The Hammer of Eden

voice. “Especially that asshole Honeymoon. They’ll be, like, ‘Shit! These people really can cause earthquakes, man! What the fuck we gonna do?’ ”

“And then what?” said Star.

“Then we threaten to do it again. But this time, we don’t give them a month. We give them a week.”

“How will we make the threat? Same way we did before?”

Melanie answered. “I don’t think so. I’m sure they have a way of monitoring the bulletin board and tracing the phone call. And if we use a different bulletin board, there’s always the chance that no one will notice our message. Remember, it was three weeks before John Truth picked up on our last one.”

“So we call and threaten a second earthquake.”

Priest put in: “But next time it won’t be in a remote wilderness — it’ll be someplace where real damage will be done.” He caught an apprehensive look from Star. “We don’t have to mean it,” he added. “Once we’ve shown our power, just the threat ought to be enough.”

Star said: “Inshallah.” She had picked it up from Poem, who was Algerian. “If God wills.”

* * *

It was pitch dark when they left the next morning.

The seismic vibrator had not been seen in daylight within a hundred miles of the valley, and Priest wanted to keep it that way. He planned to leave home and return in darkness. The round trip would be about five hundred miles, eleven hours driving in a truck with a top speed of forty-five. They would take the ’Cuda as a backup car, Priest had decided. Oaktree would come with them to share the driving.

Priest used a flashlight to illuminate the way through the trees to where the truck was concealed. The four of them were silent, anxious. It took them half an hour to remove the branches they had piled over the vehicle.

He was tense when at last he sat behind the wheel, slid the key into the ignition, and turned on the engine. It started the first time with a satisfying roar, and he felt exultant.

The commune’s houses were more than a mile away, and he was sure no one would hear the engine at such a distance. The dense forest muffled sound. Later, of course, everyone would notice that four commune members were away. Aneth had been briefed to say they had gone to a vineyard in Napa that Paul Beale wanted them to see, where a new hybrid vine had been planted. It was unusual for people to make trips out of the commune; but there would be few questions, for no one liked to challenge Priest.

He turned on the headlights, and Melanie climbed into the truck beside him. He engaged low gear and steered the heavy vehicle through the trees to the dirt track, then turned uphill and headed for the road. The all- terrain tires coped easily with streambeds and mudslides.

Jesus, I wonder if this is going to work.

An earthquake? Come on!

But it has to work.

He got on the road and headed east. After twenty minutes they climbed out of Silver River Valley and hit Route 89. Priest turned south. He checked his mirrors and saw that Star and Oaktree were still behind in the ’Cuda.

Beside him, Melanie was very calm. Probing gently, he said: “Was Dusty okay last night?”

“Fine, he likes visiting his father. Michael could always find time for him, never for me.”

Melanie’s bitterness was familiar. What surprised Priest was her lack of fear. Unlike him, she was not agonizing over what would happen to her child if she died today. She seemed completely confident that nothing would go wrong, the earthquake would not harm her. Was it that she knew more than Priest? Or was she the type of person who just ignored uncomfortable facts? Priest was not sure.

As dawn broke they were looping around the north end of Lake Tahoe. The motionless water looked like a disk of polished steel fallen amid the mountains. The seismic vibrator was a conspicuous vehicle on the winding road that followed the pine-fringed shore; but the vacationers were still asleep, and the truck was seen only by a few bleary-eyed workers on their way to jobs in hotels and restaurants.

By sunup they were on U.S. 395, across the border in Nevada, bowling south through a flat desert landscape. They took a break at a truck stop, parking the seismic vibrator where it could not be seen from the road, and ate a breakfast of oily western omelets and watery coffee.

When the road swung back into California it climbed into the mountains, and for a couple of hours the scenery was majestic, with steep forested slopes, a grander version of Silver River Valley. They dropped down again beside a silvery sea that Melanie said was Mono Lake.

Soon afterward they were on a two-lane road that cut a straight line down a long, dusty valley. The valley widened until the mountains on the far side were just a blue haze, then it narrowed again. The ground on either side of the road was tan colored and stony, with a scattering of low brush. There was no river, but the salt flats looked like a distant sheet of water.

Melanie said: “This is Owens Valley.”

The landscape gave Priest the feeling that some kind of disaster had blighted it. “What happened here?” he said.

“The river is dry because the water was diverted to Los Angeles years ago.”

They passed through a sleepy small town every twenty miles or so. Now there was no way to be inconspicuous. There was little traffic, and the seismic vibrator was stared at every time they waited at a stoplight. Plenty of men would remember it. Yeah, I seen that rig. Looked like she might be for layin’ blacktop or somethin’. What was she, anyway?

Melanie switched on her laptop and unfolded her map. She said musingly: “Somewhere beneath us, two vast slabs of the earth’s crust are wedged together, stuck, straining to spring free.”

The thought made Priest feel cold. He could hardly believe he aimed to release all that pent-up destructive force. I must be out of my mind.

“Somewhere in the next five or ten miles,” she said.

“What’s the time?”

“Just after one.”

They had cut it fine. The seismic window would open in half an hour and close fifty minutes later.

Melanie directed Priest down a side turning that crossed the flat valley floor. It was not really a road, just a track cleared through the boulders and scrub. Although the ground seemed almost level, the main road disappeared from view behind them, and they could see only the tops of high trucks passing.

“Pull up here,” Melanie said at last.

Priest stopped the truck, and they both got out. The sun beat down on them from a merciless sky. The ’Cuda pulled up behind them, and Star and Oaktree got out, stretching their arms and legs after the long drive.

“Look at that,” Melanie said. “See the dry gulch?”

Priest could see where a stream, long ago dried up, had cut a channel through the rocky ground. But where Melanie was pointing, the gulch came to an abrupt end, as if it had been walled off. “That’s strange,” Priest said.

“Now look a few yards to the right.”

Priest followed her moving finger. The streambed began again just as abruptly and continued toward the middle of the valley. Priest realized what she was pointing out. “That’s the fault line,” he said. “Last time there was an earthquake, one whole side of this valley picked up its skirts and shifted five yards, then sat down again.”

“That’s about it.”

Oaktree said: “And we’re about to make it happen again, is that right?” There was a note of awe in his voice.

“We’re going to try,” Priest said briskly. “And we don’t have much time.” He turned to Melanie. “Is the truck in exactly the right place?”

“I guess,” she said. “A few yards one way or another up here on the surface shouldn’t make any difference five miles down.”

“Okay.” He hesitated. He almost felt he ought to make a speech. He said: “Well, I’ll get started.”

He got into the cabin of the truck and settled into the driver’s seat, then started the engine that ran the vibrator. He threw the switch that lowered the steel plate to the ground. He set the vibrator to shake for thirty seconds in the middle of its frequency range. He looked through the rear window of the cab and checked the