They rode across the creek and into the dry desert beyond, coming finally to a borax-topped decline. With some prodding, the horses slid down the decline. They rode in shadow through the Death Valley sage of a quiet gully, glancing at each other and smiling but saying nothing.

The gully spread out onto a broad plain and the sage gave way to hummocky yellow salt grass. Part of an old narrow-gauge mining railway ran to their left, rails rusting on a long embankment of cinders and gray dirt. Birds called out in the stillness and a thick rat snake slid its meter length through the scrub.

“All right,” Stella said, reining her horse up short and facing him. “I’m just about cured. How about you?”

Edward nodded. “This sure helps.”

She sidled the pinto closer to him and patted its shoulder. “I’ve lived here all my life, with a few years at school and traveling. Europe. Africa. Peace Corps. My mother and sister and I have done everything we could to keep the town together after my father died. It’s become my life. Sometimes it’s an awful responsibility — you wouldn’t think that, would you, since it’s so small? But it weighs on me. Mother takes it in her stride.”

“She’s a wonder,” Edward said.

Stella leaned her head to one side, looking sadly at the gravel. “You know, I said I was a radical. It was my sister who was the real radical. She went to Cuba. She has a complete set of Lenin and Marx on her bookshelves. She loves Shoshone as much as I do, but she had to leave. We think shers in Angola. Lord, what a place to be now. Me, I’m just a capitalist like all the rest.”

“Hard on your mother, I guess.”

“Who, me or my sister?” Stella smiled.

“I meant your sister. I suppose both of you.”

“What about your family?”

“None to speak of. My father vanished more than twenty years ago, and my mother lives in Austin. We don’t see much of each other.”

“And your connections at the university?”

“I’m not sure I’ll stay there, now.”

“No long-term plans?”

Edward brushed at a buzzing horsefly and watched it veer across the hummocks until it vanished. “I don’t see why.”

“Mother and I have been making plans for selling mineral rights. We’ll redo the town’s sewage line with a government loan, but this extra money — that could keep the town going for years, even if the tourists keep flocking over to Tecopa.”

“The big resort.”

She nodded. “What a disaster for us all. Tecopa used to be a bunch of shacks built over hot springs. Rowdy. Now it’s plush. The desert is like that.”

“It’s beautiful here. Something big could happen to Shoshone.”

“Yes, but would we want it to?” She shook her head dubiously. “I’d like to keep it the way it was when I was a girl, but I know that’s not practical. The way it was when Father was alive. It seemed so permanent then. I could always come back.” She shook her head slowly, looking out across the grass to a lava-covered hill beyond. “What I’m getting around to saying is, we could use a geologist here. In Shoshone. To help us work out the mineral rights and figure out what we have, exactly.”

“That would be nice,” Edward agreed.

“You’ll think it over?”

“Your tourist business should be real good for the next few months,” he said.

Stella made a face. “We’re just getting the freaks now. Religious nuts. All going out to the cinder cone. Who needs them? Everybody else is going to stay at home and wait it out. Do you think it’s all going to go away?”

“I don’t know.” But he did know, in his gut. “That’s not true, actually. I think it’s all over.”

“The things inside the Earth?”

“Maybe. Maybe something we don’t even know about.”

“It makes me so goddamned mad,” Stella said, her voice breaking. “Helpless.”

“Yeah.”

“But I’m going to keep on planning. Maybe the whole deal will fall through. The commodities markets are going crazy. Maybe nobody will want to buy mineral rights now. But we have to keep working.”

“I don’t think I can stay,” he said. “It sounds wonderful, but…”

Her eyes narrowed. “Restless?”

“I don’t think I can really have a home now. Not even here, nice as this is.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll travel. Probably break away from Reslaw and Minelli. Go out on my own.”

‘Sometimes I wish I could do that,” she said wistfully. But my roots are too deep here. I’m not enough like my sister. And I have to stay with Mother.”

“There was a place,” Edward said, “where my father took my mother and me before he ran away. My last summer with him, and the best summer I’ve ever had. I haven’t been back since. I didn’t want to be disappointed. I wondered if it would have changed…For the worse.”

“Where was that?”

“Yosemite,” he said.

“It’s beautiful there.”

“You’ve been there recently?”

“Last summer, driving through on the way to the wine country. It was really lovely, even with all the people. Without crowds, it would be wonderful.”

“Maybe I’ll go there. Live on my back salary. I’ve dreamed about it, you know. Those peculiar dreams where I go back and it’s completely different, but still something special. I think to myself, after all those years of just dreaming about being there, I’m finally back. And then I wake up…and it’s a dream.”

Stella reached out to touch his arm. “If…it works out, you can come back here after.”

“Thank you,” Edward said. “That would be nice. My teaching position will certainly be closed by that time. I can’t expect them to wait forever.”

“Let’s strike a deal,” Stella said. “Next summer, you come back here and help Mother and me. After you go to Yosemite, and after the world gets its act together.”

“All right,” Edward said, smiling. He reached out and touched her arm, and then leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “It’s a deal.”

Compunews Network, November 29, 1996, Frederick Hart reporting:

Here in the winter desert, only a few miles from Death Valley proper, it gets bitterly cold at night, and thousands of campfires light up the grass and sand around the government-declared National Security Site. In the middle of the site, rising against the clouds of stars like a great black hump, is the so-called Bogey, the imitation extinct volcano that has burrowed into the national imagination as the Kemp objects have burrowed into the Earth’ s core, and into our nightmares. People have come here from around the world, kept back a mile from the site by barbed wire and razor-wire barricades. They seem to have come to worship, or to just sit quietly under the warm desert sun and stare. What does it mean to them, to us? Should they wish to storm the site, will the Army be able to keep them back?

Among their numbers are approximately ten thousand Forge of Godders, with their various prophets and religious guides. The American branch of this cult has arisen in just three weeks, sown in the fertile religious ground of the American South and West by the President’s blunt, uncompromising words. I have spoken with these people, and they share the President’ s convictions. Most are fundamentalist Christians, seeing this as the Apocalypse predicted in the Bible. But many come from other faiths, other religions, around the world. They say they will stay here until the end. As one cultist told me, “This is the center. This is where it’s at. Forget Australia. The End of the World begins right here, in Death Valley.”