As the meteor approached the continent, however, it was lower in the sky and slowing slightly, although its speed was still so great that observers on the ground saw the fireball flash past in the space of but a few seconds.
To the captain and Anne Marie, sitting atop the hill not many kilometers from Rio, it was an eerie, awesome sight nonetheless. The meteor approached from over the horizon, illuminating the eastern sky like the coming of dawn, slowly obliterating the stars, and overwhelming even the glow of the city lights. When it suddenly appeared, much lower on the horizon than they had expected, it was a miniature sun, a massive fireball that seemed several times the size of a full moon. Even the captain had to admit that he’d never in his incredibly long life seen anything quite like it before.
It came with blinding speed almost directly over them, and at just about that moment the captain, who’d gotten to his feet without even realizing it as he gaped at the sight, suddenly reeled, cried out, and dropped to his knees.
The sensation was momentary but powerful: a sudden loss of orientation and a pervasive, cold, desolate emptiness that struck to the core of his soul, as if someone had just walked across his grave . . .
At the same moment there was a series of thunderous explosions that echoed all around them and a brief but violent wind that came out of nowhere and struck with surprising force.
“Wha—what’s happening?” Tony cried. “What’s happening! Anne Marie!”
“I’m all right!” she shouted to him, although already the wind and explosions seemed to be dying down, vanishing into pale echoes as if they had never been there. “Oh, good lord! There are streamers—sparkling things, hundreds—no, thousands of them, falling all over. Reds, yellows, greens, golds, pure white-—incredible! Captain, can you—” For the first time she looked over and saw Solomon bent over double, looking agonized. “Captain! Are you all right?”
The captain gulped down several deep breaths. “Yes, yes! I’m all right. It was—strange. I’ve never felt anything like that before. Never. It’s fading now. Did you feel it?”
“Only the wind.”
He was getting some self-control back but was clearly still shaken. “That was just the fireball sucking up some of the air in its wake. It must have come almost directly over us. The explosions were sonic booms. It’s still going very fast, unless it’s already crashed by now.” He looked out at the spectacular fireworks display still raining down all around them. “Some of those are big! I think I can see smoke in the direction of the city!”
There was a sudden, jarring explosion very close by, an explosion so near that the ground trembled and Anne Marie’s wheelchair began to vibrate, almost tipping over. The captain again fell, this time from the tremors.
“What now? Earthquake?” Tony asked, frustrated that he could see nothing.
“I don’t think so,” the captain responded. “I think a big chunk came down pretty damned close to us.” He picked himself up off the ground and wiped off some dirt. “Everybody okay?”
“Yes—I think so,” Anne Marie responded. “Oh, my! This was quite the adventure, after all. I doubt if I will ever forget this. I’m so glad we came!”
The captain began looking around and immediately saw a reddish-orange glow from the direction of the road below—the road they’d used to get there.
“You two stay here and try to relax,” he told them. “I’m going to walk over and see just what hit and where.” He had visions of landslides that might possibly trap them atop the mountain, but he didn’t want to alarm his companions until he knew just what the situation was.
He was also still somewhat shaken by that terrible paralyzing sensation he’d had as the meteor had passed overhead. Nothing, but nothing, had ever felt like that before.
It had felt like death.
Not the warm, dark cessation of life he’d imagined but cold, terribly lonely, empty, corrupt—the cold of decomposition and the grave.
He reached the point where the road started down, but he didn’t have to walk far along it to discover what had hit and where. No wonder the earth had shaken! He couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t knocked them off the hilltop and toppled the car, for all the good the car was going to do now.
Below, near the point at which the dirt road met the main paved highway, was a large glowing object. There was a lot of steam and a hot, acrid smell as if the area had suddenly gone volcanic and melted rock and road. It was impossible to see much detail without going down quite a ways and it wasn’t terribly clear how much of the dirt road remained intact, but he didn’t dare leave his two companions to go down to check.
He started back toward them, reaching into his pocket and taking out a large cigar, which he stopped to light. He had refrained from smoking near Anne Marie, but this was the kind of situation that called for a good cigar. The hilltop was dark again, and all the debris made it a tricky walk, but he made it back to them without falling or twisting an ankle.
