“You mean they’re going to do it again?”
“Not the same routine, of course. This time they’re staging a major earthquake in a province called California. They’ll trigger it by beaming the deep substrata with tight-focus tractor probes. The whole area is in a delicate state of balance, so all it will take is the merest touch to start a crustal readjustment that will satisfy the most exacting fans.”
“The San Andreas Fault,” Waverly groaned. “Good-by, San Francisco!”
“It’s the Sequoias I’m thinking of,” Fom Berj sighed. “Remarkable organisms, and not nearly so easy to replace as San Franciscans.”
4
The twifler hurtled across the Rockies at eighty thousand feet, began to let down over northwestern Nevada, an unbroken desert gleaming ghostly white in the light of a crescent moon. Far ahead, San Francisco glowed on the horizon.
“This gets a trifle tricky now,” Fom Berj said. “The recording units will be orbiting the scene of the action at a substratospheric level, of course, catching it all with wide-spectrum senceivers, but the production crew will be on the ground, controlling the action. They’re the ones we’re after. And in order to capture these malefactors red-handed, we’ll have to land and go in on foot for the pinch. That means leaving the protection of the twifler’s antiac field.”
“What will we do when we find them?”
“I’d prefer to merely lay them by the heels with a liberal application of stun gas. If they’re alive to stand trial, the publicity will be a real bonus, careerwise. However, it may be necessary to vaporize them.”
Decelerating sharply, Fom Berj dropped low over the desert, scanning the instruments closely.
“They’ve shielded their force bubble pretty well,” she said. “But I think I’ve picked it up.” She pointed. Waverly detected a vague bluish point glowing on a high rooftop near the north edge of the city. “A good position, with an excellent view of the target area.”
Waverly held on as the flier swooped low, whistled in a tight arc and settled in on a dark rooftop. The hatch popped up, admitted a gust of cool night air. Waverly and the detective advanced to the parapet. A hundred yards distant across a bottomless, black chasm, the blue glow of the fifty-foot force bubble shone eerily. Waverly was beginning to sweat inside his purple pajamas.
“What if they see us?” he hissed—and dropped flat as a beam of green light sizzled past his head from the bubble and burst into flame.
“Does that answer your question?” Fom Berj was crouched behind the parapet. “Well, there’s no help for it. I’ll have to use sterner measures.” She broke off as the deck underfoot trembled, then rose in a series of jarring jerks, dropped a foot, thrust upward again. A low rumble had started up. Brick came pelting down from adjacent buildings to smash thunderously below.
“Oh, oh, it’s started!” Fom Berj shrilled. Clinging to the roof with her multiple ambulatory members, the detective unlimbered a device resembling a small fire extinguisher, took aim and fired. Waverly, bouncing like a passenger in a Model T Ford, saw a yellow spear of light dart out, glance off the force bubble and send up a shower of sparks as it scored the blue-glowing sphere.
“Bull’s-eye!” Fom Berj trilled. “A couple more like that, and—”
The whole mountainside under the building seemed to tilt. The parapet toppled and was gone. Waverly grabbed for a stout TV antenna, held on as his feet swung over the edge. Fom Berj emitted a sharp scream and grabbed for a handhold. The vaporizer slid past Waverly, went over the edge.
“That does it,” the detective cried over the roar of crumbling mortar. “We tried, Wivery!”
“Look!” Waverly yelled. Over his shoulder, he saw the force bubble suddenly flicker violet, then green, then yellow—and abruptly dwindle to half its former diameter. Through a pall of dust, Waverly discerned the outlines of an elaborate apparatus resembling an oversized X-ray camera, now just outside the shrunken blue bubble. A pair of figures, one tall and thin, the other rotund and possessing four arms, dithered, scrabbling at the dome for entrance. One slipped and disappeared over the roof’s edge with a mournful yowl. The other scampered off across the buckling roof, leaped to an adjacent one, disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust.
* * *
“Did you see that?” Fom Berj cried. “They’ve had to abandon their grappler! We’ve beaten them!”
