A massive enough asteroid flyby, along with the movement of the Moon, could have shifted the planet just enough to push the West Coast a few hours forward into daylight. That explained the loss of the satellites as well, taken out by the debris from the impact.
Stretching the truth, Allan knew the distances between the Earth and its Moon meant any fragments from a collision would have struck the Earth by now. The average asteroid traveled at around 28,000 miles per hour. At 300,000 miles away, with nothing to slow the debris in the frictionless vacuum of space, mushroom clouds should have pushed dark skies over his head as he drove up the mountain road. Enough time had passed, but perhaps the larger fragments avoided the Earth, or at least southern California.
Allan wondered if he was a living Stan, from Niven’s short story Inconstant Moon, only twelve hours from the effects of an astrological event that hit the other side of the planet. Niven’s riveting story had been published at the infancy of the satellite and telecommunications age. The news of a calamity would travel instantly today unless all the satellites really were gone, which wouldn’t make sense if the debris only hit the opposite side of the planet. Allan worried the Moon was not inconstant, but invisible, gone forever.
Maybe humans were luckier than dinosaurs. If the angle and velocity of the asteroid were miraculous enough to wash the debris of the Moon’s collision into a higher orbit, only tidal effects would be left to ravage the Earth.
He paused at the thought of a wall of water rushing past the promenade and up Wilshire, glad he’d refused to spend his salary on the upscale condo in Santa Monica his wife had been so in love with. No, his family would be relatively safe from a tsunami in the inland suburbs of Pasadena.
He waited for the scope to plot, leaping back to the monitor when it reached the new coordinates, eager for real data to dispel the disturbing explanations his mind presented.
The Sun looked different. Perhaps the telescope needed cleaning? Imperceptible to the unaided eye, the scope made clear the Earth orbited a smaller and cooler Sun than Allan remembered.
Allan shuddered and pushed back from the monitor, coasting the chair until he softly hit the back wall. A plaster planter in the high window behind him clinked softly and echoed through the building. For the first time, the loneliness of the complex felt unnerving.
His mind said it stronger this time. There’s a Sun out there, but not our Sun.
Unacceptable hypothesis. Stop thinking like a stone-age shaman!
Allan eked the chair back to its former position and searched the instruments for a new perspective.
Perspective! A perturbed orbit would put the Earth farther away, maybe making the Sun appear cooler than normal from our perspective.
Allan calibrated for distance. To his dismay, the data never approached normal readings from anywhere near Earth’s orbit. An orbit pushed out farther would have produced effects on the physical makeup of the planet. Catastrophes for the life on board Allan hadn’t felt. Not yet, anyway. The instruments only clarified Allan’s earlier, more frightening theory.
A different star burned overhead.
Few in the world had access to the instruments at the observatory on a normal day. Allan might be one of only a handful on the planet to suspect the truth of the day’s oddities and be in a position to verify it. He had to let them know.
Allan had never bothered to use the shortwave repeater on the mountain before, but he knew by the end of the day—although he wasn’t sure how long that would be—it might be a choice between shortwave or smoke signals to inform the world of his discovery.
After an exhaustive search of the observatory offices he found a radio switch. His brief ham operator stint in undergrad came in handy. He turned the old dials with finesse, fun if not for his new role as prophet of doom.
The ‘4-3-5 repeater’ frequency Allan searched for housed the seedy corner of the ham universe. Operators on the 4-3-5 landed in jail on occasion. However, they were anything but closed-minded. Allan counted on it as he flipped the final switch to listen live.
The troublemakers of Mt. Wilson’s 147.435 megahertz were quiet. No racist allegories. No nerd gang threats. No dirty jokes or lurid tales of bad women and worse men. Nothing.
Silence on this channel said worse things to Allan than any offensive chatter.
He’d have to take the first step. Hopefully someone out there would be listening.
Allan aimed high for a first try, 144.49 MHz. They would have had the best view in the solar system of whatever happened on Earth last night. Allan pressed the Push-To-Talk button too hard, cringing at the audible click on the air.
