It was a cargo plane, but the kind of goods it was taking to the ruined California coast was a surprise to Orbis McClune. He had supposed the urgent necessities would be such things as food, medical supplies, doctors, nurses. Not so. What was going into the airplane's hold was mostly great earth-moving machines. What's more, most of the score or so of persons, the other so-called rescue workers who were occupying the added-on passenger seats on the upper deck with him, seemed to be news reporters, and the others were all lawyers. At least the ones nearest to him were all one or the other, first a young woman whispering to her machine mind in the seat next to him, then a pair of older, plumper males studying documents together across the aisle. None of the other passengers paid any attention to Orbis McClune.
That was all right with him. He didn't want to talk to anybody just then. He had something more important to do. He closed his eyes, folded his hands on his lap and began a long, imploring, heartfelt, silent prayer to his Maker, because—in an age when members of the human race flew across the galaxy in great faster-than-light spacecraft—Orbis McClune was scared to death of airplanes.
II
What had made Kilauea a mass murderer wasn't just that it was a volcano. There are lots of volcanoes in the world. There are even quite a few of them which, like Kilauea, are in a fairly continuous state of eruption. The thing that made Kilauea special was that it was on an island. This meant that those little lava flows Kilauea kept continually plooping out had nowhere to go on land, because there just wasn't that much land on the island of Hawaii for them to go to. The only thing they could do was to ooze downhill to the beaches, and the only thing they could do after that was to tumble right down off the shoreline into the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.
When the lava got that far, it wasn't molten anymore. As soon as it hit that cold water it froze instantly solid, with a great display of fireworks and superheated steam. Then so did the next overflow out of Kilauea's endlessly recharging cauldron of liquid rock, and the one after that, and the one after that. And so as time went by, those increments of quick-frozen rock just off Hawaii's south beaches turned into a nearly vertical submarine cliff. Then it became an overhanging one. And then it cracked loose, split off from the rest of the Big Island and fell, taking hundreds of square kilometers of the island's surface with it.
Water is not compressible. The volume of water that was shoved out of the way by the collapsing cliff had to go somewhere. What it did was to become the tsunami, a ripple spreading across the Pacific at supersonic jet speed until ultimately it hit the rising slopes of the shelf around some land mass. The ripple then swelled, towered, fell on the land.
For those bits of land, that was just too bad.
The advance warnings helped, a little. Tens of millions of people heeded them and fled inland, and most of those people did succeed at least in saving their lives. But not everybody was able to get out of the way. Even the ones who could run away couldn't take their cities with them.
So Orbis McClune's plane didn't land at the old Los Angeles airport. That wasn't possible. There was nothing left of the airport, or indeed of the city, except for a desert of sand that lay over a waste of featureless, drying mud. The tsunami's first wave had scoured flat everything in that part of the world all the way from Santa Barbara to Tijuana—buildings, roads, railbug lines and everything else made by man. And then the wave that followed that one covered what was left with sand sucked up from the bottom of the sea, leaving nothing visible that could still be recognized as the work of man.
For all practical purposes the obliteration of that principal airport didn't matter. Those kilometers-long runways were heirlooms, designed for a much earlier generation of planes. It was not much of an inconvenience for the pilot of McClune's aircraft to set down on one of the many satellite airstrips in the foothills. The inconveniences started when the plane was actually on the ground. It turned out that each of the scant landing gates was already full, with half a dozen earlier arrivals already waiting on the taxi strips for one to open up. When McClune's aircraft did get to a gate, moments after the gate's previous occupant trundled away to the takeoff strip, he found the terminal crowded past recognition. The airport at Peotone had been busy, sure. But this one was less than a tenth the size of Peotone, and it was doing its inadequate best to handle ten times as much traffic.
As McClune exited the gate, he made the congestion a little worse. He stopped dead in his tracks and closed his eyes for a quick prayer of thanksgiving at having got through the flight alive. He was only a couple of seconds into it when a bump from behind made his eyes fly open.
The bump had come from his former seatmate, lugging a backpack of her own and still talking to her machine mind as she walked. Clearly she had been paying no more attention to the world around than he. "Shit," she said crossly. "Can't you get out of the goddamn way?"
McClune turned to regard her. What he noticed first about the woman was what she intended to be noticed, that is, that she was brown-haired, brown-eyed and all in all, as any normal person would recognize at once, quite pretty. She was in fact so attractive that she clearly had been able to afford plenty of cosmetic surgery. That fact would normally have been more interesting to him than her good looks, but he wasn't trying to raise funds at that moment. Had no church to be raising funds for, for that matter, so he merely gave her his heartwarming smile, the one that meant that the person he was talking to was being an unacceptable pain in the ass. He stepped as far aside as he could, into the airport's crush of people, and said politely, "I'm truly sorry, Miss. I was simply communing with the Lord for a moment."
That was as far as Orbis McClune expected the conversation to go, but it appeared that the woman was getting some other ideas. She was looking at him thoughtfully, taking in his clerical collar. Then she held up her hand toward him, palm out, and asked, "Are you a priest, then, Father, um—?"
McClune's smile, if anything, broadened. "No, I am not a priest of the Roman sect, my dear. I am a simple minister of God." Then, as he caught sight of the tiny glitter she was holding in her palm and realized he was on camera, he added, "I came here to do what I can for the souls of those in distress."
She gave him a microsecond pause before she prompted: "And what is it you can do for them, Reverend?"
The smile became broader still. "Why, I can bring them back to the merciful bosom of the Lord. What else is important in this world?"
"Thanks," she said, closing her fist and turning away, once again whispering to her machine mind and no longer showing any awareness that such a person as Orbis McClune existed.
That was annoying. McClune was accustomed to being scorned and insulted, even now and then to being punched out. However, he was not at all used to being kissed off as a six-second sound bite. He didn't like it, either.
No matter. As he removed himself from the stream of traffic McClune allowed himself a consoling moment to think of the hellfire that awaited the woman, then turned his thoughts toward where he could begin his mission ... and stopped dead once more. There were glowboards hanging below the ceiling that bore once-helpful markings, "Taxis" for the rich and extravagant, and of course "Cellular Transport" for everyone else. They no longer represented any reality. A concourse led down to the rail-bug station, all right, but the entrance to it was blocked by sawhorses bearing signs—hand-painted, of all things!—saying, unbelievably, "No cellular transportation."