There were local eruptions — that was undeniable. But when he looked at the ground speeding beneath him, he could see nothing to match the scale of his imaginings.

What was wrong?

Rebka and Perry had overlooked a fact known since the time of Newton: gravity is a body force. No known material can shield against it; every particle, no matter where it may be in the universe, feels the gravitational force of every other particle.

And so, whereas nuclear war confines its fury to the atmosphere, oceans, and top few tens of meters of a planet’s land surface, the tidal forces squeeze, pull, and twist every cubic centimeter of the world. They are distributed forces, felt from the top of the atmosphere to the innermost atom of the superheated, superpressured core.

Rebka examined the surface but saw little to suggest a coming Armageddon. His mistake was natural, and elementary. He should have been looking much deeper; and then he might have had his first inkling of the true nature of Summertide.

A wind of choking dust was screaming across the surface as the aircar came in to land. Rebka brought the car directly into that gale, relying on microwave sensors to warn of rocks big enough to cause trouble. The final landing was smooth enough, but there was an immediate problem. The search-and-rescue system told him that the distress beacon was right in front of him, less than thirty meters away. But the mass detector insisted that nothing the size of an aircar or a ship was closer than three hundred. Peering into the dust storm did not help. The world in front of the car ended with a veil of driving dust and sand, no more than a dozen paces beyond the car’s nose.

Rebka checked the SAR system again. No doubt about the location of the beacon. He gauged its line and distance from the door of the car. He forced himself to sit down and wait for five minutes, listening to the sandstorm as it screamed and buffeted at the car and hoping that the wind would drop. It blew on, as strongly as ever. Visibility was certainly not improving. Finally he pulled on goggles, respirator, and heat-resistant clothing, and eased open the door. At least the combination was a familiar one. Howling wind, superheated atmosphere, foul-tasting and near-poisonous air — just like home. He had grappled with all that in his childhood on Teufel.

He stepped outside.

The wind-driven sand was unbelievable, so fine-grained that it could find a way through the most minute of gaps in the suit. It blasted and caught at his body. He could taste powdery talc on his lips in the first few seconds, somehow creeping in through the respirator. Millions of tiny, scrabbling fingers touched him and tugged at his suit, each one eager to pull him away. His spirits dropped. This was worse than Teufel. Without the shelter of a car, how could anyone survive such conditions for even an hour? It was a side of Quake that Perry, in his preoccupation with volcanoes and earthquakes, had not warned about. But given enough atmospheric disturbance, interior activity of a planet was not necessary to make it inhospitable to life. Blown sand that would allow a person to neither breathe nor escape would do the trick nicely.

Rebka made sure that he had a return line attached firmly to the body of the aircar, then leaned into the wind and crept forward. The beacon finally appeared when it was less than four meters in front of him. No wonder the mass sensors had not registered it! It was tiny — a stand-alone unit and the smallest one he had ever seen. It measured no more than thirty centimeters square and a few centimeters thick, with a stubby antenna sticking up from its center. The solid cairn of stones on which it nestled stood at the top of a small rise in the ground. Someone had taken the trouble to make sure that, weak as it was, the beacon would be heard over the maximum possible range.

Someone. But who, and where? If they had left the beacon and headed for refuge on foot, their chances were grim. An unprotected human would not make a hundred meters. They would suffocate, unable to avoid that choking, driving wind.

But maybe they had recorded what they were doing. Every distress beacon carried a message cache in its base. If they had been gone just a few minutes…

Wishful thinking, Rebka told himself as he removed his glove and reached for the sliding plate at the bottom of the beacon. He had been receiving the distress signal for an hour. And who knew how long it had been sending out its cry for help before he heard it?

He put his hand in the narrow opening. As his fingertips touched the base, a gigantic bolt of pain shot up his hand, along his arm, and on through his whole body. His muscles convulsed and knotted, too quickly and tightly to permit a scream. He could not pull his hand free. He doubled up, helpless, over the distress beacon.

Neural convolver, his mind said in the moment before the next shock hit him, harder than the first. He could no longer draw breath. In the seconds before he became unconscious, Rebka’s mind filled with anger. Anger at the whole stupid assignment, anger at Quake — but most of all, anger at himself.

He had done something supremely dumb, and it was going to kill him. Atvar H’sial was dangerous, and at large on the surface of Quake. He had known that before he landed. And still he had blundered along like a child at a picnic, never bothering with the most elementary precautions…

But I was trying to help.

So what? His brain rejected that excuse as the jolting current twisted his body and scrambled his brains for a third and final time. You’ve said it often enough: people who are stupid enough to get themselves killed never help anybody…

And now, damn it, he would never know what Quake looked like at Summertide. The planet had won; he had lost…

The dust-filled wind screamed in triumph about his unconscious body.