Betsy lay beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm. “Happy?” she asked him.
Edward opened his eyes and stared up at white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. “Yes,” he said. “I really am.”
“So am I.”
A few dozen yards away, other campers were singing folk songs and sixties and seventies tunes. Their voices drifted in the restless, warm air, finally melding with the wind and the hum of the bees.
68
Walter Samshow celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday aboard the Glomar Discoverer, cruising in circles a few kilometers beyond the zone where huge gouts of oxygen had once risen to the ocean surface. The bubbling had stopped three days before.
The ship’s galley prepared a two-meter-long birthday cake in the shape of a sea serpent — or an oarfish, depending on whether you asked the cook or Chao, who had seen several oarfish in his time, but no sea serpents.
At five in the afternoon, the cake was cut with some ceremony under the canvas awning spread on the fantail. Bible-leaf slices of the serpent were served on the ship’s best china, accompanied by champagne or nonalcoholic punch for those ostensibly on duty.
Sand silently toasted his partner with a raised glass of champagne at the stern. Samshow smiled and tasted the cake. He was trying to decide what flavor the peculiar mud-colored icing was — someone had suggested sweetened agar earlier — when the ocean all around suddenly glowed a brilliant blue-green, even beneath the intense sun.
Samshow was reminded of his youth, standing on the beach at Cape Cod on the night of the Fourth of July, waiting for fireworks and tossing his own firecrackers into the surf just as their fuses burned short. The firecrackers had exploded below the surface with a silent puff of electric-green light.
The crew on the rear deck fell silent. Some looked at their shipmates in puzzlement, having missed the phenomenon.
In rapid succession, from the northern horizon to the southern horizon, more flashes illuminated the ocean.
“I think,” Samshow said in his best professorial tone, “we are about to have some mysteries answered.” He knelt to put his plate and glass of champagne down on the deck, and then stood, with Sand’s help, by the railing.
To the west, the entire sea and sky began to roar.
A curtain of cloud and blinding light rose from the western horizon, then slowly curled about like a snake in pain. One end of the curtain slid over the sea with amazing speed in their direction, and Samshow cringed, not wanting it all to end just yet. There was more he wanted to see; more minutes he wanted to live.
The hull shuddered violently and the steel masts and wires sang. The railing vibrated painfully under his hand.
The ocean filled with a continuous light, miles of water no more opaque than a thick green lump of glass held over a bonfire.
“It’s the bombs,” Sand said. “They’re going off. Up and down the fractures—”
The sea to the west blistered in a layer perhaps a hundred meters thick, scoured by the snaking curtain, bursting into ascending and descending ribbons of fluid and foam. Between the fragments of the peeled sea — the skin of an inconceivable bubble — rose a massive, shimmering transparent of superheated steam, perhaps two miles wide. Its revealed surface immediately condensed into a pale opalescent hemisphere. Other such bubbles broke and released and condensed from horizon to horizon, churning the sea into a mint-green froth. The clouds of vapor ascended in twisted pillars to the sky. The hiss and roar and deep churning, gut-shaking booms became unbearable. Samshow clapped his hands to his ears and waited for what he knew must come.
A scatter of calved steam bubbles broke just a few hundred meters to the east, with more on the opposite side. The turbulence spread in a high wall of water that caught the ship lengthwise and broke her spine, twisting her fore half clockwise, aft counterclockwise, metal screaming, rivets failing like cannon shots, plates ripping with a sound curiously b’ke tearing paper, beams snapping. Samshow flew over the side and seemed for a moment suspended in froth and flying debris. He felt all that he was a part of — the sea, the sky, the air and mist around him — abruptly accelerate upward. A much larger steam bubble surfaced directly beneath the ship.
There was of course no time to think, but a thought from the instant before lingered like a strobed image, congealed in his mind before his body was instantly boiled and smashed into something hardly distinguishable from the foam around it: I wish I could hear that sound, of the Earth’s crust being spread wide.
Around the globe, wherever the bomb-laying machines had infested the deep-ocean trenches, long sinuous curtains of hot vapor reached high into the atmosphere and pierced through. As the millions of glassy columns of steam condensed into cloud, and the cloud hit the cold upper masses of air and flashed into rain, the air that had been pushed aside now rushed back with violent thunderclaps. Tsunamis rolled outward beneath corresponding turbulent expanding concentric fronts of high and low pressure.
The end had begun.
DIES IRAE
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: