Thatch was still driving, with Gus peering ahead. The wide view provided by the windshield only made the weather seem worse. The rain pelted down in splendid savagery, making the deepening puddles dance. The fields beside the highway appeared already to be flooding, but the road itself was clear. Fortunately the interstate systems had good drainage. Visibility was so bad that Thatch was simply following the dotted line dividing two of the lanes, detouring around the increasingly frequent hulks of stalled cars.
Stalled cars. They seemed empty. What had happened to the people in them? Did they just disappear into the ground like ants from a disturbed nest? They would never return…
There were no houses in sight. The rain made it seem as if they had driven into some primeval wilderness. Indeed, there was already some debris on it, the highway—flotsam from the scrub. The wild state was wasting no time encroaching. Fortunately the bus was tight and warm; seemingly not a drop of water had leaked inside. She could not, actually, have asked for a better ride.
“I’m sorry, boys,” she said, taking her seat in the dinette just behind the driver’s seat. “I was tired and hungry and wet and jumpy. I guess I got the wrong idea.”
Gus turned, smiling. His seat was double-width, but mounted so that it could face around behind. He had an attractive grin and looked capable. But she could not forget that forlorn cry of his—“Thatch!”—as he was hurt. Not badly hurt, either! Was he in fact a physical coward, or was there something else between these two men?
“That’s all right,” Gus said. “Girl’s got to watch out for herself. Where’re you from?”
She took a moment to restore the dinette table, still fallen. It propped on a single light metal rod, now bent but not broken. Like Thatch’s glasses.
Where was she from? What was the safest answer? She felt she owed no further allegiance to the government, but she was not yet ready to set aside her commitment to secrecy.
A half-truth would have to do. “The Cape. I worked there—for a while. How about you?”
“Other side of the street,” Gus said, gesturing expansively. “State, I mean.” He seemed to carry no grudge. “Too hot for regular work, not much money, so Thatch got us this bus to drive north. The owner pays for gas and tolls, and we have a week to get it safely to Michigan.”
Zena shook her head silently. It was nice to know they had come by the vehicle honestly—but it would never see Michigan, now that the rain had started.
“Just in time, too,” Gus continued. “I figured the rain was coming, and I knew we had to get moving fast. We just stopped off for cheap gas—can’t get that on the main route—and then we saw you.”
Fine. Keep the men talking about themselves. “You had trouble finding decent work? Maybe you should have gone back to school to learn a trade.”
“I’ve been to school,” Gus said amiably. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’ve got a BA in Liberal Arts.”
Zena smiled carefully. Liberal arts, by one definition, was the way a dull student could get through college without having to learn anything. “You’re right. I wouldn’t know it.”
“Say—are you a karate instructor or something?”
Fair question, after the fighting she had just done. “No. If I had been an instructor, Thatch would never have gotten a hand on me. I’m a meteorologist. I happened to take a course in self-defense. Just in case.”
“Meteorology!” he exclaimed. She thought he was going to make the old joke about studying meteors, but he passed that up. “Then you know about this rain!”
Trouble again! “What do you mean?”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? Study the weather? So you know.”
“I study the weather, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I know more than you do about this particular rain. Obviously I didn’t know enough to come in out of it!”
Gus let out a hearty laugh. Then he shook his head wisely. “Uh-uh! This is a special rain! It started with that band in the sky—you saw that, didn’t you?”
“No.” Literally true. But the man was on an uncomfortably accurate track—by what coincidence, she hoped to learn.
“This one that looked like a contrail, then got larger and larger until it filled the whole sky? They said it was just a freak cloud formation that would go away in a few days, but the experts always lie about things like that How could you miss it?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Zena, the whole world could see it! The news was censored out of the papers, which is how I knew it was significant, but I have a little shortwave radio and I picked up the hams discussing it. That band went all around the earth from pole to pole, like a Russian satellite. But the Russians didn’t know anything about it either. Not the ones who were talking, anyway. You would have had to be blind or in jail to miss it!”
No help for it: She was not a facile evader, and she refused to lie directly. “I wasn’t on the world.”
Gus chuckled. “Oh, yeah! You came from the Cape. You were up in orbit, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So you didn’t see it after all. Not from below, anyhow! Maybe you were investigating it from a satellite?”
“No. Let’s talk about something else.”
“I get it now. Military secret.”
“Something like that.” Did it really make any difference? The damage had been done before Gus ever spotted his band in the sky, and there was no way to reverse it now.
“Well, the way I see it, this is no ordinary rain,” Gus said. “It’s a canopy-rain, coming down from the Saturn-rings.”
“Saturn is another planet!” Zena exclaimed, relieved to discover that he was after all off the track. It had seemed for a moment that he had somehow guessed the truth. The truth that she was still theoretically not permitted to divulge.
“I said Saturn-rings. Rings of ice, like those around Saturn—only they’re around Earth now. So the rain won’t stop—not for a long, long time. Maybe the whole world will flood. Right?”
Now she was intrigued. He was veering closer to the track again. “What are you talking about?”
“You know. You’re the meteorologist. I only know what I read.”
“That’s right. I’m the meteorologist—and I can’t make much sense of what you’re saying. What’s this about a canopy, or rings of ice?”
“That theory. How there were rings of ice around the world, long ago. And they melted down into a canopy, and then into rain—so much that the oceans rose up maybe a mile, and never did go down again. That’s what the Bible is really talking about, and all those other legends of the flood. And it’s starting again!”
“I never heard of such a thing!” Zena said indignantly. “There’s no fossil record of such large increases in the ocean level—not in the past billion years, certainly!”
“Oh yes there is,” he insisted. “Just in the last million years the ocean has changed—”
“Fluctuated, yes; risen, no,” she said. “You’re thinking of the last ice age, when so much water was taken up by glaciers and polar ice that the level of the world’s oceans dropped—then rose again when all that ice melted. But that has nothing to do with any canopy—”
“Yes it does! And ancient man actually saw the canopy.”
“Ridiculous! What ancient man saw were the four great glacials of the Pleistocene: Gunz, Mindel, Riss and Wurm.”