by Larry Niven
“Basic? Can you shoot?”
“Yes, sir.” Mark began one of his tales about ’Nam. It might or might not have been true, but Jellison wasn’t listening.
“Can he?” he asked Randall.
“Yes. I’ve seen him,” Harvey said. He began to relax, to feel the knots unwind in his neck. It looked good, it looked as if the Senator might want him…
“If you stay here, you’re on my team,” Jellison said. “Nobody else’s. Your loyalty is to me.”
“Understood,” Harvey said.
Jellison nodded. “We’ll give it a try.”
As the Mediterranean waters recede from the drowned cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, rainstorms lash the highlands of the Sudan and Ethiopia. Floodwaters cascade down the Nile to smash against the High Aswan Dam, already weakened by the earthquakes following Hammerfall. The dam bursts, joining 130 million acre-feet of water to the flooded river. The waters smash across the Nile Delta, through the ancient cities, across Cairo. The Great Pyramid is undermined and falls beneath the torrent.
Ten thousand years of civilization are scooped up and carried with the water. From the First Cataract to the Mediterranean Sea, nothing lives in the Delta of the Nile.
Beggar Man
O hear us when we cry to thee
for those in peril on the sea.
Mariner’s Hymn
Eileen slept with her seat tilted back to horizontal, her seat belt loose about her. She rolled with the motion of the car. Once Tim heard the beginnings of a snore. He reached over and tightened her belt when they started on the long downgrade. Then he switched the motor off.
He remembered his driver had done that in Greece. Everyone coasted down hills in Greece. Even down the twisted narrow road from Delphi across Parnassus to Thermopylae. That had been terrifying, but the driver insisted. Greece had the most expensive gasoline in the world.
Where was Thermopylae now? Had the waters washed away the grave of the Three Hundred? The waves wouldn’t have reached Delphi, or been as high as the Acropolis. Greece had lived through disasters before.
The road twisted and tilted and Tim eased the Blazer around the turn, using the brakes warily. A long straight stretch was ahead, down all the way, then more downhill on a wet and broken and twisting road, and riding with Eileen had made him realize just how good a driver he wasn’t.
The mountains had shifted.
Here the road ended in space. Tim braked sharply and came to a stop. He walked forward through the soft rain. It tasted sweet. No more salt rain, anyway. The road, and the steep bank of cut rock, and this part of the mountain itself had sheared and dropped twenty feet or more. Mud had piled up below, so that there were places where the drop was no more than four or five feet.
Cars went over longer drops than that in TV commercials. One pickup ad had shown clips from a movie with that truck jumping over ditches, flying over banks, and the announcer had said the truck wasn’t even especially modified…
Would the Blazer take it?
Was there any choice? The drop looked as if it ran for miles. Tim got back in and backed up fifty yards. He thought through the physics of the situation. If the car fell over the edge it would land on its nose, and they’d be dead. It had to go over horizontally, and that meant speed. Easing it over would kill them.
He set the brake and walked back to the edge again. Wake Eileen? She was dead out of it. Headlights behind him, dim in the rain, decided it for him. He didn’t know who that would be and he didn’t want to know. He walked back toward the Blazer. His mind worked the equation: Call the Blazer fifteen feet long; it would fall at one G. He got in and started the car. If the front end shouldn’t fall more than two feet before the rear left the pavement and also began to fall, then the whole car should be over in about a third of a second, which meant fifteen feet in a third of a second or forty-five feet per second, and forty-four feet per second was thirty miles per hour, so about thirty miles per hour ought to do it and here we GO…
The car fell about six feet all told. His instinct was to hit the brake but he didn’t.
They hit hard, landing on the mud, rolling down the-mud ramp onto the road itself. Amazingly that was all. They were rolling down the road as if nothing had ever happened.
Eileen bounced and rolled hard against the seat belt. She shook herself, sat partly upright and looked out. The wet countryside flowed past. She blinked, and then, satisfied, went back to sleep.
