The day before, Manuel had carefully taken apart the tripod and telescope and buried them in a large sheet of plastic to protect them from the heat and the moisture. As he and Cathy talked about the prospects for getting out of there, he dug the parcel up again and was delighted to find that the telescope was still in perfect shape and that it worked. He set it up again and trained the lens on what used to be downtown Los Angeles.

The scene below them was shocking. There was little or nothing left of the city they had grown up in. No landmarks, no large buildings, no traffic, nothing to help him get his bearings. Hardly a building was left standing in what used to be downtown L.A. The hotels and office towers of Century City were gone. The golf course at the Los Angeles Country Club was now a small lake. No doubt the glitzy shops on Rodeo Drive were gone as well, their priceless merchandise forever lost and destroyed amid the rubble. The mansions of Beverly Hills and the single-story houses in South Central L.A. were all flattened. From his vantage point, it appeared that someone had actually exploded a nuclear device over the city.

There was no way to see beyond the smoke and fires in the east, but Manuel felt certain the valleys over there had to be underwater now. In particular, the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, which lay about three hundred feet below sea level, would almost certainly be inundated, turned into a vast inland lake. He could see water coursing to the east into the valley, and he wondered if there might not also be flooding up in the mountains as well, and on to Nevada. What if the Hoover Dam had burst from the pressure? Upstream pressures along the Colorado River could even create problems as far away as Lake Mead and throughout Nevada and Arizona.

As Manuel continued to peer through the lens, he realized that his TV station was gone. The television and motion picture studios of Hollywood were too far away to see from there, but surely they were gone as well. As far as the eye could see, there was an enormous panorama of devastation—vast fields piled high with broken bricks, stone, wood, and cement and the shattered frames of buildings surrounded by twisted steel and overturned automobiles. Nothing he had known as a child, and none of the places where he had lived and worked his whole adult life were even recognizable anymore. No matter where he looked, everything was lost.