“Hello, this is Doctor Allan Sands, operating from Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. Please respond if you receive.”
A softer touch on the PTT this time. No click.
No reply, either.
“November-Alpha-One-Sierra-Sierra? Are you receiving?”
Still nothing.
If he knew Russian he’d have tried sending up a request for the Russian call signs, not that he’d be able to communicate, but it would be nice to know the International Space Station was still up there. However, radio silence suggested the largest man-made satellite disappeared with the Moon and all the rest.
Allan’s heart grew heavy. He switched to 40 MHz, normally forbidden to civilians, convinced, given the circumstances, that NORAD wouldn’t mind.
“Hello, is anyone receiving? This is Mt. Wilson. Hello?”
This time his gentle touch on the PTT returned a click, but not from the plastic, the hard click of the words being received.
“Edwards Air Force. Are you receiving, Mt. Wilson?”
“Yes, I’m receiving!”
“Your name, soldier?”
“Civilian, sir. Astronomer from Cal-Tech. Dr. Sands.”
“What are you doing on this frequency? Don’t you know it’s illegal?”
Maybe NORAD already knew what he’d discovered. Maybe Allan endangered lives by taking up bandwidth on this military channel. Better find out, in case not.
“I have something, instrument readings up here, I think you should know about.”
“Wait, what did you say your name was?”
“Sands, Allan Sands.”
The operator paused.
“Professor Allan Sands, 2134 Casa Grande Street, Pasadena, California?”
“Yes, the same, sir.”
Allan wondered how long the NSA had kept tabs on him. His guest post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog might not have been a great idea after all. It certainly didn’t sell any more books.
“Stay where you are, we’re sending a chopper. Forty minutes.”
“Sending a chopper for what? For me?”
A helicopter? Take that, Neil deGrasse Tyson!
“Executive order to get you to safety. Stay put, sir.”
“What about my family?”
“Taken care of, sir.”
“How? How will they be taken care of?”
“The same way we’re taking care of you. Now we’ve got to clear the frequency. You’re not the only rescue on the president’s list we need to locate. Go outside and wait. The show’s gonna begin in about ten minutes. You should be safe up there until the extraction team arrives.”
The military operator clicked off with the implication that their conversation had ended.
The president? Allan sat back in shock. Wait, what show?
Outside the observatory, Los Angeles looked little different than any other spring day, but as Allan studied the basin between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, anomalies crept in. Smoke from distant fires wafted upward in thin gray lines. The lack of jets coming in from the east waiting to land at LAX, normally tracking in a straight line going back almost to Riverside, proved the most damning evidence that something strange had befallen America’s preeminent home of the weird, wise, or wealthy. In the absence of decelerating jet engines, the constant chop of helicopters buzzed. Occasional s
onic booms echoed when fighter jets screamed west toward a strange white line behind Santa Barbara Island.
Allan watched as the line rippled, then surrounded the island. Someone with one less neuron might have believed it to be marine layer, a fog created by the heat of the morning sun on the Pacific. Long ago, in the throes of Cupid’s arrow he’d had to pull over on the Golden Gate Bridge when the marine layer swept in too fast and too deep. It was the first and last time he’d copulated in an automobile. The last time he felt alive.
But this was no fog or mist. Allan remembered his earlier thoughts about Moon bits splashing down, and the resultant ripples reaching out for land. No fond memories would result when this moisture hit the coast. If his hunch was correct.
He also realized it might make his expected fame inconsequential. As Niven had better put it in 1971: if the toll of destruction was as high as he expected, then money was about to become worthless. But, nearly five decades later, that tropical storm boiled up by a solar flare remained a concoction only present in literature. What swallowed Santa Barbara Island was something even the 14th floor couldn’t save you from.
He ran back inside and trained a small telescope on the coast.
