Home. Arthur connected suddenly with all that he saw; the abstraction took on solidity and meaning. The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves' eyes in an infinite night-bound forest. He paraphrased what Harry had said on his tape:

There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves . . .

He was past tears now, past anything but a deep blunt suffocating pain. Home. Home.

Marty faced the panel with eyes wide and mouth open; almost the same expression Arthur had seen when his son watched Saturday morning cartoons on television, only slightly different: tighter, with a hint of puzzlement, eyes searching.

The Earth bloated horribly. Beneath the swelling crust and mantle, the spirals and fractures of white and green light widened into vast canals and highways running crazy random courses through a uniform dull red landscape. Huge bolides exited in long graceful curves, arcing thousands of miles—entire Earth radii—out in space, and not failing back to the surface, but tracing glowing orbits around the stricken planet.

Twenty-five minutes had passed. Arthur's legs ached and he had drenched his clothes in sweat. The room filled with an awful animal stench, fear and grief and silent agony.

Virtually everyone he had ever known was dead, their bodies lost in the general apocalypse; every place he had ever been, all of his records and the records of his family, all the children Marty had grown up with. Everyone on the ark was cut adrift in nothingness. He could distinctly feel the separation, the sudden loss, as if he had always known the presence of humanity around him, a psychic connection that was no more.

The brilliant highways and canals of the revealed plasma energy sphere now stretched thousands of miles, vaulting the molten, vaporized material of the Earth outward in a rough ovoid, the long axis at right angles to the axis of rotation. The tips of the ovoid spun away huge globules of silica and nickel and iron.

Against the dominant light of the plasma, the twisted remains of mantle and compressed streamers of the core cast long shadows into near-Earth space through the expanding dusty cloud of vapor and smaller debris. The planet resembled a lantern in fog, almost unbearably bright. Inexorably, the ovoid of plasma pushed everything outward, attenuating, blasting, diminishing all that was left, scattering it before an irresistible wind of elementary particles and light.

Two hours. He glanced at his watch. The moon shined through the vapor haze, a quarter of a million miles distant and seemingly aloof. But tidal bulges would relax; and even though the moon's shape had been frozen by ages of cooling, Arthur thought the relaxation would at the very least trigger violent moonquakes.