“We’ve got a real problem,” he told them straight out. “Our friend that just passed over left us a present right at the base of the hill, and it’s none too clear if we’re going to be able to get down very easily.”
“Oh, dear!” Anne Marie exclaimed. “What will we do, Captain?”
“There’s a good-sized meteor chunk that came in and hit right down there. That was the earthquake we felt. It’s still glowing hot—probably will be for days—and I’m not sure how much of that road is still there or whether there are any rock slides or other obstacles. The only thing we can do is try very carefully to make it down in the car. If it’s impossible, then we’ll have to go as far as we can, get out, and manage on our own. I’m pretty sure that if we can get down to the main road one way or another, people will be along fairly soon who might help. But the plain fact is, we have to get down there, since nobody knows we’re up here and neither of you is exactly in condition to climb down the side of this hill even if we had ropes and such to do it with.”
“I don’t like it,” Tony told him. “The whole road might be undermined, and there might well be rather narrow passages. Not only would that cause me obvious problems, but Anne Marie’s chair would never make it.”
“Couldn’t we build a signal fire or something from all this junk?” Anne Marie asked. “I mean, there are sure to be all sorts of folks out here sooner or later, right? If it’s big enough, possibly helicopters. You did say that this was once a helicopter landing pad, didn’t you?”
Solomon nodded. “The trouble is, I think this is only one of a lot of fragment strikes, and it’s pretty far out. I would expect people along the main road any time now, particularly others who came out here like us to get a better look, but in terms of the authorities and helicopters and the like—possibly sometime. The glow toward Rio has increased, I think, and I suspect that there are a number of fires and possibly worse.”
“Check the radio,” Tony suggested. “At least we’ll know where we stand.”
The captain nodded, went over to the minivan, and, after discovering he had to start the engine to power the radio, flicked it on.
There was mostly static.
“I think Jesus may have lost his power,” the captain said a bit sarcastically. The great statue that sat on the mountain that directly overlooked Rio was the symbol of the city, but that same mountain and two others nearby were where the transmitting towers for radio, television, and other telecommunications were located. If power was out up there, it wouldn’t matter what was going on below.
He slowly turned the dial, finally getting a low-powered broadcast heavy with static.
“.. . out in two-thirds of the city, and there are numerous fires from sparks and cinders all over. Because we have managed to keep our power and remain on the air, we will keep broadcasting information as we know it. Civil authorities have asked that no one attempt to use telephones and that they remain in their homes and remain calm. Fire brigades are out all over the city, and police are trying to free people trapped in buildings and cope with dozens of accidents as most of the traffic signals are out. A declaration of martial law is expected and may be in force now; we have no way of knowing from here . . .”
Solomon got out but left the radio on. “Sounds pretty bad. Martial law, fires, power outages, you name it. They didn’t expect this. Not knowing anybody in particular is up here, I seriously doubt if anyone’s going to be out this way for some time—maybe a day or two. Even if they knew we were here, I think we’d be a pretty damned low priority. We’ve got the remains of the little picnic I packed, but that’s it, and there doesn’t appear to be any water or other facilities up here. If you’re too nervous to make the attempt down, my next inclination would be to go myself and see if I could find help—but, again, that might take a very long time, and I really wouldn’t like leaving you two up here for an extended period.”
“Ordinarily I would agree on getting down, but I am afraid that Anne Marie might get stuck halfway and then what do we do?” Tony asked.
“This is one of those ‘there’s no good solution’ problems,” the captain replied. “Anne Marie, you said you had medicine you had to take religiously, and you’ve been fairly weak as it is. How much of an extra supply of that medication did you bring?”
“Oh, my! Yes, I see what you mean,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m afraid, dear, that he’s right—we have no real choice in this.”
Tony sighed. “I don’t like it, but all right. Let us get packed up.”
The captain helped, then, as they got settled in the van, he tried the radio again. One of the big stations at least had gotten back on the air, albeit with lower power than usual, and the details of what had happened in the city and beyond were soon clear.