Slept right through the best driving I’ll ever do, Tim thought. He grinned at the rain and mud, then switched off the engine to coast downhill.
An hour later she was still asleep. He envied her. He’d heard of people who slept most of the time: shell-shocked, or bitterly disappointed in their waking lives. He could understand the temptation. But of course that wasn’t Eileen. She needed sleep. She’d be all the more alert when she was needed.
Here the road had shattered to discrete plates. Tim switched on the engine and kept the speed up, moving as if from island to concrete island. He remembered a TV program about the Baja race. One driver said the way to take a bad road was fast — that way you didn’t touch the bumps but flew over them. It hadn’t seemed like a very good idea when he heard it, but now there didn’t seem to be much else to do. The plates lurched under the car’s weight and impact. Tim’s knuckles were white on the wheel, but Eileen smiled in her sleep, as if rocked in a cradle.
Tim felt very lonely.
She had not deserted him. At the risk of her life she had stayed with him. But she was sleeping and he was driving, and the rain pounded constantly on metal an inch over his head, and the road kept doing strange things. Here it lifted in a graceful arc, like a futuristic bridge, and a new stream ran beneath it. The concrete ribbon hadn’t shattered under its own weight, not yet, but it for damn sure wouldn’t hold a car. Tim drove around it, through the flood. The wheels kept moving and the motor didn’t die, and he pulled back onto the road where he could.
He had been deserted by everything and everyone but Eileen. He could understand that money and credit cards were worthless; sure. A bullet through the windshield was something else. Driving across the green of a country club felt like vandalism! The observatory… but Tim didn’t want to think about that. He’d been thrown off his own land, and his ears burned with the memory. Cowardice. It felt like cowardice.
The road curled out of the mountains, widened and became a smooth straight line leading away. Where? No compass. Nothing to do but drive on. And the rain became a furious lashing attack. Tim started the motor and dared to increase speed to twenty mph.
Eileen asked, “How are we doing?”
“Out of the mountains. It’s a straightaway, no breaks visible. Go back to sleep.”
“Good.”
When he looked she was asleep again.
He saw a freeway ahead. A sign told him HIGHWAY 99, NORTH, He went up the ramp. Now he could go forty. He passed cars stalled in the rain, both on and off the highway. People, too. Tim hunched low whenever he saw anything that could be a gun. Once it was real: Two men stepped out from either side of the highway and raised a pair of shotguns. They gestured: Stop. Tim hunched low, stamped on the accelerator, aimed for one of the men. The man leaped unhesitatingly into the muddy darkness. Tim listened for the guns with every nerve, but they did not speak. Presently he straightened up.
Now, what was that about? Were they afraid to waste ammunition? Or were the guns too wet to fire? He said to himself, softly, “If you can’t stand not knowing…” Harv Randall’s words.
They still had gas, they were still moving. The highway was awash with water; it must have stopped lesser cars than this one. Tim grinned in the dark. Two hundred and fifty thou for a car? Well, it pays to buy the best.
The rain hurled a sea of water across the land in one ferocious blast, then stopped just as suddenly.
For a long moment Tim had an unbroken view ahead. He hit the brakes as the rain slashed down again. The car achieved a marvelous floating se
nsation before it coasted to a stop.
They had come to the end.
Eileen sat up. She pulled the seat back up behind her and smoothed her skirt with automatic gestures.
“We’ve hit an ocean,” said Tim.
She rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
Tim turned on the roof light. He spread the map across their laps. “I kept working north and west and downhill,” he said. “Until we got out of the mountains. There were a lot of them. After a while I couldn’t tell directions anymore, so I just went downhill. Eventually I came to Highway Ninetynine.” Tim spoke proudly: With his lousy sense of direction they might have ended up anywhere. “Ninety-nine’s been good. No more breaks. You missed a couple of guys with shotguns, and a lot of cars that weren’t running anymore, but no real trouble. Of course there was a lot of water on the road, but…”
She had raked the map with her eyes, once. Now she was peering ahead through the rain, along the beam of the headlamps, piecing out the view from subliminal cues and imagination. For as far as they both could see in the gray twilight there was nothing but a silver-gray expanse of rain-spattered water. No lights anywhere. Nothing.
