第12章 The Countdown Begins

She told them at two in the afternoon, standing on the gravel pad in the sun with the whole windbreak turned around to face her, and she told it in the order it had happened rather than the order it mattered. She told them first that the man on the lighthouse point had survived, and thirty-one people made a sound that was not quite a cheer. Then she told them about the fax and the sixty-one feet, and the sound went out of the windbreak the way sound goes out of a room. "Three hours ago a man named Delgado told me the same thing on that gravel," Juna said. "He has been the district's flood response man for nineteen years. He is going to say it himself, and he deserves to say it himself, so let him." Delgado stepped up beside her. He had a fresh coverall out of a pack on the peak and it was the wrong size, and he had not shaved. "Tuesday at ten past ten at night," he said. "The state's warning center called this office with a runup model. Sixty-one feet at the harbor mouth if the fault lets go twice. The man on the phone asked me to wake the harbormaster and nobody else, because it was ten at night and there was nothing to wake anybody *for*." He looked at the gravel. "I wrote it down and I went home. That is the whole of what I did. I have had three days to think of a reason and there is not one, so I have stopped looking." Hollis Halleck stood up in the second row. "You had a number and a phone." "I did." "And you decided that eleven people in boats and the cannery and forty crew on shift did not need to know." "Yes." "Then say it without the rest of it around it." Halleck's voice was level and completely out of control. "You decided that. And now we are eleven hours from sixty-one feet and everybody here is going to spend tonight deciding whether to trust a man who made that call once." The windbreak was quiet. Somebody at the back started to cry and stopped. "Yes," Delgado said. "If it helps, that is the reason I have not slept since Tuesday, and it will be the reason I do not sleep tonight either." Aughrim stood up on the catwalk rail. "All right," she said. "Nobody is going to be shouted at and nobody is going to be forgiven today, because we do not have today. We have until ten to five in the morning and then we have the daylight after that. Reyes. Give them the rest." Juna gave them the rest. She gave them Omar's number and the top of the tide at ten past ten and the fact that the front lands at six-forty, two hours before the top, which was the ordinary signature of a wave on a rising tide and the reason the second surge had caught people asleep in their beds. She gave them fourteen feet of ridge road inundation from the district's own design annex. She gave them the shape of the dome under them, three hundred and ten feet, and the fact that the survey annex put the harbor mouth at sixty-one and the peak's shoulder, by Omar's arithmetic, at somewhere north of sixty. "Higher than sixty," she said. "There is no ground on this ridge between the school and the top of this rock. Whatever comes up this valley comes up all of it at once." Somebody at the back said the word *valley* in a voice that had gone very small, and a child started asking where his shoes were. After that it was questions for two hours. Some of them were good questions. Some of them were the same question in a different coat. Then Dalton Hague, who had been sixty-one years old and had driven a school bus through the dark on Tuesday night and had not slept since, stood up and put his hand on the rail and asked the one nobody else had been brave enough to. "The north saddle. Two miles, over the top of the draw. Four hundred and sixty feet, and the county road on the far side comes down to the state highway." "No," Juna said. "You have not—" "Give me one reason and I will carry his gear myself." She turned around so she was looking at the valley with all of them behind her. "That saddle crosses the draw that runs down from the north, and the draw is the low channel this valley pours into. Every one of the five surges so far came up that draw. At sixty-one feet at the mouth we are not walking over a hill. We are walking across the top of a pipe with water in it, and if the pipe is still running when we are on the crest, there is nowhere on the crest to sit down." "Two miles with seven children and a four-year-old who has not had shoes since Tuesday, over wet rock, at night, into ground none of us have seen." "Then we sit here and drown at six-forty." "Yes," Juna said. "That is the second-best thing available. I would like to get you a third." At six Omar Hadid set the harbor clock up on a plank between two paint cans, because a clock on a pedestal is a thing you read and a clock on a plank is a thing you cannot stop looking at, and he wound it and set it to slack high at ten past ten. "From this minute forward, everything we do is counted on that board," he told them, "and I want children counting it too. Somebody write the numbers where I can see them." By eight the peak had a routine, which is what people do instead of hope. Water came up from the school roof tanks in cut-off fire hoses and was weighed. The blankets went on in order of who was coldest. The old ones went down into the lookout room, because the wind came across that dome at thirty before dawn. Hollis Halleck made an inventory of cord and came up with a plan for a mast that would put an antenna on the rock where the lookout frame already stood. "You would need a beam twenty feet up and something to hang off it," he said. "And wire." "There is a weather mast on the school," Omar said. Everyone looked at the school. It sat four hundred yards down the slope with four feet of water in the ground floor and a car park full of cars and a north gable that had held water for ten minutes and then lost it. "The mast is on the roof," Omar said. "It is a forty-foot lattice with a wind vane and a tip sensor on it and about forty feet of coax running down through the ceiling tiles to a booster in the gym." "In the gym," Halleck said. "In the four feet of water in the gym." Halleck looked at the tower, then at the school, then at his own boots, and Juna saw him decide something. "Then somebody swims into the school gym in the dark and takes a box out of a ceiling tile." "Not tonight," Juna said. "The flood comes back at ten and the current in the draw will make a swimmer into a piece of driftwood. Slack is at ten to five." "Slack," Omar said. "Which is fifty minutes from the top of the tide with no current over the rock at all." He turned and looked at her. "And the vault." Juna had not mentioned the vault aloud since the first afternoon. "Omar, we do not know what those numbers mean. We have a series that went down to zero and then stopped, and a piece of paper that says there is a survey pin on a shelf nobody has touched since 1946. That could be a wave. It could be the shelf going. Those are two completely different tomorrows and only one of them kills the ridge." "Agreed. That is why I want a number that came off a gauge in the rock instead of off a radio through forty fathoms of water." He held the notebook up. "Ibarra's array put strain gauges on that shelf and wired them into the vault, and you have already been down there once with a pry bar and a piece of chain. If the shelf has started to move, the gauge will say so, and it will say so in tenths of a millimeter per day, and no amount of guessing gets us that." "And when I open it up?" "The array will know." Omar put the notebook down. "It has known since you pulled the memory cylinder out of that case. It logged the vault trip, Juna. It does not care whether you are a diver or a thief. It knows a human has been at its instruments, and the next thing it does about that is what I want to read off the drum before dawn." At ten the flood came back into the valley and Juna went down to the granite shoulder at the bottom of the trail to watch it come, because she had learned to want to see a thing arrive rather than only ever hear about it afterward. It came up the draw exactly where the draw was. It took the school wall to the second-floor sills. It spread across the car park and made a single smooth sheet out of it, and where the sheet lifted over the ridge road it tore a long white seam and the seam did not close. And out past the harbor mouth, where the blasted shelf of Signal Rock sat under eleven feet of black water, something was standing up out of the sea in a low ring of foam. She watched it for a long time before she was sure of it. A circle maybe forty feet across, standing maybe a foot proud of the surface, turning slowly, with clean black water in the middle of it. She went up to the peak and told Omar Hadid, and Omar Hadid listened with his hands flat on the plank, and did not say a word for a long time. "A kettle," he said at last. "That is a kettle over a drain. It is water going down through a hole." "How big a hole?" He looked at the ring of foam a mile and a half away, in the last of the light, and then he picked up his pencil and turned to a clean page in the notebook. "I am going to need you in the water at ten to five," he said. "Go and sleep. I will write down what I think I know, and tomorrow you will tell me I am wrong." ---