The ripple took not the form of vapor but a tumbling wave crest three times the height of the Statue of Liberty. The little island off the coast, 634 feet tall at its highest peak, ceased to exist for a moment. A wall of water smothered the island with barely a moment’s pause. The waves split and swirled around the flat-top, making temporary whirling spirals before focusing on their next target a mere twenty miles away.
Looking north to Santa Cruz Island, Allan saw the same scenario, but with the water finding a much more formidable foe in Devil’s Peak. This time the water surged up the backside, but could not pummel a summit twice the height of the Empire State Building and more than a thousand feet higher than the breaking waves.
Only the bravest hiking tourists would be spared Poseidon's wrath. The waves, moving faster than an F1 car, usurped and erased any human footholds on the islands. The water regrouped on the eastern side of Santa Cruz and sloshed forward, eager to take on the shorter, flatter valley of Los Angeles directly ahead. The defilade of the Channel Islands slowed the waves down by a few hundred miles per hour, but horrific destruction remained imminent.
Tsunami sirens wailed among helicopter buzz and growing echoes of gunshots. The competing sound waves coalesced into a high peeping whirl, barely audible to Allan’s old ears. The finer kept instrument between his ears calculated the tsunami’s speed at a healthy 200 miles per hour. It would reach the coast of Southern California in five minutes.
Allan trained the telescope on the beaches, thankfully deserted for the holiday, and then moved farther back. Occupants of gridlocked cars on the 10 Freeway, Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset abandoned their vehicles, trusting their feet instead. Few made it more than a mile before the waves came down on the coast, devouring Santa Monica and Venice Beach in one foul gulp, not breaking until nearly half a mile inland.
Allan watched the water bustle up through West Los Angeles. Ordinarily, the waves would be armed with the foundations of uprooted homes, pushing cars like pebbles, but this high water hid the destruction. It wasn’t until the growling mash swam to the 405 that it slowed and grappled with man-made obstacles.
Tiny bodies dropped from the top floors of the high-rise on Santa Monica Boulevard that held Senator Feinstein's office before the top of the building surged upwards, lifted off its base, and pushed sideways as the water tumbled down the next hill towards Westwood.
The waves lifted the golden Angel Moroni closer to heaven from the top of the Mormon Temple before plunging it into hell on Earth. In Westwood the waves finally met high-rises they couldn’t break. Parallel rows of twenty-story magnificent blue-green glass and steel toppled into each other like gigantic dominoes pushed headlong into the Los Angeles Country Club.
The conquering tyrant gained strength as it rushed through the flatter areas of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, making a final push for Hollywood and downtown. Allan imagined a damage counter spiking as the water rushed by the mansions of the rich and famous. Billions of dollars of real estate vanished in an instant, delicate sandcastles swallowed by high tide.
Panning north Allan saw the water meet its match in the Santa Monica Mountains. Peppered with debris bubbling to the surface, the water filled the deep canyons where so many Angelinos went to sweat. Griffith Observatory momentarily became waterfront property, the gurgling maelstrom giving up an attempt to reach the old telescopes. Barnsdall Art Park, the Capital Records Building, Yamashiro, and other venerable landmarks weren’t as lucky.
The flood slowed as it rolled through the basin and into downtown, filling the streets and making Los Angeles resemble a Hollywood interpretation of Manhattan after a century of global warming. For once, the citizens rejoiced at the restrictions that handicapped their skyline for decades. An old ruling that all buildings over a respectable height must contain helipads left several teeming with frantic Angelinos competing for the few rescue choppers.
Allan frantically refocused the telescope on his home. Trees along the fringe of the residential area below the San Gabriel Mountains blocked his view. He moved the telescope slowly west along the empty suburban streets. All that remained were leftovers of lives suddenly abandoned: dogs wandering searching for owners, Christmas toys left behind by frightened children, and sprinklers spraying the manicured lawns of empty homes radiating out from the Huntington Library.
