The Forge of God

69

Below San Francisco Bay, hours after boarding the ark, the young woman who had guided them on the fishing boat — her name was Clara Fogarty — went among the twenty in the waiting room and spoke to them, answering questions, trying to keep them all calm. She seemed none too calm herself; fragile, on the edge.

Help her, Arthur was ordered. He and several others immediately obeyed. After a few minutes, he circled back through the people to Francine and took her hands. Marty hugged him fiercely.

“I’m going to visit the areas where we’ll be staying,” he said to Francine.

“The network is telling you this?”

“No,” he said, looking to one side, frowning slightly. “Something else. A voice I’ve not heard before. I’m to meet somebody.”

Francine wiped her face with her hands and kissed him. Arthur lifted Marty with an oomph and told him to take care of his mother. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He stood beside Clara Fogarty at the middle hatch on the side opposite where they had entered. The hatch — little more than an outline in the wall’s surface — slid open and they passed through quickly, before they had a clear impression of what was on the other side.

A brightly illuminated broad hallway, curving down, stretched before them. The hatch closed and they regarded each other nervously. More hatches lined both sides of the hallway.

“Artificial gravity?” Clara Fogarty asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

At a silent request, they stepped forward. They remained upright in relation to the floor, with no odd sensations other than the visual. At the end of the hallway, another open hatchway awaited them; beyond was a warm half darkness. They entered a chamber similar to the waiting room.

In the center of this chamber rose a pedestal about a foot high and a yard wide. On the pedestal rested something that at first examination Arthur took to be a sculpture. It stood about half as tall as he, shaped like a hefty square human torso and head — rather, in fact, like a squared-off and slightly flattened kachina doll. Other than an abstracted and undivided bosom, it lacked any surface features. In color it was similar to heat-treated copper, with oily swirls of rainbow iridescence. Its skin was glossy but not reflective.

Without warning, it lifted smoothly a few inches above the pedestal and addressed them both out loud:

“I am afraid your people will soon no longer be wild and free.”

Arthur had heard this same voice in his head just a few minutes ago, beckoning them through the hatches.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am not your keeper, but I am your guide.”

“Are you alive?” He did not know what else to ask.

“I am not biologically alive. I am part of this vessel, which will in turn soon become part of a much larger vessel. You are here to prepare your companions for me, that I may instruct them and carry out my own instructions.”

“Are you a robot?” Clara asked.

“I am a symbol, designed to be acceptable without conveying wrong impressions. In a manner of speaking, I am a machine, but I am not a servile laborer. Do you understand me?”

The object’s voice was deep, authoritative, yet not masculine.

“Yes,” Arthur said.

“Some among your group might panic if exposed to me without preparation. Yet it is essential that they come to know and trust me, and come to trust the information and instructions I give them. Is this understood?”

“Yes.” They answered in unison.

“The future of your people, and of all the information we have retrieved from your planet, depends on how your kind and my kind interact. Your kind must become disciplined, and I must educate you about larger realities than most of you have been used to facing.”

Arthur nodded, his mouth dry. “We’re inside one of the arks?”

“You are. These vessels will join together once we are all in space. There are now thirty-one of these vessels, and aboard twenty-one of them, five hundred humans apiece. The vessels also contain large numbers of botanical, zoological, and other specimens — not in most cases whole, but in recoverable form. Is this clear?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. Clara nodded.

“Most of my early communications with you will not be through speech, but through what you might call telepathy, as you have already been directed by the network. Later, when there is more time, this intrusive method will be largely abandoned. For now, when you go among your companions, I will speak through you, but you will have the discretion of phrasing and timing. We have very little time.”

“Has it begun?” Clara asked.

“It has begun,” the object said.

“And we’re leaving soon?”

“The last passengers and specimens for this vessel are being loaded now.”

Arthur received impressions of crates of chromium spiders being loaded from small boats through the surface entrance of the ark. The spiders contained the fruits of weeks of searching and sampling: genetic material from thousands of plants and animals along the West Coast.

“What can we call you?” Arthur asked.

“You will make up your own names for me. Now you must return to your group and introduce them to their quarters, which are spaced along this hallway. You must also ask for at least four volunteers to witness the crime that is now being committed.”

“We’re to witness the destruction of the Earth?” Clara asked.

“Yes. It is the Law. If you will excuse me, I have other introductions to make.”

They backed out of the shadowy room and watched as the hatchway slid shut.

“Very efficient,” Arthur said.

“The Law.’” Clara smiled thinly. “Right now, I’m more scared than I ever was on the boat. I don’t even know all the people’s names yet.”

“Let’s get started,” Arthur said. They traversed the curved hallway. The hatch at the opposite end opened and they saw a cluster of anxious faces. The smell of fear drifted out.

70

Irwin Schwartz stepped into the White House situation room and nearly bumped into the First Lady. She backed away with a nervous nod, her hands trembling, and he entered. Everyone’s nerves had been frazzled since the evacuation the night before and the rapid return of the President to the Capital. No one had slept for more than an hour or two since.

The President stood with Otto Lehrman before the high-resolution data screens mounted on the wood paneling covering the concrete walls. The screens were on and showed maps of different portions of the Northern Hemisphere, Mercator projection, with red spots marking vanished cities. “Come on in, Irwin,” Crockerman said. “We have some new material from the Puzzle Palace.” He seemed almost cheerful.

Irwin turned to the First Lady. “Are you here to stay?” he asked bluntly. He respected the woman, but did not like her much.

“The President specially requested my presence,” she said. “He feels we should be united.”

“Obviously, you agree with him.”

“I agree with him,” she said.

