Red Lightning by John Varley Read Free Book Online

looked a bit nervous. I figured she had every right to be. There was still a chance, according to the stories we'd been seeing, that this whole thing would be a giant fizzle, but that opinion was losing support as new satellite data came in.
    "The reports I'm hearing from the news center," she was saying, "tell me that satellite imaging is being hampered by a storm that has formed over the site of the impact. An infrared camera is being moved as I speak, and it should be able to make a better calculation as to how much energy was delivered by the object. The impact was not, let me repeat, not, registered by seismographs, which leads the oceanographers to believe that it did not strike the seabed. That's the good news. The bad news is that if it was energetic enough, if there was enough... ah, kinetic energy in whatever it was that struck the Earth a short time ago, and if enough of that energy was transferred to the water... well, we might be in for quite a wave in the next few minutes.
    I'm told that the ocean is deep to the east of my position on Mayaguana Island, that we are on the edge of the Bahamian Rise, so we may not see much of the wave's approach until it gets here."
    A computer graphic appeared on half the screen, showing how a tsunami can travel over deep water and hardly be seen or felt, then how it would pile up as it reached shallow water.
    "We don't know precisely when the wave will arrive," the reporter went on, "but I don't mind telling you I'm a little nervous." She didn't have to tell us. She was very pretty, as TV reporters usually are, and was wearing a bathing suit with a light shirt pulled on over it, like she had been relaxing in the sun when her phone rang and hadn't had time to change into more sober clothes, and her face was shiny with sunburn lotion, and given the location and the way she and the other people on the roof were dressed, it was probably quite warm up there. But she was shivering.
    "We're on the roof of a six-story building here, and I've been assured it sits on a concrete foundation and is made of steel and concrete, so –"
    Behind her, some of the people looking over the railing began to point and shout. The reporter jumped, then her instincts took over and she hurried over to the edge. Somebody cleared a space for her, and the camera operator panned until we could see over her shoulder. There was a thick line of white drawn on the water halfway to the horizon.
    "Look! Look down there!" somebody was shouting. The cameraman moved to the rail and pointed his camera down. The water was being sucked away like a giant bathtub draining. It was fast ! The beach extended out a hundred feet, then three hundred, then more and more until it seemed it would reach the distant white line. The camera zoomed in on the wet sand and rock, and I could see fish flopping around, including a big shark of some sort. There was some more shouting, then everything got very quiet as people were overcome by the sight of an ocean that had vanished. I heard some people crying, a woman shouting something unintelligible. Maybe a prayer.
    "This is... uh... what we were told to expect," the reporter said. "This suction effect is the first thing we were told to expect... I'm repeating myself... Jerry, are we getting this? Jerry..."
    The line of white in the distance began to swell, and was no longer completely straight. It was hitting shallower water, starting to pile up, and it was doing it unevenly, responding to differences in the ocean bottom that we couldn't see.
    "We can see it now. Are we getting this, Jerry? It's not what I expected, I thought we'd see a green wall, rearing up like in a surfing video..."
    As she spoke, the line of water did begin to rear up. It was hard to tell how tall it was, there were no boats out there to give us a scale. But I could hear people shouting. My guess was it was forty feet high, maybe. I think they got waves like that in Hawaii sometimes. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
    Then