The 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar. He had never worked there, but he had toured the historic site often enough. The 600-inch at Mauna Kea. His dormitory room at Cal Tech. The face of the first woman he had ever made love to, that first year in university. Professors lecturing. His joy on discovering the properties of a Mòbius strip; he had been thirteen at the time. Equal joys on grasping the concepts of limits in calculus, and reading the first articles on black holes in the late 1960s.

Harry. Always Harry.

The first time he had seen Francine, in a skimpy black one-piece swimsuit, as voluptuous as a goddess from the sea, with long wet black hair, the backs of her legs and her inner thighs rough with damp sand, running to take a towel from her friend and collapsing on her back with a laugh not five yards from where Arthur sat. Not all is lost.

Marty touched his arm. "Dad, what's that?"

The globe did not seem noticeably different. But Marty pointed, and others among the witnesses were murmuring, pointing.

Over the Pacific, a silver-white mass grew like mold in a petri dish. Over the western United States and what they could see of Australia, similar blossoms of condensing moisture expanded.

Within minutes, the Earth blanketed itself in an impenetrable blanket of white and gray. Waves passed through the mass, ripples as visible as those in a pond, but moving with clockwork slowness. Above the north pole, frantic curtains of light played, guttering and re-forming like lines of candles in a breeze. They were aurorae. Something was wreaking havoc with Earth's interior dynamo.

Arthur pictured the explosion expanding through the superhot, highly radioactive inner core to the outer core, where the Earth's magnetic field was born. The dense molten material compressing even more highly on the edge of the expanding blast. Mechanical shock waves shooting out to the crust, shifting the ocean basins— already weakened by the chains of thermonuclear explosions—and shifting the continents, up to ten times thicker than the ocean basins, buckling them all, raising them a few hundred feet, or a few miles. Oceans receding, spilling out over the continents . . . All now hidden behind the masses of clouds.

The Earth's surface extremely hot, atmosphere sloshing like water in a bowl. Most of humanity dead already, destroyed by earthquakes, horrendous atmospheric storms or floods. Soon the rock below would compress no more, and the Earth would—

"Jesus," Reuben said behind them. Arthur glanced at him; the young man's face expressed both fascination and horror.

The clouds clarified. They glimpsed through smeared atmospherics a muddy, churning mass, fit in places with the hellish light of magma welling up through fractures hundreds of miles wide. Continental and ocean-floor plates drove together at their edges, fusing into solids no more able to keep their shape and character than gases or liquids, rippling like fabric.