Her scans also showed that a wide variety of radioactive elements had penetrated the whales’ flesh. The meat was not hot enough to cause immediate illness if she tried to extend Alvin’s virtually nonexistent food supply with it; but there was no escaping the fact that her readings were twenty points in the yellow. Doesn’t matter, she told herself. Dead by Labor Day, both of us. No need to worry about the long-term effects of radiation. She unholstered a blade and began cutting.

Jonathan came to a crest above the beach, paused, and looked out across more than ten kilometers of shallow dunes. The only recognizable feature on the horizon was the pyramid-shaped mound of the Oceanside landfill. It was no less than he had expected to see; but the sight was sobering.

The city of Long Beach was simply gone, all of it, as if no one had ever built it in the first place.

Condos with names like The Breakers, The Ocean Club, and Sea Point Towers—gaudy monuments to late-twentieth-century architecture—had disappeared without leaving a single brick behind.

The sand at Jonathan’s feet was warm and dry and strewn with little green slabs of Trinity Glass. Jonathan picked up a piece and held it up to the weak, post-apocalypse sun. The glass was filled with blobs of air and iron, which told him that a great wind had swept through this place, hotter than live steam, hotter than molten glass, hotter than iron emerging white from a furnace. As he dropped the glass, a light breeze brushed over his ears and blew the hair off his forehead before dying, and at the same moment his pad sounded two blasts. He lifted the pad and began a quick sonoscan of the ground. The Long Beach he had known was one of those exclusive preservationist communities, so overly civilized that one had to obtain a license even to fly a kite. Its streets had looked almost exactly as one would have found them about 1995: a gallery of antique cars and restored buildings ranging back through the architectural low point of the 1970s to the Spanish stucco and red tile mansions of the city’s “Godfather period.” Even the boardwalk and red brick streets had been painstakingly resurrected, and local ordinances had required the display of fake TV antennae and telephone poles decorated with dummy wires and transformers, as if this small part of America were trying to escape back to the glory days, before Mexico began protesting that its economy could no longer sustain the constant influx of illegal aliens sneaking south across the Rio Grande.

As he made his scan, Jonathan’s pad monitored Hollis broadcasting to space. She was giving their precise latitude and longitude, following that with the usual distress call.

“Come on, Hollis,” he muttered to himself. “Time to turn the disk over. That side stinks.”

He continued his scan of the ground, and after only a few quick passes locked onto something. About five meters beneath his feet he could see the outline of a concrete swimming pool. The tops of foundation pilings surrounded the basin, revealing that it had been located indoors on the ground level of a reasonably large apartment dwelling. His pad told him that the only oceanfront building matching this description was The Renaissance, and as he increased the scan strength he could see pilings running down more than fifteen meters below the pool. He could just begin to make out a pattern of broken floor tiles and sewage lines, and it made him ever so slightly happy that some small archeological traces of humanity still existed. He was reminded of an elderly mason who had come to an old apartment Jonathan was renting years ago, and had asked if he could inspect the bathroom, just to see if the tiles were still there. The man had installed them more than fifty years before, and was delighted to see how well his craftsmanship had endured.