“You’ve been up all night, Harvey, you’re in no shape to go anywhere. And I’m scared.”

“Hey.” He hugged her tightly and kissed her hard. And it’s all my fault, he told himself. How could she not be scared, after all the stuff I bought? But I can’t miss Hammer Day… “Look. I’ll send somebody else down to City Hall.”

“Good!”

“And I’ll have Charlie and Manuel meet me at UCLA.”

“But why can’t you stay here?”

“Got to do something, Loretta. Manly pride if nothing else. How can T tell people I sat at home in the root cellar after telling everybody else there wasn’t any danger? Look, I’ll get some interviews, and the Governor’s in town for a charity thing at Los Angeles Country Club, I’ll go over there just after the thing has gone by. And I won’t ever be more than ten or fifteen minutes from here. If anything happens, I’ll come home fast.”

“All right. But you still haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s getting cold. And I filled your Thermos, and put a beer in the TravelAII.”

He ate quickly. She sat and watched him the whole time, not eating anything at all. She laughed when he made jokes, and she told him to be careful when he drove down the hill.

Communications were still bad. Mostly they spoke into recorders. It would be important to get their observations because the instruments weren’t going to be much use. Too much sandblasting. They had preserved the big telescope that could be attached to the color TV, though, and they’d record the video as well as try to send it back to Earth.

“Solar power’s down to about twenty-five percent,” Rick Delanty reported.

“Save the batteries,” Baker said.

“Rojj.”

It was getting warm in the spacecraft, but they needed the power for the recorders and other instruments.

Leonilla Malik spoke rapid-fire Russian into a mike. Jakov played with the transmitter controls, trying to get some response from Baikunyar. No luck. Leonilla continued to record. She had moored herself oddly, twisting to watch the observation port and still see the instrument board. Rick tried to follow what she was saying, but she was using too many unfamiliar words. Waxing lyrical, Rick thought. Letting her poetic streak have its way. Why not? How else could you describe being inside a comet?

They now knew less about Hamner-Brown’s path than Houston did. The last report from Houston was a miss by one thousand kilometers, but Rick wondered. Was that based on his visual observation? Because if it was, it meant only that that particular mountain would be that far off, and the cloud of solid gup was large. Not that large, though. Surely not that large.

“We are effectively inside the coma,” Leonilla was saying. “This is not especially evident. The chemical activity is long past. But we see the shadow of the Earth like a long tunnel leading through the tail.”

Rick caught that last phrase. Nice, he thought. If I get a chance to broadcast live to Earth, I’ll use it.

They all had work, which they did while they chattered into recorders. Rick had a hand-held camera, a Canon, which he worked like a madman, changing lenses and film as rapidly as he could. He hoped the automatic features were in good order, and forced himself to take a few frames with widely different speeds and apertures, just in case.

The status board inexorably ticked off seconds.

The long lens gave a good view through the observation port. Rick saw: half a dozen large masses, many more small ones and a myriad of tiny glinting points, all enmeshed in pearly fog. He heard Baker’s voice behind him. “Duck’s-eye view of a shotgun blast.”

“Good phrasing,” Rick said.

“Yeah. Hope it’s not too good.”

“I have lost all signal from the radar,” Pieter Jakov said.

“Roger. Give it up and make visuals,” Baker said. “Houston, Houston, are you getting anything from the inside TV?”

“…roger, Hammerlab… JPL… Sharps is in love, send more… higher-power transmission…”

“I’ll put on higher power when the Hammer’s closer,” Baker said. He didn’t know if they heard. “We’re saving the batteries.” He looked up at the status board. Ten minutes before the solid objects got to closest approach. Twenty minutes maybe for it all to pass. A half-hour. “I’ll increase transmitter power in five minutes; say again, increase to full power transmission in five minutes.”

CLANG!

“What the fuck was that?” Baker demanded.

“Pressure remains unchanged,” Jakov said. “Pressure holding in all three capsules.”

“Good,” Rick muttered. They’d closed the airlocks to Apollo and Soyuz; it seemed a reasonable precaution. Rick stood by with the meteor patches anyway. Hammerlab was by far the largest target.

And just how did the engineers estimate the size that a meteor patch ought to be? Rick wondered. From their size — about the maximum-size hole it would be worth repairing? Anything bigger would finish them anyway? To hell with it. He went back to his photographs. Through the Canon lens he looked into a galaxy of foamy ice, a tremendous, slow shotgun blast that was visibly coming toward them, spreading around Hammerlab rather than sliding sideways. “Jesus, Johnny, it’s coming close.”

“Rojj. Pieter, get the main telescope uncovered. I’m going to full power. We’ll send transmissions from here on in. Houston, Houston, visual indicates Earth is in the path of outer edges of nucleus; I say again, Earth is in the path of outer nucleus. Impossible to estimate size of objects that may strike Earth.”

“Make certain that message gets through,” Leonilla Malik said. “Pieter, see that Moscow knows as well.” There was urgency and fear in her voice.

“Eh?” Rick Delanty said.

“It is passing east of the Earth,” Leonilla said. “The United States will be more exposed, but there will be more objects close to the Soviet Union. The opportunities for deliberate misinterpretation are too great. Some fanatic—”

“Why do you say this?” Jakov demanded.

“You know it is true,” she shouted. “Fanatics. Like the madmen who had my father killed because Great Stalin was not immortal! Do not pretend they do not exist.”

“Ridiculous,” Jakov snorted, but he went to the communications console, and Rick Delanty thought he spoke urgently.

Hammerfall: One

“O my people! Hear the words of Matthew! Does he not say that the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give off her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven? And does this not come to pass even in this very hour?

“Repent, my people! Repent, and watch, for the Lord cometh, the Hammer will fall upon this wicked Earth. Hear the words of the Prophet Micah: ‘For behold, the Lord cometh forth out of his place, and will come down, and tread upon the high places of the Earth. And the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep place.’

“For He cometh! For he cometh to judge the Earth, and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth!”

“You have heard the Reverend Henry Armitage on ‘The Coming Hour.’ This and all broadcasts of ‘The Coming Hour’ have been made possible by your donations, and we ask the Lord to bless those who have given so generously.

“No further donations will be needed. The hour comes and is now at hand.”

It was a bright, cloudless summer day. A brisk wind blew in from the sea, and the Los Angeles basin was clear and lovely.

Bloody good thing, Tim Hamner thought.

He’d been faced with a terrible problem. The spectacular night skies could best be seen from the mountains, and Tim had stayed at his Angeles Forest observatory for most of the week before; but the best view of Hamner-Brown’s closest approach would be from space. Since he couldn’t be in space, Tim wanted the next best thing: to watch all of it on color television. It hadn’t been hard to persuade Charlie Sharps to invite him out to JPL.

But he was supposed to be there by nine-thirty, and the clear skies with their bright velvet ribbons of light had kept him up until dawn. He’d stretched out on the couch, careful not to go to bed, but a few minutes’ rest wouldn’t hurt…

Of course he’d overslept. Now, muzzy-headed and wateryeyed, Tim aimed rather than drove his Grand Prix down the Ventura Freeway toward Pasadena. Despite his late start he expected to be on time. There wasn’t much traffic.

“Fools,” Tim muttered. Hammer Fever. Thousands of Angelenos taking to the hills. Harvey Randall had told him that freeway traffic would be light all week, and he’d been right. Light traffic for — in Mark Czescu’s brilliant phrasing — Hot Fudge Sundae (which fell on a Tuesdae this week).

There was a flare of red ahead, a ripple of red lights. Traffic slowed. Tim cursed. There was a truck just ahead of him, so he couldn’t see what was fouling things up. Automatically he cut over into the right-hand lane, acing out a sweet little old lady in a green Ford. She cursed horribly as Tim cut in front of her.

“Probably wears her tennis shoes to bed,” Tim muttered. Just what was happening ahead? The traffic seemed to have stopped entirely. He saw a parking lot that stretched away before him as far as he could see. All the way to the Golden State interchange, Tim thought. “Damn.” He glanced over his shoulder. No highway patrolmen in sight. He cut onto the shoulder and drove forward, passing stopped cars, until he came to an off-ramp.

To his right was Forest Lawn Cemetery. Not the original one, fabled in song and story, but the Hollywood Hills colony. The streets were thick with traffic too. Tim turned left and went under the freeway. His face was a grim mask of worry and hate. Bad enough not to be in his observatory on Hot Fudge Sundae Tuesdae, but this! He was in beautiful downtown Burbank, and his comet was approaching perigee. “It’s not fair!” Tim shouted. Pedestrians glanced at him, then looked away, but Tim didn’t care. “Not fair!”

The air was electric with storm and disaster. Eileen Hancock felt it as ghostly fingers brushing her neck hairs. She saw it in more concrete form while driving to work. Despite the light traffic, people drove badly. They fought for dominance at the wrong times, and they reacted late, then overreacted. There were many U-Haul trailers piled high with household possessions, reminding Eileen of newsclips from the war: refugees, only no refugees in Asia or Africa ever carried birdcages, Beautyrest mattresses, and stereo sets.

One of the trailers had overturned on the eastbound Ventura, blocking all three lanes. A few cars squeezed past on the shoulder, but the others were immobile behind a tumbled mass of furniture. The light pickup that had pulled the trailer was angled across the fast lane with a VW embedded in its side.

Thank God I came up the Golden State, Eileen thought. She felt a moment of pity for anyone trying to get to Pasadena this morning, and she cursed the trailer and its owner. People on her side of the freeway slowed to gawk at it, and it took five minutes to get the hundred yards to her off-ramp into Burbank. She drove viciously on the surface streets and pulled into her parking space — with her name on it, Corrigan kept his word about that — with a feeling of relief that the Burbank police seemed to be elsewhere.

Corrigan’s was a storefront office near a supermarket, deceptively small because the warehouses were across an alley behind. The entry room was finished in blue nylon, brown Naugahyde, and chrome, and the chrome needed polishing. It always did; Eileen believed that wholesale customers ought to get the impression of a sound business able to keep its commitments, but not of opulence which might tempt them to dicker too hard on prices. The front door was already unlocked. “What ho?” Eileen called.

“Me.” Corrigan stumped out of his office. A smell of coffee followed him; Eileen had long ago installed an automatic Silex system with a timer, and she set it up last thing before she left in the evenings. It had improved Corrigan’s morning disposition wonderfully; but not this morning. “What kept you?” he demanded.

“Traffic. Wreck on the eastbound Ventura.”

“Umph.”

“You feel it too, huh?” Eileen said.

Corrigan frowned, then grinned sheepishly. “Yeah. I guess so. I was afraid you wouldn’t show up. There’s nobody in the front office, and only three back in the warehouse. Radio says half the shops in the city are missing half their people.”

“And the rest of us are scared.” She went past Corrigan to her own office. The clean glass surface of her desk shone like a mirror. She put her tape recorder down on it and took out her keys, but she didn’t open the desk yet. Instead she went back out into the reception area. “I’ll take the front office,” she said.

Corrigan shrugged. He was looking out through the big plate-glass window. “Nobody’s coming in today.”

“Sabrini’s due at ten,” Eileen said. “Forty bathrooms and kitchens, if we can get the decor he wants at the right price.”

Corrigan nodded. He didn’t seem to be listening. “What the hell’s that?” He pointed out the window.

There was a line of people, all dressed in white robes, all singing hymns. They seemed to be marching in step. Eileen looked closer and saw why. They were chained together. She shrugged. The Disney Studios were a few blocks away, and NBC not much further; they often used Burbank for city location shots. “Probably contestants for ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ Group effort.”

“Too early,” Corrigan said.

“Then it’s Disney. Silly way to make a living.”

“Don’t see any camera trucks,” Corrigan said. He didn’t sound very interested. He watched for a few moments longer. “Heard from that rich boy friend of yours? This is his big day.”

For just a moment Eileen felt terribly lonely. “Not for awhile.” Then she began pulling out folders of color pictures and arranged them to show attractive combinations of accessories: the bathroom your clients dream of.

Alameda was fairly speedy. Tim Hamner tried to remember the connections to the arroyo north of Pasadena. There were high hills just in front of him, the Verdugo Hills that cut through the San Fernando Valley and divided the foothill cities from Burbank. He knew there was a new freeway in there somewhere, but he didn’t know how to find it.

“Goddammit!” he shouted. Months to prepare, months waiting for his comet, and now it was approaching at fifty miles a second and he was driving past the Walt Disney Studios. Part of his mind told him that was funny, but Tim didn’t appreciate the humor in the situation.

Take Alameda to the Golden State, Tim thought. If that’s moving, I’ll get on it and back onto the Ventura. If it isn’t, I’ll just go on surface streets all the way and the hell with tickets… and what was that ahead?

Not just cars jammed across an intersection, motionless under a string of green lights. This was more, cars jockeying for room, cars pulling into driveways and through them to the alley beyond. More cars, stopped, and people on foot moving among the swarm. There was just time to get over into the right-hand lane. Tim turned hard into a parking lot, hoping to follow the moving cars into an alley.

Dead end! He was in a large parking lot, and the way was completely blocked by a delivery truck. Tim braked viciously and slammed the shift lever into PARK. Carefully he turned the key off. Then he pounded the dash and swore, using words he hadn’t remembered for years. There was no place to go; more cars had come in behind him. The lot was jammed.

I’m in trouble, Tim thought. He abandoned the car to walk toward Alameda. TV store, he thought. If they don’t have the comet on, I’ll buy a set on the spot.

Alameda was jammed with cars. Bumper-to-bumper, and none of them moving at all. And they were screaming up ahead, at the intersection where the focus of action seemed to be. Robbery? A sniper? Tim wanted no part of that. But no, those were screams of rage, not fear. And the intersection swarmed with blue-uniformed policemen. There was something else, too. White robes? Someone in a white robe was coming toward him now. Hamner tried to avoid him, but the man planted himself in Tim’s path.

It wasn’t much of a costume, that robe; probably a bedsheet, and there was certainly conventional clothing under it. The fuzzy-bearded young man was smiling, but insistent. “Sir! Pray! Pray for the safe passage of Lucifer’s Hammer! There is so little time!”

“I know that,” Tim said. He tried to dodge past, but the man moved with him.

“Pray! The Wrath of God is upon us. Yea, the hour is approaching and is now here, but God will spare the city for ten just men. Repent and be saved, and save our city.”

“How many of you are there?” Tim demanded.

“There are a hundred Wardens,” the man said.

“That’s more than ten. Now let me go.”

“But you don’t understand — we will save the city, we Wardens. We have been praying for months. We have promised God the repentance of thousands.” The intense brown eyes stared into Hamner’s. Then recognition came. “You’re him! You’re Timothy Hamner! I saw you on TV. Pray, brother. Join us in prayer, and the world will know!”

“It sure will. NBC is just down the road.” Tim frowned. There were two Burbank policemen coming up behind the Comet Warden, and they weren’t smiling at all.

“Is this man annoying you, sir?” the larger cop asked.

“Yes,” Tim said.

The policeman smiled. “Gotcha!” He took the robed man by the arm. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up—”

“I know all that crap,” the Warden said. “Look at him! He’s the man who invented the comet!”

“Nobody invents a comet, you idiot,” Tim said. “Officer, do you know where there’s a TV store? I want to see the comet pictures from space.”

“Down that way. Could we have your name and address—”

Tim took out a card and thrust it at the policeman. Then he scurried toward the intersection beyond.

Eileen had an excellent view through the storefront window. She sat with Joe Corrigan and sipped coffee; it was obvious that their architect wasn’t going to get through that traffic jam. They brought over big chrome chairs and the glass coffee table, making a picnic out of watching a lot of angry people.

The cause of it all was diagonally across from them. Twenty or thirty men and women in white robes — not all of them bedsheets — had chained themselves across Alameda from lamppost to telephone pole. They sang hymns. The quality of singing had been pretty good for awhile, but the police soon led away their white-bearded leader, and now they were discordant.

On either side of the human chain an infinite variety of cars were packed like sardines. Old Ford station wagons, for grocery shopping; chauffeured Mercedeses — stars or studio executives; campers, pickup trucks, new Japanese imports, Chevies and Plymouth Dusters, all packed together, and all immobile. A few drivers were still trying to get out, but most had given up. A horde of robed preachers moved through the matrix of cars. They stopped to speak with each driver, and they preached. Some of the drivers were screaming at them. A few listened. One or two even got out and knelt in prayer.

“Some show, eh?” Corrigan said. “Why the hell didn’t they pick some place else?”

“With NBC practically next door? If the comet goes past without smashing anything, they’ll take credit for saving the world. Haven’t we seen a few of those nuts on TV for years?”

Corrigan nodded. “Looks like they hit the big time with this one. Here come the TV cameras.”

The preachers redoubled their efforts when they saw the cameramen. The hymn stopped for a moment, then began again: “Nearer My God to Thee.” The preachers had to talk fast, and sometimes they broke off in midspeech to avoid the police. Blue uniforms chased white robes through the honking cars and screaming drivers.

“A day to remember,” Corrigan said.

“They may just have to pave the whole thing over.”

“Yep.” For a fact that traffic jam was going to be there a long time. Too many cars had been abandoned. He could see more civilians darting among the cars, flowered sports shirts and gray flannel suits among the white robes and blue uniforms. And coveralled drivers. Many were bent on murder. More had locked their cars and gone looking for a coffee shop. The supermarket next door was doing a land-office business in Coors beer. Even so, a fair number were clustered oh the sidewalks, praying.

Two policemen came into the store. Eileen and Corrigan greeted them. Both had regular beats in the neighborhood, and the younger, Eric Larsen, often joined Eileen for coffee at the local Orange Julius. He reminded Eileen of her younger brother.

“Got any bolt cutters?” Investigator Harris was all business. “Big heavy jobs.”

“Think so,” Corrigan said. He lifted a phone and pushed a button. He waited. Nothing happened. “Goddam warehouse crew’s out watching the show. I’ll get them.” He went back through the office.

“No keys?” Eileen asked.

“No.” Larsen smiled at her. “They chucked them before they came here.” Then he shook his head sadly. “If we don’t get those crazies out of here pretty soon, there’ll be a riot. No way to protect them.”

The other cop snorted. “You can tell Joe to take his time for all I care,” he said. “They’re stupid. Sometimes I think the stupid will inherit the Earth.”

“Sure.” Eric Larsen stood at the window watching the Wardens. Idly he whistled “Onward Christian Soldiers” through his teeth.

Eileen giggled. “What are you thinking about, Eric?”

“Huh?” He looked sheepish.

“The Professor’s writing a movie script,” Harris said.

Eric shrugged. “TV. Imagine James Garner marooned out there. He’s looking for a killer. One of the drivers is out to commit murder. He does it, pulls out a sheet and a chain, and we come take him away before Garner can find him…”

“Jesus,” Harris said.

“I thought it was pretty good,” Eileen said. “Who does he kill?”

“Uh, actually, you.”

“Oh.”

“I saw enough pretty girls killed last night to last me twenty years,” Harris muttered. For a moment Eric looked like he’d been rabbit-punched.

