Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 17,300 words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 1: The End of the Beginning

Part 2: Judgment Day

Chapter 2: Stars Get In Your Eyes
Dateline: 2 a.m. EDT (6 a.m. GMT), July 16, 2022

A skilled astronomical observer might have been able to catch sight of the approaching asteroid as
much as 54 hours or so before impact. But at 1.5 million miles from the Earth, from the planet’s surface it
would appear to be nothing more than a barely noticeable speck of light in the night sky – if that. If you
didn’t know what you were looking for, or that there was anything to be looked for, assuming you could see
it (that is, if your view of the stars wasn’t cut down to nearly nothing by smog, light pollution, etc.), you
wouldn’t give it a second glance.
Not until an hour or so before impact would such an observer notice anything unusual. By then, at
thirty thousand miles’ distance, the asteroid’s shape would be just barely discernible, little more than just a
point of light.
Just half an hour later, only thirty minutes before impact, the asteroid, just fifteen thousand miles from
its target, is the brightest object in the night sky, apart from the Moon, just past full, brighter even than
Venus. Even if it the Sun had already arisen there on America’s east coast, the asteroid would still be
visible to ground observers.
Now, six minutes before impact – still some twenty-seven hundred miles away – the asteroid’s
brightness increases to thirty times than that of Venus, its apparent width a tenth that of the Moon. And as
the asteroid begins its final plunge toward the Earth below, within four minutes its apparent brightness
increases almost ninefold; two minutes before zero hour, zero minute, it is 250 times brighter than Venus,
its apparent diameter a quarter of the Moon’s.
 Just eight seconds from impact, the asteroid hits atmosphere – and for the first time, it begins to shine
by its own light as well as by reflection from the Moon and Sun. For a few bare seconds before impact, it
is the brightest object in the sky. Observers three hundred miles away see a fireball bright as the Sun.
Observers thirty miles away witness a brief aerial light show a hundred times brighter than the Sun.
Coming in at an angle of 45° to the surface of the Atlantic and a speed of forty thousand miles per hour
(having been accelerated to that ferocious speed by Earth’s gravity), the asteroid’s surface is hotter than
the surface of the Sun, nearly 11,000° Fahrenheit.
But that isn’t the main source of its light. Most of that light is generated by the trillions of air
molecules through which it passes on its way through the atmosphere and into the ocean. Through
friction, some of the vast kinetic energy of the asteroid heats the air that surrounds it to a hellish 45,000-
55,000° Fahrenheit.
If our hypothetical observer is watching from directly above, he might see the dark mass, the gibbous
Moon painting it yellowish-silver, streaking through the atmosphere, a magnum bullet shot at the Earth by
a cosmic assassin. He might see it - if he doesn’t blink at the wrong moment. At 20 miles per second, a
bare instant after the lump of nickel-iron encounters the top of Earth's atmosphere, it has gone most of the
way to the planet’s surface, its trajectory traced by a line of blindingly bright white fire, the calling-card of
atmospheric gases stripped of all their electrons from the heat of its passage, furiously racing to recombine
with those electrons and anything else handy that can reclothe their naked electronic shells.
A nano-instant later, it slams into the Atlantic, not far off the coasts of Maine and Nova Scotia, just
south of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. A pico-instant more, slowed not at all by the thin skin of ocean
water in its path, it plows into the place where the continental shelf off the coast of Maine meets the
Atlantic Abyssal Plain at an angle of about 45° and a mile below sea-level. After carving out a tunnel
some 44 miles long through Mesozoic sediments in its frantic passage through the basaltic bedrock of the
continent, its ferocious kinetic energy considerably damped by the rock through which it burrows, it finally
comes to a halt roughly two miles below sea level. Its passage through the rock has turned everything
around it to incandescent magma, but, embedded deep inside a pocket of slowly-cooling magma, its
interior is still cold as the bottom of the Styx, not many degrees above absolute zero, from its long journey
through the frigid deeps of space. In its wake, a vast fan of colloidally fine particles of molten material has
been cast back along the line of its passage by the force of impact, and a gigantic shockwave has been
generated by it downward, upward, and sideways.
Hurtling out of the sky, it has taken less than two seconds for it to pass through the atmosphere to its
impact site on the sea-floor. Then, thanks to the peculiar angle (45°) and site of impact (the join of the
continental shelf’s foot and the Atlantic Abyssal Plain, some half a mile below the horizontal plane that
includes the point of impact, itself around a mile below sea-level), it takes another handful of seconds for
it to penetrate the Earth’s crust to a depth of roughly two miles below sea level. If our hypothetical
observer had looked away at the wrong moment, he’d have missed it all.
Though at the moment of impact the asteroid’s outer layers were white-hot and beginning to vaporize,
its core was still ice-cold from the stygian abyss of space. But that held true for only bare nanoseconds, no
more. Now, subliming in a flash into an incandescent plasma too hot to look upon even miles away without
being instantly blinded, at supersonic speed the remains of the asteroid shoot back out the tunnel it has
just carved for itself in the seafloor like bullets from the barrel of a rifle, exiting the tunnel, rising back up
through the water to the ocean’s surface and there joining the water vapor and particles of sea-floor that
were liberated by the impact. Great rings of white-hot vapor and blazing nitrogen have already begun to
rise from the from the ocean’s surface toward the Moon.
At the moment of impact, as much as 10% of the asteroid’s kinetic energy, around 160 billion joules,
equivalent to a forty-megaton thermonuclear explosion, was transferred to the surrounding ocean in the
form of heat and pressure waves. Cubic miles of water, mingling with the blowback from the impact, were
flash-boiled by the heat of impact, instantly subliming into incandescent rings of white-hot steam,
exploding skyward at a velocity of several thousand miles per hour, rapidly penetrating the stratosphere.
Now, around the impact site, a vast wave of ocean water, 10-15 miles high, its base glowing white-hot with
the heat of impact, rears up, far out of the ocean, driven by the shockwave’s gigantic fist. And, like the
high-speed, incandescent toroids of plasma rising from the site, the upper part of that wave quickly
penetrates the stratosphere, heading for outer space.
Moving outward at better than a thousand miles per hour, the wave gradually begins to shrink. By the
time it is five hundred miles from the impact site, it is only a hundred feet high or less. – But that doesn’t
matter at all to those in its way, including countless fishermen, naval officers and enlisted men, and others
whose misfortune it is to be anywhere within hundreds of miles of the strike on either land or sea.

