The Menace From Earth ssc

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Thus, many recent dead in Houston were disturbed. But it was nine Sunday morning before Reynolds went to tell Mary Gifford that she could rest — or relieve for Wilmington, if she felt up to it. He found her collapsed and lifted her onto the bed, wondering if she had known the Houston bomb was found.

  Eleven cities now and eight people. Grandma Wilkins held four cities. No one else had been able to double up. Reynolds thought dully that it was a miracle that they had been able to last at all; it surpassed enormously the best test performance.

  Hammond looked up as he returned. "Make any changes?"

  "No. The Gifford kid is through. We'll lose half a dozen cities before this is over."

  "Some of them must be damn near empty by now."

  "I hope so. Any more bombs found?"

  "Not yet. How do you feel, Doc?"

  "Three weeks dead." Reynolds sat down wearily. He was wondering if he should wake some of those sleeping and test them again when he heard a noise below; he went to the stairwell. Up came an M.P. captain. "They said to bring her here." Reynolds looked at the woman with him. "Dorothy Brentano!"

  "Dorothy Smith now."

  He controlled his trembling and explained what was required. She nodded. "I figured that out on the plane. Got a pencil? Take this: St. Louis — a river warehouse with a sign reading 'Bartlett & Sons, Jobbers.' Look in the loft. And Houston — no, they got that one. Baltimore — it's in a ship at the docks, the S.S. Gold Coast. What other cities? I've wasted time feeling around where there was nothing to find."

  Reynolds was already shouting for Washington to answer.

  Grandma Wilkins was last to be relieved; Dorothy located one in the Potomac — and Mrs. Wilkins told her sharply to keep trying. There were four bombs in Washington, which Mrs. Wilkins had known all along. Dorothy found them in eleven minutes.

  Three hours later Reynolds showed up in the club mess-room, not having been able to sleep. Several of his people were eating and listening to the radio blast about our raid on Russia. He gave it a wide berth; they could blast Omsk and Tomsk and Minsk and Pinsk; today he didn't care. He was sipping milk and thinking that he would never drink coffee again when Captain Mikeler bent over his table.

  "The General wants you. Hurry!"

  "Why?"

  "I said, 'Hurry!' Where's Grandma Wilkins — oh I see her. Who is Mrs. Dorothy Smith?"

  Reynolds looked around. "She's with Mrs. Wilkins."

  Mikeler rushed them to Hanby's office. Hanby merely said, "Sit over there. And you ladies, too. Stay in focus."

  Reynolds found himself looking into a television screen at the President of the United States. He looked as weary as Reynolds felt, but he turned on his smile. "You are Doctor Reynolds?"

  "Yes, Mr. President!"

  "These ladies are Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Smith?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The President said quietly, "You three and your colleagues will be thanked by the Republic. And by me, for myself. But that must wait. Mrs. Smith, there are more bombs — in Russia. Could your strange gift find them there?"

  "Why, I don't — I can try!"

  "Mrs. Wilkins, could you set off those Russian bombs while they are still far away?"

  Incredibly, she was still bright-eyed and chipper. "Why, Mr. President!"

  "Can you?"

  She got a far-away look. "Dorothy and I had better have a quiet room somewhere. And I'd like a pot of tea. A large pot."

  Water is for Washing

  He judged that the Valley was hotter than usual — but, then, it usually was. Imperial Valley was a natural hothouse, two hundred and fifty feet below sea level, diked from the Pacific Ocean by the mountains back of San Diego, protected from the Gulf of Baja California by high ground on the south. On the east, the Chocolate Mountains walled off the rushing Colorado River.

  He parked his car outside the. Barbara Worth Hotel in El Centro and went into the bar. "Scotch."

  The bartender filled a shot glass, then set a glass of ice water beside it. "Thanks. Have one?"

  "Don't mind if I do."

  The customer sipped his drink, then picked up the chaser. "That's just the right amount of water in the right place. I've got hydrophobia."

  "Huh?"

  "I hate water. Darn near drowned when I was a kid. Afraid of it ever since."

  "Water ain't fit to drink," the bartender agreed, "but I do like to swim."

