by John Varley
“I hope they know what they’re doing,” Addison said. “Couldn’t they blow up?”
“They sure could. But I trust these guys, they’re going to make these things stronger than when they were new. And at last, I’ll be able to drive one of them. Somebody’s got to do it, or Los Angeles is going to run out of coal in a week.”
The rest of Travel Town was also abuzz with activity. Many men, most of them Burt’s age or older, were swarming over half a dozen of the big black engines. There was the blue glare of acetylene torches, the screech of saws cutting metal, and the clang of hammers. They could see someone pounding the end of a metal bar glowing white-hot, and then plunging it into a barrel of water. Dave didn’t doubt that they’d get at least some of them up and running. It was a labor of necessity, but also a labor of love.
“I hope you folks have laid in a lot of supplies,” Burt said, seriously.
“We’re doing okay.”
“And you better have some way to cook, other than electricity. I’m as proud as can be of these old steamers, but they’re not going to be able to bring in a tenth of the coal we’ll need to keep everything running.”
Burt suddenly didn’t look so happy.
“We’re going to be shipping food, too, but I doubt we can keep up with the demand.” He sighed. “There’s over two hundred railroad museums in California, but only a few of them have much in the way of steam engines. The state museum in Sacramento has twenty engines that are pretty much ready to roll, but most of the others have only one or two, or not even that many.”
“What about those diesel-electric ones they use today? Can they be converted to coal or wood?”
“Guys are working on that right now. I’m dubious, but I wish them luck. Of course, they’re going to need some of the coal we haul in from back East, too. Bottom line, there’s just not going to be enough of anything to go around. I’d say get out of Los Angeles, but it may already be too late.”
Burt’s words kept repeating themselves in Dave’s head as they got on the Vespas again. Any way he looked at it, getting out of the Los Angeles area seemed like the smart thing to do. There were just too many people, not enough arable land to support a tiny fraction of them, and not enough water to grow enough food.
But was it too late already? He decided to make one more plea to Karen when they got home.
They went south through the pass on West Cahuenga Boulevard. At the beginning of Mulholland Drive they crossed over the freeway because Dave wanted to see the state of Lake Hollywood, which, along with Castaic Lake, supplied Los Angeles with its drinking water. But just around the first curve of Lakeridge Place on their way up the hill they encountered a roadblock manned by National Guard troops. They were told that only residents were being allowed through. They thanked them, and went on down the road to Hollywood, and then home.
Addison went off to feed her horse and Dave stood there in the early evening looking south over the devastated city. Wisps of black smoke still rose from the Doheny fire. Much farther south he could see three large fires burning. When he turned on the television he could find no mention of them. Censorship? Or were there just too many other stories to report?
That evening Dave made a last trip in the Escalade, with a list of things he hoped to find. He stopped at Vons. It was like a tornado had hit the store. Entire sections had been wiped out: canned goods, cake mixes, baking needs, beverages. Frozen-food lockers were turned off; there was nothing inside them. Dairy cases were empty. Toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, paper plates, plastic forks, all gone. Dog and cat food, the same. Some small amount of produce had been available, but as soon as a stock boy brought out a box of apples people filled their carts. There was a long line, as only one checker had shown up for work.
His route back to the street took him past the loading dock at the back of the store. He saw two men wearing VONS badges passing cardboard boxes to some rough-looking guys with a truck. They stopped and looked at him for a moment. He pointedly looked away. None of his business.
In the morning Dave went out on the edge of the patio with his laptop. That way he could look out over the city as he bounced around on the Internet.
There had been outages every night since the fire. Many of them he could see from his perch in the hills, others he heard about on the news from more distant parts of the Southland. They were “rolling blackouts,” dictated by lost generating capacity. His neighborhood in the hills had only suffered two blackouts, and they were brief. Some nights it looked to him as if some areas of the city were not getting power all night long. But the lights of the downtown skyscrapers blazed as brightly and as wastefully as they ever did before the crisis. At night the city had become a vast, irregular checkerboard, with squares that were lighted and squares that were almost completely black.
The local news was good only for the large, obvious stories that couldn’t easily be swept under the rug. For any other news he had come to rely on blogs. Many of them came from disgruntled, angry, or frightened city workers who knew things that they felt the general populace should know.
It was from an anonymous blog that he heard that natural gas was coming into the city fitfully, if at all, from Texas, Louisiana, and Utah. He didn’t know too much about the relationship between crude oil and natural gas, but he knew they were bound up together in some way. Wikipedia told him that the essential difference between a natural-gas field and an oil field was that one had a lot of gas and a little oil, and the other had a lot of oil and a little gas. They both came from the same source, which was anaerobic decay of ancient organic matter, far beneath the earth’s surface. It seemed likely to him that, if all the Midwestern oil fields had blown up, as they had heard, collateral damage had probably destroyed gas wells and pipelines, too.