2:00 a.m. EDT, eastern Maine:

A little south of Flagstaff Lake, at the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain, north of Rangely and the
easternmost of the Richardson Lakes, Bill Preis and Pete Martin, two graduate students in paleontology
attending the University of Southern Maine at Portland, sat, winded, on a rock shelf, hoisting brewskis.
Two days ago, they had made a bar-bet with another student that they could climb to the mountain’s
summit in under a day and consume a six-pack each before coming down. They both regretted it now. It
was cold up here, and they were winded and beginning to get stiff and sore – but honor and a flat of kegs
were at stake! So one of them got to his feet and, using his brand-new Minolta loaded with film good for
any light-level except outdoor pitch-dark, took photographs to prove that they actually made Sugarloaf’s
summit.
Suddenly, to the southeast, something traced a blindingly bright arc of light through the sky, clear
down to the ocean. Even with several cans of beer in them apiece, they both had enough sense to turn their
faces flush against the side of the mountain, covering their dazzled eyes, before they got a good deal worse
than merely dazzled by the light coming from that something. They managed to cling onto their precarious
perch through the quakes that followed – they had already sunk pitons into the rock so that they could
rappel back down once they’d completed the ascent, and now those pitons, and the ropes around their
waists tied to them, saved them from a long, hard fall off the mountain.
Now the waters came, the titanic children of Poseidon, roaring up over the land, the shockwave from
the impact lensed by the Bay of Fundy to the northeast and Nova Scotia to the east back toward Maine,
over the coastal plain, up into the Longfellow Mountains, clear to the ridge-tops and peaks, including
Sugarloaf’s summit. Once again the two men were saved by the pitons; though the gigantic wave actually
passed clear over them, drenching them with seawater and draping them with odd bits of seaweed and less
identifiable flotsam, coming close to drowning them, the deep-set pitons and the nylons ropes held like
champions, and, a few minutes later, bruised and battered, gagging and coughing up seawater and cursing
for all they were worth, the two men were once more able to breathe freely and pull themselves into more
comfortable positions.
“We’re gonna freeze our asses off up here, Petey-Boy,” Preis told Martin as they got settled on the
rock shelf once more.
“Fuck that, we still got our backpacks on. Let’s dig out the rest o’ them brewskis and hoist a few, just
to celebrate,” Martin told his friend, laughing a little in sheer relief at their escape. “That’ll keep us warm!”
“What about the jackets and shit we put in our packs, just in case, before we started climbing this
mother?”
“Fuck ’em. They’re just as wet as we are. Prob’ly more. The beer’s wet, too – but that’s the way it’s
s’posed to be, ain’t it? Gonna wet m’ whistle, I am,” Martin said. He sounded drunk, but in fact he was
stone cold sober, thanks to the experience he’d just been through, shock and dawning terror confusing his
thought-processes and slurring his speech.
Each man helped the other to get the beer out of his pack. As they sat there on the rock shelf, side by
side, secured to the mountain by ropes and pitons, they stared morosely out toward the southeast,
wondering if there would be more quakes, more waves. To the east and south there nothing more than
stark blackness as far as the eye could see, relieved only by the molten silver footprints of moon and stars
on the midnight waters below. For long moments, no sounds but their own and the hiss and slap of water
against rock broke the silence. Then Preis said to Martin, “You feel funny, the way I do?”
“Funny? What sort of funny?”
“I, I dunno, just . . . funny. You know.”
“No, I don’t know,” said Martin. He reached out a hand, placed it on his friend’s forehead. “That’s
funny – how were you feeling while we were climbing up here?”
“Nothing in particular, I mean, I felt fine. Except for the way you feel when you’ve been climbing a
