And no one had listened.
At least, no one had listened—he fumbled for the word he wanted—had listened purely. The only ones who had heard were the ones who had polluted the message with their own poisons, the quacks and the charlatans, the politicians and the greedy pirates like Danny Deere.
Why would no one hear what he had to say?
He slammed on the brakes, swearing to himself.
He had been deep in his own thoughts, and had not seen what was going on. A mile back slickered emergency crews had warned him that he was proceeding at his own risk, and now suddenly he saw how great that risk was. Just ahead of him, on the canyon road that led to Rainy's apartment complex, the road seemed to be in the process of closing itself. A delta of glistening red-brown slime was building up on the roadway itself, and the gutters along the sides had become mud rivers.
And something worse was very near to happening.
Up on the hill was someone's estate. They had obviously had experience of mud slides before, and so they had taken steps against them. They had built a cement tennis court, anchored to piles sunk into the hillside, to protect its border.
But it hadn't worked! Now the wash from the hillside had undercut the cement. The reinforced concrete beams that held it together were visible in his headlights, and they were bare. All the earth had been washed away, and only the pillars held it. One of the pilings, once eight feet deep in the ground, was now not touching earth at all; it hung in air over a gulley. Tib swallowed and eased the car past, watching the pillars for movement. He didn't stop shaking until he had reached Rainy's apartment, passed the doorman and was actually standing at her door.
And, wouldn't you know it, she was agitated about something herself, and obviously not very interested in what was agitating him. But what was agitating him should also have agitated her, so he spoke over whatever it was she was saying: "They're closing off the canyon road. They only let me in because I said I was going to evacuate my mother."
She stopped, regarding him. "Your mother?"
People who have been told that their senses of humor are deficient dislike explaining their jokes. Tib was annoyed; it was not a big joke, he conceded to himself, but it wasn't a bad one. And for this he had driven eighty-five minutes through the worst weather of the year!
But he could see that Rainy was deeply disturbed. "It does not matter," he said, taking off his wet coat. "Please tell me what is the trouble."
"Those F.B.I, people! They've been here again and, listen, you won't believe this, now they think I'm in some sort of conspiracy with the Russians!" She repeated the conversation with the agents, and waited for Tib's response. He sat with his rubbers in his hand, not noticing that he was dripping mud on the new rug. His face was gray. "I thought you might think it was funny," she said. "I mean—I didn't. But I was hoping you'd talk me into it."
He sighed and put the rubbers in the bathroom. "Naturalized citizens from Eastern Europe have trouble thinking such charges are funny," he said. "I am sorry. It is not funny. It strikes me that everything is getting terribly unfunny at once."
In a trailer on one of the access roads to Yellowstone Park, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist pondered a question of timing. His observations showed that the park was swelling like a balloon, as liquid rock squeezed its way up to the surface. Rock cores revealed that the entire Yellowstone area had erupted in the past in scores of immense volcanic explosions, scattering ejecta over millions of square miles; there had been major eruptive outbreaks every few million years, and it had been several million years since the last one. Clearly, another vast eruption was due at any time, geologically speaking. The question in his mind was, did "any time" mean within the next million years? Or the next hundred? Or next week?
Sunday, December 27th. 10:40 m.
Although Meredith was really sick with anger and pity, when she allowed herself to think about it, her old man was taking it harder than she. He had been a day and a half alternately raging and grieving, and his emotional binge seemed to grow stronger, not less. To be sure, there was always a way of soothing him down when upset, equally good for herself; but it had worked three times already, and only temporarily.
Maybe food? While Sam took his mood off to exercise it on the telephone she considered making him something to eat. Something hearty. Something he liked. She opened the refrigerator and peered into the snowfield that was her frozen food locker. Of course! She took out a frozen package of creamed chipped beef, scraped off the frost and puzzled over the instructions on the package.
Even by Meredith's own standards, she was not concentrating on cooking tonight. Her concerns were both personal and professional. Personaclass="underline" Sam Houston Bradison had been the light of her life since they were both twenty, a long time ago, and she had never seen him so upset. The death of Myrna Licht had hit him hard. Not only because she had been his own student; because she had been a good one; because she had wasted her skills with those conniving Pedigrues; because, most of all, she had died of it in the long run.
And professionally, the storm was looming ever larger in her mind. The radio was full of it—when it was not lull of stale details and gossipy speculations about the death of Myrna Licht. There was nothing really unusual about heavy rains and mud damage at this time of year. Almost every year it happened. Almost every year the media went into a flap and a largish number of Californians went through a season of misery, and then it went away. It was like everything else about Los Angeles. Los Angelenos knew that car exhaust was strangling them, but they kept their cars. They knew that earthquakes were inevitable, but they built homes under earthfill dams. They knew that brush fires took an annual toll, but they moved into the chapparal. And they knew that every winter the rains came. This was no worse than other years, really. Not as bad, so far anyway, as, say, February of 1980; and that not nearly as bad as some of the real destroyers. There had been a winter way back during the Civil War when a warm hurricane from the Pacific struck and stayed. The combination of the downpour with the snow melt from the warm winds had filled the entire valley with water from mountains to mountains—what would they say if that happened again?
She wished Sam would get off the phone so she could check the latest reports from the Weather Bureau, just to reassure herself that this storm was only a normal winter rain, maybe a little early, but not unprecedented; and certainly nothing to do with Jupiter!
She realized she was standing there with the frozen chipped beef in her hand and the refrigerator standing open as Sam came morosely back into the kitchen. "Your friend Tib doesn't answer, and Rainy Keating's phone is out, and the governor is supposed to be coming down here to 'inspect the emergency'. So I can't get anybody at all. What the devil are you doing with that stuff?"