Never in United States history had a First Lady deserted her husband when he was under fire; Mrs. Crockerman knew this, and it must have taken some courage to return. Still, Schwartz had himself given long hours of thought to resigning from the administration; he could not judge her too harshly.

He held out his hand. She accepted and they shook firmly. “Welcome back aboard,” he said.

“We have photos about twenty minutes old from a Diamond Apple,” Lehrman said. “Technicians are putting them on the screens any minute.” Diamond Apples were reconnaissance satellites launched in the early 1990s. The National Reconnaissance Office was very zealous with Diamond Apple pictures. Usually, they would have been reserved for the eyes of the President and Secretary of Defense only; that Schwartz was seeing them indicated something extraordinary was in store.

“Here they are,” Lehrman said as the screens blanked.

Crockerman apparently had been told what to expect. Lines of glowing white rimmed in red and blue-green laced across a midnight-black background. “You know,” Crockerman said softly, standing back from the screens, “I was right after all. Goddammit, Irwin, I was right, and I was wrong at the same time. How do you figure that?”

Schwartz stared at the glowing lines, not making any sense of them until a grid and labels came up with the display. This was the North Atlantic; the lines were trenches, midocean ridges and faults.

“The white,” Lehrman said, “is heat residue from thermonuclear explosions. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, maybe tens of thousands — all along the Earth’s deep-ocean seams and wrinkles.”

The First Lady half sobbed, half caught her breath. Crockerman stared at the displays with a sad grin.

“Now the western Pacific,” Lehrman said. More white lines. “By the way, Hawaii has been heavily assaulted by tsunamis. The West Coast of North America is about twenty, thirty minutes away from major waves; I’d guess it’s already been hit by waves from these areas.” He pointed to stacks of white lines near Alaska and California. “The damage could be extensive. The energy released by all the explosions is enormous; weather patterns around the world will change. The Earth’s heat budget…” He shook his head. “But I doubt we’ll be given much time to worry about it.”

“It’s a softening up?” Schwartz asked.

Lehrman shrugged. “Who can understand the design, or what this means? We’re not dead yet, so it’s a preliminary; that’s all anybody knows. Seismic stations all over are reporting heavy anomalistic fault behavior.”

“I don’t think the bullets have collided yet,” Crockerman said. “Irwin’s hit the nail on the head. It’s a softening up.”

Lehrman sat down at the large diamond-shaped table and held out his hands: your guess is as good as mine.

“I think we have maybe an hour, maybe less,” the President said. “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing we could have ever done.”

Schwartz studied the Diamond Apple displays with a slight squint. They still conveyed no convincing reality. They were attractive abstractions. What did Hawaii look like now? What would San Francisco look like in a few minutes? Or New York?

“I’m sorry not everybody is here,” Crockerman said. “I’d like to thank them.”

“We’re not evacuating…again?” Schwartz asked automatically.

Lehrman gave him a sharp, ironic look. “We don’t have a lunar settlement, Irwin. The President, when he was a senator, was instrumental in getting those funds cut in 1990.”

“My mistake,” Crockerman said, his tone almost bantering. At that moment, had Schwartz had a pistol, he would have killed the man; his anger was a helpless, undirected passion that could just as easily leave him in tears as draw him into violence. The displays conveyed no reality; Crockerman, however, conveyed it all.

“We really are children,” Schwartz said after the flush had gone out of his face and his hands had stopped trembling. “We never had a chance.”

Crockerman looked around as the floor shook beneath their feet. “I’m almost anxious for the end,” he said. “I hurt so bad inside.”

The shaking became more violent.

The First Lady held the doorframe and then leaned on the table. Schwartz reached out to help her to a chair. Secret Service agents entered the room, struggling to stay on their feet, catching hold of the table edge. After Schwartz had seated the First Lady, he sat down again himself and gripped the wooden arms of the chair. The shaking was not dying away; it was getting worse.

“How long will it take, do you think?” Crockerman asked nobody in particular.

“Mr. President, we should get you out of the building and onto the grounds,” said the agent who had made the most progress into the situation room; His voice quavered. He was terrified. “Everybody else, too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Crockerman said. “If the roof fell on me now, it would be a goddamn blessing. Right, Irwin?” His smile was bright, but there were tears in his eyes.

The display on the screen went out, and the lights in the room dimmed shortly after, to return with less conviction.

Schwartz stood. Time once again to be an example. “I think we should let these men do their job, Mr. President.” He had a sudden heavy sensation in his stomach, as if he were in a fast-rising elevator. Crockerman stumbled and an agent caught him. The rising sensation continued, seemingly forever, and then stopped with a suddenness that lifted the White House a fraction of an inch from its foundations. The framework of steel beams that had been built into the White House shell in the late forties and early fifties squealed and groaned, but held. Plaster fell in clouds and patches from the ceiling and a rich wood panel split with a loud report.

Schwartz heard the President calling his name. From where he lay on the floor — somehow he had rolled under the table — he tried to answer, but all the breath had been knocked out of him. Gasping, blinking, wiping plaster dust from his eyes, he listened to a hideous creaking and splitting noise overhead. He heard enormous thuds outside — stone facing coming loose, he guessed, or columns toppling. He was forcibly reminded of so many movies about the demise of ancient cities by earthquake or volcano, huge blocks of marble tumbling onto crowds of hapless citizens.

Not the White House…Surely not that.

“Irwin, Otto…” The President again. A pair of legs walking with short jerks near the table.

“Under here, sir,” Schwartz said. He saw a brief portrait of his wife in his mind, her features indistinct, as if he looked at an old, badly focused picture. She smiled. Then he saw their daughter, married and living in South Carolina…if the ocean had spared her.