  "Not for me. That's why I like the Valley. They restrict the stuff to irrigation ditches, washbowls, bathtubs, and glasses. I always hate to go back to Los Angeles."

  "If you're afraid of drowning," the barkeep answered, "you're better off in L.A. than in the Valley. We're below sea level here. Water all around us, higher than our heads. Suppose somebody pulled out the cork?"

  "Go frighten your grandmother. The Coast Range is no cork."

  "Earthquake."

  "That's crazy. Earthquakes don't move mountain ranges."

  "Well, it wouldn't necessarily take a quake. You've heard about the 1905 flood, when the Colorado River spilled over and formed the Salton Sea? But don't be too sure about quakes; valleys below sea level don't just grow — something has to cause them. The San Andreas Fault curls around this valley like a question mark. Just imagine the shake-up it must have taken to drop thousands of square miles below the level of the Pacific."

  "Quit trying to get my goat. That happened thousands of years ago. Here." He laid a bill on the bar and left. Joykiller! A man like that shouldn't be tending bar.

  The thermometer in the shaded doorway showed 118 degrees. The solid heat beat against him, smarting his eyes and drying his lungs, even while he remained on the covered sidewalk. His car, he knew, would be too hot to touch; he should have garaged it. He walked around the end of it and saw someone bending over the left hand door. He stopped. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  The figure turned suddenly, showing pale, shifty eyes. He was dressed in a business suit, dirty and unpressed. He was tieless. His hands and nails, were dirty, but not with the dirt of work; the palms were uncalloused. A weak mouth spoiled features otherwise satisfactory. "No harm intended," he apologized. "I just wanted to read your registration slip. You're from Los Angeles. Give me a lift back to the city, pal."

  The car owner ignored him and glanced around inside the automobile. "Just wanted to see where I was from, eh? Then why did you open the glove compartment? I ought to run you in." He looked past the vagrant at two uniformed deputy sheriffs sauntering down the other side of the street. "On your way, bum."

  The man followed the glance, then faded swiftly away in the other direction. The car's owner climbed in, swearing at the heat, then checked the glove compartment. The flashlight was missing.

  Checking it off to profit-and-loss, he headed for Brawley, fifteen miles north. The heat was oppressive, even for Imperial Valley. Earthquake weather, he said to himself, giving vent to the Californian's favorite superstition, then sternly denied it — that dumb fool gin peddler had put the idea in his mind. Just an ordinary Valley day, a little hotter, maybe.

  -

  His business took him to several outlying ranchos between Brawley and the Salton Sea. He was heading back toward the main highway on a worn gravel mat when the car began to waltz around as if he were driving over corduroy. He stopped the car, but the shaking continued, accompanied by a bass grumble.

  Earthquake! He burst out of the car possessed only by the primal urge to get out in the open, to escape the swaying towers, the falling bricks. But there were no buildings here — nothing but open desert and irrigated fields.

  He went back to the car, his stomach lurching to every following temblor. The right front tire was flat. Stone-punctured, he decided, when the car was bounced around by the first big shock.

  Changing that tire almost broke his heart. He was faint from heat and exertion when he straightened up from it.

  Another shock, not as heavy as the first, but heavy, panicked him again and he began to run, but he
fell, tripped by the crazy galloping of the ground. He got up and went back to the car.

  It had slumped drunkenly, the jack knocked over by the quake.

  He wanted to abandon it, but the dust from the shocks had closed in around him like fog, without fog's blessed coolness. He knew he was several miles from town and doubted his ability to make it on foot.

  He got to work, sweating and gasping. One hour and thirteen minutes after the initial shock the spare tire was in place. The ground still grumbled and shook from time to time. He resolved to drive slowly and thereby keep the car in control if another bad shock came along. The dust forced him to drive slowly, anyhow.

  Moseying back toward the main highway, he was regaining his calm, when he became aware of a train in the distance. The roar increased, over the noise, of the car — an express train, he decided, plunging down the valley. The thought niggled at the back of his mind for a moment, until he realized why the sound seemed wrong: Trains should not race after a quake; they should creep along, the crew alert for spread rails.

