Paul Jacopetti had taken a propranolol and was resting in the camper’s narrow bed. Ganish and Chuck Makepeace sat stiffly at the table in the kitchenette. They had grumbled at this confinement, but not too loudly; it was Tyler’s idea, and they were Tyler’s constituents; they seemed to think their docility would win them some brownie points when this was all over. “We don’t know for certain what’s going on,” Makepeace said. “It would be premature to pass judgment.”
idiot, Abby thought.
She worried about Matt, and about Miriam, grown so strangely thin, and about Tom Kindle, hiding in the shadows with that hunting rifle of his. But her eyes kept straying to the Artifact. She had grown so accustomed to that presence on the far prairie that she had forgotten what an astonishing thing it really was. It was a spaceship, she thought, as round as a marble and as big as a mountain. It was affixed to the Earth like a tick on the skin of a dog… it had fed on the Earth, filled itself with humanity, and now, sated, it was apparently ready to leave.
It was almost too bright to look at.
Abby shaded her eyes and stood at the door of the Glendale waiting for a resolution. For more gunfire, or for Matt to emerge from the house. Or Colonel Tyler. Or for the world to end: with this peculiar blue light radiating across the prairie, she guessed that was a possibility, too.
“You hear something?” Bob Ganish said.
The car salesman had cocked his head to listen.
Chuck Makepeace looked up sullenly from a game of solitaire. “No.”
“Like a rumble,” Ganish said. “Like a truck going by. You really don’t hear it?”
Abby pressed her face against the cold window glass and felt another caress of the fear that had not left her for a day and a night. “I do,” she said. “I hear it.”
The noise was faint but distinct, like thunder, like the artillery of a faraway war.
Then it was as if the cannons had come suddenly much closer, as if the caissons had rolled up behind the Connor house where the grazing land began. The Glendale motor home began to yaw and pitch.
Abby braced herself against the frame of the door. Jacopetti began shouting from the bed, shouting a single word over and over. The sense of it was lost in the roar; she looked at him and tried to read his lips. But he wasn’t speaking to her, he wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular; he was speaking to God, Abby thought. His eyes were wild with panic. The word was, “Earthquake!”
Chuck Makepeace fell to the floor and pulled the table down after him. Playing cards fluttered through the air like wounded birds. Bob Ganish gazed around himself in mute startlement, then slumped into a crude duck-and-cover with his hands clasped behind his neck. He had stocked this camper with every conceivable necessity, and the floor was suddenly awash with canned goods, bottled water, spare propane tanks, and plastic jugs of gasoline.
Somehow, Abby managed to stay upright.
She saw the Artifact begin to rise. The horizon had obscured its lower circumference, but now a gap began to widen there.
The spaceship rose with a gentle, impossible buoyancy.
At its base, a dome of hot volcanic gases exploded after it.
And the cannonfire became a deeper, more frightening growl; and the floor dropped under Abby, and rose and dropped again, until she lost her footing and fell.
Home had driven its roots deep into the lithosphere. Its central artery, its umbilical connection to the Earth, was a vent that reached below the basaltic crust to the fluid magma.
Home’s departure fractured the substrate beneath it into floating chonoliths like so many loose teeth and exposed a reservoir of liquid rock to the cold night air.
The mantle shook with protest. A tectonic shockwave radiated outward from its epicenter in northern Colorado and was followed immediately by a second shock and a third.
The hole in the earth vented a cloud of luminous gas, a phenomenon geologists called a nute ardente. The cloud emerged at enormous speed and pressure. It carried volcanic ejecta at high velocity, peppering the retreating Home with rock fragments. It unfolded around the newly opened crater and set fire to the prairie in an expanding ring miles in diameter.
Home rose at the crown of this maelstrom and accelerated toward the high atmosphere, toward the stars.
From an altitude, the caldera on the land below resembled a flower: a stamen of boiling lava, petals of gray smoke touched at their tips with flame.
Home rose silently beyond a thin waft of cloud, rose brightly and silently in the thinning air. Its motive force was silent; it transformed its few gigawatts of waste energy into a blue-white wash of photons.
In the space inside it, deserts shimmered in virtual sunlight; alpine meadows bloomed at the approach of a virtual spring. New oceans lapped at the shores of new continents.
Below, in the darkness, a blister of ash and fire expanded over the cold Colorado tableland.
The first shock knocked Matt to the floor beside Tom Kindle.
He guessed it was an earthquake. It felt as if the Connor house had grown legs and begun to take long, bounding leaps across the prairie.
Maddeningly, there was nothing to hang on to. He was as helpless as a mouse in a rolling barrel. After what seemed like an endless pummeling, he managed to grab a doorjamb and brace himself firmly enough to raise his head and look around.
The air was full of dust. The quake seemed to raise dust from every surface. Above the roar, he could hear the joists twist in the ceiling. He wondered how long the house would last.
Tom Kindle writhed on the floor with one hand clutching his bad leg.
Matt pulled himself into the room where Colonel Tyler had died. The shaking seemed progressively less intense, though it had not entirely stopped. He looked for Beth. The Colonel’s body and Joey’s had been thrown into a ghastly embrace, Tyler’s limp arm draped over Joey’s shoulder and his hand pawing at Joey’s ruined head. Beth was approximately where he had left her but no longer sitting up against the foot of the recliner; she had slid back to the floor and her breathing—she was still breathing—sounded tentative and very wet.
The floor bucked again, and Matt braced himself until it steadied. He heard what must be the sound of the Connors’ front porch collapsing: a series of dry, woody explosions. The window popped out of its frame and shattered on the ground outside the house.
When the trembling eased, Matt pulled himself up to the empty sill and took a hurried look outside.
He couldn’t see the Artifact—the window faced the wrong direction—but he knew it must be rising. It was still radiating that vivid blue-white light, casting sundial shadows from the RVs and the prairie scrub, but now the shadows were growing shorter and inclining to the west.
The door of the Glendale opened, and Abby stood in it looking bruised and bewildered. She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the light. Matt heard someone crying out from inside the vehicle—Jacopetti, he thought. He wanted to tell Abby to stay away from the house, it wasn’t structurally safe… the walls were inclining and it was a miracle only the porch had collapsed. The urgent thing was to get Beth outside, get Kindle outside, before the next shock or aftershock…
But he couldn’t speak or wave or make any coherent gesture before Abby opened her mouth in an O of dismay and clutched at the door of the motor home.
Matt supposed—much later—that there must have been a sinkhole under the RV, some old hollow in the bedrock that had been opened by the violence of the quake. All he knew as it happened was that the big Glendale tilted leftward, and the camper in front of it—Mart’s camper—tilted right; one tumbled frontward into a sudden depression that might have been five or ten feet deep; the other tumbled back. The two vehicles collided, made the shape of a flattened V, and the Glendale began to slide sideways.