Allan watched helplessly as the water, moving as quickly as Grandma in the left lane, ran down Arroyo Seco. It filled the Rose Bowl like a kiddie pool, eventually eclipsing the press box and bringing pieces of turf up to greet the elegant streetlights of Suicide Bridge. The water soon subsided, spitting a torrent of debris along Paseo Colorado and draining off into surrounding neighborhoods.
Los Angeles’s reliance on automobiles at least moved the inhabitants of the suburbs to higher ground in time. The water ran down empty streets of Pasadena, Covina, and Azuza like tumbleweeds through a ghost town.
There were, however, visitors at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The door to the offices sprang open with a violent bang, even though Allan deliberately left it unlocked. The low, heavy churn of helicopter blades outside reverberated down the hallways.
“Dr. Allan Sands?” came a forceful and fear-inducing shout.
As the Chinook lifted up and away from the mountain, Allan caught a bird’s-eye-view of the devastation through a narrow, faltering Sunset. The crushed landscape became less submerged as they crossed over Palmdale. Water funneled up through the narrow Agua Dulce channel and dribbled into the deserted desert communities. Rows of cookie-cutter-gray homes sat vacant as the water slowly searched the streets for a final resting place.
As if sensing his concern, the winch operator proudly shouted, “Water won’t reach Edwards, there’s a secret sluice system built in case Big Piute Lake ever broke free and flooded the valley.”
“Won’t be a secret now,” Allan shouted back.
The operator grinned. “You won’t be able to talk about anything you see from now on anyway.”
“It’s horrible,” Allan screamed at the winch operator. “The devastation on the coast, have you seen anything like it before?”
“You should see San Francisco,” the operator coldly shouted.
Chapter 5
“When can we return to Hawaii, sir?”
“Lieutenant, there may be nothing for you and your squad to return to,” the major told Lee without a hint of sympathy. “Holidays or not.”
Major Britely bristled and looked out the window as he talked, as if expecting to see another wall of water overtake the hot little room next to the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Above his head, banners hung from a base Christmas party, ironic vestiges of a world blissfully ignorant of its fragility.
“Oh, God, he’s right,” Allan mumbled, gripping the steel bench under him wit
h two sweaty hands, ready to jump under it at any moment like a child in an earthquake. “They must have been hit first, probably nothing left.”
In a smooth swoop the major grabbed the red fringe and ripped the banners down, tossing the coil on the cold floor.
“Mr. Sands!” Britely turned from the window to directly address the only civilian in the room. “I’d appreciate it if you kept your comments to yourself. The soldiers next to you are prepared to die to keep intact and secure the parts of the United States we do have left.”
He turned back to Lee. “I don’t know when you’ll be able to go home. I don’t know when any of us will. Home is an intangible for the moment.”
He took a long breath and steadied himself.
“I’m not even supposed to be the one telling you any of this. All the higher-ups were evacuated when the lights came on at 0200 and the folks at NORAD realized something was seriously wrong when Santa disappeared from his own flight path. We are in a scenario nobody anticipated, the nuke evac drills being the closest baseline. That leaves me in command of a ghost base, a pit stop for Pentagon reconnaissance and defense, while the generals hide in bunkers and watch.
“I’m aware that your duties have kept you in a cone of silence the past several hours. Through direct confrontation you learned of the Mexican government’s collapse, and I assure you it’s not the only one. However, with every satellite down and the Internet slowed to a crawl, the passage of information is extremely limited. We picked up Dr. Sands when he started squawking on shortwave.
“We’ve received many broadcasts from around the globe on shortwave that give us a better understanding of what happened and how everyone is faring. For the most part, most major world powers have instituted martial law and, for the time being, kept their casualties to a minimum. Since most Americans were already at home for the Christmas holiday, the country is remarkably stable. The worst of it for Middle America are a few riots for food. The bad news is, with this coordination we have others, like Dr. Sands, who have managed to get ahold of a telescope and point it up, creating more questions than answers.”
The Filter Trap Page 5
