From ten thousand miles, the Earth seemed as natural and peaceful and beautiful as it had over thirty years before, when Arthur had first seen it in full-frame pictures from space. That view—a clouded jewel, opal and lapis marbled with rich whorls of cloud—had entranced him, made him more than ever before feel a part of some cosmic whole. It had changed his life.

The witnesses were subdued. Nobody said a word or made a loud sound. He had never experienced such rapt concentration in a crowd. Marty stood by his side, having let go of his hand, a boy barely four feet eleven inches tall, standing alone. How much does he understand?

Perhaps as much as I do.

Nothing compared with what they expected to see. Not the burning of an ancestral house, or the sinking of an ocean liner; not the bombing of a city, or the horror of mass graves in time of revolution or war. The crime that had been committed against humanity was virtually total. Except for them—the occupants of the arks, and the records saved for transport in the arks—the Earth would be no more.

He could not wrap his thoughts around the totality. He had to take separate losses and mull them over. They were highly personal losses, things he would regret; but his single mind was not the holographic mind of humanity.

Essential things would be destroyed that he had never known. Connections, evidences, histories as yet uncovered, irretrievable. All the arks could save was what humans had so far learned about themselves. Hereafter, they would be refugees with no hope of ever returning to a homeland, no hope of recovering the thread of the pasts they had lost.

They would be dependent on the kindness, or whatever their motivations might be, of strangers, of nonhuman intelligences that so far had shown little evidence of being willing to reveal themselves; benefactors as mysterious as their destroyers.

Lives. Billions of human beings, their existence always fragile, sharing mutual oblivion. There was no way Arthur could encompass that. He had to deal in abstractions.

The abstractions were enough to sear him. Backed by the realization that what he saw was real and immediate, his soul burned. He had had months to come to grips with these facts and implications; those months had not done to him what the vision of the Earth, whole and bright, was doing to him now.

No explanations came from the network. Later, when each of the witnesses had faced their private griefs, perhaps the details of the end would be made clear, and a planetary postmortem would be conducted.

Strange images flashed through his mind. Television commercials from his childhood, smiling women in Peter Pan collars with tightly coiffed hair, images of motherhood tending perfect families. Faces of soldiers dying in Vietnam. Presidents standing one by one before the television cameras, ending with Crockerman, a very sad image indeed.