Possibly hundreds of pieces from the meteor had come down, ranging from fingernail-size to a few as large as soccer balls. A number of homes and buildings had been hit; there was a crater in the center of the financial district about ten meters wide that had, among other things, severed the main electrical and phone cables to and from the city center; and many other fragments had been large enough and hot enough to touch off fires. A few, in poorer and run-down areas, had quickly become conflagrations. Although only two people were known to be dead and perhaps a dozen others had injuries serious enough to need hospitalization, the massive fires in the densely populated poor areas gave an unspoken but implicit promise of a much higher toll.
The swath cut by the shedding meteor was twenty to twenty-five kilometers wide, and reports of isolated rockfalls in other areas were still coming in. A large segment, larger than any that had struck the city, was seen to have fallen somewhere in the mountains beyond the city, but at the moment it wasn’t known where it had fallen or if it had caused any major damage.
The main body had landed, perhaps only seconds later, in the remote upper Amazon basin, still within the country and inside of one of the new native reserve areas designed to protect the rain forest and the habitat of primitive tribes who lived there. Early reports said that there was massive damage at the main site, with the forest knocked down and ablaze, like the aftermath of an atomic bomb. The Archbishop of Rio had announced a special mass of thanks and salvation for tomorrow, noting that if the impact had come sooner, along the coast, there would have been massive loss of life.
The announcer then paused to gather more information, and the station began playing Jobim’s Quiet Night and Quiet Stars . . .
The captain switched off the radio and drove slowly over to the road.
“Well, that big one in the mountain must have been the one that hit below,” Tony noted.
The captain frowned. “Maybe. But I can’t understand—if it was that big, and much smaller pieces caused so much damage, why we didn’t have a minibomb effect here as well.”
“That was quite a jolt when it hit,” Anne Marie pointed out.
“Exactly. The jolt, yes, but something that hot, hitting with that kind of force, should have done far more if it’s anywhere close, and I think it is. I’m beginning to have a very bad feeling about this.”
“What do you expect? Martian invaders?” Tony joked.
“No. Nothing like that.” He took a deep breath. “Well, here we go.”
Solomon was surprised at how far they managed to get before fallen rocks and other debris stopped them. They were actually at the lower turnout of the last switchback before the main road and could see down the steep kilometer or more to the paved road below even though they couldn’t reach it.
Anne Marie gasped at the sight on that main road. “What is it?” Tony pressed her.
“The meteor! Or at least the big piece of it! It’s huge! It’s stuck half in the road and half in the opposite hillside. It looks mostly buried in the hill and there’s a lot of bubbling and hissing around the edges, but you can see a big part of it! It’s glowing—a dull, almost golden yellow, and it looks like some huge gemstone, kind of like stained glass. Good heavens! I’d almost swear it was something artificial!”
The captain stared at it. Just my imagination? he wondered. Or is that huge flat area facing outward the shape I’m afraid it is?
He got out and surveyed the path, dully illuminated by the glow of the strange object. Surveying the scene, he went back to them and said, “I think I can angle the car so it’ll give us light from the headlights the first part of the way down, after which, if that thing keeps glowing, we won’t need any more light. It might be a tight fit, but I think we can get the wheelchair down, though we might have to lift it over at one or two places. Are you willing?”
“I think better down than back up at this point,” Anne Marie replied.
It was not an easy task, but it was manageable. At one point dirt and rock had covered much of the road, making it difficult to get the wheelchair around without going off the side, but the captain managed, then, bracing her on the other side, got Tony around as well. Several times the blind man stumbled, but he was game all the way, and in about thirty minutes they made it down to the road.
The meteor had taken out much of the paved area, and between its own extrusion and the landslides the impact had caused, it would clearly be some time before any vehicle could get past. Still, there was more than enough room for them to manage, if no more slides occurred, and once on the other side, they would at least be well positioned when the first cars driven by the curious or investigators made it to the scene.
“I’m surprised there aren’t a lot of people on both sides already here,” Anne Marie said. “I know we were hardly the only ones to come up this route.”