“That’s the Earth, isn’t it, Dad?” Marty asked quietly.

“That’s it.”

“It’s still there. Maybe we can go back and nothing will happen.”

Arthur found himself nodding. Maybe so.

The woman who had known about Singapore said, “They’re still in the Earth. They’re the last of the planet-eaters. They can’t leave because we’ll get them.” Arthur glanced nervously at her, as if she were a dangerous sibyl; her face was pale and convulsed.

73

“Rock of a-a-a-ges…”

The singing had taken a slightly frantic tone, sharper, higher, more disturbing. The column of smoke from the Ahwanee had risen above the Royal Arches; the hotel was almost consumed, and sparks from the blaze threatened to ignite the surrounding woods. From their vantage, they watched park fire trucks spraying water on the flaming ruins.

Spend your last few minutes trying to save something, Edward thought. Not a bad way to go. He envied the fire fighters and park rangers. The fire took their minds away from the inevitable. Up on Glacier Point, people had nothing to do but think about what would happen — and sing very badly.

The rock beneath them shifted the merest fraction. Betsy returned from the rest room, sat firmly beside Edward on the lowest terrace, and placed her arm through his; they had not been separated for more than a few minutes the last hour. Still, he felt alone, and looking at her, sensed she felt alone as well.

“Do you hear it?” she asked.

“The grumbling?”

“Yes.”

“I hear it.”

He imagined the lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium, or whatever they were, meeting at the center; perhaps they had already met, minutes or even an hour before, and the expanding front of raging plasma had just begun to make its effects known on the Earth’s mantle and thin crust.

In high school, Edward had once tried to draw a scale chart of the layers of a section of the Earth, with the inner and outer cores, mantle, and crust outlined in proportion. He had quickly found that the crust did not show up as more than the thinnest of pencil lines, even when he extended his drawing to an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper. Using his calculator to figure how large the drawing would have to be, he had learned that the floor of the school gymnasium might suffice to hold a drawing that gave the crust a line one third the width of his little finger.

Hidden volumes and surfaces again.

Insignificance.

Geologists dealt with insignificance all the time, but how many applied it directly to their personal lives?

“…cleft for meeee…Let me hiiide myself in theeee …”

“The air is getting hotter,” Minelli said. The neckband of his black T-shirt was soaked and his hair hung down in black ribbons. Inez sat farther back, on the upper terrace, sobbing quietly to herself.

“Go to her,” Edward commanded, nodding in her direction.

Minelli gave him a helpless look, then climbed up the steps.

“People are all that matter,” he said softly to Betsy. “Nothing else matters. Not in the beginning, not in the end.”

“Look,” Betsy said, pointing to the east. Clouds were racing across the sky, not billowing but simply forming in streamers at very high altitude. The air smelled electric and was oppressive, tangible, thick and hot. The sun seemed farther away, lost in a thin milky soup.

Edward looked down from the clouds, dizzy, and tried to orient on the valley. He searched for a familiar landmark, something to give him a fixed perspective.

The Royal Arches, in slow motion, slipped in huge curved flakes down the gray face of granite onto the burning hotel. Tiny trees danced frantically and then fell on their own isolated chips of rock, limbs raised by the passing air. The roar, even across the valley, was deafening. The scythe-shaped flakes, dozens of yards wide, crumpled like old plaster on the valley floor, extinguishing the Ahwanee, the fire trucks, fire fighters, and tiny crowds of onlookers in a blossoming cloud of dust and debris. Boulders the size of houses rolled through the forest and into the Merced River. New slopes of talus crept across the valley floor like an amoeba’s pseudopods, alive, churning, settling, striving for stability.

Betsy said nothing. Edward glanced apprehensively at the crack in the terrace nearby.

Minelli had given up trying to hold on to Inez. She fled from the rim, her breasts and arms and hips bouncing as she leaped up steps and over rails. He grinned at Edward and held out his hands helplessly, then descended to sit beside them.

“Some folks ain’t got it,” he said over the declining rumble of falling rocks. He looked admiringly at Betsy. “Guts,” he said. “True grit. Did you see those concentrics come apart? Just like in school. Hundreds of years in a second.”

“We aare chiiildren in youuur haaands…” The hymn singers were self-absorbed now, paying no attention to all that was going on around them. Entranced.

To each his own.

“That’s how the domes are formed, that kind of concentric jointing,” Minelli explained. “Water gets into the joints and freezes, expands, splits the rock away.”

Betsy ignored him, staring fixedly into the valley, her and still locked in Edward’s.

“The falls,” she said. “Yosemite Falls.”

The upper ribbon of white water had been blocked, leaving the lower falls to drain what had already descended. To the right of where the upper Yosemite had once been, the freestanding pillar of Lost Arrow leaned several hundred feet of its length slowly out from the cliff face, broke into sections in midfall, and tumbled down the brush- and tree-covered slopes below. More rock spilled from the northeastern granite walls above the valley, obscuring the floor with disintegrating boulders and roils of brown and white dust.

“Why not us?” Minelli said. “It’s all on that side.”

A superstitious something in Edward wanted to shut him up. Pretend as if we’re not here. Don’t let it know.

The rock beneath them quivered. The trees beyond the hymn singers swayed and groaned and splintered, limbs whipping back and forth. Edward heard the hideous crack of great leaves of granite shearing away beneath the point. Three thousand feet below — he didn’t need to look to know — Camp Curry and Curry Village were being buried under millions of tons of jagged rock. The hymn singers stopped and clutched each other to keep their balance.

“Time to get away,” Edward said to Betsy. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the twisted, malevolent overcast painted on the sky. The air seemed thinner; great waves of high and low pressure raced over the land, propelled by the minute shifting of continents.

Edward reached under her arms and dragged her away from the lowest terrace, up the steps. The game now was to stay alive as long as possible, to see as much as they could see — to experience the spectacle to their last breath, which could be at any moment.

Minelli crawled after them, face wrapped in a manic grin. “Can you believe this?” he said over and over.

The valley was alive with the echoes of falling sheets of granite. Edward could hardly hear his own words to Betsy as they stumbled and ran down the asphalt path, away from the rim.

A scant yard behind Minelli, the rock split. The terrace and all that was beneath leaned away, the gap widening with majestic slowness. Minelli scrambled frantically, his grin transformed into a rictus of terror.

To the east, like the great wise head of a dozing giant, Half Dome nodded a few degrees and tilted into a chasm opened in the floor of the valley. In arc-shaped wedges, it began to come apart. Liberty Cap and Mount Broderick, on the south side of the valley, leaned to the north, but stayed whole, rolling and sliding like giant pebbles into the mass of Half Dome’s settling fragments, diverting, and then finally shattering and sending fragments through miles of the valley. Somewhere in the obscurity of dust were the remnants of the Mist Trail, Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, and the Emerald Lake.