The First Lady half sobbed, half caught her breath. Crockerman stared at the displays with a sad grin.

"Now the western Pacific," Lehrman said. More white lines. "By the way, Hawaii has been heavily assaulted by tsunamis. The West Coast of North America is about twenty, thirty minutes away from major waves; I'd guess it's already been hit by waves from these areas." He pointed to stacks of white lines near Alaska and California. "The damage could be extensive. The energy released by all the explosions is enormous; weather patterns around the world will change. The Earth's heat budget ..." He shook his head. "But I doubt we'll be given much time to worry about it."

"It's a softening up?" Schwartz asked.

Lehrman shrugged. "Who can understand the design, or what this means? We're not dead yet, so it's a preliminary; that's all anybody knows. Seismic stations all over are reporting heavy anomalistic fault behavior."

"I don't think the bullets have collided yet," Crockerman said. "Irwin's hit the nail on the head. It's a softening up.”

Lehrman sat down at the large diamond-shaped table and held out his hands: your guess is as good as mine.

"I think we have maybe an hour, maybe less," the President said. "There's nothing we can do. Nothing we could have ever done."

Schwartz studied the Diamond Apple displays with a slight squint. They still conveyed no convincing reality. They were attractive abstractions. What did Hawaii look like now? What would San Francisco look like in a few minutes? Or New York?

"I'm sorry not everybody is here," Crockerman said. "I'd like to thank them."

"We're not evacuating . . . again?" Schwartz asked automatically.

Lehrman gave him a sharp, ironic look. "We don't have a lunar settlement, Irwin. The President, when he was a senator, was instrumental in getting those funds cut in 1990."

"My mistake," Crockerman said, his tone almost bantering. At that moment, had Schwartz had a pistol, he would have killed the man; his anger was a helpless, undirected passion that could just as easily leave him in tears as draw him into violence. The displays conveyed no reality; Crockerman, however, conveyed it all.

"We really are children," Schwartz said after the flush had gone out of his face and his hands had stopped trembling. "We never had a chance."

Crockerman looked around as the floor shook beneath their feet. "I'm almost anxious for the end," he said. "I hurt so bad inside."

The shaking became more violent.

The First Lady held the doorframe and then leaned on the table. Schwartz reached out to help her to a chair. Secret Service agents entered the room, struggling to stay on their feet, catching hold of the table edge. After Schwartz had seated the First Lady, he sat down again himself and gripped the wooden arms of the chair. The shaking was not dying away; it was getting worse.

"How long will it take, do you think?" Crockerman asked nobody in particular.