Joe Corrigan came back with four pairs of long-handled bolt cutters. The policemen thanked him. Harris scribbled his name and badge number on a receipt, and handed two pairs to Eric Larsen. They carried them out to distribute to the other policemen, and blue uniforms moved along the chain, cutting the white robes free, then chaining them again with handcuffs. They jostled the Wardens toward the sidewalk. Few of the robed ones fought, but a good many went limp.

Corrigan looked up in surprise. “What was… ?”

“Huh?” Eileen looked vaguely around the office.

“I don’t know.” He frowned, trying to remember, but it had been too vague. As if clouds had parted to reveal the sun for a few moments, then closed again. But there were no clouds. It was a bright, cloudless summer day.

It was a nice house, well laid out, with bedrooms sprawling out like an arm, away from the huge central living room. Alim Nassor had always wanted a fireplace. He could imagine parties here, brothers and sisters splashing in the swimming pool, roar of conversation, smell of pot thick enough to get you high all by itself, a van delivering a great cartwheel of a pizza… Someday he would own such a house. He was robbing this one.

Harold and Hannibal were scooping silverware into a sheet. Gay was searching for the safe, in his own peculiar fashion: Stand in the middle of a room, look slowly around… then look behind paintings, or pull up rug… move to another room, stand in the middle and look around, and open closets… until he found the safe sunk in concrete beneath the rug in a hall closet. He pulled the drill out of his case and said, “Plug this in.”

Alim did it. Even he followed orders when the need came. “If we don’t find nothing this time, no more safes,” he ordered.

Gay nodded. They’d opened four safes in four houses and found nothing. It looked like everyone in Bel Air had stashed their jewels in banks or taken them along.

Alim returned to the living room to look through the gauze curtains. It was a bright, cloudless summer day, and dead quiet, with nobody in sight. Half the families had fled to the hills, and the rest of the men were doing whatever they did to have houses like this, and anyone who stayed home must be inside watching TV to see if they’d made a mistake. It was people like this who were afraid of the comet. People like Alim, or Alim’s mother with her job scrubbing floors and her ruined knees, or even the storekeeper he’d shot — people with something real to be afraid of didn’t worry about no damn light in the sky.

So: The street was empty. No sweat, and the pickings were good. Fuck the jewels. There was silver, paintings, TV sets from tiny to tremendous, two or three or four to a house. Under the tarps in the truck bed they had a home computer and a big telescope — strange things, hard to fence — and a dozen typewriters. Generally they’d pick up some guns, too, but not this trip. The guns had gone with the running honkies.

“Shit! Hey, brothers—”

Alim went, fast. He and Hannibal almost jammed in the doorway. Gay had the safe open and was hauling out plastic sandwich bags. It was stuff that couldn’t be stashed in no bank vault. Three bags of good golden weed; oh, Mr. White, do your neighbors know about this? Smaller amounts of heavier stuff: coke, and dark hashish, and a small bottle of what might be hash oil, but you’d be crazy to try it without seeing a label. Gay and Harold and Hannibal whooped and hollered. Gay fished around and found papers; he started to roll a joint.

“Fuck that!” Alim slapped at Gay’s hands, scattering paper and weed. “You crazy? In the middle of a job and four houses to go? Give me that! All of it! You want a party, fine, we’ll have a fine party when we’re home free!”

They didn’t like it, but they passed the bags to Alim and he stashed them in the pockets of his baggy combat jacket. He slapped their butts and they went, carrying heavy bedsheet sacks.

He hadn’t gotten it all. It didn’t matter. At least they wouldn’t be blowing the tops of their heads off till this was over.

Alim picked up a radio and a Toast-it-Oven and followed them out. He blinked in the daylight. Gay was in the back, adjusting tarpaulins. Harold started the motor. Good. Alim stopped with the truck door open to look down the driveway.

He saw a tall tree on the lawn casting two sharp shadows.

And that smaller tree: two shadows. He looked down and saw his own two shadows, one moving. Alim looked up and saw it, a second sun dropping down the sky, dropping below the hill. He blinked; he squeezed his eyes shut, hard. The violet afterimage blocked everything.

He climbed in. “Get going,” he said. While the truck rolled down the drive he started the CB. “Come in, Jackie. Come in, Jackie. Jackie, you motherfucker, answer me!”

“Who’s that? Alim Nassor?”

“Yeah. Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“The comet, the Hammer of God! I saw it fall! I watched it burn its way down the sky till it hit! Jackie, listen good, ’cause these CB things ain’t gonna be any good in a minute. We’ve been hit. It’s all gonna come true, and we got to link up.”

“slim, you must’ve found something real special. Coke, maybe?”

“Jackie, it’s real, the whole world been hit. There’s gonna be earthquakes and tidal waves. You call everyone you can and tell them we meet at… the cabin up near Grapevine.

We got to stick together. We won’t drown because we’re too high, but we got to meet.”

“slim, this is crazy. I got two houses to go, we got lots of stuff, and you come on like the end of the world?”

“Just call someone, Jackie! Someone’s got to have seen it! Look, I got to call the others while we still got the CB.” Alim switched off.

They were still in the driveway. Harold was the color of wet ashes. He said, “I saw it too. George… Alim, do you think we’re too high to drown? I don’t want to drown.”

“We’re about as high as we can get. We got to go down before we get to Grapevine. Get movie’, Harold. We want to be across the low spots before it rains too much.”

Harold took off, fast. Alim reached for the CB. Were they really too high to drown? Was anybody, anywhere?

Hot Fudge Tuesdae: One

The crest of the Santa Monica Mountains was a thoroughly inconvenient place to live. Shopping centers were far away. Roads were an adventure. Driveways tended to be nearly vertical in spots. Yet there were many houses up here, and it was only indirectly due to population pressure.

Population pressure produced the cities.

The view from the crest on Monday night was incredible; unique. Downslope on one side was Los Angeles; downslope on the other, the San Fernando Valley. At night the cities became carpets of multicolored light stretching away forever. Freeways were rivers of light moving through seas of light. It looked like the whole world had turned to city, and loved it!

Yet there were vacant patches on the crest. Mark and Frank and Joanna left Mulholland Drive at sunset, took their motorcycles up the side of a hill. They camped in a rocky area out of sight of wandering fuzzmobiles, a couple of blocks distant from the houses on both sides.

Frank Stoner walked around the crest of the hill, looked at the slopes on both sides, then nodded to himself. Undevelopable. Too much danger of mudslides. Not that it mattered a damn why no one had built a house here, but Frank Stoner didn’t like unanswered questions. He came back to where Joanna and Mark were setting up the Svea backpacker stove.

“We may have nervous neighbors,” Frank said. “Let’s get dinner over while there’s light. After dark, no flashlights and no fires.”

“I don’t see — ” Mark began.

Joanna broke in impatiently. “Look, these houses are a long way from the nearest police station. People wandering up here would tend to make them nervous. We do not need to spend the night before Hot Fudge Sundae at Malibu Sheriff Station.” She went back to reading the directions on the freeze-dried dinner they’d brought. She was not a good cook; but if she left it to Mark, he’d do it however he felt, which might turn onto well and might not. Following the directions was sure to produce something edible, and she was hungry.

She looked at the two men. Frank Stoner towered over Mark. A big man, strong, physically attractive. Joanna had felt that before. He’d be damned good in bed.

She’d felt that before, but she hadn’t found herself thinking she was teamed up with the wrong man before. The thought puzzled her. Living with Mark was a lot of fun. She didn’t know if she was in love with Mark, because she wasn’t sure what love was, but they were compatible in bed, and they didn’t often get on each other’s nerves. So why this sudden pash for Frank Stoner?

She emptied the beef Stroganoff into a cooking pot and grinned down at it so the others couldn’t see. They’d want to know why she was grinning, and it wasn’t something she wanted to explain. If she wondered why she was getting the hots for Frank Stoner…

But it bothered her. Joanna had a very good education, courtesy of her upper-middle-class parents. She didn’t make much use of it, but it had left her with considerable curiosity, particularly about people — which included herself.

“This is just about perfect,” Mark said.

Frank grunted disapproval.

“No? Why not? Where else?” Mark demanded. He’d picked this spot and was proud of it.

“Mojave is better,” Frank said absently. He laid out his sleeping bag and sat on it. “But that’s a long way to go for nothing. Still… we’re on the wrong plate.”

“Plate?” Joanna said.

“It’s plate tectonics,” Mark said. “You know, the continents float around on top of the melted rock inside the Earth.”

Frank listened absently. No point in correcting Mark. But the Mojave was certainly a better place. It was on the North American plate. Los Angeles and Baja California were on another. The plates joined at the San Andreas Fault, and if the Hammer fell the San Andreas would sure as hell let go. It would shake both plates, but the North American would get it less.

It was just an exercise anyway. Frank had checked with JPL; the odds of the Hammer hitting Earth were low. You were in more danger on the freeway. This business of camping out was for drill, but it was Stoner’s nature that if he did anything, he did it right. He’d made Joanna bring her own bike, although she preferred riding behind Mark on his. Take all three; we might lose one.

“All for drill,” Frank said. “But maybe the drill’s worth the effort.”

“Eh?” Joanna had the stove going now. It roared in the late afternoon.

“Nothing silly about being ready for the collapse of civilization,” Frank said. “Next time it won’t be the Hammer, it’ll be something else. But it’ll be something. Read your newspapers.”

That’s it, Joanna thought. He’s got me thinking that way. And that’s why… it sure made more sense to be teamed up with Frank Stoner than Mark Czescu if civilization was coming to an end.

And Frank had wanted to go to the Mojave. Only Mark talked him out of it. Mark couldn’t quite admit to Hammer Fever. It would look silly.

They ate earlier than they usually did. Frank insisted. When they finished, there was just enough light to boil out the cooking pots. Then they lay down on their sleeping bags in near darkness, watching the glow die out over the Pacific, until the night grew cool and they climbed in. Joanna had brought her own bag and hadn’t zipped it together with Mark’s, although they usually did on camp-outs.

The light died in the west. One by one the stars came out. At first there were only stars. Then the turning sky brought a luminous film up from the east. It blended with the glowing lights over Los Angeles, grew brighter, until by midnight it was brighter than L.A., as bright as a good northern aurora. Still it thickened and brightened until only a few stars showed through the Earth-enveloping tail of Hamner-Brown Comet.

To keep themselves awake, they talked. Crickets talked around them. They had slept that afternoon, though neither Frank nor Mark would tell that to the others. It would have been an admission that each was in his thirties and feeling it. Frank told stories about the ways the world might end. Mark kept interrupting to make points of his own, adding details, or anticipating what Frank would say and saying it first.

Joanna listened with increasing impatience. She fell silent, brooding. Mark always did that. It never bothered her before. Why was she getting pissed off at him now? Part of the same pattern. Wow, Joanna thought. Female instincts? Glom on to the strongest guy around? That didn’t make sense. It certainly wasn’t part of her philosophy. She was Joanna, fully liberated, her own person, in control of her life…

The conflict made her think of other things. She wasn’t yet thirty, but she was getting there, and what had she done? What was she doing? She couldn’t just go on, making a few bucks when Mark was out of work, bopping around the country on a motorcycle. That was a lot of fun, but dammit, she ought to do something serious, one permanent thing…

“I bet I can get the packs set so nobody can see the stove,” Mark was saying. “Jo, want to make coffee? Jo?”

Full dawn found Frank and Joanna asleep. Mark smiled as if he’d won a contest. He enjoyed watching dawn break. It didn’t happen often enough these days. Today’s dawn still carried an elfin light, sunlight faintly thinned and transmuted by gases and dust brought inward from interstellar space.

It occurred to Mark that if he started breakfast now, he could reach a telephone while Harv Randall could be expected to be still at home. Randall had invited him to join the news team on Hot Fudge Tuesdae, but Mark had dithered. He dithered now. He set up the stove and pans for breakfast, debated waking the others; then crawled back into his own bag.

Frying bacon woke him.

“Didn’t call Harv, huh?” Joanna said.

Mark stretched elaborately. “Decided I’d rather be watching the news than making it. Know where the best view in the world is right now? Right in front of a television set.”

Frank looked at him curiously. He turned his head to indicate the height of the Sun. When Mark didn’t get it, he said, “Look at your watch.”

It was nearly ten! Joanna laughed at Mark’s expression.

“Hell, we’ll miss it,” Mark complained.

“No point in racing anywhere now,” Frank chortled. “Don’t worry, they’ll be showing instant replays all day.”

“We could knock at one of the houses,” Mark suggested. But the others laughed at him! and Mark admitted he didn’t have the guts. They ate quickly, and Mark broke out a bottle of Strawberry Hill wine and passed it around. It tasted perfect, fruity flavor like morning juice, but with some authority.

“Best pack up and — ” Frank stopped in midsentence.

There was a bright light over the Pacific. Far away, and very high, and moving downward fast. A very bright light.

The men didn’t speak. They just stared. Joanna looked up in alarm when Frank fell silent. She had never seen him startled by anything, and she whirled around quickly, expecting to see Charles Manson running at them with a chain saw. She followed their stare.

A tiny blue-white dwarf sun sank rapidly in the South, setting far beyond the flat blue Pacific horizon. It left a burning trail behind it. In the moment after it was gone, something like a searchlight beam probed back along its path, rose higher, above the cloudless sky.

Then nothing for one, two, three heartbeats.

Mark said, “Hot—”

A white fireball peeked over the edge of the world.

“Fudge Tuesdae. It’s real. It’s all real.” The edge of a giggle was in Mark’s voice. “We’ve got to get moving—”

“Bullshit.” Frank used just enough volume to get their attention. “We don’t want to be moving when the quakes hit. Lie down. Get your sleeping bag around you. Stay out in the open. Joanna, lie down here. I’ll tie you in. Mark, get over there. Further.”

Then Frank ran to the bikes. He carefully laid the first one on its side, then rolled the next away from it and laid it down too. He moved quickly and decisively. He came back for the third bike and moved it away.

Three white points glared at them, then winked out, one, two… The third and brightest must have touched down, far to the southeast. Frank glanced at his watch, counting the ticking seconds. Joanna was safe. Mark was safe. Frank brought his own bag and lay near them. He took out dark glasses. So did the others. The bulky sleeping bag made Frank look very fat. The dark glasses made his face unreadable. He lay stretched out on his back with his thick forearms behind his head. “Great view.”

“Yeah. The Comet Wardens will love this,” Mark said. “I wonder where Harv went? I’m glad I decided not to get up and go join him. We ought to be safe here. If the mountains hold up.”

“Shut up,” Joanna said. “Shut up, shut up.” But she didn’t say it loud enough to hear. She whispered, and her whisper was drowned out by rumbling that rolled toward them, and then the mountains began to dance.

The communications center at JPL was jammed with people: newsmen with special passes; friends of the Director; and even some people, like Charles Sharps and Dan Forrester, who belonged there.

The TV screens were bright with pictures. Reception wasn’t as good as they’d have liked; the ionized tail of the comet roiled the upper atmosphere, and live TV pictures were apt to dissolve into wavy lines. No matter, Sharps thought. They’ll make onboard recordings in the Apollo, and we’ll recover them later. And there’ll be all those film pictures, taken through the telescope. We’ll learn more about comets in the next hour than we have learned in the last hundred thousand years.

That was a sobering thought, but Sharps was used to it. It was the same for the planets, for the whole solar system. Until men went — or sent probes — into space, they were guessing about their universe. Now they knew. And no other generation could ever discover so much, because the next generation would read it from textbooks, not from the universe itself. They would grow up knowing. Not like when I was growing up and we didn’t know anything, Sharps thought. God, what exciting times. I love it.

A digital clock ticked off the seconds. A glass panel with a world map showed the current position of the Apollo capsule.

Apollo-Soyuz, Sharps reminded himself, and he grinned, because if the one hadn’t gone, the other wouldn’t have either. U.S.-Soviet rivalry was still good for something. Sometimes. To force U.S.-Soviet cooperation, if nothing else.

Pity we’re having communications problems. Power losses on Hammerlab. Didn’t anticipate that. Should have. But we didn’t think it would be this close when we threw Hammerlab together.

“How close?” Sharps said.

Forrester looked up from his computer console. “Hard to say.” He played his fingers across the keys like E. Power Biggs at the Milan Cathedral organ. “If that last input hadn’t been garbled, I’d know. Best estimate is still around a thousand kilometers. If. If that garbled reading was right. And if the one I threw out because it didn’t fit the others is wrong. There are a lot of ifs.”

“Yeah.”

“Taking shots… number thirty-one filter… handheld…” They could barely recognize Rick Delanty’s voice.

“One of your accomplishments,” Dan Forrester said.

“Mine? Which one is this?”

“Getting the first black astronaut a mission,” Forrester said, but he said it absently, because he was studying squiggles on the oscilloscope above his console. He did something, and one of the TV pictures improved enormously.

Charlie Sharps looked at the approaching cloud. He saw it only as a batch of not very sharply focused grays, but one thing was evident — it wasn’t moving sideways at all. The seconds ticked on relentlessly.

“Where the devil is Hamner?” Sharps asked suddenly.

Forrester, if he heard, didn’t answer.

“…path of outer edges of nucleus; say again, Earth… Outer… impossible… may strike…” The voice faded.

“Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy, use full power and say again; I say again, we do not copy.”

More seconds ticked off. Then, suddenly, the TV pictures on the screens swam, blurred and became clearer, in color, as Apollo used the main telescope and full transmission power.

“Jesus, it’s coming closer” Johnny Baker’s voice shouted. “Like it’s going to hit…”

The TV screens changed rapidly as Rick Delanty kept the main telescope trained on the comet head. The comet grew and grew, shapes appearing in the maelstrom of fog, larger shapes, details, lumps of rock, jets of streaming gas, all happening even as they watched. The picture swung on down, until the Earth itself was in view…

And flaming spots appeared on the Earth. For just one long moment, a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the pictures stayed there on the TV screen: Earth, with bright flashes, light so bright that the TV couldn’t show it as more than bright smears and lapses of detail.

The picture stayed in Charlie Sharps’s mind. Flashes in the Atlantic. Europe dotted with bright smears, all over, with a big one in the Mediterranean. A bright flash in the Gulf of Mexico. Any west of that wouldn’t be visible to the Apollo, but Dan Forrester was playing with the computer. All the data they had, from any source, was supposed to go into it. Speakers were screaming. Several of them, on different channels, different sources, riding over the sudden static.

“FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” someone’s voice shouted.

“Where was that?” Forrester called. His voice was just loud enough to go over the babble in the room.

“Apollo recovery fleet,” came the answer. “And we’ve lost communications with them. Last words we got were: ‘Fireball southeast.’ Then ‘Fireball overhead.’ Then nothing.”

“Thank you,” Forrester said.

“Houston, HOUSTON, THERE IS A LARGE STRIKE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO; I SAY AGAIN, LARGE STRIKE THREE HUNDRED MILES SOUTHEAST OF YOU. REQUEST YOU SEND A HELICOPTER FOR OUR FAMILIES.”

“Jesus, how can Baker be so calm about it?” someone demanded.

