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.
Hammerfalclass="underline" 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.