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Bastard. He was waiting for someone to figure it out, to shout out the truth to the rest. Fire and doom --
"Shut the door!" someone bellowed.
"Time to go," I said softly.
"What's the hurry?"
The hurry? He might speak! But I couldn't say that...
Leslie put her hand over mine. "I know. I know. But we can't run away from it, can we?"
A fist closed hard on my heart. She'd known, and I hadn't noticed?
The door closed, leaving the Red Barn in reddish dusk. The man who had been buying drinks was gone.
"Oh, God. When did you figure it out?"
"Before you came over," she said. "But when I tried to check it out, it didn't work."
"Check it out?"
"I went out on the balcony and turned the telescope on Jupiter. Mars is below the horizon these nights. If the sun's gone nova, all the planets ought to be lit up like the moon, right?"
"Right. Damn." I should have thought of that myself. But Leslie was the stargazer. I knew some astrophysics, but I couldn't have found Jupiter to save my life.
"But Jupiter wasn't any brighter than usual. So then I didn't know what to think."
"But then --"' I felt hope dawning fiery hot. Then I remembered. "That star, just overhead. The one you stared at."
"Jupiter."
"All lit up like a fucking neon sign. Well, that tears it."
"Keep your voice down."
I had been keeping my voice down. But for a wild moment I wanted to stand up on a table and scream! Fire and doom -- What right had they to be ignorant?
Leslie's hand closed tight on mine. The urge passed. It left me shuddering.
"Let's get out of here. Let 'em think there's going to be a dawn."
"There is." Leslie laughed a bitter, barking laugh like nothing I'd ever heard from her. She walked out while I was reaching for my wallet -- and remembering that there was no need.
Poor Leslie. Finding Jupiter its normal self must have looked like a reprieve -- until the white spark flared to shining glory an hour and a half late. An hour and a half, for sunlight to reach Earth by way of Jupiter.
When I reached the door Leslie was half-ru
Then I noticed the shadows ahead of us. All along the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard: moon shadows, in horizontal patterns of dark and blue-white bands.
I caught her at the corner.
The moon was setting.
A setting moon always looks tremendous. Tonight it glared at us through the gap of sky beneath the freeway, terribly bright, casting an incredible complexity of lines and shadows. Even the unlighted crescent glowed pearly bright with earthshine.
Which told me all I wanted to know about what was happening on the lighted side of Earth.
And on the moon? The men of Apollo Nineteen must have died in the first few minutes of nova sunlight. Trapped out on a lunar plain, hiding perhaps behind a melting boulder... Or were they on the night side? I couldn't remember. Hell, they could outlive us all. I felt a stab of envy and hatred.
And pride. We'd put them there. We reached the moon before the nova came. A little longer, we'd have reached the stars.
The disc changed oddly as it set. A dome, a flying saucer, a lens, a line...
Gone.
Gone. Well, that was that. Now we could forget it; now we could walk around outside without being constantly reminded that something was wrong. Moonset had taken all the queer shadows out of the city.
But the clouds had an odd glow to them. As clouds glow after sunset, tonight the clouds shone livid white at their; western edges. And they streamed too quickly across the sky. As if they tried to run...
When I turned to Leslie, there were big tears rolling down her cheeks.
"Oh, damn." I took her arm. "Now stop it. Stop it."
"I can't. You know I can't stop crying once I get started."
"This wasn't what I had in mind. I thought we'd do things we've been putting off, things we like. It's our last chance. Is this the way you want to die, crying on a street corner?"
"I don't want to die at all!"
"Tough shit!"
"Thanks a lot." Her face was all red and twisted. Leslie was crying as a baby cries, without regard for dignity or appearance. I felt awful. I felt guilty, and I knew the nova wasn't my fault, and it made me angry.
"I don't want to die either!" I snarled at her. "You show me a way out and I'll take it. Where would we go? The South Pole? It'd just take longer. The moon must be molten all across its day side. Mars? When this is over Mars will be part of the sun, like the Earth. Alpha Centauri? The acceleration we'd need, we'd be spread across a wall like peanut butter and jelly --"
"Oh, shut up."
"Right."
"Hawaii. Stan, we could get to the airport in twenty minutes. We'd get two hours extra, going west! Two hours more before sunrise!"
She had something there. Two hours was worth any price! But I'd worked this out before, staring at the moon from my balcony. "No. We'd die sooner. Listen, love, we saw the moon go bright about midnight. That means California was at the back of the Earth when the sun went nova."
"Yes, that's right."
"Then we must be furthest from the shock wave."
She blinked. "I don't understand."
"Look at it this way. First the sun explodes. That heats the air and the oceans, all in a flash, all across the day side. The steam and superheated air expand fast. A flaming shock wave comes roaring over into the night side. It's closing on us right now. Like a noose. But it'll reach Hawaii first. Hawaii is two hours closer to the sunset line."
"Then we won't see the dawn. We won't live even that long."
"No."
"You explain things so well," she said bitterly. "A flaming shock wave. So graphic."
"Sorry. I've been thinking about it too much. Wondering what it will be like."
"Well, stop it." She came to me her face in my shoulder. She cried quietly. I held her with one arm and used the other to rub her neck, and I watched the streaming clouds, and I didn't think about what it would be like.
Didn't think about the ring of fire closing on us.
It was the wrong picture anyway.
I thought of how the oceans had boiled on the day side, so that the shock wave had been mostly steam to start with. I thought of the millions of square miles of ocean it had to cross. It would be cooler and wetter when it reached us. And the Earth's rotation would spin it like the whirlpool in a bathtub.
Two counterrotating hurricanes of live steam, one north, one south. That was how it would come. We were lucky. California would be near the eye of the northern one.
A hurricane wind of live steam. It would pick a man up and cook him in the air, strip the steamed flesh from him and cast him aside. It was going to hurt like hell.
We would never see the sunrise. In a way that was a pity. It would be spectacular.
Thick parallel streamers of clouds were drifting across the stars, too fast, their bellies white by city light. Jupiter dimmed, then went out. Could it be starting already? Heat lightning jumped --
"Aurora," I said.
"What?"
"There's a shock wave from the sun, too. There should be an aurora like nothing anybody's ever seen before."
Leslie laughed suddenly, jarringly. "It seems so strange, standing on a street corner talking like this! Stan, are we dreaming it?"
"We could pretend --"
"No. Most of the human race must be dead already."
"Yah."
"And there's nowhere to go."
"Damn it, you figured that out long ago, all by yourself. Why bring it up now?"
"You could have let me sleep," she said bitterly. "I was dropping off to sleep when you whispered in my ear. "
I didn't answer. It was true.