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 rectangular 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.