He lay down near one of the forward ports, guessing from the instructions what was coming next, and was grateful that Alvin had once been towed by a Valkyrie to Jupiter’s moon Europa, where a crew of dolphins and humans had camped under the ice fields and explored whole new oceans. Alvin was thus already adapted to space travel, and Jonathan took great comfort in the fact that the portholes, which on most submersibles were designed only to keep pressure from getting in, would not blow out into the vacuum of space.

He heard a series of rising notes communicating through the tethers into Alvin’s hull, coming closer and faster and louder as he listened, sounding to him as if the hull or the tethers or some combination of both might break under the mounting strain; but the initial shock simply hoisted Alvin out of the water, to dangle motionless for a moment, its sides dripping. Then, as if propelled by the snapping of a giant rubber band, the ship sped toward the Sun.

Inside, Jonathan was pressed face down against a porthole, through which his field of vision expanded enormously. He thought he could barely make out the Rockaways and Sandy Hook before the ship passed through a veil of brownish-yellow dust into brilliant white sunshine, revealing to him the rim of a cloud-shrouded Earth, through which no mountain ranges or foreign shores were visible.

Looking, for the very last time, in the direction of Manhattan, he remembered something he had read about the last people to flee Thera, routed by the volcanic upheaval that gave rise to the legend of Atlantis. And he realized that the grave and reverent feelings that passed through him were unique. No humans except the Therans of the ancient Aegean could possibly have understood. He and Hollis were leaving Earth, with no hope of ever returning. And now that the last people had gone, their cities and nations, their world, would have no names.

And the sky around them deepened from dirty blue to violet, and at last to the eternal darkness of space. Like a child’s telephone line made from cups and string, the tethers continued to transmit sounds through Alvin’s hull. Jonathan heard something race down toward him and stop with a bang. Seconds later, there was a roar of retrothrust and objects in the cabin began floating up. He tried to grab a handhold but could find none, and was on the verge of panic when the roar grew louder and the ceiling became the floor.

“Who would have imagined that?” said Hollis.

“Sticky bombs and slingshots with retrorockets!” She was on the verge of laughter.

“Space!” Jonathan cried. “Why did it have to be space?” he asked as he climbed back up to the portholes, “up” now being the floor of the cabin. The inverted point of view made him queasy; but he found it far, far preferable to weightlessness.

One of Hollis’s whale meat bundles had struck the ports, smearing them with grease. He rubbed the nearest port clean with a shirt sleeve while Hollis stood anxiously on the ceiling.