The shifting of the spin axis caused oceans to slop across continents. Swathes of blue and green cold advancing hour by hour across the previously yellow and orange hot areas on the false-color infrared images told of miles-high cliffs of water bursting over the Appalachian barrier to descend upon Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, surging up into the funnel formed by Siberia and Alaska to spill over into the Arctic basin, and turning the southern Himalayas into an archipelago. With the surface charted simply by its temperature variations, the images quickly lost all resemblance to maps that were recognizable. In any case, it was already clear that those maps would hence be of interest only to future historians, geologists, and archaeologists. “Could anything survive that?” Vicki whispered amid the horrified silence that had enveloped the cabin for hours.
“Nothing could survive that,” Joe murmured. His voice was numbed.
“It happened before, not all that long ago,” Keene reminded them. “And some survived then. It may have been just a handful, scattered across a mountaintop here and there or a few places that the floods didn’t reach. But it was enough.”
“Go forth and multiply, and repopulate the Earth,” Reynolds recited softly.
“But could it really have been this bad?” Vicki persisted.
“They didn’t have the technology either,” Charlie said. “Some of those down there might pull through, even with all that.” Keene didn’t know. All he could do was look with the rest of them at the dark ball that Earth had become and know that in the cities disappearing under towering walls of foam in the darkness beneath, the forests and grasslands that had become carpets of ash, the exposed seabeds being consumed under spreading lava plains, the splitting mountains and sinking islands, humans and life of every kind were dying in billions. The things he had seen in the past week had hardened and wearied him to the degree of showing little external sign, even to this. Vivid though the pictures were that he created in his mind, nothing in his experience enabled him to relate to the the calamity he was witnessing. But inside, in his soul, he wept for the tragedies taking place everywhere, a million every minute, on the scale he was capable of grasping. He wept for all the Marvin Curtisses with stepdaughters who would never play their cellos to a public audience now; for the David Salios with pretty wives and young children who would never see Europe; the Wally Lomacks and their grandchildren; the Washington cab drivers and their wives who weren’t going to retire to Colorado; the Lieutenant Penalskis, Colonel Laceys, and General Ullmans who had stayed to carry through their duty; the Buffs and Lukes who had gone back to find their kinfolk.
And he mourned the passing of the culture that had emerged from squabbling European tribes to produce the cathedrals of Cologne and Rheims, the paintings of Michelangelo and the music of Bach, the calculus, the steam engine, the Boeing 747, the IBM PC, and yes, even Wall Street. Would visitors from another age return one day to take pictures of New York’s steel skeletons standing stark against a sandy desert, or to excavate the ruins of Tokyo and its seaport among some range of inland hills as others had the pyramids or the ziggurats of Nineveh?
The momentum of the two bodies’ turning embrace parted them, and Athena at last began withdrawing to find whatever future was destined for it among the other objects of the Solar System. As a macabre finale to its act, it recrossed the lunar orbit close enough to draw the Moon toward itself until the Moon started to break up. It receded with what had been Luna slowly transforming into a trail of debris, curling around to circle Athena like a triumphal garland. The bulk of the material could be seen plunging down in a torrent to be consumed into Athena’s incandescent surface. The residue would accompany Athena as a ring system, a trophy from its victory, which it would carry across the heavens as a taunting reminder for thousands of years to come.
54
The ellipse carried them out past what had been the Moon’s orbit, into regions of space that were cleaner. However, being intended for short missions, the shuttle was not equipped with solar panels or a long-life power source, and use of the sampling instruments and external imagers had to be limited. The craft had evidently sustained some damage during the lift up from the surface, for nothing could be picked up on radar. Neither could a signal be received from any surviving ship or other source that might be out there. This naturally raised the question of how they could be sure that any of the communications equipment was functioning properly—in particular, the beacon that was supposed to provide a signal for the Osiris. As time continued to drag by, the more sinister but obvious question raised itself of whether the Osiris’s failure to materialize might be due not to any malfunction of the shuttle’s equipment, but the fact that the Osiris was no longer out there at all.