Goodbye California - Alistair [132]
The day was fine and bright and clear with cloudless skies which, in the circumstances, formed an impossibly macabre setting for the convulsion the watchers were about to witness, a circumstance that must have pleased Morro greatly, for it could not but increase the emotional impact of the spectacle: a storm-wracked sky, lowering clouds, driving rain, fog, any face of nature that showed itself in a sombre and minor key would have been far more in keeping with the occasion – and would have lessened the impact of the spectacle of the explosion. There was only one favourable aspect about the weather. Normally at that time of the day and at that time of year the wind would have been westerly and on-shore: today, because of a heavy front pressing down from the north-west, the wind was slightly west of southerly and in that direction the nearest land-mass of any size lay as far distant as the Antarctic.
‘Pay attention to the sweep-second hand on the wall-clock,’ Morro said. ‘It is perfectly synchronized with the detonating mechanism. There are, as you can see, twenty seconds to go.’
A pure measure of time is only relative. To a person in ecstasy it can be less than the flicker of an eyelid: for a person on the rack it can be an eternity. The watchers were on no physical rack but they were on an emotional one, and those twenty seconds seemed interminable. All of them behaved in precisely the same way, their eyes constantly flickering between the clock and the screen and back again at least once in every second.
The sweep second reached sixty and nothing happened. One second passed, two, three and still nothing. Almost as if by command the watchers glanced at Morro, who sat relaxed and apparently unworried. He smiled at them.
‘Be of good faith. The bomb lies deep and you forget the factor of the earth’s curvature.’
Their eyes swivelled back to the screen and then they saw it. At first it was no more than a tiny protuberance on the curve of the distant horizon, but a protuberance that rose and swelled with frightening rapidity with the passage of every second. There was no blinding white glare of light, there was no light whatsoever of any colour, just that monstrous eruption of water and vaporized water that rose and spread, rose and spread until it filled the screen. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb but was perfectly fan-shaped in appearance, much thicker in the centre than at the edges, the lowermost sides of which were streaking outwards just above and almost parallel with the sea. The cloud, had it been possible to see it from above, must have looked exactly like an inverted umbrella, but from the side it looked like a gigantic fan opened to its full 180 degrees, much more dense in the centre, presumably because there the blast had had the shortest distance to cover before reaching the surface of the sea. Suddenly the giant fan, which had run completely off the screen, shrunk until it occupied no more than half of it.
A woman’s voice, awed and shaky, said: ‘What happened to it? What’s happened to it?’
‘Nothing’s happened to it.’ Morro looked and sounded very comfortable. ‘It’s the camera. The operator has pulled in his zoom to get the picture inside the frame.’
The commentator, who had been babbling on almost incoherently, telling the world what they could see perfectly well for themselves, was still babbling on.
‘It must be eight thousand feet high now. No, more. Ten thousand would be nearer it. Think of it, just think of it! Two miles high and four miles across the