“See if you can back up,” she said. She fell to studying the map. Tim inched backward, out of the water, until it was only hubcap-deep.
“We’re in trouble,” Eileen said. “Have we passed Bakersfield?”
“Yes.” There had been freeway signs, and the ghosts of dark buildings, a mountain range done all in right angles. “Not long ago.”
She frowned and squinted at tiny print. “It says Bakersfield is four hundred feet above sea level.”
Tim remembered the fallen mountains. “I wouldn’t rely on elevations any longer. I seem to remember the entire San Fernando Valley dropped thirty feet during the Sylmar quake. And that was a little one.”
“Well, everything gets lower and lower from here on. We’re in the lowlands.” And we’re sinking in the lowlands, lowlands, low… “Tim, no tidal wave could have gotten this far. Could it?”
“No. But it’s raining.”
“Raining. Ye gods, how it must have rained, and it’s still coming! This wasn’t all in the comet head, was it?” She shushed him when he started to explain. “Skip it. Let’s rethink from scratch. Where do we want to go?”
Back to high ground. “Well,” Tim said, “that’s a problem too. I know where we want to be. The high farming country, say around Sequoia National Forest. What I don’t know is why anyone would want us there.” He didn’t dare say anything else.
She didn’t say anything at all. She was waiting.
Tim worked on his nerve. “I did have one idea…”
She waited.
Damn, it was evaporating even as he tried to speak it! Like the restaurants and good hotels that waited in Tujunga: Speak your wish and they were gone. He said it anyway, a little desperately. “Senator Jellison’s ranch. I contributed a lot of money to his campaign. And I’ve been to his ranch. It’s perfect. If he’s there, he’ll let us in. And he’ll be there. He’s that smart.”
“And you contributed money to his campaign.” She chuckled.
“Money was worth good money then. And, honey, it’s all I’ve got.”
“Okay. I can’t think of a single farmer who owes me anything. And the farmers own it all now, don’t they? Just like Thomas Jefferson wanted it. Where is this ranch?”
Tim tapped the map between Springville and Lake Success, just below the mountainous Sequoia National Park. “Here. We go underwater for a way, then we turn right and resume breathing.”
“Maybe there’s a better way. Look to your left. Do you see a railroad embankment?”
He turned off the roof light, then the headlights. A little time for his eyes to adjust, and… “No.”
“Well, it’s there.” She was looking at the map. “Southern Pacific Railroad. Swing us around and point the headlights that way.”
Tim maneuvered the car around. “What are you thinking of? Catching a train?”
“Not exactly.”
The headlights didn’t reach far through the rain. They showed nothing but rain-stippled sea in all directions.
“We’ll have to take the embankment on faith,” Eileen said. “Slide over.” She climbed over him to reach the steering wheel. He couldn’t guess what she had in mind, but he strapped down while she started the motor. Eileen turned south, back the way they had come.
“There are people back there,” he said. “Two of them have shotguns. Also, I don’t think we’ve got a siphon, so we shouldn’t use up too much gas.”
“Good news from all over.”
“I’m just telling you,” said Tim. He noticed that the water was no longer hubcap-deep. Off to the west, higher ground made black humps in the shallow sea. Here was a grove of almond trees, there a farmhouse; and Eileen turned sharp right where there was no road. The car settled as it left 99, then shouldered forward through water and mud.
Tim was afraid to speak, almost afraid to breathe. Eileen wove a path that crossed one and another of the black humps of rising ground, but they weren’t continuous. It was an ocean with islands, and they drove through it in an endless rainstorm. Tim waited, with both hands braced on the dashboard, for the car to plunge into some two-foot dip and die.
“There,” Eileen muttered. “There.”