What damn fool is that? Sharps wondered. New man. Never heard the astronauts when there’s a real problem. He glanced over to Forrester.

Dan Forrester nodded. “The Hammer has fallen,” he said.

Then all the TV screens went blank, and the loudspeakers hissed with static.

Two thousand miles northeast of Pasadena, in a concretelined hole fifty feet below ground, Major Bennet Rosten idly fingered the .38 on his hip. He caught himself and put his hands on the Minuteman missile-launch-control console. They strayed restlessly for a moment, then one went to the key on its chain around his neck. Bloody hell, Rosten thought. The Old Man’s got me nervous.

He had justification. The night before, he’d got a call direct from General Thomas Bambridge, and the SAC Commander in Chief didn’t often speak personally to missile squadron commanders. Bambridge’s message had been short. “I want you in the hole tomorrow,” he’d said. “And for your information, I’ll be up in Looking Glass myself.”

“Goddam,” Major Rosten had answered. “Sir… is this the Big One?”

“Probably not,” Bambridge had answered, and then he’d gone on to explain.

Which wasn’t, Rosten thought, very reassuring. If the Russkis really thought the U.S. was blind and crippled…

He glanced to his left. His deputy, Captain Harold Luce was at another console just like Rosten’s. The consoles were deep underground, surrounded by concrete and steel, built to withstand a near miss by an atomic bomb. It took both men to launch their birds: Both had to turn keys and punch buttons, and the timing sequence was set so that one man couldn’t do it alone.

Captain Luce was relaxed at his console. Books were spread out in front of him: a correspondence course in Oriental art history. Collecting correspondence degrees was the usual pastime for men on duty in the holes, but how could Luce do it, today, when they were unofficially on alert?

“Hey, Hal…” Rosten called.

“Yo, Skipper.”

“You’re supposed to be alert.”

“I am alert. Nothing’s going to happen. You watch.”

“Christ, I hope not.” Rosten thought about his wife and four children in Missoula. They’d hated the idea of moving to Montana, but now they loved it. Big country, open skies, no big-city problems. “I wish—”

He was interrupted by the impersonal voice from the wiregrill-covered speaker above him. “EWO, EWO,” the voice said. “EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. THIS IS NO DRILL. AUTHENTICATION 78-43-76854-87902-1735 ZULU. RED ALERT. RED ALERT. YOUR CONDITION IS RED.”

Sirens screamed through the concrete bunker. Major Rosten hardly noticed as a sergeant came down the steel ladder to the entrance and slammed shut the big Mosler Safe Company bank-vault door. The sergeant closed it from the outside and twirled the combination dial. No one would get into the hole without blasting.

Then, as regulations required, the sergeant cocked his submachine gun and stood with his back to the big safe door. His face was hard, and he stood rigidly, swallowing the sharp knot of fear.

Inside, Rosten punched the authentication numbers into his console, and opened the seals on an envelope from his order book. Luce was doing the same thing at his console. “I certify that the authentication is genuine,” Luce said.

“Right. Insert,” Rosten ordered.

Simultaneously they took the keys from around their necks and put them into the red-painted locked switches on their consoles. Once inserted and turned to the first click, the keys couldn’t be withdrawn without other keys neither Luce nor Rosten had. SAC procedure…

“On my count,” said Rosten. “One. Two.” They turned the keys two clicks. Then they waited. They did not turn them further. Yet.

It was mid-morning in California; it was evening in the Greek isles. The last of the sun’s disk had vanished as two men reached the top of the granite knob. In the east a first star showed. Far below them, Greek peasants were driving overloaded donkeys through a maze of low stone walls and vineyards.

The town of Akrotira lay in twilight. Incongruities: white mudwalled houses that might have been created ten thousand years ago; the Venetian fortress at the top of its hill; the modern school near the ancient Byzantine church; and below that, the camp where Willis and MacDonald were uncovering Atlantis. The site was almost invisible from the hilltop. In the west a star switched on and instantly off, blink. Then another. “It’s started,” MacDonald said.

Wheezing, Alexander Willis settled himself on the rock. He was mildly irritated. The hour’s climb had left him breathless, though he was twenty-four years old and considered himself in good shape. But MacDonald had led him all the way and helped him over the top, and MacDonald, whose dark red hair had receded to expose most of his darkly tanned scalp, was not even breathing hard. MacDonald had earned his strength; archeologists work harder than ditchdiggers.

The two sat crosslegged, looking west, watching the meteors,

They were twenty-eight hundred feet above sea level on the highest point of the strange island of Thera. The granite knob had been called many things by a dozen civilizations, and it had endured much. Now it was known as Mount Prophet Elias.

Dusk faded on the waters of the bay far below. The bay was circular, surrounded by cliffs a thousand feet high, the caldera of a volcanic explosion that destroyed two thirds of the island, destroyed the Minoan Empire, created the legends of Atlantis. Now a new black island, evil in appearance and barren, rose in the center of the bay. The Greeks called it the New Burnt Land, and the islanders knew that some day it too would explode, as Thera had exploded so many times before.

Fiery streaks reflected in the bay. Something burned blue-white overhead. In the west the golden glow faded, not to black, but to a strange curdled green-and-orange glow, a back drop for the meteors. Once again Phaethon drove the chariot of the sun…

The meteors came every few seconds! Ice chips struck atmosphere and burned in a flash. Snowballs streaked down, burning greenish-white. Earth was deep in the coma of Hamner-Brown.

“Funny hobby, for us,” said Willis.

“Sky watching? I’ve always loved the sky,” MacDonald said. “You don’t see me digging in New York, do you? The desert places, where the air’s clear, where men have watched the stars for ten thousand years, that’s where you find old civilizations. But I’ve never seen the sky like this.”

“I wonder what it looked like after you-know-what.”

MacDonald shrugged in the near-dark. “Plato didn’t describe it. But the Hittites said a stone god rose from the sea to challenge the sky. Maybe they saw the cloud. Or there are things in the Bible, you could take them as eyewitness accounts, but from a long way away. You wouldn’t have wanted to be near when Thera went off.”

Willis didn’t answer, and small wonder. A great greenish light drew fire across the sky, moving up, lasting for seconds before it burst and died. Willis found himself looking east. His lips pursed in a soundless Oh. Then, “Mac! Turn around!”

MacDonald turned.

The curdled sky was rising like a curtain; you could see beneath the edge. The edge was perfectly straight, a few degrees above the horizon. Above was the green-and-orange glow of the comet’s coma. Below, blackness in which stars glowed.

“The Earth’s shadow,” MacDonald said. “A shadow cast through the coma. I wish my wife had lived to see this. Just another year…”

A great light glared behind them. Willis turned. It sank slowly — too bright to see, blinding, drowning the background . — Willis stared into it. God, what was it? Sinking… faded.

“I hope you hid your eyes,” MacDonald said.

Willis saw only agony. He blinked; it made no difference. He said, “I think I’m blind.” He reached out, patted rock, seeking the reassurance of a human hand.

Softly MacDonald said, “I don’t think it matters.”

Rage flared and died. That quickly, Willis knew what he meant. MacDonald’s hands took his wrists and moved them around a rock. “Hug that tight. I’ll tell you what I see.”

“Right.”

MacDonald’s speech seemed hurried. “When the light went out I opened my eyes. For a moment I think I saw something like a violet searchlight beam going up, then it was gone. But it came from behind the horizon. We’ll have some time.”

“Thera’s a bad luck island,” Willis said. He could see nothing, not even darkness.

“Did you ever wonder why they still build here? Some of the houses are hundreds of years old. Eruptions every few centuries. But they always come back. For that matter, whattre we doing — Alex, I can see the tidal wave. It gets taller every second. I don’t know if it’ll reach this high or not. Brace yourself for the air shock wave, though.”

“Ground shock first. I guess this is the end of Greek civilization.”

“I suppose so. And a new Atlantis legend, if anyone lives to tell it. The curtain’s still rising. Streamlines from the nucleus in the west, Earth’s black shadow in the east, meteors everywhere…” MacDonald’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“I closed my eyes. But it was northeast! and huge!”

“Greg, who named Mount Prophet Elias? It’s too bloody appropriate.”

The ground shock ripped through and beneath Thera, through the magma channel that the sea bed had covered thirty-five hundred years before. Willis felt the rock wrench at his arms. Then Thera exploded. A shock wave of live steam laced with lava tore him away and killed him instantly. Seconds later the tsunami rolled across the raw orange wound.

Nobody would live to tell of the second Thera explosion.

Mabel Hawker fanned her cards and smiled inwardly. Twenty points: Her hand was a good one. Her partner, unfortunately, wasn’t. The way Bea Anderson was bidding, they’d be out a hundred dollars by the time the plane landed at JFK.

The 747 was high above New Jersey in its descent into New York. Mabel and Chet and the Andersons were seated around a table in the first-class section, too far from the windows to see anything. Mabel regretted the bridge game. She’d never seen New York from the air; but she didn’t want the Andersons to know that.

The windows flashed again.

“Your bid, May,” Chet said.

People in the window seats were craning out. First class buzzed with voices, and Mabel heard the fear that lies buried in every passenger’s mind. She said, “Sorry. Two diamonds.”

“Four hearts,” Bea Anderson said, and Mabel cringed.

There was a soft ping. The sign lit: “FASTEN SEAT BELTS.”

“This is Captain Ferrar,” said a friendly voice. “We don’t know what that flash was, but we’ll ask you to fasten your seat belts, just in case. Whatever it was, it was a long way behind us.” The pilot’s voice was very calm and reassuring.

Did Bea have a jump bid? Oh, Lord, did she even know what an opening “two diamonds” meant? Have to bull it through. …

There was a sound: like something very large being slowly torn in two. Suddenly the 747 was laboring, surging forward.

She’d read that experienced travelers kept their seats belts fastened loosely, so she had done that. Now Mabel deliberately unfastened the belt, laid her cards face-down, and lurched toward a pair of empty window seats.

“Mother, should you do that?” Chet asked.

Mabel winced. She hated being called “Mother.” It sounded country hick. She sprawled across the seats and looked out.

The big plane nosed down, diving, as the pilots tried to compensate for a sudden tail wind moving nearly with the speed of the plane. The wings lost all lift. The 747 fell like a leaf, yawing, lurching, as the pilots fought to hold her.

Mabel saw New York City ahead in the distance. There was the Empire State Building, there the Statue of Liberty, there the World Trade Center, looking just as she’d imagined them, but poking out of a landscape tilted at forty-five degrees. Somewhere out there her daughter would be going to JFK to meet her parents and introduce the boy she was going to marry. …

Flaps were sliding from the wing’s trailing edge. The plane lurched and shuddered, and Mabel’s cards flew like startled butterflies. She felt the plane surging upward, pulling out of its dive.

Far above, black clouds ran like a curtain across the sky, faster than the plane, sparking with lightning as they moved. Lightning everywhere. An enormous bolt struck the Statue of Liberty and played along the grande dame’s upraised torch Then lightning struck the plane.

Beyond Ocean Boulevard there was a bluff. At the bottom of the bluff, the Pacific Coast Highway, and then the sea. At the edge of the bluff the bearded man watched the horizon with a look of surpassing joy.

The light had flashed only for a second or two, but blindingly. Its afterimage was a blue balloon in the bearded man’s field of view. A red glow… strange lighting effects outlining a vertical pillar… He turned with a happy smile. “Pray!” he called. “The Day of Judgment is here!”

A dozen passersby had stopped to stare. Mostly they ignored him, though he was a most impressive figure, with his eyes glowing with happiness and his thick black beard marked with two snow-white tufts at the chin. But one turned and answered. “It’s your Day of Judgment if you don’t step back. Earthquake.”

The bearded man turned away.

The black man in the expensive business suit called more urgently. “If you’re on the cliff when it falls, you’ll miss most of Judgment Day. Come on now!”

The bearded man nodded as if to himself. He turned and strolled back to join the other on the sidewalk. “Thank you, brother.”

The earth shuddered and groaned.

The bearded man kept his feet. He saw that the man in the brown suit was kneeling, and now he knelt too. The earth shook, and parts of the bluff fell away. It would have carried the bearded man with it if he hadn’t moved.

“For He cometh,” the bearded man shouted. “For He cometh to judge the Earth…”

The businessman joined in the psalm “…and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with His truth.”

Others joined. The heaving earth buckled and rolled. “Glory be to the Father and—”

A sharp sudden shock threw them to the ground. They scrambled back to their knees. The shaking stopped, and some of the group hurried away, looking for cars, running inland.

“Oh, ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord,” the bearded man cried. Those who had stayed joined in the canticle. The responses were easy to learn, and the bearded man knew all the versicles.

There were surfers out in the water. They had floated through the violent upheavals. Now they were invisible in a blinding curtain of salt rain. Many of the bearded man’s group ran away into the wet darkening. Still he prayed, and others from the apartments across the street joined him.

“Oh, ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him forever.”

The rains came hard, but just in front of the bearded man and his flock a trick combination of winds drove a clear path that let them see down the bluff to the deserted beach. The waters were receding, boiling away to leave small things flopping on the rainy wet sands.

“Oh, ye Whales, and all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord…”

The canticle ended. They knelt in the driving rain and flashing lightning. The bearded man thought he saw, far away, through the rain and beyond the receding waters, beyond that to the horizon, the ocean was rising in a hump, a straight wall across the world. “Save us, Oh God: for the waters are come in, even unto my soul,” the bearded man cried. The others did not know the psalm, but they listened quietly. An ominous rumble came from the ocean. “I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is; I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.”

But no, the bearded man thought. The rest of that psalm is not appropriate. Not at all. He began again. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

The water rushed forward. They finished the psalm. One of the women stood.

“Pray now,” the bearded man said.

The noise from the sea drowned out all other words, and a curtain of rain swept over them, warm rain to hide the sea and waves. It came in a rush, a towering wall of water higher than the highest buildings, an onrushing juggernaut of water foaming gray and white at the base, rising as a green curtain. The bearded man saw a tiny object moving across the face of the water. Then the wall swept over him and his flock.

Gil rested face-down on the board, thinking slow thoughts, waiting with the others for the one big wave. Water sloshed under his belly. Hot sunlight broiled his back. Other surfboards bobbed in a line on either side of him.

Jeanine caught his eye and smiled a lazy smile full of promises and memories. Her husband would be out of town for three more days. Gil’s answering grin said nothing. He was waiting for a wave. There wouldn’t be very good waves here at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, but Jeanine’s apartment was near, and there’d be other waves on other days.

The houses and apartments on the bluff above bobbed up and down. They looked bright and new, not like the houses on Malibu Beach where the buildings always looked older than they were. Yet even here there were signs of age. Entropy ran fast at the line between sea and land. Gil was young, like all the young men bobbing on the water this fine morning. He was seventeen, burned brown, his longish hair bleached nearly white, belly muscles like the discrete plates of an armadillo. He was glad to look older than he was. He hadn’t needed to pay for a place to stay or food to eat since his father threw him out of the house. There were always older women.

If he thought about Jeanine’s husband, it was with friendly amusement. He was no threat to the man. He wanted nothing permanent. She could be making out with some guy who’d want her money on a permanent basis…

He squinted against the brilliance. It flared and he closed his eyes. That was a reflex; wave reflections were a common thing out here. The flare died against his closed eyelids, and he looked out to sea. Wave coming?

He saw a fiery cloud lift beyond the horizon. He studied it, squinting, making himself believe…

“Big wave coming,” he called, and rose to his knees.

Corey called, “Where?”

“You’ll see it,” Gil called confidently. He turned his board and paddled out to sea, bending almost until his cheek touched the board, using long, deep sweeps of his long arms. He was scared shitless, but nobody would ever know it.

“Wait for me!” Jeanine called.

Gil continued paddling. Others followed, but only the strongest could keep up. Corey pulled abreast of him.

“I saw the fireball!” he shouted. He panted with effort. “It’s Lucifer’s Hammer! Tidal wave!”

Gil said nothing. Talk was discouraged out here, but the others jabbered among themselves, and Gil paddled even faster, leaving them. A man ought to be alone during a thing like this. He was beginning to grasp the fact of death.

Rain came, and he paddled on. He glanced back to see the houses and bluff receding, going uphill, leaving an enormous stretch of new beach, gleaming wet. Lightning flared along the hills above Malibu.

The hills had changed. The orderly buildings of Santa Monica had tumbled into heaps.

The horizon went up.

Death. Inevitable. If death was inevitable, what was left? Style, only style. Gil went on paddling, riding the receding waters until motion was gone. He was a long way out now. He turned his board, and waited.

Others caught up and turned, spread across hundreds of yards in the rainy waters. If they spoke, Gil couldn’t hear them. There was a terrifying rumble behind him. Gil waited a moment longer, then paddled like mad, sure deep strokes, doing it well and truly.

He was sliding downhill, down the big green wall, and the water was lifting hard beneath him, so that he rested on knees and elbows with the blood pouring into his face, bugging his eyes, starting a nosebleed. The pressure was enormous, unhearable, then it eased. With the speed he’d gained he turned the board, scooting down and sideways along the nearly vertical wall, balancing on knees…

He stood up. He needed more angle, more. If he could reach the peak of the wave he’d be out of it, he could actually live through this! Ride it out, ride it out, and do it well…

Other boards had turned too. He saw them ahead of him above and below on the green wall. Corey had turned the wrong way. He shot beneath Gil’s feet, moving faster than hell and looking terrified.

They swept toward the bluff. They were higher than the bluff. The beach house and the Santa Monica pier with its carousel and all the yachts anchored nearby slid beneath the waters. Then they were looking down on streets and cars. Gil had a momentary glimpse of a bearded man kneeling with others; then the waters swept on past. The base of the wall was churning chaos, white foam and swirling debris and thrashing bodies and tumbling cars.

Below him now was Santa Monica Boulevard. The wave swept over the Mall, adding the wreckage of shops and shoppers and potted trees and bicycles to the crashing foam below. As the wave engulfed each low building he braced himself for the shock, squatting low. The board slammed against his feet and he nearly lost it; he saw Tommy Schumacher engulfed, gone, his board bounding high and whirling crazily. Only two boards left now.

The wave’s frothing peak was far, far above him; the churning base was much too close. His legs shrieked in the agony of exhaustion. One board left ahead of him, ahead and below. Who? It didn’t matter; he saw it dip into chaos, gone. Gil risked a quick look back: nobody there. He was alone on the ultimate wave.

Oh, God, if he lived to tell this tale, what a movie it would make! Bigger than The Endless Summer, bigger than The Towering Inferno: a stirring movie with ten million in special effects! If only his legs would hold! He already had a world record, he must be at least a mile inland, no one had ever ridden a wave for a mile! But the frothing, purling peak was miles overhead and the Barrington Apartments, thirty stories tall, was coming at him like a flyswatter.

What was once a comet is a pitiful remnant, a double handful of flying hills and boulders of dirty ice. Earth’s gravitational field has spread them across the sky. They may still reach the halo, but they can never rejoin.

