Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [107]
"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