Was the horizon slightly higher ahead? Moments later Tim was sure: The land humped ahead of them. Five minutes later they were at the base of the railroad embankment.
The car wouldn’t climb it.
Tim was sent out into the rain with the tow rope. He looped it under a rail and pulled back on it, leaning his weight above the embankment, while Eileen tried to drive up sloping mud. The car kept sliding back. Tim looped the rope again around the other rail. He took in slack, inches at a time. The car would surge upward and start to fall back, and Tim would take up the slack and heave. One wrong move would cost him one finger. He had stopped thinking. It was easier that way, in the dull misery of rain and exhaustion and the impossible task. His earlier triumphs were forgotten, useless…
It came to him, slowly, that the car was up on the embankment, almost level, and Eileen was leaning on the horn. He detached the rope and coiled it and trudged back to the car.
“Well done,” Eileen said. He nodded. And waited.
If Tim’s energy and determination were burned out, she still had hers. “A lot of cops know this trick. Eric Larsen told me about it. I never tried it myself…” The car lurched up onto a rail; backed and turned, tilting on the embankment; lurched forward again, and was suddenly doing a balancing act on both rails. “Of course it takes the right car,” said Eileen, with less tension and more confidence now. “Off we go…”
Off they went, balanced on the rails. The wheels were just the right width. A new sea gleamed silver on both sides. The car moved slowly, tottering and recovering, balancing like a dancer, the steering wheel moving constantly, minutely. Eileen was wire-tense.
“If you had told me, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Tim said.
“I didn’t think you’d get us up.”
Tim didn’t answer. He saw very clearly that the tracks were dipping gradually toward the water; but whatever it was that he didn’t believe now, he kept it to himself.
Gliding, gliding over the sea. Eileen had been driving for hours over the water. Her slight frown, wide eyes, rigidly upright posture made her a closed universe. Tim dared not speak to her.
There was nobody to call on them for help now, and nobody to point guns. The headlights and an occasional lightning bolt showed them only water and the rails. In places the rails actually dipped below the water, and then Eileen slowed to a crawl and drove by feel. Once the lightning illuminated the roof of a large house, and six human forms on the peaked roof, all glistening in rain gear; twelve glinting eyes watching a phantom car drive across the water. And again there was a house, but it floated on its side, and nobody was near it. Once they drove for miles past a rec
tangular array of bushes, a drowned orchard with only the tops of the trees showing.
“I’m afraid to stop,” Eileen said.
“I gathered that. I’m afraid to distract you.”
“No, talk to me. Don’t let me get drowsy. Make me real, Tim. This is nightmarish.”
“God, yes. I’d know the surface of Mars at a glance, but this isn’t anyplace in the universe. Did you see those people watching us?”
“Where?”
Of course, she dared not take her eyes off the rails. He told her about the six people on the roof. “If they live,” he said, “they’ll start a legend about us. If anyone believes them.”
“I’d like that.”
“I don’t know. A Flying Dutchman legend?” But that was tactless. “We won’t be here forever, though. These tracks’ll take us as far as Porterville, and there won’t be anyone trying to stop us.”
“You think Senator Jellison will let you in, do you?”
“Sure.” Even if that hope failed them, they’d be in a safe area. What counted now was a magic trick: driving to Porterville on railroad tracks. He had to keep her mind on that.
He was not expecting her next remark.
“Will he let me in?”
“Are you crazy? You’re a lot more valuable than I am. Remember the observatory?”
“Sure. After all, I’m such a damn good accountant.”
“If they’re as organized around Springville as they were in Tujunga, they’ll need an accountant to take care of distributing goods. They may even have a barter system. That could get complicated, with money obsolete.”
“Now you’re the crazy one,” Eileen said. “Anyone who does his own income tax can keep accounts. That’s everyone but you, Tim. The accountants and the lawyers run this country, and they want everyone to be like them, and they’ve damn near succeeded.”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s my point. Accountants are a drug on the market now.”
“I don’t go in without you,” said Tim.