Again the rising. He was pressed to the floor. It was brief, only a second or two, but he knew it was enough. When it stopped, he waited for the collapse of the upper floors, eyes scrunched tight. Jesus, is the entire eastern seaboard going up? The wait and the silence seemed interminable. Schwartz could not decide whether to open his eyes again…or to wait out the long seconds, feeling the sway of the building above.

He turned his head to one side and opened his eyes.

The President had fallen and lay faceup beside the table, ghost-white with dust. His eyes were open but not aware.

The White House regained its voice and screamed like a thing alive.

The massive legs of the table buckled and exploded in splinters. They could not withstand the weight of tons of cement and steel and stone.

71

Quaint, Edward thought; quaint and touching and he wished he could muster up the emotion to join them; a group of twenty or more had gathered by now in a circle a hundred yards behind the Granite Point, singing hymns and more folk songs. Betsy clung to him on the asphalt path. Fresh tremors had subsided, but the air itself seemed to be grumbling, complaining.

Ironically, having climbed the trail to have a good vantage, they now stood well back from the rim. A foot-wide crack had appeared in the terrace stonework. From where they stood, they could see only the upper third of the opposite wall of the valley.

“You’re a geologist,” Betsy said, massaging his neck with one hand, something he had not asked her to do, but which felt good. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“No,” he said.

“It’s not just an earthquake, though?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So it’s beginning now. We just got up here.”

He nodded and swallowed back a lump of fear. Now that it had come, he was near panic. He felt trapped, claustrophobic, with only all of the Earth and sky to move in — not even that, lacking wings. He felt squeezed between steel plates of gravity and his own puny weakness. His body was forcibly reminding him that fear was difficult to control, and presence of mind in the face of death was rare.

“God,” Betsy said, placing her cheek against his, looking toward the Point. She was shaking, too. “I thought at least we’d have time to talk about it, sit around a campfire…”

Edward held her more tightly. He imagined her as a wife, and then thought of Stella, marveling at the fickleness of his fantasies; he was grasping for many lives, now that his own seemed so short. Over his fear he thought of long years together with both of them.

The tremors had almost passed.

The hymn singers continued searching for a common key, hopelessly lost. Minelli and Inez came from the trees and climbed the hill between the close switchbacks of the asphalt path. Minelli whooped out loud and ran his hand through his hair. “Jesus, isn’t adrenaline great?”

“He’s crazy,” Inez said, breathing hard, her face pale. “Maybe not the craziest I’ve met, but close.”

“Does it feel warmer to you?” Betsy asked.

Edward considered that possibility. Would heat transmit itself before a shock wave? No. If the bullets were colliding, or had collided only a short time ago, deep in the center of the Earth, the expanding and irresistible plasma of their mutual destruction would crack the Earth wide before heat could ever reach the surface.

“I don’t think it’s warmer because of…the end,” Edward said. He had never felt his mind racing so rapidly over so many subjects. He wanted to see what was happening in the valley.

“Shall we?” he asked, pointing to the terraces and the still-intact rim.

“What else did we come here for?” Minelli asked, laughing and shaking his head like a wet dog. Sweat flew from his hair. He whooped again and took Inez’s plump hand, dragging her across the gravel to the terraces.

“Minelli,” she protested, looking back at them for help. Edward glanced at Betsy, and she nodded once, face flushed.

“I am so terrified” she whispered. “It’s like being high.” They walked together toward the edge. “I pity all those folks who stayed home. I really do.”

The two couples stood alone on the terrace, looking down into the valley. Not much had changed; there was no visible damage, not at first glance, anyway. Then Minelli pointed to a thick column of smoke. “Look.”

The Ahwanee was on fire. Nearly the entire hotel was ablaze.

“I love that old place,” Betsy said. Inez moaned and wrung her hands.

“How much longer, do you think?” Inez asked, her expression that of someone about to sneeze, or shriek. She did neither.

“It seems real close,” he said. Betsy raised her arms with a moan and he hugged her tightly, almost squeezing the breath out of her.

“Hold me, dammit,” Inez demanded. Minelli blinked at her, then followed Edward’s example.

Ten minutes after the meeting, Arthur and Clara had assigned the members of their group to the new quarters along the curved hallway. Two of the younger children were crying inconsolably and all were emotionally exhausted; Arthur stood in the confines of the cabin he and Francine and Marty would share, pondering the common sanitation facilities accessible through the first doorway on the right of the sealed hatch where they had met with the robot. A few had already used the lavatory; some had gone in there to be sick. Clara was one of the latter. She came to the Gordons’ cabin and leaned against the edge of the hatch, rubbing her eyes with one hand. “All settled, I think,” she said. “What’s next?”

Francine had said little for the entire time they had been aboard. She sat on the bed, clutching her box of disks and papers with one hand. Marty held her other hand firmly. She stared at Clara with a vacancy that worried Arthur.

Choose four witnesses. The restatement of the command in their minds was polite but unequivocal. It is the Law.

Clara jerked and stood upright. “You heard that?” she asked.

He nodded. Francine turned to look at Arthur. “They want us to choose four witnesses,” he told her.

“Witnesses to what?” Her voice was small, distant.

“The end,” he said.

“Not the children,” Francine said firmly. Arthur briefly conferred with the voice. Two must be younger, to pass on the memories.

“They want two children,” he said. Francine clenched her fists.

“I don’t want Martin to experience that,” she said. “It’s bad enough if we have to.”

“They want kids for what?” Marty asked, looking between them, wide-eyed.

“It’s the Law. Their law,” Arthur said. “They need some of us to watch the Earth when it’s destroyed, and two of them must be kids.”

Marty thought that over for a moment. “All the other kids are younger than me,” he said, “except one. That girl. I don’t know her name.”