Craters glow across the face of the Earth. The sea strikes glow as brightly as the land strikes; but the sea strikes are growing smaller. Walls of water hover around them, edging inward.

The water hovers two miles high around the Pacific strike. Its edges boil frantically. The pressure of expanding live steam holds back the walls of water.

And the hot vapor goes up in a column clear as glass, carrying salt from vaporized seawater, and silt from the sea bottom, and recondensed rock from the strike itself. At the limits of Earth’s atmosphere it begins to spread in an expanding whirlpool.

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 beginning to sound when Tim was thrown violently to the asphalt parking lot.

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 flannel shirts stood near a station wagon. One walked completely around it, inspecting for damage. The wagon was heavily loaded. A porch with a railing of ornamental iron scrollwork had dropped through the back end. The men cursed loudly. One dug into the back of the wagon. He took out shotguns and handed them to his friends. “We won’t get out of here because of those motherfuckers.” The man’s voice was quiet and strangely calm. Eric could barely hear him.

The others nodded and began thrusting shells into their guns. They didn’t look back at Eric Larsen. When the guns were loaded, the three raised them to their shoulders and aimed at a dozen Wardens. The white-robed preachers screamed and pulled at their chains. Then the shotguns went off in volley.

Eric put his hand to his pistol, then drew it away quickly. Hell! He walked toward the men, his knees unsteady. They were reloading.

“Don’t do that,” Eric said.

The men jumped at the voice. They turned to see police blue. They frowned, their eyes wide, their expressions uncertain. Eric stared back. He had already noticed the “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE” bumper sticker on the station wagon.

The oldest of the three men snorted. “It’s over! That was the end of civilization you just saw, don’t you understand?”

And suddenly Eric did understand. There weren’t going to be any ambulances to take the injured to hospitals. Startled, Eric looked back down Alameda, toward the place where St. Joseph’s was. He saw nothing but buckled streets and collapsed houses. Had St. Joseph’s been visible from here? Eric couldn’t remember.

The spokesman for the men was still shouting. “Those motherfuckers kept us from getting up into the hills! What use are they?” He looked down at his empty shotgun. It lay open in his hand. His other hand held two shells, and kept straying toward the breech of the gun, not quite inserting them.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Are you going to be the first man to start shooting policemen?” He let his eyes go to the bumper sticker. The burly man’s followed, then looked down at the street. “Are you?” Eric repeated.

“No.”

“Good. Now give me the shotgun.”

“I need it—”

“So do I,” Eric said. “Your friends have others.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Where would I take you? I need your shotgun. That’s all.”

The man nodded. “Okay.”

“The shells, too,” Eric said. His voice took on a note of urgency.

“All right.”

“Now get out of here,” Eric said. He held the shotgun without loading it. The Wardens, the few that survived, watched in silent horror. “Thank you,” Eric said. He turned away, not caring where the burly men went.

I’ve just watched Murder One and done nothing about it, he told himself. He walked briskly away from the traffic jam. It was as if his mind were no longer connected to his body, and his body knew where it was going.

The sky to the southwest was strange. Clouds flew overhead, formed and vanished as in a speeded-up film. It was all familiar to Eric Larsen, as familiar as the way the air felt in his sinuses. Anyone from Topeka would know. Tornado weather. When the air feels like this, and the sky looks that way, you head for the nearest basement, taking a radio and a canteen of water.

It’s a good mile to the Burbank City Jail, Eric thought. He studied the sky judiciously. I can make it. He walked briskly toward the jail. Eric Larsen was still a civilized man.

Eileen watched the incident in horror. She hadn’t heard the conversation, but what happened was plain enough. The police… weren’t police any longer.

Two of the Wardens were messily dead, five more writhed in the agony of mortal wounds, and the rest were writhing to free themselves from the chains. One of the Wardens had a pair of bolt cutters. Eileen recognized them. Joe Corrigan had given them to the police only minutes, or lifetimes, before.

The scene outside was incomprehensible. People lay in heaps, or dragged themselves from ruined shops. One man had climbed on top of a wrecked truck. He sat on the cab, feet dangling over the windshield, and drank deeply from a bottle of whiskey. Every now and again he looked up and laughed.

Anyone wearing a white robe was in danger. For the Wardens in chains it was a nightmare. Hundreds of enraged drivers, more hundreds of passengers, many fleeing the city, not really expecting Hammerfall but heading out just in case — and the Wardens had stopped them. Most of the people in the street were still lying flat on their backs, or wandering aimlessly, but there were enough men and women converging on the robed and chained Wardens, and each carrying something heavy — tire irons, tire chains, jack handles, a baseball bat…

Eileen stood in the doorway. She glanced back at Corrigan’s body. Two vertical lines deepened between her eyes as she watched Patrolman Larsen’s retreating back. A riot was starting out there, and the only cop was walking away, fast, after calmly watching murder. It wasn’t a world Eileen understood.

World. What had happened to the world? Gingerly she picked her way back through the broken glass toward her office. Thank God for medium heels, she thought. Glass crunched underfoot. She moved as quickly as she could, without a glance at the smashed goods and broken shelves and sagging walls.

A length of pipe, torn loose from the ceiling, had half crushed her desk, smashing the glass top. The pipe was heavier than anything she had ever lifted before, and she grunted with the effort, but it moved. She pulled her purse from underneath, then scrambled about looking for the portable radio. It seemed undamaged.

Nothing but static. She thought she heard a few words in the static. Someone shouting “Hammerfall!” over and over again, or was that in her head? No matter. There was no useful information.

Or, rather, there was, in that fact itself. This wasn’t a local disaster. The San Andreas had let go. Okay, but there were plenty of radio stations in southern California, and not all of them were near the fault. One or more should still be broadcasting, and Eileen knew of nothing an earthquake could do that would cause so much static.

Static. She went on through the back of the store. She found another body there, one of the warehousemen. She knew from the coveralls; there wouldn’t have been any point in looking for a face. Or for an upper torso, either, not under that… The door to the alley was jammed. She pulled and it moved, slightly, and she pulled again, bracing her cut knee against the wall and straining as hard as she could. It opened just far enough to let her squeeze through, and she went out and looked up at the sky.

Black clouds, roiling, and rain beginning to fall. Salt rain. Lightning flashed overhead.

The alley was blocked with rubble. Her car couldn’t possibly get through. She stopped and used the mirror from her purse, found a Kleenex and wiped away the dirty tear streaks and blood; not that it mattered a damn how she looked, but it made her feel better.

More rain fell. Darkness and lightning overhead, and salt rain. What did that mean? A big ocean strike? Tim had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t listened; it had so little to do with real life. She thought about Tim as she hurried down the alley, back toward Alameda because it was the only way she could go, and when she got to the street she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Tim was there, in the middle of a riot.

The earthquake rolled Tim Hamner under his car. He stayed there, waiting for the next shock, until he smelled gasoline. Then he came out, fast, crawling across the buckled pavement, staying on hands and knees.

He heard screams of terror and agony, and new sounds: concrete smashing on street pavement, concrete punching through metal car bodies, an endless tinkle of falling glass. And still he couldn’t believe. He got up, trembling.

People in white robes, blue uniforms, street clothes, lay sprawled on shattered street and sidewalks. Some moved. Some did not. Some were obviously dead, twisted or crushed. Cars had been overturned or smashed together or crushed by falling masonry. No building stood intact. The smell of gasoline was strong in his nostrils. He reached for a cigarette, jerked his hand violently away, then thoughtfully put his lighter in a back pocket, where he’d have to think before finding it.

A three-story building had lost its east face; the glass and brick had disintegrated, spilling outward across the parking lot and side street almost as far as where Tim Hamner had been lying. A chunk with part of a bay window in it had dropped through the passenger section of Hamner’s car. Gasoline ran from it in a spreading pool.

From somewhere he heard screams. He tried to shut them out. He couldn’t think of anything to do. Then the riot spilled around the corner.

It was led by three men in white robes. They were not screaming; they were panting, and saving all their breath for it. The screaming came from those behind them, and not from those in the lead.

One of the robed ones screamed at last. “Help! Please!” he screamed at Tim Hamner and ran toward him.

The mob pursued. They were looking at Tim Hamner, all those eyes at once, and he thought, They’ll believe I’m with them! Then a worse thought: I could be recognized. As the man who invented the Hammer…

Time was too short to consider the idea. Tim reached into the trunk and brought out the portable tape unit. The robed youth running toward him had a wispy blond beard and a lean face set in classic lines of terror. Tim shoved his microphone toward the Warden and said loudly, “One moment, please, sir. Just how—”

Insulted and betrayed, the man swiped at the microphone and ran past him. The other two fugitives, and most of the mob, had continued on down the street — toward the dead end, and of course that was a pity. Some burly types ran past Tim, chasing the robed man into the broken building. One stopped, panting, and looked at Tim.

Hamner lifted the microphone again. “Sir? Have you any idea how all this happened?”

“Hell, yes… buddy. Those sons of bitches… those Wardens blocked us off just as we… were taking off for Big Bear. They were… going to stop the comet by praying. Didn’t… work, and they… trapped us here, and we’ve… already killed about… half of the motherfuckers.”

It was working! Somehow nobody ever thinks of killing a newsman. Too vividly public, maybe: The whole world is watching. Other rioters had stopped, were crowding around, but not as if they were waiting their turn to kill Tim Hamner. They were waiting for a chance to speak.

“Who you with?” one demanded.

“KNBS,” Tim said. He fumbled in his pockets for the press-card Harvey Randall had given him. There it was. Tim flashed it, but kept his thumb over the name.

“Can you get a message out?” the man demanded. “Send for—”

Tim shook his head. “This is a recorder, not a remote unit. The rest of the crew will be here soon. I hope.” He turned back to the first man. “How are you planning to get out now?”

“Don’t know. Walk out, I guess.” He seemed to have lost interest in the fleeing Wardens.

“Thank you, sir. Would you mind signing…” Tim brought out a stack of NBS release forms. The big man stepped back as if they’d been scorpions. He looked thoughtful for a second.

“Forget it, buddy.” He turned and walked away. Others followed, and the whole crowd melted away, leaving Tim alone by the ruins of his car.

Hamner put the press card into his shirt pocket, adjusting it so that the big lettering, PRESS, was visible, but his name wasn’t. Then he put the recorder’s strap over his shoulder. He also carried the microphone and a stack of release forms. It was all heavy and awkward, but it was worth it. He did not laugh.

Alameda was filled with horrors. A woman dressed in an expensive pant-quit was jumping up and down on a lumpy white robe. Tim looked away. When he looked back, there were more people swarming around him. They carried bloody tire irons. A man swung toward him, swung an enormous handgun toward Tim’s navel. Tim pointed the microphone at him. “Excuse me, sir. How did you manage to get trapped in this mess?” The man cried as he told his tale…

There was someone at Tim’s elbow. Hamner hesitated, not wanting to look away; the man with the gun was still talking, tears of rage running down his face, and his gun still pointed at Tim’s navel. He looked earnestly into Hamner’s eyes. Whatever he saw, he hadn’t fired yet…

Who the devil was that? Someone reaching for the release forms—

Eileen! Eileen Hancock? Tim held the microphone motionless as Eileen stepped briskly to his side. He let her take the release forms.

“Okay, Chief, I’m here,” she said. “Bit of trouble back there…”

Tim almost fainted. She wasn’t going to blow his cover, thank God she had brains for that. Tim nodded, his eyes still fixed on his interview subject. “Glad you got here,” Tim said from the corner of his mouth, speaking low as if worried about ruining the interview. He did not smile.

“…and if I see another of the sons of bitches I’ll kill him too!”

“Thank you, sir,” Tim said gravely. “I don’t suppose you’d care to sign—”

“Sign? Sign what?”

“A release form.”

The gun swung up to point at Tim’s face. “You bastard!” the man screamed.

“Anonymous subject,” Eileen said. “Sir — you do know there’s a newspersons’ shield law in California, don’t you?”

“What—”

“We can’t be forced to reveal our sources,” Eileen said. “You don’t need to worry. It’s the law.”

“Oh.” The man looked around. The other rioters had gone, somewhere, and it was raining. He looked at Tim, and at Eileen, and at the gun in his hand. There were more tears. Then he turned and walked away. After a few steps he ran.

Somewhere a woman screamed, short and sharp. The background noise was screams and moans and thunder, thunder always, and very near. A brisk wind had risen. Two men were atop an intact car with a shoulder-carried television camera. No way to tell how long they’d been there, but they were all alone on an island of privacy. And so were Tim and Eileen.

“Rioters are publicity-shy,” Tim said. “Glad to see you. I’d forgotten you work around here.”

“Worked,” Eileen said. She pointed toward the ruins of Corrigan’s. “I don’t suppose anyone will be selling plumbing supplies…”

“Not from Burbank,” Tim said. “I am glad to see you. You know that, don’t you? What do we do now?”

“You’re the expert.”

Lightning crackled nearby. The hills of Griffith Park were aflame with blue flashes.

“High ground,” Tim said. “And fast.”

Eileen looked puzzled. She pointed at the lightning.

“That might hit us,” he agreed. “But we’ve a better chance out of this river valley. Feel the rain? And there may be…”

“Yes?”

“Tidal wave,” Tim said.

“Jesus. It’s real, isn’t it? This way, then. Up into the Verdugo Hills. We can hike across. How much time do we have?”

“I don’t know. Depends on where it hit. They hit, probably,” Tim was surprised at how calm his voice was.

Eileen began walking. East on Alameda. The route led toward the head of the traffic jam, where the huddled bodies of the Wardens lay. As they got near, a car roared off through the intersection, into a filling station beyond, then onto the sidewalk. It squeezed through between a wall and a telephone pole, scraping paint off the right side.

The car that had been behind it was now clear, and it was unlocked. Keys dangled in the ignition. Eileen waved Tim toward it. “How good a driver are you?” she demanded.

“Okay.”

“I’ll drive,” she said firmly. “I’m damned good at it.” She got into the driver’s seat and started the car. It was an elderly Chrysler, once a luxury car. Now the rugs were worn and it had ugly stains on the seat covers. When the motor turned over with a steady purr, Tim thought it the most beautiful car he’d ever seen.

Eileen took the route of the previous car. They drove over a white robe, bump; she didn’t slow. The space between the telephone pole and the wall was narrow, but she went through it at speed, twenty miles an hour anyway, without worrying about it. Tim held his breath until they were through.

The street curved gently ahead of them. There were cars jammed in both lanes of traffic, and Eileen kept on the sidewalk, veering off into yards when she had to to avoid more utility poles. She drove through rose beds and manicured lawns until they were past the traffic jam.

“Lord God, you are a good driver,” Tim said.

Eileen didn’t look up. She was busy avoiding obstructions. Some of the obstructions were people. “Should we warn them?” she asked.

“Would it do any good? But yes,” Tim said. He opened the window on his side. The rain was coming down hard now, and the salt stung his eyes. “Get to high ground,” he shouted. “Tidal waves. Flood! Get to high ground,” he shouted into the rising wind. People stared at him as they went by. A few looked around wildly, and once Tim saw a man grab a woman and dash for a car in sudden decision.

They turned a corner, and there were red flames. A whole block of houses was burning out of control, burning despite the rain. The wind blew flaming chips into the air.

Another time they slowed to avoid rubble in the street. A woman ran toward them carrying a bundled blanket. Before Eileen could accelerate, the woman had reached the car. She thrust the blanket in the window. “His name is John!” she shouted. “Take care of him!”

“But — don’t you want—”

Tim couldn’t finish. The woman had turned away. “Two more back there!” she screamed. “John. John Mason. Remember his name!”

Eileen speeded up again. Tim opened the bundle. There was a baby in it. It didn’t move. Tim felt for a heartbeat, and his hand came out covered with blood. It was bright red, copper blood, and the smell filled the car despite the warm salt smell of the rain.

“Dead,” Tim said.

“Throw him out,” Eileen said.

“But—”

“We aren’t going to eat him. We won’t be that hungry.”

It shocked Tim, so much that he thrust the baby out the window and let go. “I — it felt like I was letting some of my life drop onto that pavement,” he said.

“Do you think I like it?” Eileen’s voice was pinched. Tim looked at her in alarm; there were tears streaming down her cheeks. “That woman thinks she saved her child. At least she thinks that. It’s all we could have done for her.”

“Yes,” Tim said gently.

“If… When. When we’ve got to high ground, when we know what’s happening, we can start thinking civilization again,” Eileen said. “Until then, we survive.”

“If we can.”

“We will.” She drove on, grimly. The rain was coming down so hard that she couldn’t see, despite the windshield wipers speeding away, smearing grime and salt water across the windshield.

The Golden State Freeway had cracked. The underpass was blocked with wreckage. A tangle of cars and a large gasoline tank truck lay in the midst of a spreading pool of fire.

“Jesus,” Tim said. “That’s… shouldn’t we stop?”

“What for?” Eileen turned left and drove parallel to the freeway. “Anyone who’s going to survive that has got out already.”

They were driving through a residential area. The houses had mostly survived intact. They both felt relief; for a few moments there was no one hurt, broken or dying. They found another underpass, and Eileen drove toward it.

The way had been blocked by a traffic barrier. Someone had torn down the barrier. Eileen drove through it. As she did, another car came out of the rain ahead. It dashed past, horn screaming.

“Why would anyone be going into the valley?” Tim demanded.

“Wives. Sweethearts. Children,” Eileen said. They were climbing now. When the way was blocked by twisted remains of buildings and cars, Eileen turned left, bearing north and east always. They passed the ruins of a hospital. Police in blue, nurses in rain-soaked white poked at the wreckage. One of the policemen stopped and looked at them. Tim leaned out the window and screamed at him. “Get to high ground! Flood! Tidal wave! High ground!”

The policeman waved, then turned back to the wreckage of the hospital.

Tim stared moodily at the swirling smears on the windshield. He blinked back tears of his own.

Eileen had a moment to glance at him. Her hand touched his before returning to the wheel. “We couldn’t have helped. They’ve got cars, and enough people…”

“I guess.” He wondered if he meant it. The nightmare ride went on, as the car climbed toward the Verdugo Hills, past wrecked stucco houses, a fallen school, burning houses and intact houses. Whenever they saw anyone, Tim screamed warning. It made him feel a little better for not stopping.

He glanced at his watch. Incredibly, less than forty minutes had passed since he’d seen the bright flash. He muttered it: “Forty minutes. H plus forty minutes, and counting.”

The wave rushes outward from the center of the Gulf of Mexico, moving at 760 miles an hour. When it reaches the shallows along the coast of Texas and Louisiana, the foot of the wave stumbles. More and more water rushes up behind, piling higher and higher until a towering monster half a kilometer high falls forward and flows up onto the land.

Galveston and Texas City vanish under the pounding waves. The water that flows westward through the swamps into El Lago, further west into Houston itself, is now filled with debris. The wave strikes all along the arc from Brownsville, Texas, to Pensacola, Florida, seeking lowlands, rivers, any path inland and away from the burning hell at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

The waters pile high along the Florida west coast; then they break across, carrying with them the sandy soil. They leave behind channels scoured clean, a myriad of passages from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream will be cooler and much smaller for centuries to come.

