The conversation was desultory. They talked about incidentals, how strange the sky looked, how nobody was going to leave home again. And they reassured one another.
Had long-dead Pinnacle experienced these things? "They have to be part of the natural order," Carson said. "Every eight thousand years they come in and take you out. Why?"
"It's almost as if," said Angela, "the universe is wired to attack cities. Is that possible?"
Hutch sat in the darkness, feeling like prey. What was the line Richard had quoted? Something there is that doesn't love a wall. "It might be," she said, "that it's part of a program to protect life."
Carson's brows drew together. "By blowing it up?"
"By discouraging the rise of dominant species. Maybe it's a balancing effect. Maybe the universe doesn't approve of places like New York."
In the west, they saw lightning. Coming this way.
"Air pressure's going down fast," said Angela. The ground shook. It was only a tremor, a wobble. "Maybe we should get back upstairs."
"No." Carson sank into his chair and tried to relax. "We're safer here."
Monday; 0004 hours.
Ashley was accelerating. But whatever was going to happen would be over long before they arrived on the scene. Janet had spent much of her time trying to talk with Emory, but the signals had faded in the electromagnetic flux created by the dragon. On her screens, Delta and the thing had joined. Drafts was frantic, and had grown worse as the hour approached. He was not helped by the loss of communications. And being pinned in his web chair did nothing to ease his frustration.
Janet tried to sound optimistic. Hutch and Angela Morgan together! If there was a way to survive, she knew one or the other would find it.
0027 hours.
The skies flowed past, churned, exploded. Heavy bolts ripped the night, and the wind howled around them. Snow and ice rattled against the shuttle.
The plain trembled. One by one, the shuttle's monitors died.
Carson hovered in the rear doorway, between the two women. "We're doing okay," he said.
"Never better," said Hutch.
"You betcha," said Angela, with mock cheer. "Here we sit with God coming after us."
"We'll be fine," said Carson.
There was no point at which it could be said that contact actually occurred. The dragon no longer possessed defini-
live limits. It had opened out. Filaments tens of thousands of kilometers long had broached Delta's atmosphere hours earlier. But Carson and the women knew that the moon was now firmly in the embrace of its fierce visitor.
The air was thick with ash and snow. It drifted down onto the plain, and a black crust began to form.
"Maybe," said Angela, "there really is no core."
"Let's hope not," said Carson. And he was about to add, optimistically, that maybe it wouldn't be much worse than a large storm after all, when white light exploded overhead, and a fireball roared out of the sky and ripped into the snowscape.
It wasn't close, but they all flinched.
"What was that?"
"Meteor?"
"Don't know—"
"Damn," said Hutch.
Carson took a deep breath. "Angela, how long do you think this will last?"
"Hard to tell. The worst of it should end within a day or two. It's still moving pretty quickly. And it's not tracking Delta's orbit, so we should come out of it fairly soon." They could hear her breathing in the dark. "I think this place is going to have even lousier weather than usual for a while though."
"I'm scared," said Hutch.
So was Carson. But he knew it would be improper to concede the point. Someone needed to show strength. "We'll be okay," he told her. He wished they could get pictures from the ground cameras. What was happening at the site?
The dragon's head dissolved. Billows and fountains expanded, collapsed, and blew apart. They rubbed together like great cats. Chunks of rock and ice, apparently buried within the thick atmosphere, were expelled.
On Delta, methane seas exploded into nearby low-lying areas. Tornado-force winds, generated by sudden changes in pressure, roared around the globe. Everywhere, it was midnight.
Rock and ice fell out of the sky. Their fiery trails illuminated the general chaos. Most were small, too small to penetrate even the relatively thin atmosphere. Others plowed into ice fields, and blasted swamps and seas.
Volcanoes erupted.
Out on their plain, Hutch, Angela, and Frank crouched in the shuttle and waited. Waited for the world-cracking collision that would come when the core of the dragon struck ground. As it must. As Angela, despite her assurances to the contrary, sincerely believed it must.
But it never happened.
The winds hammered at them, and the plain trembled, and black rain and ice and thick ashes poured down.
The night rumbled and flared.
Gradually, they became persuaded that the worst was over, that the hurricane-force winds were diminishing. They would survive; they needed only ride out the storm. And they grew talkative. An atmosphere that might best be described as nervous festive set in. Things banged and exploded and crunched in the night. But they were still there. And they silently congratulated themselves on their good luck. At one point, their rising spirits were helped along when they thought they heard Janet's voice in the ocean of static pouring out of the receivers.
Navigation lights were mounted low on both sides of the cowling, behind the cockpit on the fuselage, and beneath the wings. Periodically, Angela blew the snow and soot off the windscreen and turned them on. Mounds were building high around them.
"I'll make you a bet, Frank," said Hutch.
"Which is—?"
"When we start reading the history of the Monument-Makers, we're going to discover that a lot of them cleared out."
"How do you mean?"
"Left the Galaxy. Probably went to one of the Magellanic Clouds. Somewhere where they don't have these things."
"Maybe. I think they entertained themselves bringing them down on the heads of whatever primitives they could find. I don't think the Monument-Makers were very decent critters."
"I think you've got it wrong," she said.
"In what way?"
She took Carson's wrist. "Oz was a decoy," she said.
He leaned closer to her. "Say again."
"Frank, they were all decoys. The cube moons. The Oz-creation at Beta Pac. They were supposed to draw these things off."
"Well, if they were," he said, "they apparently didn't work."
"No. I guess they did the best they could. But you're right. They didn't work. In the end, the Monument-Makers couldn't even save themselves."
He sat down on the deck behind her seat. "You think they got hit by one of these things?"
"I think they got hit twice. The interstellar civilization probably got nailed. They collapsed. Maybe they ran. I don't know. Maybe they got out and made for the Lesser Magellanic. Ran from these things because they couldn't divert them, and couldn't stop them."
"What about the space station?" he asked. "What do you think happened there?"
"— Survivors. Somebody rebuilt. But they didn't get as far the second time. They didn't go interstellar. Maybe it was a different type of civilization. Maybe they lost too much. They were just at the beginning of their space age when the wave came again." She was glad now for the dark. "Frank, think what their technology must have been at its height. And how much advance warning they had. Maybe thousands of years. They knew these things were out there, and they tried to help where they could. But you're right: they didn't succeed."
"The goop is getting a little high," said Angela. "I think it would be a good idea to shift locations. We don't want to get buried."