Francine turned Marty to face her and gripped his arms. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” she asked.

“The Earth is going to blow up,” Marty said. “They want us to see it so we know what it’s like.”

“Do you know who they are?” Francine asked.

“The people that talk to Dad,” Marty said.

“He understands pretty well,” Arthur said.

“I’ll say,” Clara agreed.

Francine gave her an angry glance, then focused again on Marty. “Do you want to see?” she asked.

Marty shook his head no. “It would give me nightmares,” he said.

“Then it’s decided,” Francine said. “He—”

“But Mom, if I don’t see, I won’t know.”

“Know what?”

“How mad I’m supposed to be.”

Francine searched her son’s face slowly, and then let him go, wrapping her arms around herself. “Only four?” she asked softly.

“At least four,” he said. “All who wish to see.”

“Marty,” Francine said, “we’ll share nightmares, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’re a very brave boy,” Clara said.

“Are you going to watch?” Arthur asked Francine.

She nodded slowly. “If you and Marty watch, I can’t chicken out, can I?”

How much longer? he asked.

There will be a gathering in the common viewing cabin in an hour and ten minutes.

He sat on the narrow lower bed beside Francine and Marty. “We’ll be leaving the Earth soon,” he said. “In a few minutes, probably.”

“Can we feel it when we take off, Dad?” Marty asked.

“No,” he said. “We won’t feel it.”

Grant had followed the Gordons’ station wagon to the bay, and waited a hundred yards away, engine idling, as they parked and walked to the pier. Then he had parked his BMW beside the wagon, slung a pair of binoculars around his neck, and followed at a discreet distance, feeling like a fool, asking himself — as Danielle had asked when he left — why he didn’t simply confront them and demand answers.

He knew he wouldn’t do that. First, he could not really believe that Arthur would be part of a government escape into space. Grant couldn’t believe such an escape was contemplated, or even possible. Nobody could travel far enough away to survive the Earth’s destruction — not if such destruction was as spectacular as what he had seen in the movies. And even if they could — traveling out beyond the moon, for example — he didn’t think they would be able to live very long in space.

But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.

He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others — all who knew and believed — were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.

This, of course, was vaster and more final than the Holocaust. Nondiscriminatory. Thinking such thoughts pressed him up against a wall of ignorance; he had never been particularly imaginative, and he could not conceive the means or motives behind what he nevertheless knew was coming.

He stood on the concrete seawall and watched them board the fishing boat. The boat, covered with people, sailed out to the north.

Then he sat on the concrete and rock, buttoning his coat and slipping on a cap to keep away the chill of the breezes off the bay.

Grant had no clear plans, or clear idea what he was doing. If he waited, perhaps an answer would come.

Hours passed. He doubled his legs up on the rock and pressed his knees against his chest, chin on the new denim of his pants. The afternoon passed very slowly, but he stuck with his vigil.

The ground trembled slightly and the water level of the bay rose a foot against the seawall, and then fell until the rocks at the base of the wall were exposed — a drop of perhaps four or five feet. He expected — almost welcomed the possibility — that the water would rise again drastically and drown him.

It did not rise again.

Like a robot, he stood and walked through the unlocked gate to the end of the pier, where he leaned his elbows against the wood rail, staring north. He could barely see Alcatraz beyond the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The water just south of Alcatraz appeared rougher than usual, almost white.

A dark gray shape sat in the middle of the whiteness. For a moment, Grant thought a ship had overturned in the bay and was floating hull-up. But the gray bulk was rising higher in the water, not sinking. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the shape.

With a jerk of surprise, he saw that it was already out of the water, and that it had a flat bottom. He had an impression of something shaped like a flatiron, or like the body of a horseshoe crab, four or five hundred feet in length. It rose above the span of the bridge, lifting on a brilliant cone of blinding green. Across the bay came a teeth-aching high-pitched hissing, roaring sound. The object accelerated rapidly upward and dwindled against the late morning sky. In a few seconds, it was gone. How many others had seen it? he wondered.

Could the government really have had something in the works — something spectacular?

He bit his lip and shook his head, crying now, not knowing why. He felt a peculiar relief. Somehow, a few people were getting away. That was a kind of victory, as important as his parents surviving the death camps.

And for those still condemned…

Grant wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried back along the pier, bumping into an iron pole as he passed through the gate. He ran to his car, hoping he would be in time. He wanted to be home with his family.

The bridge was practically deserted as he crossed. He could not see the spot in the bay where the water had been white.

He did not know how he would explain this to Danielle. Her concerns would be more immediate, less abstract; she would ask why he did not try to find a way to save them all.

Perhaps he would say nothing, just tell her that he had followed the Gordons as far south as Redwood City…and stopped, waited a few hours, and turned back.

She wouldn’t believe him.

72

The ship, Arthur learned, contained 412 passengers, all boarded in secrecy during the morning and the previous night. The passengers had been divided into groups of twenty, and for the most part would not mingle until several days had passed, and they had grown used to their situation. The only exception would be the witnessing.

Out of their group of twenty, nine had volunteered, two children, three women, and four men, including Arthur, Francine, and Marty. The nine followed the stocky copper robot through the chamber at the end of the curved hall.

They walked along a narrow black strip in a cylindrical corridor. Arthur tried to make a map in his head, not entirely succeeding. The ship apparently had compartments that moved in relation to each other.

Passing through a hatch ahead of them, the robot rolled abruptly to take up a new vertical. They found themselves doing likewise, with a few moans of complaint and surprise. In a cabin about a hundred feet long and forty or fifty feet deep, they faced a broad transparent panel that gave a view of bright steady stars. Marty kept close to Arthur, holding his arm tightly with one hand, the other clenched into a fist. The boy had sucked his lips inward over his teeth and was making small smacking sounds. Francine followed, tense and reluctant.

