Sand cocked his head to one side. “It still seems theoretical to me,” he said. “I can’t believe anything’s really happening.”
“It’s been raining for two days in Montana, and they still can’t put out the fires,” Samshow said. “Now there’s a grass fire in central Asia that’s burned half a million acres. They can’t control it, needless to say. And the fire in Tokyo. We’re not only stupid, all our crazy folks are going to burn us out before the world goes kablooey. All our sins hang around our necks.”
Fanning, barely twenty, a graduate student from the University of California at Berkeley, came onto the bridge and stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders in excitement. “I’ve just figured it out. Some of the Navy’s coded messages,” he said. “They’re not working real hard to hide anything. They have a deep submersible somewhere out there.” He removed a hand from one pocket and swept the horizon. “I think it’s one of their biggies, a nuclear. With treads. They say it’s crawling along the bottom.”
“Anything else?” Sand asked facetiously. “Or is it a secret?”
Fanning shrugged. “Maybe we’re going to do something,” he said. “Maybe we’re going to try again. Knock out something important, not just a rock. Up the President, man,” he said, and lifted an expressive finger.
January 30
Edward stood in the parking lot of the Little America Restaurant and Motel, motor home idling nearby, and scanned the smoky northern horizon. The fire had been burning for five days now and was completely out of control. The orange and brown cloud stretched to the limits of east and west, turning the sun an apocalyptic flame red. Tendrils of gray smoke had passed over the highway and motel, dropping ghostly flakes of fine white ash. From what he had heard on the radio, there was no way he could go any farther north; two hundred thousand acres of Montana were ablaze, and yesterday the flames had stretched hungrily into Canada.
Seated at the RV’s dining table, he charted a southwesterly route on an auto club map with a yellow marker, then climbed into the driver’s seat and strapped himself in.
The cold northern air was delicious, even thickened by the smell of burning timber. He had never known air so invigorating.
Edward pulled out of the parking lot and headed west.
He hoped Yosemite would still be there when he arrived.
Sky and Telescope On-line, February 4, 1997: Today, Venus is at superior conjunction, behind the sun and out of sight. Today is also the projected date of the impact of a huge chunk of ice, allegedly from Europa. What this will do to Venus is a fascinating question. The impact will cause enormous seismic disruption, perhaps even deep-mantle cracking and a rearrangement of the planet’s internal structure. Venus has virtually no water; with the trillions of tons of water provided by the ice ball, and the renewed geologic activity, the planet could, in a few tens of thousands of years, become a garden of Eden…
51
“About a third of the kids have been taken out of school,” Francine said, putting the phone down. She had just phoned to tell the attendance office that Marty would be vacationing with them. Arthur carried a box of camping gear and — for no particular reason — the Astroscan through the living room to the station wagon in the garage.
“Not surprising,” he said.
“Jim and Hilary called to say Gauge is doing fine.”
“Why can’t we take Gauge with us?” Marty called from the garage.
“We talked about that last night,” Arthur said.
“He could sit on my lap,” Marty offered, squatting beside the station wagon and sorting toys.
“Not for long,” Arthur predicted. “He’s got kids to play with, good people to look after him.”
“Yeah. But I don’t have him.”
There was nothing Arthur could say to that.
“I called the auto club,” Francine said, “and asked what traffic was like between here and Seattle, and down the coast. They say it’s really light. That’s surprising. You’d think everybody would be off playing hooky, off to Disneyland or the parks.”
“Lucky for us,” Arthur said from the garage. He rearranged the crammed boxes in the back of the wagon. Marty sat on the concrete, continuing to pick halfheartedly through his toys.
“This is hard,” he said.
“You think you have problems, fellah,” Arthur said. “What about my books?”
“Are we just going to lock up?” Francine asked, standing in the door from the garage to the house. She carried a box filled with disks and papers- — the notes she had made for her book.
“Just like we’re going on vacation,” Arthur said. “So we’re atypical.”
“It is strange, isn’t it, that everybody’s staying home, now of all times?” She crammed the box into a spare corner of the station wagon.
“How many people really understand what’s happening?” he asked.
“That’s a point.”
“The kids at school understand,” Marty said. “They know the world’s going to end.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said. Again, trying to reassure them hurt him. The world is going to end. You know it, and they know it.
“Maybe everybody wants to be together,” Francine said, returning to the kitchen. She brought out a box of canned and dried food. “They want to be someplace familiar.”
“We don’t need that, do we?” Marty asked, shoving aside a pile of unwanted metal and plastic robots and spacecraft.
“All we need is each other,” Arthur agreed.
In the office, he reached into the back of the closet’s upper shelf and took out the wooden box containing the spiders. It felt peculiarly light. He opened the box. It was empty. For a moment, he stood with the box in his hand, and for some reason he could not understand he smiled. They had more work to do. He glanced at his watch. Wednesday. Ten a.m.
Time to be on the road.
“All packed?” he asked.
Marty surveyed the pile of rejected toys and clutched a single White Owl cigar box filled with the chosen. The cigar box had come down from Arthur’s father, who had had it from his father. It was tattered and reinforced with tape and represented continuity. Marty treasured the box in and of itself.
“Ready,” the boy said, climbing into the back seat. “Are we going to sleep in a lot of motels?”
“You got it,” Arthur said.
“Can I buy some toys where we go?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And some pretty rocks? If I find them, I mean.”
“Nothing over a ton,” Francine said.
“The boulder that broke the Buick’s back,” Arthur said, going into the house for a final check.
Good-bye, bedroom, good-bye, office, good-bye, kitchen. Refrigerator still full of food. Good-bye, knotty-pine paneling, elevated porch, backyard, and wild plum tree. Good-bye, smooth and singing river. He passed Gauge’s wicker bed in the service porch and felt a lump in his throat.
“Good-bye, books,” he whispered, looking at the shelves in the living room. He locked the front door, but did not turn the dead bolt.
52
Trevor Hicks, his work finished in Washington, D.C., had taken a train to Boston, single suitcase and computer in hand. At the station, he had been met by a middle-aged, brown-haired scattered-looking woman dressed in a black wool skirt and old flower-print blouse. She had taken him to her home in Quincy in a battered Toyota sedan.
There he had rested for two days, watched owlishly by the woman’s five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. The woman had been husbandless for three years, and the old wood-frame house was in severe disrepair — leaky pipes, decrepit wallboard, broken stairs. The children seemed surprised that he did not share her bedroom, which led him to believe she had not lacked for male company. None of this mattered much to Hicks, who had never been judgmental even before his possession. He spent much of his time sitting on the broken-down living room couch, thinking or interacting with the network, helping a dozen other people in the Northeast compile lists of people to be contacted, and/or prepared for removal from the Earth.