  The sound was recast in his mind. Water!

  Out of the nightmare depths of his subconscious, out of the fright of his childhood, he placed it. This was the sound after the darn broke, when, as a kid, he had been so nearly drowned. Water! A great wall of water, somewhere in the dust, hunting for him, hunting for him!

  His foot jammed the accelerator down to the floorboards; the car bucked and promptly stalled. He started it again and strove to keep himself calm. With no spare tire and a bumpy road he could not afford the risk of too much speed. He held himself down to a crawling thirty-five miles an hour, tried to estimate the distance and direction of the water, and prayed.

  The main highway jumped at him in the dust and he was almost run down by a big car roaring past to the north. A second followed it, then a vegetable truck, then the tractor unit of a semi-trailer freighter.

  It was all he needed to know. He turned north.

  He passed the vegetable truck and a jalopy-load of Okiestyle workers, a family. They shouted at him, but he kept going. Several cars more powerful than his passed him and he passed in turn several of the heaps used by the itinerant farm workers. After that he had the road to himself. Nothing came from the north.

  The trainlike rumble behind him increased.

  He peered into the rear-view mirror but could see nothing through the dusty haze.

  -

  There was a child sitting beside the road and crying — a little girl about eight. He drove on past, hardly aware of her, then braked to a stop. He told himself that she must have folks around somewhere, that it was no business of his. Cursing himself, he backed and turned, almost drove past her in the dust, then managed to turn around without backing and pulled up beside her. "Get in!"

  She turned a dirty, wet, tragic face, but remained seated.

  "I can't. My foot hurts."

  He jumped out, scooped her up and dumped her in the righthand seat, noting as he did so that her right foot was swollen. "How did you do it?" he demanded, as he threw in the car.

  "When the thing happened. Is it broke?" She was not crying now. "Are you going to take me home?"

  "I — I'll take care of you. Don't ask questions."

  "All right," she said doubtfully. The roar behind them was increasing. He wanted to speed up but the haze and the need to nurse his unreliable spare tire held him back. He had to swerve suddenly when a figure loomed up in the dust — a Nisei boy, hurrying toward them.

  The child beside him leaned out. "That's Tommy!"

  "Huh? Never mind. Just a goddam Jap."

  "That's Tommy Hayakawa. He's in my class." She added. "Maybe he's looking for me."

  He cursed again, under his breath, and threw the car into a turn that almost toppled it. Then he was heading back, into that awful sound.

  "There he is," the child shrieked. "Tommy! Oh, Tommy!"

  "Get in," he commanded, when he had stopped the car by the boy.

  "Get in, Tommy," his passenger added.

  The boy hesitated; the driver reached past the little girl, grabbed the boy by his shirt and dragged him in. "Want to be drowned, you fool?"

  He had just shifted into second, and was still accelerating, when another figure sprang up almost in front of the car — a man, waving his arms. He caught a glimpse of the face as the car gained speed. It was the sneak thief.

  His conscience was easy about that one, he thought as he drove on. Good riddance! Let the water get him.

  Then the horror out of his own childhood welled up in him and he saw the face of the tramp again, in a horrible fantasy. He was struggling in the water, his bloodshot eyes bulging with terror, his gasping mouth crying wordlessly for help.

  The driver was stopping the car. He did not dare turn; he backed the car, at the highest speed he could manage. It was no great distance, or else the vagrant had run after them.

  The door was jerked open and the tramp lurched in. "Thanks, pal," he gasped. "Let's get out of here!"

  "Right!" He glanced into the mirror, then stuck his head out and looked behind. Through the haze he saw it, a lead black wall, thirty — or was it a hundred? — feet high, rushing down on them, overwhelming them. The noise of it pounded his skull.

  He gunned the car in second, then slid into high and gave it all he had, careless of the tires. "How we doing?" he yelled.

  The tramp looked out the rear window. "We're gaining. Keep it up"

  He skidded around a wreck on the highway, then slowed a trifle, aware that the breakneck flight would surely lose them the questionable safety of the car if he kept it up. The little girl started to cry.

  "Shut up!" he snapped.

  The Nisei boy twisted around and looked behind. "What is it?" he asked in an awed voice.

  The tramp answered him. "The Pacific Ocean has broken through."

  "It can't be!" cried the driver. "It must be the Colorado River."

  "That's no river, Mac. That's the Gulf. I was in a cantina in Centro when it came over the radio from Calexico. Warned us that the ground had dropped away to the south. Tidal wave coming. Then the station went dead." He moistened his lips. "That's why I'm here."

  The driver did not answer. The vagrant went on nervously, "Guy I hitched with went on without me, when he stopped for gas in Brawley." He looked back again. "I can't see it any more."

  "We've gotten away from it?"

  "Hell, no. It's just as loud. I just can't see it through the murk."

  They drove on. The road curved a little to the right and dropped away almost imperceptibly.

  The bum looked ahead. Suddenly he yelled. "Hey! Where you going?"

  "Huh?'

  "You got to get off the highway, man! We're dropping back toward the Salton Sea — the lowest place in the Valley."

  "There's no other place to go. We can't turn around."

  "You can't go ahead. It's suicide!"

  "We'll outrun it. North of the Salton, it's high ground again."

  "Not a chance. Look at your gas gauge."

  The gauge was fluttering around the left side of the dial. Two gallons, maybe less. Enough to strand them by the sunken shores of the Salton Sea. He Stared at it in an agony of indecision.

  "Gotta cut off to the left," his passenger was saying. "Side road. Follow it up toward the hills."

  "Where?"

  "Coming up. I know this road. I'll watch for it."

  When he turned into the side road, he realized sickly that his course was now nearly parallel to the hungry flood south of them. But the road climbed.

  He looked to the left and tried to see the black wall of water, the noise of which beat loud in his ears, but the road demanded his attention. "Can you see it?" he yelled to the tramp.

  "Yes! Keep trying, pal!"

  He nodded and concentrated on the hills ahead. The hills must surely be above sea level, he told himself. On and on he drove, through a timeless waste of dust and heat and roar. The grade increased, then suddenly the car broke o
ver a rise and headed down into a wash — a shallow arroyo that should have been dry, but was not.

  He was into water before he knew it, hub high and higher. He braked and tried to back. The engine coughed and stalled.

  The tramp jerked open the door, dragged the two children out, and, with one under each arm, splashed his way back to higher ground. The driver tried to start the car, then saw frantically that the rising water was up above the floorboards.

  He jumped out, stumbled to his knees in water waist-deep, got to his feet, and struggled after them.

  The tramp had set the children down on a little rise and was looking around. "We got to get out of here," the car owner gasped.

  The tramp shook his head. "No good. Look around you."

  To the south, the wall of water had broken around the rise on which they stood. A branch had sluiced between them and the hills, filling the wash in which the car lay stalled. The main body of the rushing waters had passed east of them, covering the highway they had left, and sweeping on toward the Salton Sea.

  Even as he watched, the secondary flood down the wash returned to the parent body. They were cut off, surrounded by the waters.

  He wanted to scream, to throw himself into the opaque turbulence and get it over. Perhaps he did scream. He realized that the tramp was shaking him by the shoulder.

  "Take it easy, pal. We've got a couple of throws left."

  "Huh?" He wiped his eyes. "‘What do we do?"

  "I want my mother," the little girl said decisively.

  The tramp reached down and patted her absent-mindedly. Tommy Hayakawa put his arm around her. "I'll take care of you, Laura," he said gravely.

  The water was already over the top of the car and rising. The boiling head of the flood was well past them; its thunder was lessening; the waters rose quietly — but they rose.

  "We can't stay here," he persisted.

  ‘We'll have to," the tramp answered....

  Their living space grew smaller, hardly thirty feet by fifty. They were not alone now. A coyote, jack rabbits, creepers, crawlers, and gnawers, all the poor relations of the desert, were forced equally back into the narrowing circle of dry land. The coyote ignored the rabbits; they ignored the coyote. The highest point of their island was surmounted by a rough concrete post about four feet high, an obelisk with a brass plate set in its side. He read it twice before the meaning of the words came to him.