The waters crossing Florida are capricious. Here a reflected wave joins the main body of rushing water to build even higher; there a reflection cancels, leaving parts of the Okefenokee Swamp untouched. Havana and the Florida Keys vanish instantly. Miami en joys an hour’s respite until the waves from the Atlantic strikes rush down, meet the outrushing waves from the Gulf, overpower them, and crash into Florida’s eastern cities.

Atlantic waters pour into the Gulf of Mexico through the newly formed cross-Florida channels. The saucer bowl of the Gulf cannot hold it all, and the waters once again flow west and north, across the already drowned lands. One wave rushes up the Mississippi. It is forty feet above flood level when it passes Memphis, Tennessee.

Fred Lauren had been at the window all night. The bars didn’t hide the sky at all. They’d put him alone in a cell after they photographed and fingerprinted him, and they left him. At noon he’d be taken to the Los Angeles Jail.

Fred laughed. At noon there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles Jail. There’d be no Los Angeles. They’d never get a chance to put him in with those other men. Memories of another prison came, and he swept them away with better thoughts.

He remembered Colleen. He’d gone to her door with presents. He only wanted to talk. She’d been afraid of him, hut he was inside before she could bolt the door, and he’d brought very nice presents for her, nice enough that she’d let him stand by the door while she stood on the other side of the room and looked at the jewelry and the gloves and red shoes, and then she’d wondered how he knew her sizes, and he told her.

He’d talked and talked, and after awhile she was friendly and let him sit down. She’d offered him a drink and they’d talked some more, and she had two drinks for herself, and then another. She’d been pleased that he knew so much about her. He didn’t tell her about the telescope, of course, but he’d told her how he knew where she worked, and where she shopped, and how beautiful she was…

Fred didn’t want to remember the rest of it. How she’d had one drink too many, and told him that even though they’d just met she felt she’d known him a long time and of course he really had known her even if she didn’t know it, and she’d asked if he wanted to stay…

Tramp. Like all of them. A tramp. No, she couldn’t have been, she really loved him, he knew she did, but why had she laughed, and then screamed and told him to get out when—

NO!

Fred always stopped remembering then. He looked up at the sky. The comet was there. Its tail blazed across the sky just as he’d seen in the paintings in the astronomy magazines, and when the sky was blue with hidden dawn, brightening in that tiny patch of western sky that Fred could see, there were still the wisps of comet among the clouds, and people moved on the streets below, the fools, didn’t they know?

They brought him breakfast in his cell. The jailers didn’t want to talk to him. Even the trustees looked at him that way…

They knew. They knew. The police doctors must have examined her, and they knew she hadn’t been, that he couldn’t, that he’d tried but he couldn’t and she laughed and he knew how he could do it, but he didn’t want to, and she laughed again, and he bit her until she screamed and then he’d be able to only she kept on screaming!

He had to stop thinking. He had to, before he remembered the shape on the bed. The cops had made him look at her. One had held his hand in a certain way and bent his fingers until he opened his eyes and looked and he didn’t want to, didn’t they understand that he loved her and he didn’t want…?

The sky glowed strangely through the cracks of the buildings across the street. Somewhere to the left, far south and west. The glow died before he’d seen anything at all, but Fred smiled. It had happened. It wouldn’t be long now.

“Hey, Charlie,” the drunk across the block called. “Charlie!”

“Yeah?” the trustee answered.

“What the fuck was that? They making movies out there?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Ask the sex maniac, he’s got western exposure.”

“Hey, Sex Maniac—”

The walls and floor jerked suddenly, savagely. He was flying… He threw out his arms to ward the wall from his head. The stone wave broke against his arms, and Fred howled. Agony screamed in his left elbow.

The floor seemed to stabilize. The jail was solidly built. There’d been nothing damaged. Fred moved his left arm and moaned. Other prisoners were shouting now. One screamed in agony. He must have fallen from an upper bunk. Fred ignored them all and moved again to the window. He felt real fear. Was that all?

One ordinary day, with… clouds. Jesus, they were moving fast! Churning, forming and vanishing, streaming north and west. A lower cloud bank, calmer and more stable, began moving south and west. This wasn’t what Fred had expected. One wave of fire, that was what he had prepared for. Doomsday was taking its own sweet time.

The sky darkened. Now it was all black clouds, swirling, churning, flashing with continuous lightning. The wind and the thunder howled louder than the prisoners.

The end of the world came in blinding light and simultaneous thunderclap.

Fred’s mind recondensed to find him on the floor. His elbow was shrieking agony. Lightning… lightning must have struck the jail itself. There were no lights in the corridor, and outside was dark, so that he could see only in surrealistic flashes like a strobe-lit go-go bar.

Charlie was moving along the cellblock. He carried keys. He was letting the prisoners out. One by one. He opened the cells and they came out and moved down the corridor — and he had already passed Fred’s cell. The cells on either side were open. His was locked.

Fred screamed. Charlie didn’t turn. He went on until he reached the end of the cellblock, then he went out and down the stairs.

Fred was alone.

Eric Larsen looked to neither the right nor the left. He walked in long strides. He stepped around the dead and the injured, and ignored pleas for help. He could have helped them, but he was driven by a terrible urgency. His cold eyes and the carelessly carried shotgun discouraged anyone from getting in his way.

He saw no other policemen. He barely noticed the people around him, that some were helping the injured, some were disconsolately staring at the ruins of their homes and shops and stores, some were running aimlessly. None of it mattered now. They were all doomed, as Eric Larsen was doomed.

He might have taken a car and driven away into the hills. He saw cars race past him. He saw Eileen Hancock in an old Chrysler. If she’d stopped he might have gone with her, but she didn’t, and Eric was glad, because it was tough enough to keep his resolve.

But suppose he wasn’t needed? Suppose it was a fool’s errand? There was no way to know.

But I should have taken a car, he thought. I could have finished it and had a chance. Too late now. There was the station house, City Hall, and the jail. They seemed deserted. He went into the jail. There was a dead policewoman under the wreckage of a huge cabinet that had stood against the wall. He saw no one else, living or dead. He went through, behind the booking cage and up the stairs. The cellblocks were quiet.

It was a fool’s errand. He was not needed. He was about to go back down the stairs, but he stopped himself. No point in coming this far without being sure.

There’d been talk of a tidal wave following Hammerfall. There were people in the Burbank Jail, people that Eric Larsen had put there. Drunks, petty thieves, young vagrants who said they were eighteen but looked much younger. They couldn’t be left to drown like rats in forgotten jail cells. They didn’t deserve that. And Eric had put them there — it was his responsibility.

The barred door at the top of the stairs stood open. Eric went through and used his big flash in the near darkness. The cell doors stood open. All but one.

All but one. Eric went to the cell. Fred Lauren stood with his back to the corridor. His left arm was cradled in his right. Lauren stared out the window, and he didn’t turn when Eric flashed the light on him. Eric stood watching him for a moment. No one deserved to drown like a rat in a cage. No human did. The thieves and drunks and runaways and…

“Turn around,” Eric said. Lauren didn’t move. “Turn around or I’ll shoot your kneecaps out. That hurts a lot.”

Fred whimpered and turned. He saw the shotgun leveled at him. The policeman was holding the light off to one side, almost behind himself, so that Fred could see.

“Do you know who I am?” the policeman asked.

“Yes. You kept the other policeman from beating me last night.” Fred moved closer. He stared at the shotgun. “Is that for me?”

“I brought it for you,” Eric said. “I came to turn the others loose. I couldn’t let you loose. So I brought the shotgun.”

“It’s the end of the world,” Fred Lauren said. “All of it. Nothing will be left. But…” Fred whimpered deep in his throat. “But when? Would… please, you’ve got to tell me. Wouldn’t she be dead now? Already? She couldn’t live through the end of the world. She’d have died and I’d never have talked to her—”

“Talked to her!” Eric brought the shotgun up in rage. He saw Fred Lauren standing calmly, waiting, and he saw the bed and the ruins of a young girl, and the closet with the pathetically small wardrobe. There was a smell of copper blood in his nostrils. His finger tightened on the trigger, then relaxed. He lowered the shotgun.

“Please,” Fred Lauren said. “Please—”

The shotgun came up quickly. Eric hadn’t known it would kick so hard.

Hot Fudge Tuesdae: Two

Static roared in the crowded room. Random blobs and colors filled the large TV, but twenty men and women stared at the screen where they had watched lights blaze and die above the Atlantic, above Europe, Northwest Africa, the Gulf of Mexico. Only Dan Forrester continued to work. The screen above his console held a computer-drawn world map, and Forrester laboriously called up all the data received at JPL, plotting the strikes and using their locations as input for more calculations.

Charles Sharps felt that he ought to be interested in Forrester’s calculations, but he wasn’t. Instead he watched the others. Open mouths, bulging eyes, feet thrusting them back into their chairs. They cringed back from their blinded consoles and screens, as if these were the danger. And still Forrester typed instructions, made precise movements, studied results and typed again…

“Hammerfall,” Sharps said to himself. And what the hell do we do about it? He couldn’t think of anything, and the room depressed him. He left his station and went to the long table against one wall. There were coffee and Danish there, and Sharps poured himself a cup. He stared into it, then lifted it in a mock salute. “Doom,” he said. He kept his voice low. The others began to rise from their stations.

“Doom,” Sharps repeated. Ragnarok. And what use now was man’s proud civilization? Ice Age, Fire Age, Ax Age, Wolf Age… he turned to see that Forrester had left his station and was moving toward the door. “What now?” Sharps asked.

“Earthquake.” Forrester continued to walk rapidly toward the exit. “Earthquake.” He said it loudly, so that everyone could hear, and there was a rush toward the door.

Dr. Charles Sharps poured his cup almost full. He took it to the tap and ran a splash of cold water into it. It was Mocha-Java made less than an hour ago with a Melitta filter and kept in a clean Thermos. A pity to water it; but now it was just cool enough to drink. How long would it be before ships crossed major oceans again? Years, decades, forever? He might never taste coffee again. Sharps drained the cup in four swallows and dropped it onto the floor. The heavy china bounced and rolled against a console. Sharps went outside at a run.

The others had passed Forrester in the hall; the glass doors at the entrance were just closing behind him. That urgent waddle: Dan Forrester had never been athletic, but surely he could move faster than that? Did they have time to spare, then? Sharps jogged to catch up.

“Parking lot,” Dan puffed. “Watch it—”

Sharps stumbled, recovered. Dan was dancing on one leg. The ground had jerked, emphatically, once. Sharps thought: Why, that wasn’t bad. The buildings aren’t even harmed—

“Now,” Forrester said. He continued toward the parking lot. It was at the top of a long flight of concrete stairs. Dan stopped near the top, blowing hard, and Sharps got a shoulder under his armpit and managed to half-carry him the rest of the way to the top. There Dan lay down and rolled over. Sharps watched him with concern.

Forrester puffed, tried to say something and failed. He was too winded. He lifted one arm and gestured with palm down. Sit.

Too late. The ground danced under his feet, and Sharps sat down too hard, then found himself rolling toward the stairs. This time there was the sound of breaking glass, but when Sharps looked over the JPL complex he didn’t see any obvious damage. Down below, the reporters were beginning to stream out of the Von Karman Center, but many paused after the mild quake, and some went back inside.

“Tell them…” puff puff. “Tell them to get out,” Forrester said. “The worst one is coming—”

Charles Sharps called to the reporters. “Big shock coming! Get everyone outside!” He recognized the New York Times man. “Get them out!” Sharps called.

He turned to see that Forrester was on his feet and moving rapidly toward the back of the parking lot, away from the cars. He was walking as fast as Sharps had ever seen him move. “Hurry!” Sharps called to the others.

Men and women were spilling out of all the JPL buildings. Some came toward Sharps and the parking lot. Others milled about in areas between buildings, wondering where to go. Sharps gestured viciously, then looked at Forrester. Dan had reached a clear area, and was sitting down…

Sharps turned and ran toward Forrester. He reached him and sprawled onto the asphalt. Nothing happened for a moment.

“First shock… was the ground wave… from the Death Valley strike,” Forrester huffed. “Then… the Pacific strike. Don’t know how long until it triggers—”

The earth groaned. Birds flew into the air, and there was an electric feeling of impending doom. Down at the end of the parking lot a group had just come to the top of the stairs and were moving toward Forrester and Sharps.

The earth groaned again. Then it roared.

“San Andreas,” Forrester said. “It will let go completely. Way overdue. Hundred megatons of energy. Maybe more.”

Half a dozen people had cleared the stairwell. Two came toward Sharps and Forrester. The rest sought their own cars. “Get them out of there,” Forrester huffed.

“Get into the clear!” Sharps screamed. “And clear off that stairwell! Get off!”

A TV camera appeared at the top of the stairs. A man was carrying it, followed by a woman. There was a knot of people behind them. The TV crew started across the parking lot—

And the earth moved. There was time for them to curl up hugging their knees in the two or three seconds it took the quake to build strength. The earth roared again, and again, and there were other sounds, of people screaming, of falling glass and crashing concrete, and then the sound lost all form and became the shapeless chaos of nightmare. Sharps tried to sit erect and look back toward JPL, but nothing was solid. The asphalt rippled and ripped. The hot pavement slid gratingly away, throwing Sharps into a double somersault, then heaved and bucked once more, and the world was filled with sound and roaring and screams.

Finally it was over. Sharps sat and tried to focus his eyes. The world had changed. He looked up toward the towering Angeles mountains, and their skyline was different, subtly, but different. He had no time to see more. There was sound behind him, and he turned to see that part of the parking lot was gone, the rest tilted at strange angles. Many of the cars were gone, tumbled over the precipice that had developed between him and the stairs — only there weren’t any stairs. They, too, had tumbled onto the lower parking lot. The remaining cars butted each other like battling beasts. Everywhere was sound: cars, buildings, rocks, all grinding together.

A Volkswagen rolled ponderously toward Sharps, like a steel tumbleweed, growing huge. Sharps screamed and tried to run. His legs wouldn’t hold him. He fell, crawled, and saw the VW tumble past his heels, a mountain of painted metal. It smashed itself half flat against a Lincoln… and now it was only Volkswagen-sized again.

Another small car was on its back, and someone was under it, thrashing. Oh, God, it was Charlene, and there wasn’t a hope of anyone getting to her. Abruptly she stopped moving. The ground continued to tremble and groan, then thrashed. More of the parking lot separated, dipped, slid slowly downhill, carrying Charlene and her killer car. Now Sharps no longer heard the roar. He was deaf. He lay flat on the shuddering ground, waiting for it to end.

The tower, the large central building of JPL, was gone. In its place there was a crumpled mass of glass, concrete, twisted metal, broken computers. The Von Karman Center was similarly in ruins. One wall had fallen, and through it Sharps saw the first unmanned lunar, the metal spider that had gone to the Moon to scoop up its surface. The spacecraft was helpless under the falling roof. Then the walls collapsed as well, burying the spacecraft, and burying the science press corps.

“End! When will it end?” someone was screaming. Sharps could barely hear the words.

Finally the quake began to die. Sharps stayed down. He would not tempt the fates. What remained of the parking lot was tilted downslope and bulged in the middle. Now Sharps had time to wonder who had been on the stairway behind the cameramen. Not that it mattered; they were gone, the camera people were gone; everyone who had been within fifty feet of the stairwell had vanished into the mass below, covered by the hillside and the mangled remains of cars.

The day was darkening. Visibly darkening. Sharps looked up to see why.

A black curtain was rolling across the sky. Within churning black clouds the lightning flared as dozens, scores, hundreds of flashbulbs.

Lightning flared and split a tree to their right. The instantaneous thunder was deafening, and the air smelled of ozone. More lightning crashed in the hills ahead.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Tim Hamner demanded.

“No.” Eileen drove on, speeding through empty, rainwashed streets. “There’s a road up into the hills here somewhere. I’ve been up it a couple of times.”

To their left and behind them were more houses, mostly intact. To the right were the Verdugo Hills, with small side streets penetrating a couple of blocks into them, each street with its “Dead End” sign. Except for the rain and lightning, everything seemed normal here. The rain hid everything not close to them, and the houses, mostly older, stucco, Spanishstyle, stood without visible damage.

“Aha!” Eileen cried. She turned hard right, onto a blacktop road that twisted its way along the base of a high bluff, a protruding spur of the lightning-washed mountains ahead. The road twisted ahead, and soon they saw nothing but the hill to the right, the brooding mountains looming above and a golf course to their left. There were neither cars nor people.

They turned, turned again, and Eileen jammed on the brakes. The car skidded to a halt. It stood face-to-face with a landslide. Ten feet and more of flint and mud blocked their way.

“Walk,” Tim said. He looked out at the lightning ahead and shuddered.

“The road goes a lot further,” Eileen said. “Over the top of the hills, I think.” She pointed to her left, at the golf course protected by its chain link fence. “Tear a hole in the fence.”

“With what?” Tim demanded, but he got out. Rain soaked him almost instantly. He stood helplessly. Eileen got out on the other side and brought the trunk keys.

There was a jack, and a few flares, and an old raincoat, oil-soaked as if it had been used to wipe the engine. Eileen took out the jack handle. “Use that. Tim, we don’t have much time—”

“I know.” Hamner took the thin metal rod and went over to the fence. He stood helplessly, pounding the jack handle into his right hand. The task looked hopeless. He heard the trunk lid slam, then the car door. The starter whirred.

Tim looked around, startled, but the car wasn’t moving. He couldn’t see Eileen’s face through the driving rain and wet glass. Would she leave him here?

Experimentally he put the jack handle between the wire and a fence post and twisted. Nothing happened. He strained, throwing his weight onto the handle, and something gave. He slipped and fell against the fence, and felt his wet clothing tear as a jagged point snagged him. It cut him, and the salt on his clothes was in the wound. He hunched his shoulders against the pain and hopelessness, and stood, helpless again.

“Tim! How are you doing?”

He wanted to turn and call to her. He wanted to tell her it was no use, and that he was miserable, and he’d torn his clothes, and…

Instead, he crouched and inserted the jack handle again, twisting and prying at the wire, until it broke free of the post. Then again, and again, and suddenly the whole length of fence was loose there. He went to the next post and began his work.

Eileen gunned the car. The horn sounded, and she called, “Stand aside!” The car left the road and came at the fence rammed it, tore it loose from another post and flattened it onto the grass, and the car drove over it. The car motor raced. “Get in,” she called.

Tim ran for it. She hadn’t stopped completely, and now it seemed she wasn’t going to stop at all. He ran to catch up and tugged open the door, threw himself onto the seat. She gunned the car across the fairway, leaving deep ruts, then came to a green. She drove across it. The car tore at the carefully manicured surface.

Tim laughed. There was a note of hysteria in it.

“What?” Eileen asked. She didn’t take her eyes off the grassy fairway ahead.

