Jack McDevitt - The Moonfall

When the ceremony ended, they drank a toast to his success. Evelyn had designed, and Saber printed, programs for the event, and everyone asked him to sign a copy.

"This isn't exactly the way I'd pictured my inauguration," he told them. "Usually the swearing-in includes a parade, ballrooms, dignitaries, lots of press coverage." He smiled at Keith Morley, who'd agreed to shut the mike off momentarily. "This one is quieter than most. But I think no other president has been so fortunate in the persons who surrounded him during the rite of passage. Living and dead." He lifted his glass to toast them. "Thank you."

(Helicopter in the background, rotors slowly turning.)

"… atop the New County Courthouse in Los Angeles. From our perch up here we can see the Hall of Justice, the Federal Building, the Civic Center. Everywhere, frightened crowds are breaking into whatever buildings, whatever skyscrapers, they can, hoping to get up high." (Crowd noises, explosions, gunfire audible in background.)

"We can see lights and people moving on the upper floors of police headquarters and at the Museum of Contemporary Art. As far as we can tell, there is no longer an organized police force left in the city. The streets are filled with people. I don't know where they keep coming from.

"Our best information is that all highways out of the city remain hopelessly blocked. PacRail, of course, stopped operating earlier this evening, so right now the only salvation anyone has is to get above the water level. Whatever that might be. In fact, they're signaling me that we can hear people moving up in this building.

"Okay, that's the story from Hill Street and Beverly Boulevard. We're going to switch over now to Linda Tellier, who's in our news copter at Redondo Beach. Linda?"

"Thanks, Rod. We're about a half mile off shore, awaiting the first of the waves that the National Weather Service has been predicting for the last few hours. We're just over the water now, and while you can't see it in the dark, Redondo Beach is experiencing an extraordinarily low tide. That's one of the sure signs of an approaching wave.

"Looking east, we can see the lights of Torrance and Inglewood. Interstate 405 is almost dark, Rod. It's filled with abandoned cars. Police and military units were up there until about an hour ago, just pushing vehicles off the highway, but they're gone now too. And when we looked at it a few minutes ago, we saw only a few people wandering aimlessly, and some who were stripping cars.

"We were in touch with the Coast Guard-wait, I think I see something now. You're not getting this in your picture, but I can see what looks like a wall across the horizon. The ocean just seems to be rising up. And up." (Long pause.) "And up. God help us, Rod, it's hard to tell for sure, but that thing might be fifteen stories high.

"I hope everyone's out of Redondo." Pacific Coast. 4:39 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time (7:39 A.M. EDT).

The first wave struck well before dawn. It roared ashore between Point Conception and Santa Barbara and boiled into the Santa Ynez Mountains. Forewarned, the population had scattered to high ground, and only a handful of casualties were recorded. The National Park Service estimated that the wave was one hundred fifty feet high.

Within minutes other tsunamis hit Seattle and Coos Bay. The Seattle wave was initially reported to have been a half-mile high when it struck the city, but videos taken from office buildings and aircraft put the crest at only a tenth of that figure. It was enough.

Between four thirty-five and five A.M., the Pacific rose from its bed and overwhelmed the coastline from Juneau to San Carlos. In the Los Angeles area, the city simply disappeared, save for a few downtown skyscrapers and the surrounding hilltops. Most of Santa Monica and Redondo, Inglewood and Long Beach went with it.

San Francisco also died. A wave estimated at six hundred fifty feet took down the Golden Gate Bridge, submerged the city from the Presidio on the north to San Andreas Lake on the south. It buried Oakland and Berkeley, and poured through the Simi Valley and the bays north of San Francisco into the California interior. The San Joaquin Valley became an inland sea.

Initial estimates put the death toll at two million in greater Los Angeles alone. Curiously, throughout the bombardment San Diego remained untouched. It reported lower than normal tides.

In Mexico the ocean surged over Baja California, spilled into the Gulf of California, and maintained enough power to impose severe damage on the eastern shore from Isla Del Tiburon to Mazatlan. County Route 6, southeast of San Francisco. 4:59 A.M. PDT (7:59 A.M. EDT).

There were no emergency services. Phones were dead and the radio in the police car brought only a carrier wave. As the first gray light of dawn was appearing, a helicopter owned by Short Haul Airways arrived with a doctor and some medical supplies.

"Best I could do," said the pilot, whose name Marisa never caught. "It's pretty grim out there."

Among the group trapped by the landslide, there'd been only one physician, and he'd broken his back. Marisa and Jerry had taken charge of the rescue effort.

They had converted the restaurant into a makeshift hospital, and the antique shop into a morgue. She'd tried to treat the seriously injured where they fell, despite the threat presented by the cliff. But the ground had continued to shake, and eventually she'd bitten the bullet and ordered everyone away. Ten minutes later the mountain had collapsed.

Jerry had rounded up volunteers and they pitched in to help, cleaning wounds, setting bones, and applying tourniquets. The doctor who'd come in aboard the chopper had been vacationing at a mountain cabin when Short Haul found him.

They had about forty people who needed hospital treatment. "Not going to happen," said the doctor. His name was Hardacre and he was in his early thirties. He was a young, good-looking guy who complained that it was his first vacation in three years. He seemed to regard the disaster as a personal imposition. But he'd come, and he seemed competent, so Marisa wasn't complaining.

"What do you mean, it's not going to happen?" she demanded.

"You been watching the TV?" he asked.

"Not for the last hour or so."

"When you get a minute, take a look. Whatever hospitals are left will be swamped. It's likely to be a long time before anybody's going to have beds available."

She looked around at her patients. They had no cots, so the patients had all been placed on the floor and made as comfortable as conditions allowed. Hardacre had grabbed some painkillers and other supplies from the cache at the resort where he'd been staying, and they'd helped, had helped a lot. But these people needed serious treatment. What were they going to do?

As if to underscore the point, a distant murmur was becoming audible. Marisa's first thought was that the rest of the mountain was coming down. They were well across the road, far enough away to be safe, but the sound was different from the one she'd heard earlier. And it was coming from the opposite direction, from the San Joaquin. Maybe the part of the mountain they were sitting on was going to go this time.

She put it out of her mind and went back to changing a dressing. The patient was a middle-aged woman with a shattered leg and a sliced arm. Hardacre had put twenty stitches in the arm and supported the leg as best he could. The woman's husband, who'd come through untouched, was beside her.

Marisa's thoughts returned to Jerry. They'd set up a center for the lost kids wandering around. Jerry had seen that it was properly staffed. Now he was busy on the far side of the restaurant, changing bandages. It wasn't something he liked to do and, in fact, Jerry had never liked blood very much, but he was shining this morning.