Arthur looked down at his son and smiled. “Your choice, fellah,” he said. Marty nodded. This was no longer a youngster playing patsy to a pretty blond cousin; this was a boy feeling his way to manhood.

More people entered through a hatch in the opposite side of the cabin in groups of four or five or six, children among them, until a small crowd faced the darkness and stars; Arthur estimated seventy or eighty. He seemed to recognize some from his time on the network, though that was hardly likely; all he had heard were their inner voices, which almost never matched physical appearance. He thought of Hicks’s inner voice, robust and young and sharp, and of his white-haired, grandfatherly presence. I’m going to miss him. He could have helped us a lot here.

Arthur flashed on Harry, desiccated, decaying, buried deep in a coffin in the Earth; or had Ithaca had him cremated? That seemed to suit both of them better.

A tall young black man stood behind Arthur and Francine. Arthur nodded a greeting and the man returned the nod, cordial, dignified, terrified, his neck muscles taut as cords. Arthur examined the other faces, trying to learn something from the mix, how they had been chosen. Age? There were few older than fifty; but then, these were just the ones who had chosen to witness. Race? All types found on North America were represented. Intelligence? There was no way to tell that…

“We’re in space, aren’t we?” the tall young man asked. “That’s what they said, I just didn’t believe them. We’re in space, and we’re going to join with other arks soon. My name’s Reuben,” he said, offering his hand to Arthur. They shook. Reuben’s hand was damp, but so was Arthur’s. “This your son?”

“This is Martin,” Arthur said. Reuben reached down and shook Marty’s hand. Marty looked up at him solemnly, still sucking his lips. “And my wife, Francine.”

“I don’t know how to feel,” Reuben said. “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore.”

Arthur agreed. He did not feel like talking.

Something flashed against the stars, turning in the sunlight, and then steadied and approached them. Francine pointed, awed. It was shaped like a huge, rounded arrowhead, flat on one side, contoured to a central ridge on the opposite side.

“That’s Singapore,” said a woman behind them. Not all of the network received information at once, Arthur decided; that made sense. It would have flooded them.

“Singapore,” Reuben said, shaking his head. “I’ve never even been there.”

“We have Istanbul and Cleveland,” said a young man at one end of the cabin, hardly more than a boy.

The gray ship passed out of view above them. There was still no sensation of motion, nor any sound except for the murmurs and shuffling of the cabin’s occupants. They might have been standing in an exhibit hall waiting for some spectacular new form of entertainment to begin.

The stars began to move all in one direction; the ark was rotating. Arthur searched for constellations he knew, and for a moment saw none; then he spotted the Southern Cross, and as the rotation continued, Orion.

The white and blue limb of the Earth rose into view and the occupants of the cabin gave a collective gasp.

Still there. Still looks the same.

“Jesus,” Reuben said. “Poppa, Momma, Jesus.”

Danielle, Grant, Becky. Angkor Wat, Taj Mahal, Library of Congress. Grand Canyon. The house and the river. Steppes of central Asia. Cockroaches, elephants, Olduvai Gorge, New York City, Dublin, Beijing. The first woman I ever dated, Kate — Katherine. The bones of the dog who helped me come to grips with the world and become a man.

“That’s the Earth, isn’t it, Dad?” Marty asked quietly.

“That’s it.”

“It’s still there. Maybe we can go back and nothing will happen.”

Arthur found himself nodding. Maybe so.

The woman who had known about Singapore said, “They’re still in the Earth. They’re the last of the planet-eaters. They can’t leave because we’ll get them.” Arthur glanced nervously at her, as if she were a dangerous sibyl; her face was pale and convulsed.

73

“Rock of a-a-a-ges…”

The singing had taken a slightly frantic tone, sharper, higher, more disturbing. The column of smoke from the Ahwanee had risen above the Royal Arches; the hotel was almost consumed, and sparks from the blaze threatened to ignite the surrounding woods. From their vantage, they watched park fire trucks spraying water on the flaming ruins.

Spend your last few minutes trying to save something, Edward thought. Not a bad way to go. He envied the fire fighters and park rangers. The fire took their minds away from the inevitable. Up on Glacier Point, people had nothing to do but think about what would happen — and sing very badly.

The rock beneath them shifted the merest fraction. Betsy returned from the rest room, sat firmly beside Edward on the lowest terrace, and placed her arm through his; they had not been separated for more than a few minutes the last hour. Still, he felt alone, and looking at her, sensed she felt alone as well.

“Do you hear it?” she asked.

“The grumbling?”

“Yes.”

“I hear it.”

He imagined the lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium, or whatever they were, meeting at the center; perhaps they had already met, minutes or even an hour before, and the expanding front of raging plasma had just begun to make its effects known on the Earth’s mantle and thin crust.

In high school, Edward had once tried to draw a scale chart of the layers of a section of the Earth, with the inner and outer cores, mantle, and crust outlined in proportion. He had quickly found that the crust did not show up as more than the thinnest of pencil lines, even when he extended his drawing to an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper. Using his calculator to figure how large the drawing would have to be, he had learned that the floor of the school gymnasium might suffice to hold a drawing that gave the crust a line one third the width of his little finger.

Hidden volumes and surfaces again.

Insignificance.

Geologists dealt with insignificance all the time, but how many applied it directly to their personal lives?

“…cleft for meeee…Let me hiiide myself in theeee …”

“The air is getting hotter,” Minelli said. The neckband of his black T-shirt was soaked and his hair hung down in black ribbons. Inez sat farther back, on the upper terrace, sobbing quietly to herself.

