The white and blue limb of the Earth rose into view and the occupants of the cabin gave a collective gasp.

Still there. Still looks the same.

"Jesus," Reuben said. "Poppa, Momma, Jesus."

Danielle, Grant, Becky. Angkor Wat, Taj Mahal, Library of Congress. Grand Canyon. The house and the river. Steppes of central Asia. Cockroaches, elephants, Olduvai Gorge, New York City, Dublin, Beijing. The first woman I ever dated, Kate—Katherine. The bones of the dog who helped me come to grips with the world and become a man.

"That's the Earth, isn't it, Dad?" Marty asked quietly.

"That's it."

"It's still there. Maybe we can go back and nothing will happen."

Arthur found himself nodding. Maybe so.

The woman who had known about Singapore said, "They're still in the Earth. They're the last of the planet-eaters. They can't leave because we'll get them." Arthur glanced nervously at her, as if she were a dangerous sibyl; her face was pale and convulsed.

Chapter 73

73

"Rock of a-a-a-ges ..."

The singing had taken a slightly frantic tone, sharper, higher, more disturbing. The column of smoke from the Ahwanee had risen above the Royal Arches; the hotel was almost consumed, and sparks from the blaze threatened to ignite the surrounding woods. From their vantage, they watched park fire trucks spraying water on the flaming ruins.

Spend your last few minutes trying to save something, Edward thought. Not a bad way to go. He envied the fire fighters and park rangers. The fire took their minds away from the inevitable. Up on Glacier Point, people had nothing to do but think about what would happen—and sing very badly.

The rock beneath them shifted the merest fraction. Betsy returned from the rest room, sat firmly beside Edward on the lowest terrace, and placed her arm through his; they had not been separated for more than a few minutes the last hour. Still, he felt alone, and looking at her, sensed she felt alone as well.

"Do you hear it?" she asked.

"The grumbling?"

"Yes."

"I hear it."

He imagined the lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium, or whatever they were, meeting at the center; perhaps they had already met, minutes or even an hour before, and the expanding front of raging plasma had just begun to make its effects known on the Earth's mantle and thin crust.

In high school, Edward had once tried to draw a scale chart of the layers of a section of the Earth, with the inner and outer cores, mantle, and crust outlined in proportion. He had quickly found that the crust did not show up as more than the thinnest of pencil lines, even when he extended his drawing to an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper. Using his calculator to figure how large the drawing would have to be, he had learned that the floor of the school gymnasium might suffice to hold a drawing that gave the crust a line one third the width of his little finger.