Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [270]
"You said it so casually. Shower. A hot shower. Do you know how long .. . ? Skip it. All I ever said was, most of us had to do some running."
The policeman's nose almost touched Mark's. It was narrow, prominently bridged, a classic Roman nose. "We did not run. We were in the right place to put the city back together again afterward. Goddammit, there wasn't anything left! There's nothing left but this power plant, which the Mayor says is officially part of Los Angeles. We're here now. Nobody's going to hurt it."
"All right."
The four boats were dwindling with distance. A few of the remaining construction men had climbed the levee to watch them go—wistfully, perhaps. "I expect they'll be fishermen now," Mark said.
"Try to imagine how little I care," the policeman said. "Let's get to work."
Horrie Jackson cut the motor and let the boat drift to a stop. "Far as I can tell, Wasco is just under us," he said. "If it's not, there ain't much I can do about it."
Tim looked at the cold water and shuddered. The wet suit fit him, but there were loose spots, and it was going to be damned cold out there. He tested the air system. It worked. The tanks were fully charged; and that had been impressive, too. When the mechanics at SJNP hadn't had valves and fittings in stock, they simply went into the machine shop and made them. It was a reminder of another world, a world when you didn't have to make do with what was around, when you had some control.
"I keep thinking," Tim said. "If people's pet goldfish got loose, what happened to the piranhas?"
"Too cold for them," Jason Gillcuddy said, and he laughed.
"Yeah. Well, here goes." Tim climbed to the gunwale, sat balanced for a moment, and rolled off backward into the water.
The cold was a shock, but it wasn't as bad as he expected. He waved at the boat crew, then tried an experimental dive. The water was as black as ink. He could barely see his wrist compass and depth gauge. The gauge was another of the SJNP crew's miracles, fabricated and calibrated in a couple of hours. Tim turned on the sealed lantern. The beam gave him no more than ten feet of milky visibility.
The sea in Emerald Bay off Catalina had been clear as glass. He had flown through seaweed jungles rich with darting fish … long ago.
He kicked down into the white murk, searching for the bottom, and found it at sixty feet. There was no sound but the bubbles from his regulator, the sound of his breathing. A shape loomed up in front of him, monstrous, humpbacked, a Volkswagen, he saw when he got closer. He didn't look inside.
He followed the road. He passed an Imperial with hordes of fish swarming in and out of the broken windows. No buildings. More cars ... and finally a gas station, but it had burned before it was flooded. He kept going. He would be out of air soon.
Finally, civilization: rectangular shadings in the murk. Visibility was too poor to let him be selective. The doors he tried were locked. Locked against the sea … He swam on until he found a smashed plate-glass window. It was frighteningly dark in there, but he forced himself to enter.
He was in a large room; at least it felt large. A dense cloud of white fog to one side proved to be a rack of paperback books turned to mush and floating particles. The mist followed him as he swam away. He found counters and shelves, racks and goods toppled to the floor. He coasted above the floor, finding treasure everywhere—lamps, cameras, radios, tape recorders, Tensor lamps, television sets, nose drops, spray cans of paint, plastic models, tropical fish tanks, batteries, soap, scouring pads, light bulbs, canned salted peanuts ...
So many things, and mostly ruined. His air supply cut off abruptly; in panic he looked behind for his diving partner, then realized that despite all his training he was diving without a buddy. That was almost funny. You had to have more than one scuba outfit in the world before you could use the buddy system. He calmed himself and reached back to the air tanks, arm contorting to grasp the regulator valve and turn it to reserve.