"No, but we're worried about it, and that gives me nightmares, and makes your mommy shiver."

Francine closed her eyes in an agony of maternal empathy.

"Everybody's ascared," Marty declared. "Not just me. Everybody."

"That's right," Arthur said. He rocked Francine gently. She relaxed her wrinkled brows but kept her eyes closed. Her shaking had slowed to an occasional shudder. Marty came from his bed to theirs and wrapped his arms around Francine, placing his cheek against her shoulder.

"It's all right, Mom," he said.

"It's all right to be afraid," Arthur said to nobody in particular, staring at the flowered wallpaper illuminated by a small night-light pointing the way to the bathroom.

They were in a bed-and-breakfast inn a few miles south of Portland.

The network was not active.

He had been set on his course, given his instructions.

I could use a little sympathy, too.

But none was offered.

PERSPECTIVE

Excerpt from New Scientist,

March 25, 1997:

The emergence of a new and radically altered Venus from behind the sun has given planetary geologists many things to ponder. It was supposed that the impact of a block of ice two hundred kilometers in diameter would cause enormous seismic disruption, but there is no sign of that. Some, in fact—connecting the impact with events on Earth—have theorized that the block was artificially "calved" into many smaller chunks, distributing the impact more evenly around the solar system's second planet.

What we now see is a naked Venus, her atmosphere transformed into a cloak of transparent, superheated steam. Surface features thus revealed are little different from what we had expected from the evidence of past planetary probe radar scans.

Planetologist Ure Heisinck of Gòttingen University believes that the atmosphere may now have a built-in heat-transfer mechanism that will allow it to cool; that eventually the steam will condense and the resulting opaque white clouds will reflect more of the sun's heat into space than they will absorb. More cooling will occur, and eventually rain will fall, which will turn again into steam on the planet's surface. The steam will condense in the upper atmosphere, conveying heat back into space. In a few centuries, Earthlike conditions may prevail . . .

LACRIMOSA DIES ILLA!

LACRIMOSA DIES ILLA!

60

Smoky haze hung high over the valley from fires in the east: Idaho, Arizona, Utah. The morning sun glowered bright orange through the pall, casting all Yosemite in a dreamy shadow-light the color of Apocalypse.

Edward walked past the general store and saw Minelli sitting in the open doorway of his car in the parking lot, listening to the radio with one leg drawn up on the other knee, picking mud out of his boot tread with a twig.

"What's the word?" Edward asked, leaning his walking stick on the car's bumper.

"Nothing close to us yet," Minelli answered. "Fires to the south, spreading south but not north, and fires to the east about three, four hundred miles."

"Anything else?"