Tib gazed down at her. "It is funny that that should sound so strange to me. Is that what we are, lovers? Not dating' or going with'?"
Rainy picked up his hand, lifted it to her mouth and touched the fold of flesh between thumb and forefinger with her tongue. "It's what I would like us to be, I guess," she said. "Now! Your endless sexual indulgences have made you smell like a goat. Come shower with me."
It was not a thing Tib Sonderman had been used to doing, and he was awkward with her at first. Not for long. It turned out to be about as pleasant, in a gently sexual way, as anything short of intercourse, and marvelously relaxing as well. It even stimulated conversation, and he found he was telling her his perplexities and puzzlements. It brought them no nearer solution, but it seemed to bring Tib and Rainy closer to each other, while the water of Mono Lake and the Colorado River splashed over them and into the drain and Tib did not give it even a thought. In spite of the considerable sexual indulgences of the past eight or ten hours they might easily have wound up on the convertible bed again if Rainy had not heard a sound imperceptible to Tib, excused herself, wrapped herself in a towel, and disappeared.
Reluctantly, Tib turned off the shower. She had closed the door behind her, but he heard an exclamation, then sounds of scrambling around the room, then a brief low-voiced conversation of which he only caught one word, but that word was one he had not wanted to hear: Tinker.
He stood on the fluffy pink mat with the towel in his hand and a whole scenario unrolled inevitably before him. The name of the skit was Returning Husband Discovers Wife's Lover, and he was playing one of the leads.
How very embarrassing, he thought. Now, what were the traditional stage directions? Under the bed, in a closet, out the window? But none of those were available; not even his clothes were available. No. Of course they weren't. They were exactly where he had left them, namely draped across the kitchen chairs.
He might have gone on drying himself indefinitely, but he heard the door close, peeked out and saw Rainy, all by herself, wrapped up in a robe she had grabbed from somewhere, the towel turbaned around her wet hair, staring thoughtfully at Tib's trousers. She looked around. "That was Tinker," she said. "He said he was worried about me. He said the back road is open now, so we could get out if we wanted to. "
Tib nodded. Her face was so blank that he could not tell whether she was closer to laughter or tears. In the event, there was neither. She moved into the kitchen to start water for coffee. "He's really a sweet man," she said. "But we're really not married any more, and now I guess he understands that."
About seventy million pieces of solid matter strike the Earth's atmosphere every day. Fortunately, all but a few of them are extremely small, of the order of a billionth of a gram. But any person who spends much time walking, sunbathing or playing golf is, on average, "struck" by several of these micrometeorites each week—with so little force by the time they reach the Earth's surface that they are indistinguishable from ordinary atmospheric dust.
Monday, December 28th. 11:40 m.
Saunders Robinson got up from the canvas cot where Dennis was sleeping to get his fifteenth cup of coffee. He didn't even drink coffee. But he didn't want to sleep, not covered with mud, not in this high-school gymnasium with the canvas cots all over the basketball court. They had been up all night, shoveling mud into potato sacks up along Mulholland Drive for three hours, then back here in the emergency shelter for nearly another three. The Red Cross woman handing out the coffee had a radio going, turned down low in case any of the five or six families who had elected to try the shelters were really trying to sleep— few of them were—and reports were coming in from what seemed like the entire world: Mandeville Canyon, Rustic Canyon, Montebello, Pacific Palisades, all over the Santa Monica Mountains, Mount Olympus, the San Gabriel foothills, Encino, Monterey Park. The Pacific Coast Highway was closed (surf); so was the Ventura Freeway (slides). Malibu residents were ordered to boil their water. The governor had been asked to declare a state of emergency, and the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu was flooded.
There was not much loss of life. Quite a few highway deaths, but that was not unusual for a Southland Monday morning, where you could almost always count on one or two motorists winding up guillotined in a windshield, or with an engine in their laps. But the property damage! Half of Los Angeles had leaking roofs. Another half was worried about its houses slipping down the hillsides, and some of them were seeing it happen. The black family in the shelter had an unusual story: they had been burned out in the middle of the night, when their cellar flooded, silently and without fuss. The water had risen to the base of the natural-gas hot-water heater, half a foot a minute. It covered the jet, but the flame did not go out: the gas bubbled through the rising water and burned in spatters of flame at the surface. When it came close to the two- by-sixes that held the floor of the living room in place, they began to smolder. The smoke alarm woke the family in time to see their house burn from the inside, with all the water in the world surrounding it on all sides.
Robinson realized his fifteenth cup of coffee was empty, and wandered back to the urn for number sixteen. There were not many people in the refuge. Most threatened families had refused to leave their homes—or been afraid to. Of the forty people in the room that could have sheltered five hundred, more than two dozen were volunteers like himself, from the Red Cross lady at the coffee urn to the handful of Tree People and casual volunteers who had responded to the radio appeal. Most of them were silent, staring around as though they were wondering what they were doing here. Robinson wondered that too. It had been his idea to volunteer, and the word "penance" stuck in his mind when he suggested it; but he knew he had beaten Dennis to the point of making it articulate only by moments. He debated trying to call Afeefah to tell her he was all right—mostly to see if she was—but the nearest phone was in the school office, and the effort seemed considerable.
A man came in from the rain. He didn't trouble to take his rain hat off, or even to close the door. He would not be that long. "Okay, troops," he called. "Saddle up."
They could see little outside the canvas top of the National Guard six-by-six, but there wasn't much to see. Dennis craned past Robinson's shoulder to peer out at the rain and the hillsides, accepting the penalty of blown drops in his eyes; it was nearly seventy degrees outside, and a lot hotter than that inside the truck. They were barely crawling along, on a stretch of the freeway that had been closed to all but emergency traffic for the past twelve hours. The driver didn't seem to know where he was going. Twice he started on a down ramp, stopped, muttered with the L.A. County Flood Control engineer in the seat beside him, and then grindingly backed onto the freeway again. It was lunch time, and Dennis was beginning to be very hungry. He had slept through the sandwiches at the high school, and now he regretted it.
On the hillside just ahead of them the slope was rather gentle, and there were no split-level houses to dam and channel the water. The rain soaked in where it fell and did no harm. As long as it could. Until the ground was saturated, and the soil would not accept one more drop. Even then it only flowed gently down the gentle slope. It did not channel scabland trenches into bare soil, because the soil was not bare; it was once dense turf, now grown to weeds and tangles but all the better able to hold itself together because of that. And it did hold, through the first four-inch downpour, and the three days of lesser rains that followed, even through the three inches that had fallen overnight; but by that time on Monday it was no more firm than Jell-O. Worse. The structural integrity had been violated. All along the side of that hill, row on row, over a period of decades, holes had been dug. They were quite uniform holes, each one of them eight feet long^forty-two inches wide, and seven feet deep. The hillside had been perforated like the stub of a check.