“Go to her,” Edward commanded, nodding in her direction.

Minelli gave him a helpless look, then climbed up the steps.

“People are all that matter,” he said softly to Betsy. “Nothing else matters. Not in the beginning, not in the end.”

“Look,” Betsy said, pointing to the east. Clouds were racing across the sky, not billowing but simply forming in streamers at very high altitude. The air smelled electric and was oppressive, tangible, thick and hot. The sun seemed farther away, lost in a thin milky soup.

Edward looked down from the clouds, dizzy, and tried to orient on the valley. He searched for a familiar landmark, something to give him a fixed perspective.

The Royal Arches, in slow motion, slipped in huge curved flakes down the gray face of granite onto the burning hotel. Tiny trees danced frantically and then fell on their own isolated chips of rock, limbs raised by the passing air. The roar, even across the valley, was deafening. The scythe-shaped flakes, dozens of yards wide, crumpled like old plaster on the valley floor, extinguishing the Ahwanee, the fire trucks, fire fighters, and tiny crowds of onlookers in a blossoming cloud of dust and debris. Boulders the size of houses rolled through the forest and into the Merced River. New slopes of talus crept across the valley floor like an amoeba’s pseudopods, alive, churning, settling, striving for stability.

Betsy said nothing. Edward glanced apprehensively at the crack in the terrace nearby.

Minelli had given up trying to hold on to Inez. She fled from the rim, her breasts and arms and hips bouncing as she leaped up steps and over rails. He grinned at Edward and held out his hands helplessly, then descended to sit beside them.

“Some folks ain’t got it,” he said over the declining rumble of falling rocks. He looked admiringly at Betsy. “Guts,” he said. “True grit. Did you see those concentrics come apart? Just like in school. Hundreds of years in a second.”

“We aare chiiildren in youuur haaands…” The hymn singers were self-absorbed now, paying no attention to all that was going on around them. Entranced.

To each his own.

“That’s how the domes are formed, that kind of concentric jointing,” Minelli explained. “Water gets into the joints and freezes, expands, splits the rock away.”

Betsy ignored him, staring fixedly into the valley, her and still locked in Edward’s.

“The falls,” she said. “Yosemite Falls.”

The upper ribbon of white water had been blocked, leaving the lower falls to drain what had already descended. To the right of where the upper Yosemite had once been, the freestanding pillar of Lost Arrow leaned several hundred feet of its length slowly out from the cliff face, broke into sections in midfall, and tumbled down the brush- and tree-covered slopes below. More rock spilled from the northeastern granite walls above the valley, obscuring the floor with disintegrating boulders and roils of brown and white dust.

“Why not us?” Minelli said. “It’s all on that side.”

A superstitious something in Edward wanted to shut him up. Pretend as if we’re not here. Don’t let it know.

The rock beneath them quivered. The trees beyond the hymn singers swayed and groaned and splintered, limbs whipping back and forth. Edward heard the hideous crack of great leaves of granite shearing away beneath the point. Three thousand feet below — he didn’t need to look to know — Camp Curry and Curry Village were being buried under millions of tons of jagged rock. The hymn singers stopped and clutched each other to keep their balance.

“Time to get away,” Edward said to Betsy. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the twisted, malevolent overcast painted on the sky. The air seemed thinner; great waves of high and low pressure raced over the land, propelled by the minute shifting of continents.

Edward reached under her arms and dragged her away from the lowest terrace, up the steps. The game now was to stay alive as long as possible, to see as much as they could see — to experience the spectacle to their last breath, which could be at any moment.

Minelli crawled after them, face wrapped in a manic grin. “Can you believe this?” he said over and over.

The valley was alive with the echoes of falling sheets of granite. Edward could hardly hear his own words to Betsy as they stumbled and ran down the asphalt path, away from the rim.

A scant yard behind Minelli, the rock split. The terrace and all that was beneath leaned away, the gap widening with majestic slowness. Minelli scrambled frantically, his grin transformed into a rictus of terror.

To the east, like the great wise head of a dozing giant, Half Dome nodded a few degrees and tilted into a chasm opened in the floor of the valley. In arc-shaped wedges, it began to come apart. Liberty Cap and Mount Broderick, on the south side of the valley, leaned to the north, but stayed whole, rolling and sliding like giant pebbles into the mass of Half Dome’s settling fragments, diverting, and then finally shattering and sending fragments through miles of the valley. Somewhere in the obscurity of dust were the remnants of the Mist Trail, Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, and the Emerald Lake.

The silt of the valley floor liquefied under the vibration, swallowing meadows and roads and absorbing the Merced along its entire length. The fresh slopes of talus dropped their leading edges into snakelike fractures and began to spread again; behind them, more leaves of granite plummeted.

The air was stifling. The hymn singers, on their knees, weeping and singing at once, could not be heard, only seen. The death-sound of Yosemite was beyond comprehension, having crossed the border into pain, a wide-spectrum roaring howl.

Edward and Betsy could not keep balance even on their hands and knees; they rolled to the ground and held each other. Betsy had closed her eyes, lips working against his neck; she was praying. Edward, curiously, did not feel like praying; he was exultant now. He looked to the east, away from the valley, beyond the tumbling trees, and saw something dark and massive on the horizon. Not clouds, not a front of storm, but—

He was past any expression of awe or wonder. What he was seeing could only be one thing: east of the Sierra Nevada, along the fault line drawn between the mountains formed by ages of wrinkling pressure, and the desert beyond, the continent was splitting, raising its jagged edge dozens of miles into the atmosphere.

Edward did not need to do calculations to know this meant the end. Such energy — even if all other activity ceased — would be enough to smash all living things along the western edge of the continent, enough to change the entire face of North America.

