Vlade went back up to the top of the building and made sure everything under the cupola was secured, feeling as grim as Quasimodo. The boys were missing, and Amelia was flying the storm in a blimp. Probably they would be okay, but they were exposed in a way they wouldn’t be if they were here. He would so much rather have had them here. The building was bombproof, the building would endure, even if the farm floor got deshuttered and stripped clean as a whistle. There was nowhere else he was as sure about, not in the whole great bay, not in the whole world. The building would be fine. But some of his people weren’t there.
Idelba could read him well enough to see this when he got back down to his office, and she paused to touch his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’ll be okay.”
He nodded heavily. They both knew it wasn’t always true.
Then the day got very dark, the sky black, the air under it green. Vlade took the elevator back up to the cupola, then climbed the spiral stairs to the blimp room, where narrow windows gave a view from as high as the building afforded. This got him just above the top of the Chopsticks, which was pleasing. The Freedom Tower and the Empire State poked above the general murk of the lower city. Farther north the uptown superscrapers had seemingly coalesced into a single Gothic spire, elongated surreally. Hoboken and Brooklyn Heights were similarly dark and spiky.
The rain was coming down now out of dark gray clouds, falling so hard it covered the windows with a wavery sheet of water that sometimes allowed him to see the city fairly well. The Empire State looked like he had never seen it before, he even had trouble comprehending the sight: so much rain was hitting its south side that it had become an immense waterfall dropping right out of the clouds. The thickest part of this fall of white water poured down the vertical inset that scored the middle of the tower’s south side, but really the entire south surface was white water, no building visible at all except the very top of the spire. “Wow!” Vlade shouted. “Holy God!” He wished there were someone there with him to witness it, and he even called Idelba to tell her to come up, but she was busy down below with something.
Now the wind became both a low ripping roar and a high keening, blended across the octaves to make a curdling superhuman shriek. The East River was whitecapped, and he could now see the Hudson in a way that he usually couldn’t from up here, because it too was white. Both appeared to be running hard north, like rapids. Below him he could see the western half of the bacino, and it too was whitecapped, the waves rolling south to north and leaving trails of white bubbles on black water. The dock at the northwest corner was slamming up against its restraints over and over, jerking at its high point like some mad dog rushing against its leash. Something in that system would break soon. The sight of it confirmed to him that many of the docks on the Hudson would be getting torn off. The wind was now so strong it was wiping his windows clean and giving him brief clear views of the city, which blurred over and over as freshets spewed down. Really the south side of the Empire State had to be seen to be believed, and even then it was unbelievable. He wished that the super there would defy the storm with the building’s light show; under the wall of water it would look crazy. Then it occurred to him that the Thirty-third Street canal under the Empire State must be like the bottom of Niagara Falls. He couldn’t see a single boat or ship anywhere. Which made sense and was good, but it looked weird too. End of the world: New York empty, abandoned to the elements, which were now howling in triumph at their victory.
Then the lights in the cupola flickered and went out, and he cursed and clicked his wristpad to the building’s control center. Nothing came up until the generators kicked in, which they were programmed to do automatically. Then the lights came back on. Even so, it would be imprudent to get in an elevator now. So he cursed again and began the long painful task of descending the stairs. When he got down the tight spiral staircases of the cupola to the real stairwell behind the elevator, the generators seemed to be working well, everything was still lit, and he was tempted to take the elevator to save time and his knees. But it would be a disaster to get caught in a stuck elevator, so he thumped down methodically.
Forty painful stories later he was down in the control room, and there everything was okay, except for two problems: their generators could only run for about three days before they would have used up their fuel; and the storm surge pouring in the Narrows, which the tide screen showed was already an astonishing ten feet above the normal high tide, would, if it continued very long, raise sea level in the city to the point where their boathouse room would be flooded above the level of its ceiling. The water would therefore ascend the open stairs to the floor above, where many of the building’s working rooms were; this was where one had to locate some of the building’s functions for them to operate most efficiently.
There was no way to fully close the boathouse off from the bacino itself, which was something Vlade promised himself to change in the future. So water would get in from the canal under its door to the water inside, and the boathouse would fill precisely as high as the storm surge went.
“We’ll have to close off the boathouse here on the inside, and just let the water fill it all the way to its top,” he said to Su and the others in the control room. Su was already packing up stuff in the drawers.
Closing off the boathouse would save them from anything but leaky seals, which they could deal with. The boats in the boathouse would be lifted and knocked around a bit, mostly into each other. If it was an orderly rise of water, perhaps it wouldn’t wreak too much damage.
Then, power. He went down the list and shut off power to everything but the absolute necessities, after informing everyone in the building over the intercom: “People, we’re cutting power to everything but essential services, to save fuel. Seems like the grid might be out for a while.”