Nowhere could he see any of the works of humanity. Cities—if any still existed, which did not seem likely— would have been far too small. Most of Europe and Asia were on the other side of the globe, out of sight, their fate no different from what they saw happening to eastern Asia and the western United States and Australia. Indeed, these landmasses could no longer be distinguished; there were no oceans or land, only belts of translucent superheated steam and cooler cloud and tortured basins of mud, shot through with dull brown magma and, here and there, great white spots of plasma beginning to burrow out from the interior.

"Is it going to blow up?" Marty asked.

Arthur shook his head, unable to speak.

Despite the growing distance between the ark and Earth, the globe visibly expanded, but again with clockwork slowness.

Arthur checked his watch. They had been viewing for fifteen minutes; the time had passed in a flash.

Again the Earth took on the appearance of a jewel, but this time a great bloated fire opal, orange and brown and deep ruby red, shot through with spectral patches of brilliant green and white. The crust melted, turning into basaltic slag adrift in slowly spinning patches on a sea of brown and red. There were no discernible features but the colors. The Earth, dying, became an incomprehensible abstraction, horribly beautiful.

Already, with the appearance of long spirals of white and green, intensely bright, the final fate became obvious. The limb of the world no longer made a smooth curve; it had visible irregularities, broad low lumps distinct against the blackness. From these lumps, jets of vapor hundreds of miles high lanced through the turbid remnants of the atmosphere and cast pale gray fans into space.

Such volcanoes might have been seen in the early ages of the Earth's coalescence, but not since. New chains of released fire and vapor emerged across the face of the distorted globe. Slowly, a spiraling snake of white plasma shot chunks from its interior coils outward, the projectiles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour but still falling back, being reabsorbed.

No single piece of the Earth's crust had yet been flung out with a velocity equal to or greater than eighteen thousand miles per hour, orbital velocity, much less escape velocity. But the trend was obvious.

Countless island-sized bolides pocked the face of the Earth with a churning effervescence. These bolides rose hundreds, even thousands of miles, then fell, scattering broad trajectories of smaller debris. At the limb, the increased altitude of these molten projectiles was apparent. Energy rapidly built sufficient to toss them into orbit, and even to blow them free from the bulk of the globe.