“Yeah. I’ve kept up with the news and I’ve read books and I’ve worked with all sorts of people for sixty-odd years, and I’ve seen one kind of stupid, and another. We all bump into each other every day of our lives, by guess and by golly, and we render our opinions whether we know anything or not, and if anybody catches us out we lie…Ah, shit on it.” He shook his head. “I’m just feeling uncommonly sour today.”

“Right.” Sand brushed his sun-dried hair from his eyes.

“They’ve got us, you know that? We’re down and we’re weak and there’s not a goddamn thing we can do now except go out and look…” — he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips — “and say, ‘yep, by golly, there it is. We’re bleeding to death.’ They knew exactly what to do. They used their decoys, and we fell for them. It’s like they know stupidity from generations back, thousands of years back. Maybe they’ve found stupid hayseed worlds all across the galaxy. So now they have us confused and on our backs kicking and they’ve got the knife at our throats, like slaughtering a goddamned pig.” He gripped the railing and rocked on his heels gently. “I have never in my life felt so useless.”

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.