Hollis looked up from her pad, and Jonathan’s calm brown eyes stared into hers as he said, “Man plans, God laughs.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” she replied. “Man had his place, as does every tier in the hierarchies; and it was all his, for a while. Man just didn’t look after his place very well, that’s all.”

He smiled at her and asked, “Is that what happened?”

The Sun was almost directly overhead, trying to burn through the cloud cover. There was still a slight drizzle, but from where Wayville and Hollis stood, atop Alvin’s conning tower, they could look six kilometers in every direction to the edges of the crater. Twelve kilometers in diameter, one kilometer deep. The numbers rolled easily off the tongue, but it was necessary to sail the new bay to appreciate its immensity. Words and numbers would not do.

After they got used to the size of it, they noticed the silence. Except for the gentle lapping of water against Alvin’s hull and the faint hiss of millions of little gas bubbles venting to the surface, Manhattan Bay was deathly silent. One of the world’s last authentic cities had thrived here, but today there were no reassuring murmurs of crowds, no aircraft engines or police sirens, and no signs that such sounds had ever existed.

For several minutes, Jonathan and Hollis stood motionless on the tower, looking at distant sheets of black rain and listening for peals of thunder that never came. Finally, Hollis activated her pad and began sending up her usual distress call—and for the first time she got an answer.

Something resembling a water balloon splattered down out of nowhere, striking hard against the stern’s smoothly curving surface, spreading there, and hardening instantly. Hollis barely had time to notice that the balloon had trailed a thread before a second balloon hit. And another. And another. One struck only a meter from her face, and she was momentarily torn between curiosity and the urge to jump overboard. Then she reached out and touched the thread, not knowing what to expect, but knowing that it now anchored Alvin to something above the cloud cover—or maybe even beyond the planet.

It was as taut as well-tuned piano wire, and climbed higher than she could see, as in the legend of Mohammed’s rope to heaven. It sent a vibrationthrough her fingers, as if something were alive at the other end, plucking the string with cyclopean fingers.

And then a voice resonated from it and from all the strings anchored to Alvin’s hull. Hollis jumped back and heard the strings say in an angelic tenor, clear and bright and in the king’s English, “Go inside your ship and seal the hatch at once! You have thirty seconds. At the end of that time you must be lying on the floor, on your backs, waiting.”

Hopeful as much as astonished, Jonathan tried to convince himself, as he scrambled down behind Hollis, that this was all a new variety of emergency rescue equipment, and that a ship manned by their colleagues was waiting for them at the other end. He hoped so, but he didn’t really believe it.