Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [124]
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.