Acceleration in the pit of his stomach. Going up. His skin seemed to be boiling. Going up. Winds blew that threatened to lift them away. With the last of his strength, he held on to Betsy. He could not see Minelli for a moment, and then he opened his tingling eyes and saw against a muddy blue sky filled with stars — the atmosphere racing away above them — saw Minelli standing, smiling beatifically, arms raised, near the new rim of the point. He receded through walls of dust on a fresh-hewn leaf of granite, mouth open, shouting unheard into the overwhelming din.

Yosemite is gone. The Earth might be gone. I’m still thinking. The only sensation Edward could feel, other than the endless acceleration, was Betsy’s body against his own. He could hardly breathe.

They no longer lay on the ground, but fell. Edward saw walls of rock, great fresh white revealed volumes on all sides — thousands of feet wide — and spinning trees and disintegrating clumps of dirt and even a small flying woman, yards away, face angelic, eyes closed, arms spread.

It seemed an eternity before the light vanished.

The granite volumes enclosed them all.

74

From ten thousand miles, the Earth seemed as natural and peaceful and beautiful as it had over thirty years before, when Arthur had first seen it in full-frame pictures from space. That view — a clouded jewel, opal and lapis marbled with rich whorls of cloud — had entranced him, made him more than ever before feel a part of some cosmic whole. It had changed his life.

The witnesses were subdued. Nobody said a word or made a loud sound. He had never experienced such rapt concentration in a crowd. Marty stood by his side, having let go of his hand, a boy barely four feet eleven inches tall, standing alone. How much does he understand?

Perhaps as much as I do.

Nothing compared with what they expected to see. Not the burning of an ancestral house, or the sinking of an ocean liner; not the bombing of a city, or the horror of mass graves in time of revolution or war. The crime that had been committed against humanity was virtually total. Except for them — the occupants of the arks, and the records saved for transport in the arks — the Earth would be no more.

He could not wrap his thoughts around the totality. He had to take separate losses and mull them over. They were highly personal losses, things he would regret; but his single mind was not the holographic mind of humanity.

Essential things would be destroyed that he had never known. Connections, evidences, histories as yet uncovered, irretrievable. All the arks could save was what humans had so far learned about themselves. Hereafter, they would be refugees with no hope of ever returning to a homeland, no hope of recovering the thread of the pasts they had lost.

They would be dependent on the kindness, or whatever their motivations might be, of strangers, of nonhuman intelligences that so far had shown little evidence of being willing to reveal themselves; benefactors as mysterious as their destroyers.

Lives. Billions of human beings, their existence always fragile, sharing mutual oblivion. There was no way Arthur could encompass that. He had to deal in abstractions.

The abstractions were enough to sear him. Backed by the realization that what he saw was real and immediate, his soul burned. He had had months to come to grips with these facts and implications; those months had not done to him what the vision of the Earth, whole and bright, was doing to him now.

No explanations came from the network. Later, when each of the witnesses had faced their private griefs, perhaps the details of the end would be made clear, and a planetary postmortem would be conducted.

Strange images flashed through his mind. Television commercials from his childhood, smiling women in Peter Pan collars with tightly coiffed hair, images of motherhood tending perfect families. Faces of soldiers dying in Vietnam. Presidents standing one by one before the television cameras, ending with Crockerman, a very sad image indeed.

The 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar. He had never worked there, but he had toured the historic site often enough. The 600-inch at Mauna Kea. His dormitory room at Cal Tech. The face of the first woman he had ever made love to, that first year in university. Professors lecturing. His joy on discovering the properties of a Mobius strip; he had been thirteen at the time. Equal joys on grasping the concepts of limits in calculus, and reading the first articles on black holes in the late 1960s.

Harry. Always Harry.

The first time he had seen Francine, in a skimpy black one-piece swimsuit, as voluptuous as a goddess from the sea, with long wet black hair, the backs of her legs and her inner thighs rough with damp sand, running to take a towel from her friend and collapsing on her back with a laugh not five yards from where Arthur sat. Not all is lost.

Marty touched his arm. “Dad, what’s that?”

The globe did not seem noticeably different. But Marty pointed, and others among the witnesses were murmuring, pointing.

Over the Pacific, a silver-white mass grew like mold in a petri dish. Over the western United States and what they could see of Australia, similar blossoms of condensing moisture expanded.

Within minutes, the Earth blanketed itself in an impenetrable blanket of white and gray. Waves passed through the mass, ripples as visible as those in a pond, but moving with clockwork slowness. Above the north pole, frantic curtains of light played, guttering and re-forming like lines of candles in a breeze. They were aurorae. Something was wreaking havoc with Earth’s interior dynamo.

Arthur pictured the explosion expanding through the superhot, highly radioactive inner core to the outer core, where the Earth’s magnetic field was born. The dense molten material compressing even more highly on the edge of the expanding blast. Mechanical shock waves shooting out to the crust, shifting the ocean basins — already weakened by the chains of thermonuclear explosions — and shifting the continents, up to ten times thicker than the ocean basins, buckling them all, raising them a few hundred feet, or a few miles. Oceans receding, spilling out over the continents…All now hidden behind the masses of clouds.

The Earth’s surface extremely hot, atmosphere sloshing like water in a bowl. Most of humanity dead already, destroyed by earthquakes, horrendous atmospheric storms or floods. Soon the rock below would compress no more, and the Earth would—

“Jesus,” Reuben said behind them. Arthur glanced at him; the young man’s face expressed both fascination and horror.

