The Earth’s surface extremely hot, atmosphere sloshing like water in a bowl. Most of humanity dead already, destroyed by earthquakes, horrendous atmospheric storms or floods. Soon the rock below would compress no more, and the Earth would—
“Jesus,” Reuben said behind them. Arthur glanced at him; the young man’s face expressed both fascination and horror.
The clouds clarified. They glimpsed through smeared atmospherics a muddy, churning mass, lit in places with the hellish light of magma welling up through fractures hundreds of miles wide. Continental and ocean-floor plates drove together at their edges, fusing into solids no more able to keep their shape and character than gases or liquids, rippling like fabric.
Nowhere could he see any of the works of humanity. Cities — if any still existed, which did not seem likely — would have been far too small. Most of Europe and Asia were on the other side of the globe, out of sight, their fate no different from what they saw happening to eastern Asia and the western United States and Australia. Indeed, these landmasses could no longer be distinguished; there were no oceans or land, only belts of translucent superheated steam and cooler cloud and tortured basins of mud, shot through with dull brown magma and, here and there, great white spots of plasma beginning to burrow out from the interior.
“Is it going to blow up?” Marty asked.
Arthur shook his head, unable to speak.
Despite the growing distance between the ark and Earth, the globe visibly expanded, but again with clockwork slowness.
Arthur checked his watch. They had been viewing for fifteen minutes; the time had passed in a flash.
Again the Earth took on the appearance of a jewel, but this time a great bloated fire opal, orange and brown and deep ruby red, shot through with spectral patches of brilliant green and white. The crust melted, turning into basaltic slag adrift in slowly spinning patches on a sea of brown and red. There were no discernible features but the colors. The Earth, dying, became an incomprehensible abstraction, horribly beautiful.
Already, with the appearance of long spirals of white and green, intensely bright, the final fate became obvious. The limb of the world no longer made a smooth curve; it had visible irregularities, broad low lumps distinct against the blackness. From these lumps, jets of vapor hundreds of miles high lanced through the turbid remnants of the atmosphere and cast pale gray fans into space.
Such volcanoes might have been seen in the early ages of the Earth’s coalescence, but not since. New chains of released fire and vapor emerged across the face of the distorted globe. Slowly, a spiraling snake of white plasma shot chunks from its interior coils outward, the projectiles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour but still falling back, being reabsorbed.
No single piece of the Earth’s crust had yet been flung out with a velocity equal to or greater than eighteen thousand miles per hour, orbital, velocity, much less escape velocity. But the trend was obvious.
Countless island-sized bolides pocked the face of the Earth with a churning effervescence. These bolides rose hundreds, even thousands of miles, then fell, scattering broad trajectories of smaller debris. At the limb, the increased altitude of these molten projectiles was apparent. Energy rapidly built sufficient to toss them into orbit, and even to blow them free from the bulk of the globe.
Home. Arthur connected suddenly with all that he saw; the abstraction took on solidity and meaning. The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves’ eyes in an infinite night-bound forest. He paraphrased what Harry had said on his tape:
There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves…
He was past tears now, past anything but a deep blunt suffocating pain. Home. Home.
Marty faced the panel with eyes wide and mouth open; almost the same expression Arthur had seen when his son watched Saturday morning cartoons on television, only slightly different: tighter, with a hint of puzzlement, eyes searching.
The Earth bloated horribly. Beneath the swelling crust and mantle, the spirals and fractures of white and green light widened into vast canals and highways running crazy random courses through a uniform dull red landscape. Huge bolides exited in long graceful curves, arcing thousands of miles — entire Earth radii — out in space, and not falling back to the surface, but tracing glowing orbits around the stricken planet.
Twenty-five minutes had passed. Arthur’s legs ached and he had drenched his clothes in sweat. The room filled with an awful animal stench, fear and grief and silent agony.
Virtually everyone he had ever known was dead, their bodies lost in the general apocalypse; every place he had ever been, all of his records and the records of his family, all the children Marty had grown up with. Everyone on the ark was cut adrift in nothingness. He could distinctly feel the separation, the sudden loss, as if he had always known the presence of humanity around him, a psychic connection that was no more.
The brilliant highways and canals of the revealed plasma energy sphere now stretched thousands of miles, vaulting the molten, vaporized material of the Earth outward in a rough ovoid, the long axis at right angles to the axis of rotation. The tips of the ovoid spun away huge globules of silica and nickel and iron.
Against the dominant light of the plasma, the twisted remains of mantle and compressed streamers of the core cast long shadows into near-Earth space through the expanding dusty cloud of vapor and smaller debris. The planet resembled a lantern in fog, almost unbearably bright. Inexorably, the ovoid of plasma pushed everything outward, attenuating, blasting, diminishing all that was left, scattering it before an irresistible wind of elementary particles and light.
Two hours. He glanced at his watch. The moon shined through the vapor haze, a quarter of a million miles distant and seemingly aloof. But tidal bulges would relax, and even though the moon’s shape had been frozen by ages of cooling, Arthur thought the relaxation would at the very least trigger violent moonquakes.
He turned his attention again to the dead Earth. The plasma glow had dimmed slightly. Distinct ethereal pinks and oranges and grayish blues gave it a pearly appearance, like a child’s plastic ball illuminated from within. The diameter of the plasma ovoid and the haze of debris had expanded to well over thirty thousand miles by now. The ovoid continued to lengthen, spreading the new belt of asteroids into the stubby beginnings of an arc.
The transparent panel became mercifully opaque.
As if released from puppet strings, fully half of the witnesses collapsed on the floor. Arthur hugged Francine and gripped Marty’s shoulder, unable to speak, then walked among his fellows, seeing what could be done to help them.
The copper-colored robot appeared at the end of the cabin and floated forward. Behind it came dozens more survivors, bearing trays and bowls of water, food, and medicines.
It is the Law.
The words echoed again and again through Arthur’s thoughts as he helped revive those who had fallen.
It is the Law.
Marty stayed by his side, kneeling with him as he elevated a young woman’s head and held a metal cup of water to her lips.
“Father,” the boy said, “where are we going now?”