“Yes—but what about the earthquake?” Waverly called as the roof under him bounded and leaped.
“We’ll just have to ride it out and hope for the best!”
Through the dust cloud, they watched as the blue bubble quivered, swam upward from its perch, leaving the abandoned tractor beamer perched forlornly on the roof.
“Let them go,” Fom Berj called. “As soon as the ground stops shaking, we’ll be after them.”
Waverly looked out toward the vast sprawl of lights, which were now executing a slow, graceful shimmy. As he watched, a section of the city half a mile square went dark. A moment later, the twinkling orange lights of fires sprang up here and there across the darkened portion. Beyond the city, the surface of the Pacific heaved and boiled. A dome swelled up, burst; green water streamed back as a gout of black smoke belched upward in a roiling fire-shot cloud. The moonlight gleamed on a twenty-foot wavefront that traveled outward from the submarine eruption. Waverly saw it meet and merge with the waterfront, sweep grandly inland, foaming majestically about the bases of the hills on which the city was built. The long, undulating span of the Golden Gate bridge wavered in a slow snake dance, then descended silently into the bay, disappeared in a rising smother of white. More light went out; more fires appeared across the rapidly darkening city. A deafening rumble rolled continuously across the scene of devastation.
Now the backwash of the tidal wave was sweeping back out to sea, bearing with it a flotsam of bars, billboards, seafood restaurants and automobiles, many of the latter with their headlights still on, gleaming murkily through the shallow waters. Smoke was forming a pall across the mile of darkened ruins, lit from beneath by leaping flames. Here and there the quick yellow flashes of explosions punctuated the general overcast.
“G-good Lord,” Waverly gasped as the shaking under him subsided into a quiver and then was still. “What an incredible catastrophe!”
“That was nothing to what it would have been if they’d had time to give it a good push,” Fom Berj commented.
“The fiends!” Waverly scrambled to his feet. “Some of the best bars in the country were down there!”
“It could have been worse.”
“I suppose so. At least the San Franciscans are used to it. Imagine what that tidal wave would have done to Manhattan!”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Fom Berj said. “That’s where the next scene is due to be shot.”
5
“The scare we gave them should throw them far enough behind schedule to give us a decent crack at them this time,” Fom Berj said, staring forward into the night as the twifler rocketed eastward. “They only have the one production unit here, you know. It’s a shoestring operation, barely a hundred billion dollar budget.”
Waverly, crouched again in his cramped perch behind the pilot, peered out as the lights of Chicago appeared ahead, spread below them and dwindled behind.
“What do they have in mind for New York? Another earthquake? A fire? Or maybe just a super typhoon?”
“Those minor disturbances won’t do for this one,” Fom Berj corrected him. “This is the climactic scene of the show. They plan to collapse a massive off-shore igneous dike and let the whole stretch of continental shelf from Boston to Cape Charles slide into the ocean.”
“Saints preserve us!” Waverly cried.
“You should see what they’d do on a Class-A budget,” Fom Berj retorted. “The local moon would look quite impressive, colliding with Earth.”
“Ye gods! You sound almost as if you approve of these atrocities!”
“Well, I used to be a regular Saturday-afternoon theatergoer; but now that I’ve attained responsible age, I see the folly of wasting planets that way.”
The blaze of lights that was the Atlantic seaboard swam over the horizon ahead, rushed toward the speeding twifler.
“They’re set up on a barge about five miles offshore,” the detective said as they swept over the city. “It’s just a little field rig; it will only be used once, of course.” She leaned forward. “Ah, there it is now.”
Waverly gaped at a raft of lights visible on the sea ahead.
“Gad!” he cried. “The thing’s the size of an Australian sheep ranch!”
“They need a certain area on which to set up the antenna arrays,” Fom Berj said. “After all, they’ll be handling a hundred billion megavolt-seconds of power. Now, we’ll just stand off at about twenty miles and lob a few rounds into them. I concede it will be a little messy, what with the initial flash, the shock wave, the fallout and the storms and tidal waves, but it’s better than letting them get away.”