The clouds clarified. They glimpsed through smeared atmospherics a muddy, churning mass, lit in places with the hellish light of magma welling up through fractures hundreds of miles wide. Continental and ocean-floor plates drove together at their edges, fusing into solids no more able to keep their shape and character than gases or liquids, rippling like fabric.

Nowhere could he see any of the works of humanity. Cities — if any still existed, which did not seem likely — would have been far too small. Most of Europe and Asia were on the other side of the globe, out of sight, their fate no different from what they saw happening to eastern Asia and the western United States and Australia. Indeed, these landmasses could no longer be distinguished; there were no oceans or land, only belts of translucent superheated steam and cooler cloud and tortured basins of mud, shot through with dull brown magma and, here and there, great white spots of plasma beginning to burrow out from the interior.

“Is it going to blow up?” Marty asked.

Arthur shook his head, unable to speak.

Despite the growing distance between the ark and Earth, the globe visibly expanded, but again with clockwork slowness.

Arthur checked his watch. They had been viewing for fifteen minutes; the time had passed in a flash.

Again the Earth took on the appearance of a jewel, but this time a great bloated fire opal, orange and brown and deep ruby red, shot through with spectral patches of brilliant green and white. The crust melted, turning into basaltic slag adrift in slowly spinning patches on a sea of brown and red. There were no discernible features but the colors. The Earth, dying, became an incomprehensible abstraction, horribly beautiful.

Already, with the appearance of long spirals of white and green, intensely bright, the final fate became obvious. The limb of the world no longer made a smooth curve; it had visible irregularities, broad low lumps distinct against the blackness. From these lumps, jets of vapor hundreds of miles high lanced through the turbid remnants of the atmosphere and cast pale gray fans into space.

Such volcanoes might have been seen in the early ages of the Earth’s coalescence, but not since. New chains of released fire and vapor emerged across the face of the distorted globe. Slowly, a spiraling snake of white plasma shot chunks from its interior coils outward, the projectiles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour but still falling back, being reabsorbed.

No single piece of the Earth’s crust had yet been flung out with a velocity equal to or greater than eighteen thousand miles per hour, orbital, velocity, much less escape velocity. But the trend was obvious.

Countless island-sized bolides pocked the face of the Earth with a churning effervescence. These bolides rose hundreds, even thousands of miles, then fell, scattering broad trajectories of smaller debris. At the limb, the increased altitude of these molten projectiles was apparent. Energy rapidly built sufficient to toss them into orbit, and even to blow them free from the bulk of the globe.

Home. Arthur connected suddenly with all that he saw; the abstraction took on solidity and meaning. The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves’ eyes in an infinite night-bound forest. He paraphrased what Harry had said on his tape:

There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves…

He was past tears now, past anything but a deep blunt suffocating pain. Home. Home.

Marty faced the panel with eyes wide and mouth open; almost the same expression Arthur had seen when his son watched Saturday morning cartoons on television, only slightly different: tighter, with a hint of puzzlement, eyes searching.

The Earth bloated horribly. Beneath the swelling crust and mantle, the spirals and fractures of white and green light widened into vast canals and highways running crazy random courses through a uniform dull red landscape. Huge bolides exited in long graceful curves, arcing thousands of miles — entire Earth radii — out in space, and not falling back to the surface, but tracing glowing orbits around the stricken planet.

Twenty-five minutes had passed. Arthur’s legs ached and he had drenched his clothes in sweat. The room filled with an awful animal stench, fear and grief and silent agony.

Virtually everyone he had ever known was dead, their bodies lost in the general apocalypse; every place he had ever been, all of his records and the records of his family, all the children Marty had grown up with. Everyone on the ark was cut adrift in nothingness. He could distinctly feel the separation, the sudden loss, as if he had always known the presence of humanity around him, a psychic connection that was no more.

The brilliant highways and canals of the revealed plasma energy sphere now stretched thousands of miles, vaulting the molten, vaporized material of the Earth outward in a rough ovoid, the long axis at right angles to the axis of rotation. The tips of the ovoid spun away huge globules of silica and nickel and iron.

Against the dominant light of the plasma, the twisted remains of mantle and compressed streamers of the core cast long shadows into near-Earth space through the expanding dusty cloud of vapor and smaller debris. The planet resembled a lantern in fog, almost unbearably bright. Inexorably, the ovoid of plasma pushed everything outward, attenuating, blasting, diminishing all that was left, scattering it before an irresistible wind of elementary particles and light.

Two hours. He glanced at his watch. The moon shined through the vapor haze, a quarter of a million miles distant and seemingly aloof. But tidal bulges would relax, and even though the moon’s shape had been frozen by ages of cooling, Arthur thought the relaxation would at the very least trigger violent moonquakes.

He turned his attention again to the dead Earth. The plasma glow had dimmed slightly. Distinct ethereal pinks and oranges and grayish blues gave it a pearly appearance, like a child’s plastic ball illuminated from within. The diameter of the plasma ovoid and the haze of debris had expanded to well over thirty thousand miles by now. The ovoid continued to lengthen, spreading the new belt of asteroids into the stubby beginnings of an arc.

The transparent panel became mercifully opaque.

As if released from puppet strings, fully half of the witnesses collapsed on the floor. Arthur hugged Francine and gripped Marty’s shoulder, unable to speak, then walked among his fellows, seeing what could be done to help them.

The copper-colored robot appeared at the end of the cabin and floated forward. Behind it came dozens more survivors, bearing trays and bowls of water, food, and medicines.

It is the Law.

The words echoed again and again through Arthur’s thoughts as he helped revive those who had fallen.

It is the Law.

Marty stayed by his side, kneeling with him as he elevated a young woman’s head and held a metal cup of water to her lips.

“Father,” the boy said, “where are we going now?”