"My God. That son of a bitch is, what, ten blocks long?" Henry, for the first time, felt his disease. Like a living thing, it crept into his intestines and his lungs and curled around his spine. He found it hard to breathe.

"He says it's the trigger. If it lands, it's lights out everywhere. Ice age, famine, you name it."

"When?"

"He doesn't know. Depends on what happens to it as it passes through the atmosphere."

"Worst-case scenario?"

"Could be a couple of days."

Henry wiped perspiration from his brow and dug through the papers on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. "NASA says no immediate threat." His stomach felt as if it were wrapped in steel bands. "This Feinberg, is he-?"

"Our people think he's the best there is."

"Okay. Well, we're not going to sit here and take it. We'll nuke the son of a bitch." He tapped his finger on the NASA document. "It says here, closest approach at eight forty-seven. We'll take it out this morning and be done with it."

"I agree, Henry."

"Have NASA check Feinberg's numbers. See if they come up with the same results. Meantime, get Wilson on the line." Wilson was the air force chief of staff. "If NASA concurs with Feinberg, we'll do it."

Kerr violated his usual procedure by making a couple of quick calls while Henry waited, setting the process in motion. Then he turned again to the president. "There's something else we need to talk about, Henry. The District is vulnerable. I think we need to move inland ourselves. Just in case. I've taken the liberty of setting up an alternate command center at Peterson AFB."

Henry wanted to laugh, but his throat was dry. "Peterson? You want me to go to Colorado and sit on a mountain?"

"Peterson's not on a mountain, Henry."

"People hear Colorado, they think mountains. How's it going to look if the president, who told everybody to stay home, don't worry about the waves, everything's under control-if the goddam president clears out and heads for the mountains?"

"People are going to be too busy to think about how it looks, Henry. Afterward, they'll be glad the government still has a head."

"Like hell they will. Not this head."

"Henry, we've got aircraft out there, and satellites, more spotters than we know what to do with, but the waves are hard to see. Until they get close. They're coming, some of them, at three hundred miles an hour." His eyes got round and hard. "You've got a lot of people working with you, Henry. If you want to expose yourself, it's one thing, but you have your staff to think about."

And Emily. But Emily had recognized the dilemma, had refused to leave when he'd suggested it earlier that evening.

The president could hear voices outside. "Al," he said, "the country's hanging by a thread tonight. If we've got any nonessential people left here, get them out. That includes the agents. But I just don't have time to be running around the country. The operations team is mostly military. Their job's here. With me. We stay."

"This is Sidney Cain reporting from London." (His voice sounds unsteady.) "You're looking at the old financial district from a point close to where Waterloo Bridge used to be. Eyewitnesses say the crest of the wave was higher than Charing Cross Station. The downtown area is currently under about ten feet of water. Casualties are believed to number upward of a hundred thousand. And that may be a very conservative estimate. Emergency teams have begun to arrive, but they are going to have a very difficult time.

"Many-" (Voice breaks momentarily.) "Many of the landmarks have been destroyed. St. Paul's, as you can see, has collapsed. The roof is gone from the House of Parliament. The bridges are all down. Nelson seems to have survived. And Cleopatra's Needle. But not much else." (Another pause.) "Boats and supplies are already coming in from all over the British Isles. We've heard reports of a French flotilla en route across the Channel." (Struggles to say more. Gives up.) "Back to you, Clyde." Micro Flight Deck. 3:22 A.M.

Evelyn had insisted on staying with her. Saber had been too numb to object. They'd sat silently for a time and then begun to talk. About how she felt, and later about Tony, and Saber's ambitions, and finally about life support.

There was still a lot of rock out there. Saber reacted automatically to the occasional warnings on the scopes, shutting down the engine when necessary, changing the angle of propulsion, doing a creditably good job of steering clear of hazards. Of course, it was getting easier. The outer edge of the blast had blown past them so quickly that it had been sheer luck they'd survived. Now the debris was moving far more slowly relative to the bus. The result was that a human pilot could hope to react in a timely fashion.

Whenever she had to accelerate, Tony's body fell aft, out of sight, but after they'd been running without thrust for a while he'd drift back, as if he were trying to stay close to the flight deck. To her.

It was eerie, and she was grateful for Evelyn's presence.

Tony's death was hard to accept. He'd been endlessly competent, the man who believed he could do anything. A wasteland had opened inside her. She had not realized until she'd seen him out there, trailing at the end of the tether, how much she needed his support.

Now she was left in a bus with its life support shut off, no hope of rescue, and no way to repair the damage. There was one piece of good news: She had her communications back with Skyport. She'd described her situation, described it a second time for a supervisor.

They insisted she check the flight deck storage cabinets on the possibility there'd be an extra suit. When there was none, they told her they would stay with her and that their best people were working on a solution. She knew what that meant.

"No chance of a rescue mission?" asked Evelyn.

She shook her head. "No way anybody can reach us in time to do any good. Fact is, they'd be hard-pressed to get to us before we achieve Earth-orbit."

"When'll that be?"

"About twelve hours."

"We'll be breathing vacuum long before then," Evelyn said. "We need an idea."

Saber had never stopped trying to devise one. And she kept coming back to the moment when Tony had looked through the puncture into C deck and seen one of Bigfoot's plastic bags. "We might have a long shot," she said. Micro Passenger Cabin. 3:29 A.M.

The mood in the passenger cabin had become bleak. There had been talk of trying to go below without a p-suit, of using one of the air tanks and just gutting it out, of ripping off the hatch and recovering a suit from the lower deck and getting back with it. How long would all that take?

Five minutes? Ten? Surely, one of them could stand anything for five minutes.

Depends how long it takes to get the hatch open.

And there was the roadblock: getting past the hatch. But they really didn't have much choice except to try it. Either try it, or just get ready to open the airlock in a little while and accept death gracefully.

Charlie was easily the most physically endowed of the persons on board, so he agreed to try, thinking that if no solution was possible he'd just as soon get it over. The happy camaraderie of the dinner party now seemed light-years away.

So it happened that when Evelyn and Saber climbed down the ladder from the flight deck, they found Charlie, with his oxygen tank shoved into his belt, standing at the airlock.

"You have the right idea," said Saber. She was carrying a rumpled gray jumpsuit. "But you'll freeze pretty quick."