And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other’s arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.
“We’re going to die,” she said.
“Maybe not.”
“Get used to the idea, I have,” she said. “Look at you, you’re all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn’t it been a lovely night?”
“Unique. I wish I’d known in time to take you to dinner.”
Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. “Me too,” she said when we could hear again.
“I wish I’d known this afternoon.”
“Pecan pralines!”
“Farmer’s Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would
“There was a girl in my sorority—”
—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.
The lights flickered, then came on again.
Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”
“It better
“Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Yellow dwarf stars don’t go nova.”
“What if ours did?”
“The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you’d guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-naught yellow dwarf. They don’t go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”
She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”
“Something did.”
“What? I don’t believe it. We’d remember.”
“Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”
“Of course. We watched it at Earl’s Lunar Landing Party.”
“They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.
“Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.
“Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there’s no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn’t stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”
The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie’s ear.
“We’d remember. It
“I’m not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn’t do
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.
“I believe you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
“Then shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”
“We are.”
“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there’re going to be floods!”
“You bet your ass there are, but they won’t rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I’ve thought this through. We’re in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It’d take more than a hurricane to knock it over.
“As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won’t get far tonight, not with the streetsflooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains ; then what? Mudslides, that’s what. That area won’t stand up to what’s coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”
“Suppose the polar caps melt?”
“Yeah… well, we’re pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah’s Flood. Maybe it’s happening again. Sure as hell, there’s not a place on Earth that isn’t the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
“At least we’ve got food!” I shouted. “If the floods marroon us here, we can last it out!”
“But if the power goes, we can’t cook it! And the refrigerator—”
“We’ll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs—”
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I’d been stupid; I’d waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—
Leslie screamed, “We’ll have to use the oven!”
Of course. The oven couldn’t possibly fall on us.
We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie’s thiry-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn’t trust the rain as a water source; I couldn’t control it.
The sound. Already we’d stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we’d be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I’d have been doing it anyway. You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she’d probably thought of it herself.