“I remember when some lady stepped on the Los Angeles Country Club green with spiked heels,” Tim said. “The steward nearly died! I thought I understood Hammerfall, and what it meant, but I didn’t, not until you drove across the greens…”

She didn’t say anything, and Tim stared moodily ahead again. How many man-hours had gone to produce that perfect grassy surface? Would anyone ever again bother? Tim had another wild impulse to laughter. If there were golf clubs in the car, he could get out and tee off on a green…

Eileen went completely across the golf course and back to the blacktop road up into the hills. Now they were in wilderness, high hills on either side of them. They passed a picnic ground. There were Boy Scouts there. They had a tent set up, and they seemed to be arguing with the scoutmaster. Tim opened the car window. “Stay on high ground,” he shouted.

“What’s happened below?” the scoutmaster asked.

Eileen slowed to a stop.

“Fires. Floods. Traffic jams,” Tim said. “Nothing you’ll want to go into. Not for awhile.” He motioned the adult closer. “Stay up here, at least for the night.”

“Our families…” the man said.

“Where?”

“Studio City.”

“You can’t get there now,” Tim said. “Traffic’s not moving in the valley. Roads closed, freeways down, lot of fires. The best thing you can do for your families is to stay up here where you’re safe.”

The man nodded. He had big brown eyes in a square, honest face. There was a stubble of red beard on his chin. “I’ve been telling the kids that. Julie-Ann, you hear that? Your mother knows where we are. If things were really bad down there, they’d send the cops after us. Best we stay here.” He lowered his voice. “Lot of rebuilding to do after that quake, I guess. Many hurt?”

“Yeah,” Tim said. He turned away. He couldn’t look into the scoutmaster’s eyes.

“We’ll stay another day, then,” the scoutmaster said. “They ought to have things moving again by tomorrow. Kids aren’t really prepared for this rain, though. Nobody expects rain in June. Maybe we ought to go down into Burbank and stay in a house. Or a church. They’d put us up—”

“Don’t,” Tim said. His voice was urgent. “Not yet. Does this road go on over the top?”

“Yes.” The man brought his face close to Tim’s. “Why do you want to go up into that?” He waved toward the lightning that flashed on the peaks above. “Why?”

“Have to,” Tim said. “You stay here. For the night, anyway. Let’s go, Eileen.”

She drove off without saying anything. They rounded a bend, leaving the scoutmaster standing in the road. “I couldn’t tell him either,” Eileen said. “Are they safe there?”

“I think so. We seem to be pretty high.”

“The top is about three thousand feet,” Eileen said.

“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 thinner pattern and they could see blurred shapes out there. There were bright orange flares down on the valley floor. Dozens of them.

“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.”

“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?”

She shook her head and laughed in a funny way and didn’t get up. He bent and took her shoulders. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help. Tim lifted her, got his arms under her legs and began staggering down the blacktop road.

“This is silly,” Eileen said.

“Damn betcha”

“I can walk.”

“Good.” He let her legs drop. She stood, but she clung to him, her head against his shoulder.

Finally she let go. “I’m glad I found you. Let’s get moving.”

“Count off,” Gordie called.

“One,” Andy Randall answered. The others sang out in turn: “Two.” “Three.” “Four.” “Five,” Bert Vance said. He was a little late, and glanced up nervously, but his father didn’t seem to have noticed. “Six.”

“And me,” Gordie said. “Okay, Andy, lead off. I’ll play tail-end Charlie.”

They started down the trail. The cliff was less than a mile away. Twenty minutes, no more. They rounded a bend and had a magnificent view stretching eastward across the tops of the pine trees. The morning air was crystal clear; the light was… funny.

Gordie glanced at his watch. They’d been hiking ten minutes. He was tempted to skip his compulsory halt for bootlace adjustments. What difference would it make? Nobody would have blisters, not in another half-mile, and walking along, trying to be natural, was harder than the decision had been.

There was a bright flash to the east. Brilliant, but small. Much too bright to be lightning, and out of a clear sky? It left an afterimage that blinking couldn’t get rid of.

“What was that, Dad?” Bert asked.

“Don’t know. Meteor? Hold up, up in front. Time for boot adjustments.”

They dropped their packs and found rocks to sit on. The bright afterimage was still there, although it was fading. Gordie couldn’t look directly at his bootlaces. Then he noticed that the wind had died. The forest was deathly still.

Bright flash. Sudden stillness. Like—

The shock wave rumbled across them with a thunder of sound. A dead tree crashed somewhere above them, thrashing in final agony among its brothers. The rumbling went on a long time, with rising wind.

Atom bomb at Frenchman’s Flats? Gordie wondered. Couldn’t be. They’d never test anything that big. So what was it?

The boys were chattering. Then the ground rumbled and heaved beneath them. More trees fell.

Gordie fell onto his pack. The other boys had been shaken off their rocks. One, Herbie Robinett, seemed to be hurt. Gordie crawled toward him. The boy wasn’t bleeding, and nothing was broken. Just shaken up. “Stay down!” Gordie shouted. “And watch for falling limbs and trees!”

The wind continued to rise, but it was shifting, moving around to the south, no longer coming from the east, where they’d seen the bright flash. The earth shook again.

And out there, far beyond the horizon, rising high into the stratosphere, was an ugly cloud, mushroom-shaped. It climbed on and on, roiling horribly. It was just where the bright flash had been.

One of the boys had a radio. He had it to his ear. “Nothing but static, Mr. Vance. I keep thinking I hear something else, but I can’t make out what.”

“Not surprising. We almost never get anything in the mountains in daytime,” Gordie said.

But I don’t like that wind. And what was that thing? A piece of the comet? Probably. Gordie laughed bitterly. All that fuss about the end of the world, and it was nothing. A bright flash out there in Death Valley — or maybe it wasn’t the comet at all. Frenchman’s Flat was that way, a hundred and fifty miles or so…

The ground had stopped shaking. “Let’s move on,” Gordie said. “On your feet.”

He pulled on his pack. Now what? he asked himself. Can I… will the boys be all right without me? What’s happening out there?

Nothing. Nothing but a goddam meteor. Maybe a big one. Maybe as big as that thing in Arizona, the one that made a half-mile crater. An impressive thing, and the boys saw it fall. They’ll talk about it for years.

But it doesn’t solve my problem. The bank examiners will still be around next Friday, and—

“Funny clouds up there,” Andy Randall said. There was worry in his voice.

“Yeah, sure,” Gordie said absently. Then he noticed where Andy was pointing.

Southwest. Almost due south. It was as if a pool of black ink had been poured across the sky. Huge, towering black clouds, rising higher and higher, blotting out everything…

And the wind was howling through the trees. More clouds, and more, seeming to form from nothing, and racing toward them at terrific velocity, faster than jet planes…

Gordie looked frantically along the trail. No good place to hide. “Ponchos,” he shouted.

They scrabbled their rain gear out. As Gordie flipped his poncho open, the rain came like a torrent of warm bathwater. Gordie tasted salt.

Salt!

“Hammerfall,” he whispered.

And the end of civilization. The paper shortages at the bank: gone, washed away. They weren’t important now.

Marie? The clouds were building above Los Angeles — and it was a long way to the nearest car. Nothing he could do for her. No way to help Marie. Maybe Harvey Randall would look out for her. Right now, Gordie’s problem was the boys.

“Back to Soda Springs,” he shouted. It was the best place, until they found out just what was going to happen. It was sheltered, and there was a clearing and a flat.

“I want to go home!” Herbie Robinett screamed.

“Get ’em moving, Andy,” Gordie called. He waved them ahead of him, ready to shove them if he had to, but he didn’t. They followed Andy. Bert went past. Gordie thought he saw tears in his son’s eyes. Tears through the dirty rainwater that hammered at them.

The trails will all be flooded in no time. Washed out, Gordie thought. And this warm crap will melt all the snow. The Kern’s going to be up over its banks, and all the roads will be gone.

Gordie Vance suddenly threw back his head and yelled in triumph. He was going to live.

Hot Fudge Tuesdae: Three

Harvey Randall had been fifteen minutes from home… until Hammerfall.

It was day turned night, and the night was alive with pyrotechnics. If daylight still leaked through the black cloud cover, the lightning was far brighter. Hills flashed in bluewhite light and vanished, now a white sky over jagged black skyline, now a look into the canyon on his left, now blackness lit only by the headlamps of cars, now a nearby blast that clenched Randall’s eyelids in pain. The wipers were going like crazy, but the rain fell faster; it all came through in a blur. Randall had rolled down both side windows. Wet was better than blind.

To drive in such conditions was madness, yet the traffic was still heavy. Perhaps they were all mad. Through the thunder and the drum of rain on metal came the bleat of myriad horns. Cars shifted lanes without warning; they drove in the oncoming lanes, and butted their way back into line when oncoming lights faced them down.

Randall’s TravelAII was too big to challenge. Where a landslide had blocked half the road and a coward had stopped to let oncoming traffic through, Randall drove the TravelAII over the slide — it tilted badly, but held — and in front of the coward and straight at the traffic, and butted the lead car until it backed up.

He didn’t see the people who blocked his way. He saw only barriers: mudslides, breaks in the road, cars. He kept wondering if the house had collapsed, with Loretta inside. Or if Loretta, in blind panic, was about to come looking for him in the car. She’d never survive alone, and they’d never link up. Hell, it was almost an hour since Hammerfall!

The looters would come sooner or later. Loretta knew where to find his gun, but would she use it? Randall turned onto Fox Lane in floodwater that was hubcap-deep, drove to the end, used the remote. All the houses were dark.

The garage door didn’t open.

But the front door was wide open.

The looting couldn’t have started this soon, Randall thought, and he made himself believe it. Just for drill, then, he took the flashlight and handgun with him, and he left the TravelAII in a roll and immediately rolled back under the car, and studied the situation from there.

The house looked dead. And rain was blowing in the door.

He rolled out and sprinted and pulled up alongside the door. He still hadn’t used the flash. First person he saw, he’d flick the beam in her face. It would be Loretta, coming to close the door, and if she had his gun he was going to do a swan dive off the steps, because the way he was behaving she’d be scared enough to shoot.

He poked head and flash around the doorjamb. Lightning only made confusing shadows. Thunder drowned out other sounds.

He flicked on the flashlight.

It jumped at him; it hit him straight in the face. Loretta was lying on the floor, face-up. Her face and chest were a shapeless wet ruin, the kind left by a shotgun blast. Kipling, headless, was a mess of blood and fur beside her.

He walked inside, and he couldn’t feel his legs. Walking on pillows, they call it, the last stage of exhaustion before collapse. He knelt, set the gun down — it never occurred to him that someone might be here — and reached for Loretta’s throat. He drew his hand back, with a rippling shudder, and reached for her wrist instead. There was no pulse. Thank God. What would he have done?

They hadn’t raped her. As if it mattered now. But they hadn’t taken the jewelry off her wrists either. And though the drawers from the buffet had been pulled out and dumped, the good silver was still lying there.

Why? What could they have wanted?

Randall’s thoughts were slow and confused; they took strange paths. A part of him believed none of this: not the body of his wife, flickering in lightning, in and out of existence; not the weird weather, nor the earthquakes, nor the translation of a great light show into the end of the world. When he got up and went into the bedroom for something to cover Loretta, it was because he had been staring at her until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

The dresser drawers were all pulled out. Randall saw cuff links and a gold ring and Loretta’s amethyst brooch and matching earrings in the wreckage. The closets had been rifled too. Where were… ? Yes, they’d taken both of his overcoats. He waded through the wreckage.

The bed was piled high with senseless things: panty hose, bottles of cosmetics, lipsticks. He swept it to the floor, pulled the bedclothes off the bed and dragged them behind him into the hall. Something echoed in his mind… but he shied from it. He covered Loretta. He sat down again.

At no time had he wondered if “they” were still here. But he tried to picture the people who had done this. He? She? All men, all women, a mixed group? What could they have wanted? They’d left silver and jewelry, but taken . … overcoats.

Randall shambled into the kitchen.

They’d found and taken the beef jerky, and his stock of vitamins, and all of his canned soup. Now he saw it, and he kept looking. They’d taken his canned gasoline from the garage. They’d taken his guns. They’d been ready, they’d planned this! At the moment of Hammerfall they had already known what they would do. Had they picked his house at random? Or his street? They could have raided every house on the block.

He was back in the entrance hall, with Loretta. “You wanted me to stay,” he told her. More words clogged in his throat; he shook his head and went into the bedroom.

He was tired to death. He stood beside the bed, staring at what had been on the bed. This was what didn’t make sense. Panty hose still in the packages. Shampoo, hair conditioner, skin conditioner, nail polish, a couple of dozen large bottles. Lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, Chap Sticks, emery boards, new boxes of curlers… scores of items. If he could figure this out, maybe he’d know who. He could go after them. He still had the handgun.

Even in his stupor he didn’t really believe it. They were gone, and he was here with Loretta. He sat down on the bed and stared at Loretta’s hairbrush and dark glasses.

… Oh.

Of course. The Hammer had fallen, and Loretta had started packing her survival kit. The things she couldn’t live without. Then the killers had come. And killed her. And left behind as garbage the lipsticks and eyebrow pencils and panty hose Loretta couldn’t face life without. But they’d taken the suitcase.

Harvey rolled over on his belly and hid his face in his arms. Thunder and rain roared in his ears, drowning thoughts he wanted drowned.

He was aware that there was someone looking at him. The thunder went on and on; he couldn’t have heard a noise. But there were eyes on him, and he remembered not to move, and then he remembered why. When he moved, it would have to be suddenly, and — he’d left the gun sitting beside Loretta. Oh, the hell with it. He rolled over.

“Harv?”

He didn’t answer.

“Harv, it’s Mark. My God, man, what happened!”

“Don’t know. Raiders.”

He had almost dozed off when Mark spoke again. “You all right, Harv?”

“I wasn’t here. I was interviewing a goddam professor at UCLA and I was in a traffic jam and I was… I wasn’t here. Leave me alone.”

Mark shifted from one foot to the other. He wandered around the bedroom, looking into closets. “Harv, we’ve got to get out of here. You and your damn hot fudge sundae. The whole L.A. basin is under the ocean, you know that?”

“She wanted me to stay. She was scared,” said Harvey. He tried to think of some way to make Mark go away. “Get out and leave me alone.”

“Can’t, Harv. We have to bury your old lady. Got a shovel?”

“Oh.” Harvey opened his eyes. The room was still lit by surrealistic strobe lighting. Funny he didn’t notice the thunder anymore. He got up. “There’s one out in the garage, I think. Thanks.”

They dug in the backyard. Harvey wanted to do it all, but he ran out of energy quickly, and Mark took over. The shovel made squishing sounds; the hard adobe was soaking faster than Mark could dig. Squish. Plop. Squish. Plop. And rolling thunder.

“Time?” Mark called. He was standing in a waist-deep hole, his boots nearly underwater.

“Noon.”

Harvey looked around, startled at the voice from behind him. Joanna was perched above them on the slope, rain running down her face. She held a shotgun, and she looked very alert.

“Deep enough,” Mark said. “Stay here, Harv. Jo, let’s go inside. Give Harv the shotgun.”

“Right.” She came down from the slope, a tiny figure with a big shotgun. She handed it to Harvey without a word.

He stood in the rain, standing guard by looking down into an empty grave. If someone had come up behind him, he wouldn’t have noticed. Or cared. Except that he did notice Mark and Joanna.

Big Mark and tiny Joanna, carrying a blanketed bundle. Harvey went over to help her carry, but he was too late. They lowered her into the grave. Water flowed up and around the blanket. It was an electric blanket, Harvey saw. Loretta’s electric blanket. She could never stay warm enough at night.

Mark took the shovel. Joanna took the shotgun. Mark shoveled steadily. Squish. Plop. Harvey tried to think of something to say, but there weren’t any words. Finally, “Thanks.”

“Yeah. You want to read any words?”

“I ought to,” Harvey said. He started toward the house, but he couldn’t go in.

“Here. This was in the bedroom,” Joanna said. She took a small book out of her pocket.

It was Andy’s confirmation prayer book; Loretta must have included that in her survival kit. She would have. Harvey opened it to the prayers for the dead. Rain soaked the page before he could read it, but he found a line, half read and half remembered. “Eternal rest grant her, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon her.” He couldn’t see any more. After a long time Mark and Joanna led Harvey into the house.

They sat at the kitchen table. “We don’t have long,” Mark said. “I think we saw your raiders.”

“They killed Frank Stoner,” Joanna added.

“Who?” Harvey demanded. “What did they look like? Can we track the bastards?”

“Tell you later,” Mark said. “First we get packed up and moving.”

“You’ll tell me now.”

“No.”

Joanna had rested the shotgun against the table. Harvey picked it up, calmly, and checked the loads. He pulled one outside hammer back. His firearms training was excellent: He didn’t point it at anyone. “I want to know,” Harvey Randall said.

“They were bikers,” Joanna said quickly. “Half a dozen of them riding escort with a big blue van. We saw them turn out of Fox Lane.”

“Those bastards,” Harvey said. “I know where they live. Short side street, half a mile from here. The street’s half a block long. They repainted the sign to read ‘Snow Mountain.’ ” He stood.

“They won’t be there now,” Mark said. “They went north, toward Mulholland.”

“Frank and Mark and I,” Joanna said. “We had our bikes.”

“They were coming out of your street,” Mark said. “I wanted to know what was happening in there. I stopped and held up my hand, you know, the way bikers stop each other for a friendly talk. And one of the sons of bitches blasted at me with a shotgun!”

“And they missed Mark and hit Frank,” Joanna said. “Frank went right over the edge. If the shotgun didn’t kill him, the fall did. The bikers kept on going. We didn’t know what to do, so we came here as fast as we could.”

“Jesus,” Harvey said. “I got here half an hour before you. They were here, somewhere. Right near here, while I was… while…”

“Yeah,” Joanna said. “We’ll know them if we see them again. Big bikes. Chopped, but not much. And murals on the van. We’ll know them.”

“Never saw that gang before,” Mark added. “No way we can catch up with them just now. Harv, we can’t stay here. The L.A. basin’s flooded, everybody down there is dead from the tsunami, but there must be a million people in the hills around here, and there sure ain’t enough for a million people to eat. There’s got to be a better place to go.”

“Frank wanted to head for the Mojave,” Joanna said. “But Mark thought we ought to look in on you…”

Harvey said nothing. He put the shotgun down and stared at the wall. They were right. He couldn’t catch the bike crew, not now, and he was very tired.

“They leave anything at all?” Mark demanded.

Harvey didn’t answer.

“We’ll do a search anyway,” Mark said. “Jo, you take the house. I’ll go the rounds outside, garage, everything. Only, we can’t leave the TravelAII by itself. Come on, Harv.” He took Harvey’s arm and pulled him to his feet. Mark was surprisingly strong. Harvey made no resistance. Mark led him to the TravelAII and put him in the passenger seat. He put the Olympic target pistol in Harvey’s lap. Then he locked all the doors, leaving Harvey sitting inside, still staring at the rain.

“He going to be all right?” Joanna asked.

“Don’t know. But he’s ours,” Mark said. “Come on, let’s see what we can find.”