This wasn’t good news for power generation, as Los Angeles got a quarter of its electricity from burning natural gas. It wasn’t good for consumers, either. The morning of their trip downtown he had turned on the stove to fry some eggs and nothing had come out of the burner. It had stayed off all that day, and all that night, and the next morning it was still off. He made a note to set up the propane stove, and fixed himself a bowl of cold cereal with powdered milk.
Addison joined him on the patio with her own breakfast, two pieces of toast and a jar of sugarless fruit preserves.
It was eight fifteen in the morning.
The umbrella on the pole that went through the center of the heavy wrought-iron circular table began to sway back and forth. The coffee in his cup jiggled, and then some of it slopped out onto the glass tabletop. Off to his left he saw an undulation of the water in the pool, beneath the cover that he had been keeping in place to prevent evaporation.
“Earthquake,” Addison said, in a reasonably calm voice. He found himself on his feet, not quite remembering standing. Addison came to him. He put his arm over her shoulder. If it got any worse, he’d get them down on their hands and knees.
“What about Mom?” she asked.
“She knows what to do. Best stay out here.”
The shaking stopped.
Addison was hugging his waist. The waves in the pool made a few more laps, but the cover soon damped that out. It was very quiet. Then Karen screamed.
He hurried into the house and bounded up the stairs, trying to imagine what he might confront when he got there.
Karen was sitting on the bed, in her nightgown. Her head was thrown back and she was taking a deep breath, ready to let out another scream. She seemed completely unhurt. He went to her side and sat, put his arm around her, and instead of screaming she dissolved in tears.
“Dave, make it stop!” she cried.
“Hush, hush,” he whispered, and kissed the top of her head. He noticed that she didn’t smell very good. “It’s over. It stopped.”
She continued to cry. Addison appeared in the doorway and he gave her what he hoped was a reassuring thumbs-up. She nodded, and backed away.
“You’re not hurt?”
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br /> She shook her head. He kissed her hair again.
“No big deal, honey. No big deal. I’d say it was a 5.5. We’ve ridden out worse than that.”
She nodded, but still didn’t say anything.
“Maybe you’d like to come down and join us for breakfast,” he ventured.
There was a long pause, and then, “Maybe I will.”
He felt unreasonably happy. It would be her first trip downstairs in a week. Addison had been bringing meals up to her, and bringing them down mostly uneaten. They hadn’t talked about it, as one doesn’t talk about the crazy old aunt hidden away in the attic. When she turned to face him, he was shocked. She was wearing no makeup and her hair was a mess. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were alarmingly red. Her cheeks were hollow. He thought she had lost weight. Her lips were trembling, and she swayed slightly as she tried to get up.
“Just let me freshen up a bit…” she said, vaguely, and started off toward the bathroom, taking small, careful steps.
Addison was looking in the open door.
“Is she all right?” she asked, timidly.
He got up and put his hand on her shoulder, steered her out of the room, and pulled the door partly closed behind him. He guided her toward the stairs.
“No, she’s not,” he said. There seemed little point in lying about it. They didn’t say anything more. Over the last weeks they had become a team, so not much needed to be said, much of the time. One of the things they didn’t say, but Dave was sure they both knew, was that it would be a much stronger team if they could just get Karen to suit up for the game.
Some books and various bric-a-brac had been shaken off the shelves. It didn’t take long to sort that out. In the kitchen some of the cupboard doors had opened and some canned goods had rolled onto the floor. One jar of peaches had shattered.
While Addison and he were cleaning up the breakfast dishes there was another mild shock. Karen had settled herself in front of the television, but didn’t seem to be seeing much, and the sound was muted. She got to her feet and all three of them stood silently for a moment, waiting to see if this was just the beginning of something big, or merely an aftershock. When nothing had happened for a bit over a minute, she sat back down.
Karen had showered, washed and combed her hair, and applied some light makeup. Addison and Dave sort of tiptoed around her, neither of them quite daring to start up a conversation, and she didn’t seem inclined to talk to them.
Eventually he went outside. It was 10:35 A.M.
Something out there was not right.
Helicopters were now a rare sight over the Los Angeles Basin, but two were hovering in the middle distance. They were due southeast from him, little gnats circling silently. They were about three or four miles away, which put them around the Park La Brea area.
Park La Brea is an interruption of the orderly north–south east–west grid of streets down on the flats, situated just north of the Miracle Mile on Wilshire. It covers 160 acres. The streets are laid out in a diamond pattern. To the west are two-story apartment blocks, and to the east are eighteen or twenty mid-rise apartment buildings. Just to the north was the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, where he had had many a lunch with his posse and his family, and The Grove, a high-end shopping complex. To the south was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Just to the east of LACMA was the place that often came as a surprise to out-of-towners: the La Brea Tar Pits. Many people have heard of the tar pits, of course, but most don’t realize that they are right in the middle of town, on busy Wilshire Boulevard.
Now there was the George C. Page Museum, which displayed the bones of mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloth, saber-toothed tiger, and American lion—all the big animals that had thrived in the area.
