Алистер Маклин - Goodbye California

The day was fine and bright and clear with cloudless skies which, in the circumstances, formed an impossibly macabre setting for the convulsion the watchers were about to witness, a circumstance that must have pleased Morro greatly, for it could not but increase the emotional impact of the spectacle: a storm-wracked sky, lowering clouds, driving rain, fog, any face of nature that showed itself in a sombre and minor key would have been far more in keeping with the occasion – and would have lessened the impact of the spectacle of the explosion. There was only one favourable aspect about the weather. Normally at that time of the day and at that time of year the wind would have been westerly and on-shore: today, because of a heavy front pressing down from the north-west, the wind was slightly west of southerly and in that direction the nearest land-mass of any size lay as far distant as the Antarctic.

‘Pay attention to the sweep-second hand on the wall-clock,’ Morro said. ‘It is perfectly synchronized with the detonating mechanism. There are, as you can see, twenty seconds to go.’

A pure measure of time is only relative. To a person in ecstasy it can be less than the flicker of an eyelid: for a person on the rack it can be an eternity. The watchers were on no physical rack but they were on an emotional one, and those twenty seconds seemed interminable. All of them behaved in precisely the same way, their eyes constantly flickering between the clock and the screen and back again at least once in every second.

The sweep second reached sixty and nothing happened. One second passed, two, three and still nothing. Almost as if by command the watchers glanced at Morro, who sat relaxed and apparently unworried. He smiled at them.

‘Be of good faith. The bomb lies deep and you forget the factor of the earth’s curvature.’

Their eyes swivelled back to the screen and then they saw it. At first it was no more than a tiny protuberance on the curve of the distant horizon, but a protuberance that rose and swelled with frightening rapidity with the passage of every second. There was no blinding white glare of light, there was no light whatsoever of any colour, just that monstrous eruption of water and vaporized water that rose and spread, rose and spread until it filled the screen. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb but was perfectly fan-shaped in appearance, much thicker in the centre than at the edges, the lowermost sides of which were streaking outwards just above and almost parallel with the sea. The cloud, had it been possible to see it from above, must have looked exactly like an inverted umbrella, but from the side it looked like a gigantic fan opened to its full 180 degrees, much more dense in the centre, presumably because there the blast had had the shortest distance to cover before reaching the surface of the sea. Suddenly the giant fan, which had run completely off the screen, shrunk until it occupied no more than half of it.

A woman’s voice, awed and shaky, said: ‘What happened to it? What’s happened to it?’

‘Nothing’s happened to it.’ Morro looked and sounded very comfortable. ‘It’s the camera. The operator has pulled in his zoom to get the picture inside the frame.’

The commentator, who had been babbling on almost incoherently, telling the world what they could see perfectly well for themselves, was still babbling on.

‘It must be eight thousand feet high now. No, more. Ten thousand would be nearer it. Think of it, just think of it! Two miles high and four miles across the base. Good God, is the thing never going to stop growing?’

‘I think congratulations are in order, Professor Aachen,’ Morro said. ‘Your little contraption seems to have worked quite well.’

Aachen gave him a look which was meant to be a glare, but wasn’t. A broken spirit can take a long time to heal.

For about the next thirty seconds the commentator stopped commentating. It was no instance of a gross dereliction of duty: he was probably so awe-struck that he could find no words to describe his emotions. It was not often that a commentator had the opportunity to witness the terrifying spectacle unfolding before his eyes: more precisely, no commentator had ever had the opportunity before. By and by he bestirred himself. ‘Could we have full zoom, please?’

All but the base of the centre of the fan disappeared. A tiny ripple could be seen advancing lazily across the ocean. The commentator said: ‘That, I suppose, must be the tidal wave.’ He sounded disappointed; clearly he regarded it as an altogether insignificant product of the titanic explosion he’d just seen. ‘Doesn’t look much like a tidal wave to me.’

‘Ignorant youth,’ Morro said sadly. ‘That wave is probably travelling something about four hundred miles an hour at the moment. It will slow down very quickly as it reaches shallower water, but its height will increase in inverse proportion to its deceleration. I think the poor boy is in for a shock.’

About two-and-a-half minutes after the detonation a thunderous roar, which seemed as if it might shake the TV to pieces, filled the room. It lasted about two seconds before it was suddenly reduced to a tolerable level. A new voice cut in.

‘Sorry about that, folks. We couldn’t reach the volume control in time. Whew! We never expected a deafening racket like that. In fact, to be quite honest with you, we didn’t expect any sound at all from an explosion so deep under water.’

‘Fool.’ Liberal as ever, Morro had supplied refreshment for the entertainment, and he now took a delicate sip of his Glenfiddich. Burnett took a large gulp of his.

‘My word, that was a bang.’ The original commentator was back on the air. He was silent for some time while the camera, still on full zoom, remained fixed on the incoming tidal wave. ‘I don’t think I like this too much. That wave might not be so big but I’ve never seen anything moving so fast. I wonder–’

The viewers were not to find out what he was wondering about. He gave an articulate cry, there was an accompanying crashing sound and suddenly the tidal wave on the screen was replaced by an empty expanse of blue sky.

‘He’s been hit by the blast shock wave. I should have warned them about that, I suppose.’ If Morro was covered with remorse he was hiding it well. ‘Couldn’t have been all that bad, or the camera wouldn’t still be functioning.’

As usual Morro was right. Within seconds the commentator was on the air again but was clearly so dazed that he had forgotten the fact.

‘Jesus Christ! My bloody head!’ There was a pause, punctuated by a fair amount of wheezing and groaning. ‘Sorry about that, viewers. Mitigating circumstances. Now I know what it’s like to be hit by an express train. If I may be spared a feeble joke, I know the occupation I’d like to have tomorrow. A glazier. That blast must have broken a million windows in the city. Let’s see if this camera is still functioning.’

It was functioning. As the camera was lifted back to the upright the blue sky was gradually replaced by the ocean. The operator had obviously advanced the zoom, for the fan was once again in the picture. It had grown no larger and appeared to be in the first beginnings of disintegration because it had become ragged and was gradually losing its shape. A faint greyish cloud, perhaps two miles high, could be seen faintly drifting away.

‘I think it’s falling back into the ocean. Can you see that cloud drifting away to the left – to the south? That can’t be water, surely. I wonder if it’s a radio-active cloud.’

‘It’s radio-active, all right,’ Morro said. ‘But that greyness is not radio-activity; it’s water vapour held in suspension.’

Burnett said: ‘I suppose you’re aware, you bloodless bastard, that that cloud is lethal?’