Mark found Harvey’s Chlorox bottles of water in the garage. There were other things. Sleeping bags, wet, but serviceable; evidently the bikers had their own and didn’t bother. Stupid, Mark thought. Harv’s Army Arctic was better than any the bikers would have.

After awhile he brought his salvage to the TravelAII and opened the back. Then he got the small dirt bikes he and Joanna had ridden and brought them around. He started to ask Harvey to help, but instead found a heavy two-by-eight and used it as a ramp. With Joanna’s help he wrestled one of the bikes into the back, and piled stuff in on top of it.

“Harv, where’s Andy?” Mark said finally.

“Safe. Up in the mountains. With Gordie Vance… Marie!” Harvey shouted. He jumped out of the car and ran toward Gordie’s house. Then he stopped. The front door was open. Harvey stood there, afraid to go in. What if… what if they’d been in Gordie’s place while Harvey was mooning over Loretta? Jesus, what a goddam useless bastard I am…

Mark went into the Vance house. He came out a few minutes later. “Looted. But nobody home. No blood. Nothing.” He went to the garage and tried to open the door. It came open easily; the lock was broken. When it swung up, the garage was empty. “Harv, what kind of car did your buddy have?”

“Caddy,” Harvey said.

“Then she left, ’cause there’s no car here and no Caddy with the bikers. You get back and watch the TravelAll. There’s more of your stuff we’ll need. Or come help carry.”

“In a minute.” Harvey went back to the car and stood, thinking. Where would Marie Vance go? She was his responsibility; Gordie was taking care of Harvey’s boy, Gordie’s wife would be Harvey’s lookout. Only Harvey didn’t have a clue as to where Marie might be—

Yes he did. Los Angeles Country Club. Governor’s fundraising thingy. Crippled children. Marie was on the board. She’d have been there for Hammerfall.

And if she hadn’t got back here by now, she wasn’t coming back. Marie wasn’t Harvey’s responsibility anymore.

Mark came out of the house, and Harvey was finally startled. Mark was carrying something… OhmyGod. Carrying five thousand dollars’ worth of Steuben crystal whale, Loretta’s wedding present from her family. A couple of years ago Loretta had thrown Mark out of the house for picking it up.

Mark got the whale to the van without dropping it. He wrapped it in sheets and pillowcases and spare blankets.

“What’s all that for?” Harvey asked. He pointed to the whale, and the skin cream, and Kleenex, and the remains of Loretta’s survival kit. And other things.

“Trade goods,” Mark said. “Your paintings. Some luxury items. If we find something better, we dump the lot, but we might as well be carrying something. Jesus, Harv, I’m glad your head’s working again. We’re about loaded up. Want to get in, or do you want to take another look through the house?”

“I can’t go back in there—”

“Right. Okay.” He raised his voice. “Jo, let’s move it.”

“Right.” She appeared from out of a hedge, soaking wet, still holding the shotgun.

“You up to driving, Harv?” Mark demanded. “It’s a big car for Joanna to handle.”

“I can drive.”

“Fine. I’ll be outrider with the bike. Give me the pistol, and Jo keeps the shotgun. One thing, Harv. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Harvey said. “North. I’ll think of something once we get started.”

“Right.”

The motorcycle could hardly be heard over the roar of the thunder. They drove out, north toward Mulholland, along the same route the bikers had taken, and Harvey kept hoping…

It rained. Dan Forrester saw his path in split-second flashes when the frenetic wipers disturbed the flood of water across his windshield. The rain ate the light of his headlamps before the light could reach the road. Continuous lightning gave more light, but the rain scattered it into flashing white murk.

Rivers ran across the twisting mountain road. The car plowed through them.

In the valleys it must be… well, he would learn soon enough. There were preparations he must make first.

Charlie Sharps would know sooner.

Dan worried for Charlie. Charlie’s chances weren’t poor, but he should not have been traveling with that loaded station wagon. It was too obviously worth stealing. But Masterson might have packed guns, too.

Even if they reached the ranch, would Senator Jellison let them in? Ranch country, high above the floods. If they accepted everyone who came, their food would be gone in a day, their livestock the next. They might let Charlie Sharps in, alone. They probably would not require the services of Dan Forrester, Ph.D., ax-astrophysicist. Who would?

Dan was surprised to find that he’d driven home. He zapped the garage door and it opened. Huh! He still had electricity. That wouldn’t last. He left the door open. Inside, he turned on some lights, then set out a great many candles. He lit two.

The house was small. There was one big room, and the walls of that room were bookshelves, floor to ceiling. Dan’s dining table was piled high with his equipment. He had bought his fair share of freeze-dried foods while they existed, but Dan had thought further than that. He had carried home far more than his share of Ziploc Bags and salad-size Baggies, insect spray and mothballs. The table was full. He set to work on the floor.

He whistled as he worked. Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes. Presently he got up to put on some gloves. He came back with a fan and set it blowing past his ears from behind. That ought to keep the insecticide off his hands and out of his lungs.

When the pile on the floor got too big, he moved. And when the second pile was as high as the first, he stood up carefully. His joints were stiff. His feet hurt. He moved his legs to build circulation. He started coffee in the kitchen. The radio gave him nothing but static, so he started a stack of records going. There was now room at the kitchen table. He resumed work there.

The two piles merged into one.

The lights went out, the Beatles’ voices deepened and slowed and stopped. Dan was suddenly immersed in darkness and sounds he’d been ignoring: rolling thunder, the scream of wind and the roar of rain attacking the house. Water had begun to drip from a corner of the ceiling.

He got coffee in the kitchen, then moved around the library lighting candles. Hours had passed. The forgotten coffee had already been heated too long. Four-fifths of the shelves were still full, but most of the right books were in bags.

Dan walked along the bookshelves. Weariness reinforced his deep melancholy. He had lived in this house for twelve years, but it was twice that long since he’d read Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies and Gulliver’s Travels. These books would rot in an abandoned house: Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat’s Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon’s Day; The Red Right Hand, The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife, Rosemary’s Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He’d packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization. Even Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man…

Dammit, no! Dan tossed Habitable Planets for Man on the table. Fat chance that the next incarnation of NASA would need it before it turned to dust, but so what? He added more: Future Shock; Cults of Unreason; Dante’s Inferno; Tau Zero… stop. Fifteen minutes later he had finished. There were no more bags.

He drank coffee that was still warm, and forced himself to rest before he tackled the heavy work. His watch said it was ten at night. He couldn’t tell.

He wheeled a wheelbarrow in from the garage. It was brand-new, the labels still on it. He resisted the temptation to overload it. He donned raincoat, boots, hat. He wheeled the books out through the garage.

Tujunga’s modern sewage system was relatively new. The territory was dotted with abandoned septic tanks, and one of these was behind Dan Forrester’s house. It was uphill. You can’t have everything.

The wind screamed. The rain tasted both salty and gritty. The lightning guided him, but badly. Dan wrestled the wheelbarrow uphill, looking for the septic tank. He finally found it, full of rain because he’d removed the lid yesterday evening.

The books went in in handfuls. He pushed them into the aged sewage with a plumber’s helper, gently. Before he left he broke open an emergency flare and left it on the upended lid.

He made his second trip in a bathing suit. The warm lashing rain was less unpleasant than soaked and sticky clothes. The third trip he wore the hat. He almost fainted coming back. That wouldn’t do. He’d better have a rest. He took off the wet suit and stretched out on the couch, pulled a blanket over himself… and fell deeply asleep.

He woke in a pandemonium of thunder and wind and rain. He was horribly stiff. He got to his feet an inch at a time, and kept moving toward the kitchen, talking encouragement to himself. Breakfast first, then back to work. His watch had stopped. He didn’t know if it was day or night.

Fill the wheelbarrow half full, no more. Wheel it through slippery mud, uphill. Next trip, remember to take another flare. Dump the books by armfuls, then push them down into the old sewage. Unlikely that anyone, moron or genius, would look for such a treasure here, even if he knew it existed. The smell hardly bothered him; but these hurricane winds couldn’t last forever, and then the trove would be doubly safe. Back for another load…

Once he slipped, and slid a fair distance downhill through the mud with the empty wheelbarrow tugging him along. He crossed just enough sharp rocks to dissuade him from trying it again.

Then: last load. Finished. He wrestled with the lid, rested, tried again. He’d had a hell of a time getting it off, and he had a hell of a time getting it back on. Then downhill with the empty barrow. In a day his tracks would be flooded away. He thought of burying the last evidence of his project — the wheelbarrow — but just the thought of all that work made him hurt all over.

He dried himself with all the towels in the bathroom. Why not? He used the same towels to dry the rain gear. He got more from the linen closet. He stuffed hand towels into the boots before he put them in the car, with the raincoat and the hat and more dry towels. The old house leaked now; he wondered if the old car would too. Ultimately it wouldn’t matter. Ultimately he would have to abandon the car and set out on foot, in the rain, carrying a backpack for the first time in his life. He’d be safe, or dead, long before this rain began to think about stopping.

Into the car went the new backpack he’d packed day before yesterday, including a hypo and some insulin. There were two more such medical packages elsewhere in the car, because someone might steal the whole backpack. Or someone might steal the hypos… but surely they would leave him one.

The car was an ancient heap, and nothing in it would attract thieves. He’d included a few items to buy his life, if and when it could be bought. There was one really valuable item; it would look like trash to the average looter, but it might get him to safety.

Daniel Forrester, Ph.D., was a middle-aged man with no useful profession. His doctorate would never again be worth as much as a cup of coffee. His hands were soft, he weighed too much, he was a diabetic. Friends had told him that he often underestimated his own worth; well, that was bad too, because it restricted his bargaining ability. He knew how to make insulin. It took a laboratory and the killing of one sheep per month.

Yesterday Dan Forrester had become an expensive luxury.

What was in his backpack was something else again. It was a book, wrapped like the others: Volume Two of The Way Things Work. Volume One was in the septic tank.

Harvey Randall saw the white Cadillac coming toward him. For a moment it didn’t register. Then he jammed on the brakes so hard that Joanna was thrown forward against the restraining belts. The shotgun clattered hard against the dash. “You gone crazy?” she yelled, but Harvey had already opened the door and was running out into the street.

He waved his arms frantically. God! She had to see him! “Marie!” he shouted.

The Cadillac slowed, halted. Harvey ran up to it.

Incredibly, Marie Vance was unruffled. She wore a Gernreich original, a simple low-cut summer dress of white linen with a golden thread woven into it. Gold earrings and a small diamond pendant on a gold chain set it off perfectly. Her dark hair was coming out of place from the damp, but it wasn’t long hair and had never been fully curled; even now she looked as if she’d merely been at the Country Club all day and was going home to change into evening clothes.

Harvey looked at her in astonishment. She eyed him calmly. His dislike of her boiled up inside him. He wanted to scream at her, to ruffle her. Didn’t she realize… ?

“How did you get here?” he demanded.

When she answered, he was ashamed of himself. Marie Vance spoke calmly; too calmly. There was an undertone of unnatural effort in her voice. “I came up the ridge. There were cars in the way, but some men moved them. I went — Why do you want to know how I got here, Harvey?”

He laughed, at himself, at the world, and she was frightened at his laughter. He could see the fear come into her eyes.

Mark drove up on the motorcycle. He looked at the Cadillac, then at Marie. He didn’t whistle. “Your neighbor?” he asked.

“Yes. Marie, you’ll have to come with us. You can’t stay at your place—”

“I’ve no intention of staying at my place,” she said. “I’m going to find my son. And Gordie,” she added, after a tiny pause. She looked down at her gold-colored sandals. “When I get some clothes… Harvey, where is… ?” Before she could finish she saw the pain, then the numbness in Harvey’s eyes. “Loretta?” she said, her voice low and wondering.

Harvey said nothing. Mark, behind him, shook his head slowly. His eyes met Marie’s. She nodded.

Harvey Randall turned away. He stood in the rain, saying nothing, looking at nothing.

“Leave the Caddy and get in the TravelAII,” Mark said.

“No.” Marie tried to smile. “Please, can’t you wait until I get some clothes? Harvey—”

“He’s not making decisions just now,” Mark said. “Look, there’ll be clothes. Not much food, but plenty of clothes.”

“I have perfectly good outdoor equipment at home.” Marie was firm. She knew how to talk to employees, Gordie’s or Harvey’s. “And boots that fit. I am very hard to fit. You can’t tell me that ten minutes will make that much difference.”

“It’ll take longer than ten minutes, and we don’t have any time at all,” Mark said.

“It certainly will take longer if we stand here talking about it.” Marie started the car. She began moving forward, slowly. “Please wait for me,” she said, and drove away, south.

“Jesus,” Mark said. “Harv? What…?” He let his question stay unfinished. Harvey Randall wasn’t making decisions just now. “Get in the goddam car, Harv!” Mark ordered.

The bark in Mark’s voice moved Harvey toward the TravelAII. He started to get into the driver’s seat. Mark growled, “Joanna, take the bike. I’ll drive.”

“Where… ?”

“Back to Harvey’s place. I guess. Hell, I don’t know what we ought to do. Maybe we ought to just go on.”

“We can’t leave her,” Joanna said firmly. She got out and took the bike. Mark shrugged and climbed into the TravelAII. He managed to turn in a drive and started back the way they’d come, cursing all the way.

When they reached the cul-de-sac, Marie Vance was sitting on her front porch. She wore trousers of an expensive artificial fabric. They were cut in a rugged square pattern and looked very durable. She wore a cotton blouse and a wool Pendleton shirt over it. She was lacing medium-height hiking boots over wool socks. A blanket lay beside her. The blanket was lumpy.

Joanna braked the motorcycle on the lawn. Mark got out and joined her. He stared at Marie, then back at Joanna. “Goddam, that’s the quickest change I’ve ever seen. She could be useful.”

“Depends on for what,” Marie said evenly. “Who are you two, and what’s wrong with Harvey?” She went on lacing her boots.

“His wife was killed. Same outfit that broke into your place,” Mark said. “Listen, where were you going in that Caddy? Is your husband with Andy Randall?”

“Yes, of course,” Marie said. “Andy and Burt are up there. With Gordie.” She tied the boot and stood. “Poor Loretta. She — oh, damn it. Will you tell me your names?”

“Mark. This is Joanna. I worked for Harv—”

“Yes,” Marie said. She’d heard about Mark. “Hello. You’re staying with Harvey, then?”

“Sure—”

“Then let’s go. Please put this bundle in the car. I’ll be right out.”

Hard as fucking nails, Mark thought. Coldest bitch I ever saw. He took the blanket. It was lumpy with clothing and other objects. Marie came out with a plastic travel bag, the kind used to hang clothes when carried on board an airplane. There wasn’t a lot of room in the back of the TravelAII, but she was careful about how she laid it, smoothing out wrinkles.

“What’s all that?” Mark demanded.

“Things I’ll need. I’m ready now.”

“Can you drive Harv’s buggy?”

“On roads,” Marie said. “I’ve never tried to drive except on roads. But I can handle a stick shift.”

“Good. You drive. It’s too big for Joanna.”

“I can manage.”

“Sure, Jo, but you don’t have to,” Mark said. “Let Miz-”

“Marie.”

“Let Miz Marie-”

She laughed. Hard. “It’s just Marie. And I’ll drive. Do you have maps? I don’t have a good map. I know the boys are up near the southern edge of Sequoia National Park, but I’m not sure how to get there.” Dressed in trousers and wool shirt, thin nylon jacket she’d brought from the house, hiking boots, she looked smaller than Mark remembered, and somehow less competent. Mark had no time to wonder why.

She’ll have to do, Mark thought. “I’ll lead on the bike. Joanna will ride shotgun in the car. I think we ought to put Harv in the back seat. Maybe if he gets some sleep his brain will turn on again. Christ, I never saw a guy go to pieces like that before. It’s like he killed her himself.” Mark saw Marie’s eyes widen slightly. To hell with that, he thought. He went to the bike and kicked it into life.

They went back out, turned north again. The road was deserted. Mark wondered where to go now. He could ask Harv, but would he get the right answer, and how would he know if he did? Why the hell is he so broke up about it, Mark wondered. She wasn’t much wife anyway. Never went anywhere with Harv. Good-looker, but not much of a companion. Why get so broke up? If Mark had to bury Joanna he’d hate it, but it wouldn’t break him apart. He’d still function, and he’d turn a glass over for her next time he had a drink — and Harv had always been tough.

Mark glanced at his watch. Getting late. Time to move fast, through what was left of Burbank and the San Fernando Valley. How? If the freeways weren’t down they’d be packed with cars. No good. He thought of routes, and wished Harvey’s head was working again, but it wasn’t and it was up to Mark to lead. When he reached Mulholland he turned left.

The horn sounded behind him. Marie had stopped at the intersection. “This isn’t the way!” she shouted.

“Sure it is. Come on!”

“No.”

God damn it. Mark drove back to the TravelAII. Marie and Joanna sat tensely in the front seat. The shotgun was poised in Joanna’s hands, pointing upward; Marie sat with one arm carelessly near the gun. She was a lot bigger than Joanna.

“What is this?” Mark demanded.

“The boys. We are going to find our boys,” Marie said. “And they are east of us, not west.”

“Hell, I know that,” Mark shouted. “This is the best way. Stay on high ground. We get across the valley on Topanga, stay along the Santa Susanna hills and go up through the canyons. That keeps us off the freeways and out of the passes where everybody else will be.”

Marie frowned, trying to imagine a map of the L.A. basin. Then she nodded. That route would take them to Sequoia She started the car moving again.

Mark roared on ahead. As he drove he muttered to himself. Frank Stoner had said the Mojave was the place to be. Stoner knew everything. It was good enough for Mark. It was a place to go, and once there they could figure out what to do next. It was a destination.

But Harv would want to get his kid out. And that Vance woman wanted hers. Funny she barely mentioned her husband. Maybe they didn’t get along. Mark remembered Marie as he’d first seen her. Class. Lots of it. That might be interesting stuff.

They drove on through the rain, across the backbone of Los Angeles, and the rain kept them from seeing the destruction in the valleys to either side. The roads were clear of traffic, and the TravelAII got over the rapidly building piles of mud wherever the road dipped below the ridgeline. They were making miles, and Mark was pleased.

Randall dozed and woke, dozed and woke. The car seat jolted and tilted and jerked. Thunder and rain roared in his ears. His own ghastly memories kept pulling him almost awake. When lightning flashed he saw it again, his strobelit living room, crystal and silver intact, dog and wife dead on the Kashdan rug… When voices came he thought he was hearing his own thoughts:

“Yes, they were very close… she was completely dependent on him…”

The voices faded in and out. Once he was aware that the car had stopped, and there were three voices speaking in a tangle, but they might have been inside his head too.

“Wife is dead… wasn’t there… yes, she said she was going to ask him to stay home… lost his house and his job and everything he owned… not just his job, but whole profession. There won’t be any more television documentaries for a thousand years. Jesus, Mark, you’d be a basket case too.”

“I know, but… didn’t expect… curl up and die.”

Curl up and die, Randall thought. Yeah. He curled tighter in the car seat. The car began moving again and it jolted him. He whimpered.