The Page Museum was like an earthen bunker, partially underground, with sloping grass-covered sides. In front of it was the largest tar pit, looking deceptively calm and inviting beneath a few inches of water. You could easily see how animals would be lured there, to bog down hopelessly in the sticky goo beneath. There was a sad life-size tableau on one edge of the pit: a family of Columbian mammoths, the male half-buried and struggling to escape, while the mother and baby cried out to him from the shore. In the middle of the pond, swamp gas bubbled constantly to the surface.
Something looked out of kilter.
He got his telescope and brought it to bear on the buildings of the art museum. The one farthest to the east was an irregular shape, and housed the collections of Japanese art, including a fine selection of tiny netsuke that he loved. To the west of that was the Hammer Building and the Ahmanson Building, and across the entrance plaza was the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and LACMA West, housed in the old May Company building at Wilshire and Fairfax.
The Ahmanson Building was leaning. The west side looked to be a lot higher than the east side. There was a big gap between it and the Broad, and it looked like part of the ceilings of both buildings had collapsed. On the other side of the plaza, the Broad was leaning in the other direction. It was as if something big was trying to force its way to the surface right beneath the plaza.
He moved the scope and zeroed in on the big tar pool just off Wilshire Boulevard. He couldn’t find it. Where it had been a black cone, like a volcano, had formed and spilled over into the street and covered much of the lawn between the Japanese pavilion and the Page Museum. The life-size mammoth sculptures had vanished. As he watched, the huge heap of tar heaved, heaved again, and spit out a thick black goo that ran down the sides of the new formation in all directions.
He became aware that Addison was standing beside him.
“Can I see?” she asked, quietly.
He moved aside and let her look through the telescope.
He didn’t know why the destruction of LACMA should shake him so, but it did. It couldn’t compare to the tragedy of people killed and left homeless by the explosions and fires from the Doheny field. But there was something about the accumulated treasures of the human imagination being engulfed by a substance that looked like primordial ooze that was profoundly disturbing. It was something he had never seen. It struck him as something new and unprecedented, like watching the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Cultures from all over the world were represented in those big buildings down there, and it looked as if it were all being swallowed up.
He found some television coverage.
“The police are trying to prevent people from entering the damaged buildings,” a reporter on the ground was saying, “but there are not enough of them, they’re spread too thin, and most of them are exhausted from endless double shifts, and the whole force is depleted from resignations and inability to get to work, as I revealed here in a special report two days ago. And, frankly, I get the impression that they just don’t care that much. One cop told me he had more important things to do than to protect works of art, and—his words—‘idiots who run into a collapsing building.’
“Museum staff are risking their lives, carrying priceless works of art out to waiting trucks. There are also quite a number of volunteers. Frankly, it’s hard to say if all of them are…well, there is some suspicion that looting is going on, right under our noses. I spoke to a curator a few moments ago, and she was in tears. She said they were only able to save a part of the paintings collection. Most everything else—statues, pottery, furniture, things like that—has already been destroyed or is too heavy to move without special equipment, which they don’t have and wouldn’t be able to move into these precarious buildings anyway.”
He went on like that for a while. Then Addison shouted.
“Daddy, it’s falling down!”
He could see it on the television, probably better than she could. The reporter was running and the camera was jolting, but he could see another wall of the Ahmanson collapsing, right into the street. Everything was enveloped by a dust cloud for a moment, and then the shattered building loomed out of the dust.
“It’s really happening, isn’t it?”
“Really happening?”
“What you said. That crazy story about the man who wanted revenge, and made something that would destroy all the oil in the world.”
“We’ll never know if that story was literally true,” he said. “But real? It’s happening right in our backyard.”
They watched in silence for a while. When she spoke she still didn’t look at him.
“I volunteered down there at LACMA. Remember?”
“I think so.” The truth was she had worked for so many causes over the last few years that he hadn’t been able to keep them all straight.
No, that was not fair. He hadn’t really been paying attention to her projects. The fact was that for a long time he had been a workaholic, largely absent from her life. He had been coming to the reluctant and painful realization over the last months, thinking about how their relationship had fallen apart, that he was at least as responsible for that as she was.
“I’ve been very depressed,” she said.
“No. Really?” The dry understatement was the sort of thing the old Karen would have caught, and probably even appreciated. But she gave no sign she had noticed.
“I haven’t really been here,” she went on. “Not for you, not for Addison. The last few weeks have been sort of a blur. I think I slept a lot.”
“That’s what I do when I’m depressed. I guess everybody does.” Once more, it was as if he hadn’t spoken. He decided just to listen.
“And then, looking out the window just now. The museum is falling into the earth. Just like those mammoths so many years ago. All their dreams and aspirations, swallowed up in blackness.” He didn’t point out that the museum was being raised up from below. He understood her analogy. “I remember once looking at that tableau of the mammoths at the Page. I almost cried. Silly, I guess. But that mammoth, slowly sinking into the tar. Do you think he had dreams?”