Tuesday Afternoon

For two hours the Earth had turned, while Hammerlab made one circle and a fraction more. Europe and West Africa had moved from sunset to night.

Perhaps they were all afraid to speak. Rick knew he was. If he spoke, what would come out? Johnny’s ex-wife and children had not been in Texas. Rick hated him for it: a shameful secret. He watched the turning Earth in silence.

It was hot in Hammerlab. Sweat didn’t run in free fall; it stayed where it formed. When Rick remembered he mopped it away with the soggy cloth clutched in his left hand. When tears formed they covered the eyes like thickening lenses. Blinking only distorted the lenses. They had to be mopped away; and then he saw.

Orange holes glowed on the dark Earth, like cigarettes poked through the back of a map. Hard to tell where each glowing spot was. City lights had disappeared across Europe, covered by clouds, or simply gone. Sea looked like land. Rick had watched land become sea in places: down the American East Coast, and across Florida, and deep into Texas. Texas. Could an Army helicopter move faster than a wall of water? But the winds! No, she was dead…

But he’d seen the strikes in daylight, and Rick remembered. The glow in the Mediterranean had died away. The smaller Baltic strike had been quenched almost immediately.

Much bigger strikes in the mid-Atlantic still showed. You saw only a diffuse pearly glow until Hammerlab was right above one. Then you looked down into’ the clear center of the tremendous hurricane: down through a clear pillar of live steam, into an orange-white glare. Three of these, and they were much smaller now. The sea was returning.

Four small bright craters scattered across the Sudan, and three in Europe, and a much larger one near Moscow, still shed their orange-white light back to space.

Johnny Baker sighed and thrust himself back from the window. He cleared his throat and said, “All right. We have things to discuss.”

They looked at him as if he had interrupted a eulogy. Johnny went doggedly on. “We can’t use the Apollo. That big Pacific strike was practically on our recovery fleet. The Apollo’s built for sea landings, and the sea… all the oceans… hell…”

“You must beg a ride home,” Pieter Jakov said, nodding. “Yes. We have room. Accept our hospitality.”

Leonilla Malik said, “We have no home. Where shall we go?”

“Moskva is not all of the Soviet Union,” Pieter said gently, reprovingly.

“Isn’t it?”

Rick was giving him no help. He was framed in the window, and Johnny saw only his back. “Glaciers,” Johnny said. Yes, he had their attention. “There was a strike above Russia, in the… ?”

“Ikara Sea. We did not see it. It would have been too far north. We only infer it from the way the clouds swept down.”

“The clouds swept down, right. That had to be an ocean strike. The clouds will keep coming down across Russia till the crater on the seabed is quenched. They’ll dump tens of millions of tons of snow all across the continent. White clouds and white snow. Any sunlight that falls will be reflected back to space for the next couple of hundred years. I…” Johnny’s face twisted. “God knows I hate to ruin your day, but those glaciers are going to sweep right down to China. I really think we ought to head for some place warm.”

Pieter Jakov’s face was cold. He said, “Perhaps Texas?”

Rick’s back flinched. Johnny said, “Thanks a whole lot.”

“My family was in Moskva. They die by fire and the blast. Your family dies by water. You see, I know how you feel. But the Soviet Union has survived disasters before, and glaciers move slowly.”

“Revolution moves quickly,” Leonilla said.

“Eh?”

Leonilla spoke in rapid Russian. Pieter answered in kind.

Johnny spoke low-voiced to Rick. “Let them talk it over. Hell, it’s their rocket ship. Listen, Rick, they could have got a helicopter there in time. Rick?” Rick wasn’t listening. Finally Johnny looked where Rick was looking, down toward the dark mass of Asia…

Presently Leonilla switched to English. Almost briskly almost cheerfully, she said, “Glaciers move slowly, but revolutions move quickly. Most Party members, and everyone in the government, were Great Russians like me, like Pieter. Well, too much of Great Russia was under the strike. What will be happening now, as the Ukrainians, the Georgians, all the subject people, realize that Moscow no longer holds their lives? I have tried to convince Comrade General Jakov… What are you staring at?”

Rick Delanty turned to her, and she shied back. Facial expressions differ among races and cultures, but she knew murderous hate when she saw it. A moment later Rick moved; but only to give her room at the viewport.

There were dozens of tiny sparks above the black cloud cover of Hammerfall. More were coming through. A field of tiny rising sparks, fireflies in formation…

Leonilla lost her handhold. She drifted back across the width of Hammerlab, held by the hate in Rick’s eyes, unable to look away. Pieter saw that look and braced himself, one hand gripping hard to moor himself, the other fist clenched and ready, braced himself to defend the woman from a threat he didn’t understand.

And Johnny Baker dived in a clean arc across to the communications panel. He turned frequency dials in carefully controlled haste, pushed buttons, and spoke. “LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS WHITE BIRD; LOOKING GLASS LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS WHITE BIRD. SOVIET UNION HAS LAUNCHED MASSIVE ICBM FORCE, I SAY AGAIN, SOVIET ROCKETS ARE RISING. CONFIRMED OBSERVATION. Goddammit, the bastards are launching everything they’ve got! Five hundred birds, maybe more!”

Pieter Jakov reached the console. He pulled frantically at circuit breakers. The indicator lights on the panel went out. Baker and Jakov faced each other.

“Delanty!”

“Sir.” Rick launched himself toward Jakov. Even as his body moved across the capsule, Leonilla was shouting in Russian. Then Rick had Jakov — but the Russian had gone passive. His face was a mask of hatred to match Rick’s.

“Send your warning,” he said. “You will tell them nothing they do not know.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Rick Delanty shouted.

“Look,” Pieter said.

Leonilla’s voice was strangely flat. “There is another flare above Moscow. A new one.”

“Eh?” Johnny Baker looked from the Russian general to the woman, finally let himself drift toward the viewport. He knew already. He knew what it would look like, and he saw it at once. At the edge of the red-orange glare that marked Moscow, a tiny vivid mushroom bloomed in red and violet-white.

“Late strike.” The lie was thick on his tongue, for HamnerBrown was two hours past and his eyes were already searching for the others. He found two small mushroom-shaped clouds and a tiny sun that blossomed as he watched. “Jesus,” he said, “the whole world’s gone crazy.”

“Gilding the lily,” Rick Delanty said. “Not enough to get hit by a comet. Some son of a bitch pushed the button. Aw, shit.”

All four now watched the scene below: the rising fireflies of Soviet rockets, and the sudden blue-white glares across what had been European Russia. Whatever industry might have survived the comet was…

Madness, Johnny Baker thought. Why, why, WHY?

“I don’t think we’ll be welcome down there,” Rick Delanty said. His voice was strangely calm, and Johnny wondered if Rick had gone crazy too. He couldn’t look at Leonilla.

Finally Rick snarled deep in his throat. Just a sound. It had no meaning and was directed at no one. Then he turned and kicked himself away from them all, down the length of Hammerlab. Jakov was at the other end, near the airlock to the Soyuz, and Johnny Baker had the insane thought that the Russian was going for a concealed weapon.

That’s what we need. A pistol fight in orbit. Why not?

Madness and revenge were fine old traditions where Jakov came from.

“That’s that,” Johnny said quietly. “It would have been nice to stick together. The last of the astronauts. But I guess not. Rick?”

Rick was down at the Apollo airlock, and he was cursing, quietly, but loud enough that they could hear.

Johnny turned back to watch Jakov. The Russian made no move to open the airlock to the Soyuz. He hung in space, poised as if ready to do something, but he didn’t move at all. He was staring down at the stricken Earth below.

Rick’s bellow echoed the length of the cabin. “Shit!” Then, “Sir. The Apollo’s in vacuum. Shall I close up my hat and go see if the heat shield’s damaged?”

“Don’t bother. Shit!” A hole anywhere in the Apollo would kill them during reentry. They were back to one spacecraft. Johnny turned back to Pieter Jakov, who was still watching through the viewport.

A blow to the back of General Jakov’s neck, right now, before he expects it. Or go back to Russia. As prisoners of war? Hardly. Johnny Baker remembered scenes from the Gulag Archipelago. His hand arched to strike. Rick could handle Leonilla, and they’d have…

He thought it, but he did nothing. And Pieter Jakov turned toward them all and said, carefully, “They’re moving east. East.”

They stared at each other, Baker and Jakov, for a moment that stretched endlessly, then both dived frantically toward the communication panel.

“Roger, Looking Glass, White Bird out,” Johnny Baker said.

“You got through?” Rick demanded.

“Yeah. At least somebody acknowledged.” Johnny Baker looked down at the roiling mess below. “I think God hears us pretty well up here. I don’t see any other way we could have got a message through that.”

“Skip distances. Random ionization patterns,” Jakov said.

Johnny Baker shrugged. He wasn’t interested in arguing theology. The capsule fell silent as they watched the flight of the missiles. The sparks were going out now as they reached their trajectories. They would light again, but far more brightly…

But before the flames died, it had been easy to see that the missiles were not rising to curve over the North Pole. A slim crescent of Earth showed, more than enough to let them orient themselves, and the missiles were plainly moving east, toward China.

And there had been the nuclear explosions over Russia. The Chinese had attacked first, and what the Hammer had spared was now radioactive hell.

Pieter’s family was down there, Johnny Baker thought. And Leonilla’s, if she has any. I don’t think she does. Jesus, I’m lucky. Ann left Houston weeks ago.

Johnny laughed quietly to himself. Ann Baker had no reason to stay in Texas. She’d taken the kids to Las Vegas for a divorce that had probably saved her life. As for Maureen… Yeah. Maureen. If any woman could have survived Hammerfall on brains and determination, it was Maureen. She’d said she was going to California with her father.

“There is much to be done.” Pieter Jakov was a study in professional detachment, except for the quiet edge in his voice. “We cannot survive here more than a few weeks at most. General, we have no onboard computer. You must use your equipment to compute our reentry.”

“Sure,” Johnny said.

“We will need both of you.” Jakov tilted his head toward the other end of the capsule, where Rick Delanty seemed huddled in on himself.

“He’ll help when we need him,” Baker said. “He’s got to take this pretty hard. Even if his wife and kids are still alive, even if they got them out, he’ll never know it.”

“Not knowing is better,” said Pieter. “Much better.”

Johnny remembered Moscow, doubly destroyed, and nodded.

“Perhaps Dr. Malik should administer a tranquilizer,” Jakov was saying.

“I told you, Colonel Delanty will be all right,” Johnny Baker said. “Rick, we need a conference.”

“Sure.”

“Why?” Jakov demanded. “Why did they do it?”

The sudden question did not surprise Baker. He’d been wondering when Jakov would say something.

“You know why,” Leonilla Malik said. She left her place at the viewport. “Our government had already coveted China. With the threat of glaciers coming, Russians have only one place to go. Europe has been destroyed, and there is very little to the south. If we can reach that conclusion, the Chinese can also.”

“And so they attacked,” Jakov said. “But not in time. We were able to launch our own strike.”

“So where will we land?” Leonilla asked.

“You are very calm about this,” Jakov said. “Do you not care that your country has been destroyed?”

“I care both less and more than you think,” she said. “It was my homeland, but it was not my country. Stalin killed my country. In any event we cannot go there now. We would land in the middle of a war, if we could find a place to land at all.”

“We are officers of the Soviet Union, and this war is not over,” Jakov said.

“Balls.” They all turned toward Rick Delanty. “Balls,” he said again. “You know damn well there’s nothing you can do down there. Where would you go? Into China to wait for the Red Army? Or down into the fallout to wait for glaciers? For Christ’s sake, Pieter, that war’s not your war, even if you’re crazy enough to believe it’s still going on. It’s over for you.”

“So where do we go?” Jakov demanded.

“Southern Hemisphere,” Leonilla said. “Weather patterns do not usually cross the equator, and most of the strikes were in the Northern Hemisphere. I believe we will find that Australia and South Africa are undamaged industrial societies. Australia would be difficult to achieve from this orbit. We would have little control over where we landed, and we would starve if we came down in the outback. South Africa—”

Johnny’s laugh was bitter. Rick said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stay here.”

They all laughed. Baker felt the tension easing slightly. “Look,” he said, “we could probably manage South America, and we wouldn’t find much damage there, but why bother? We’d be four strangers, and none of us speaks the language. I suggest we go home. Our home. We can set down pretty close to where we aim for, and you’ll be two strangers with native guides. And you know English.”

“Things are pretty bad,” Delanty said.

“Sure.”

“So where?”

“California. High farming country in California. There won’t be glaciers there for a long time.”

Leonilla said nothing. Pieter said, “Earthquakes.”

“You know it, but they’ll be over before we can land. The shock waves must have triggered every fault there is. There won’t be another earthquake in California for a hundred years.”

“Whatever we do, it must be quickly,” Pieter said. He pointed to the status board. “We are losing air and we are losing power. If we do not act quickly we will be unable to act at all. You say California. Will two Communists be welcome there?”

Leonilla looked at him strangely, as if she were about to say something, but she didn’t.

“Better there than other places,” Baker said. “We wouldn’t want the South or the Midwest—”

“Johnny, there’s going to be people down there who think this was all a Russki plot,” Rick Delanty said.

“Yes. Again, more in the Midwest and South than in California. And the East is gone. What else is left? Besides, look, we’re heroes, all of us. The last men in space.” If he was trying to convince himself, it wasn’t working.

Leonilla and Pieter exchanged glances. They spoke softly in Russian. “Can you imagine what the KGB would do if we came down in an American space capsule?” Leonilla asked. “Are the Americans such fools as well?”

Rick Delanty’s reply was a soft, sad chuckle. “We’re not in quite the same boat,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about the FBI. It’s the righteous patriotic citizens…”

Leonilla frowned the question.

“Well,” Rick said, “what’s to worry? We’re coming down in a Soviet spacecraft plainly marked with a hammer and sickle and that big CCCP…”

“Better that than a Mars symbol,” Johnny Baker said.

No one laughed.

“Hell,” Rick said. “If we had any choice, that wouldn’t be the world we’d land on. You’d think people would get together after this. But I doubt they will.”

“Some will,” Baker said.

“Sure. Look, Johnny, half the people are dead, and the rest will be fighting over what’s left of the food. Strange weather ruins crops. You know that. A lot of the survivors won’t get through another winter.”

Leonilla shivered. She had known people who lived — barely — through the great famine in the Ukraine that followed Stalin’s ascension to the throne of the czars.

“But if there’s any civilization left down there, anybody who cares about what we’ve done, it’ll be in California,” Rick Delanty said. “We’ve got the records from HamnerBrown. Last space mission for—”

“For a long time,” Pieter said.

“Yeah. And we’ve got to save the records. So it will mean something.”

Pieter Jakov seemed relieved, now that there were no more difficult choices. “Very well. There are atomic power plants in California? Yes. Perhaps they will survive. Civilization will form around electrical power. That is where we should go.”

SAC communications are designed to survive. They are intended to operate even after an atomic attack. They were not designed for planetwide disaster, but they contain so much redundancy and so many parallel systems that even under the impact of the Hammer, messages got through.

Major Bennet Rosten listened to the chatter on his speaker. Most of it was not intended for him, but he got it anyway, if communications ever stopped, Major Rosten would own his missiles, and, after the timers ran out, could launch them. It was better that he knew too much than too little.

“EWO EWO, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. ALL SAC COMMANDERS, THIS IS CINC SAC.”

General Bambridge’s voice came through heavy static. Rosten could barely understand him.

“THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD. HELICOPTER ACCIDENT; I SAY AGAIN, THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD IN A HELICOPTER ACCIDENT. WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF HOSTILE ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES. WE HAVE NO COMMUNICATION WITH HIGHER AUTHORITY.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Captain Luce muttered. “Now what do we do?”

“What we’re paid for,” Rosten said.

Static overlay the speaker’s voice. “…NO REPORT FROM B-MEWS… HURRICANE WINDS OVER… SAY AGAIN… TORNADOES…”

“Jesus,” Luce muttered. He wondered about his family up at ground level. There were shelters at the base. Millie would have sense enough to get to them. Wouldn’t she? She was an Air Force wife, but she was young, too young and—

“…CONDITION REMAINS RED; SAY AGAIN, CONDITION REMAINS RED. SAC OUT.”

“We will unlock the target cards,” Rosten said.

Harold Luce nodded. “Guess that’s best, Skipper.” Then, as he’d been trained to do, Luce noted the time in the log: “On orders of the CO the targeting cards and interpretations were removed at 1841 ZULU.” Luce used his keys, then turned the combination panel. He took out a deck of IBM cards and laid them on the console. They gave no indication of what they were, but there was a code book that could interpret them. Under normal circumstances neither Luce nor Rosten knew where their missiles were aimed. Now, though, with good prospects that they’d own the birds, it seemed better to know.

Time went by. The speaker blared again. “APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILE LAUNCH… SAY AGAIN… MASSIVE… FIVE HUNDRED… TYARA TAM…”

“The bastards!” Rosten shouted. “Lousy red sons of bitches!”

“Calm, Skipper.” Captain Luce fingered the cards and code book. He looked up at his status board. Their missiles were still sealed; they couldn’t launch anything if they wanted to, not without orders from Looking Glass.

“LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. WE HAVE MESSAGES FROM SOVIET PREMIER. SOVIETS CLAIM CHINESE ATTACK ON SOVIET UNION HAS BEEN MET BY MISSILE LAUNCHES. SOVIETS REQUEST U.S. ASSISTANCE AGAINST CHINESE UNPROVOKED ATTACK.”

“ALL UNITS, THIS IS SAC. APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILES HEADED EAST; REPEAT… NO… AS FAR AS WE KNOW…”

“SQUADRON COMMANDERS, THIS IS LOOKING GLASS. NO SOVIET ATTACK ON UNITED STATES; I SAY AGAIN, SOVIET ATTACK ON CHINA ONLY, NOT ON UNITED STATES…”

The speakers went dead. Luce and Rosten looked at each other. Then they looked at their target cards.

Red flags dropped over lights on their status board, and a new digital timer began ticking off seconds.

In four hours they would own their birds.

A handful of glowing coals scattered across Mexico and the eastern United States: the land strikes of the Hammer. Columns of superheated air stream up into the stratosphere, carrying millions of tons of dust and vaporized soil. Winds rush inward toward the rising air; as they cross the turning world their paths are deflected into half a dozen counterclockwise spirals. Eddies form in the spirals and are thrown off as hurricanes.

A mother hurricane forms over Mexico and moves eastward across the Gulf, gaining heat energy from the boiling seawater that covers the Gulf Strike. The hurricane moves north, from sea to land, and spawns tornadoes as it goes. Hurricane winds drive floodwaters further up the Mississippi valley.

As heated wet air rises above the oceans, cold winds pour down from the Arctic. An enormous front forms along the Ohio valley. Tornadoes bud and break free and scatter. When the front moves past, another forms, and another behind it, spewing out a hundred, then a thousand tornadoes to dance out their fury on the graves of the ruined cities. The fronts move east. More form in the Atlantic, above Europe, across Africa. Rain clouds cover the Earth.