fucking mountain nearly a mile high. But I didn’t feel sick, if that’s what you mean. Why?”
“You’re burning up.”
“I – what?”
“Your forehead’s hot as a bastard! You’re running a fever, m’ man. Hotter’n hell.”
“Let me see,” Preis said, reaching up to touch his forehead. “It doesn’t feel hot to me.”
 “That’s ’cause you’re in, inside it, dimwit! I mean, your hand’s the same, I mean . . . fuck it. Anyway,
it really is hot. So’re your cheeks,” he said, feeling Preis’s face.
“Shit, Petey, I’m fine! Hell, if anything, I feel cold. And what’re you doing, feeling my cheeks,
anyway, you dork pansy bastard?” Preis said, laughing crazily.
“You do, hunh?” said Martin, not joining in the laughter. “That’s what you feel when you got a raging
fever, ’cause you’re losing heat faster to the air or somethin’ . . . you’re hotter, so the air feels colder and
you start shivering. Like you are now.”
“Pete?”
“What, Bro’?”
“You look funny.”
“What do you mean?”
The moonlight was more than bright enough for them to see each other’s faces quite clearly.
“Your face . . . Jesus, buddy, what’s that flap of skin peeling off the right side of your face?”
Martin reached up an exploratory hand to touch the indicated area, then pulled it back as if he’d been
stung. Instead of pliable skin, he’d felt an empty space rimmed by hard things – and something wet and
giving just behind the latter. “Oh . . . my . . . God . . . Bill, tell me . . . what do you see on this side of my
face?” he said, turning his head so that Preis could get a clear look at his face.
Preis open his mouth, but for long seconds no sound emerged from it. Then, gobbling like a flustered
turkey, he said, “Pete – Pete – it’s – your face is gone on that side! It’s – there’s a hole there, and I can
see . . . teeth . . . and, and bone, I think that’s what it is . . .”
On the edge of complete breakdown, Martin said, “Bill, could you . . . could you touch it, see what you
feel?”
“I . . . I . . .” Clearly forcing himself to do what his friend wanted, slowly and with great reluctance
Preis reached out and gingerly touched Martin’s cheek. “Oh, Christ!” he hissed, jerking his hand back and
wiping it hard on his wet jeans to get rid of contamination. “Oh, fucking Jesus, Pete, your face . . . it’s
falling apart! I touched – I think I touched your tongue! And bone . . . And there’s, there’s no blood,
you’re not bleeding, it’s just, God, it looks rotten! It stinks, too . . .”
“S-stinks?”
“Can’t you smell it? You smell like – like that skunk somebody killed and put in the frat house late
last June so it wasn’t found until September because all of us were gone for summer break, remember?”
“I – can’t smell it. I – I can’t smell a thing!” Martin cried, terror over this new discovery making his
voice high and shrill. He reached up to touch his nose – and the tip broke off at his touch, tumbling into the
abyss below. “Oh, God, my nose! My nose is falling apart!”
That wasn’t all. Preis, horrified, saw that Martin’s right eye was starting to sag and run over the edge
of his lower eyelid. It had a distinctly greenish tinge, and even as he looked, it was dissolving under
gravity’s relentless pull, running downward, spilling over the lid, down onto Martin’s right cheek. It made
him think of a very old raw egg dropped onto a hard surface, the yolk melded by the passing seconds into
the white, both spreading out tiredly from the crushed shell as gravity took over. He could just imagine
what shape the brain behind that eye, the sinuses behind Martin’s nose, were in.
“Your hand, Bill – what’s wrong with your hand?” Martin said, his voice heavy with a strange
combination of sleepiness and amazement. Apparently his left eye was still in good shape.
“What hand?” Preis said, reflexively turning his gaze downward to look at the hand with which he had
touched Martin’s face. He inhaled sharply, staring at his hand.
“Bill, what is it?”
“Pete, the skin . . . the skin’s gone from my fingers! I – I – Jesus, that’s bone sticking out from my
fingertips!” His voice transmuted into a thin wail that rapidly rose in pitch and volume until he was
screaming the next words: “My hand is rotting away! It’s like your – your face! What’s happening to
us?”
The only answer he got from Martin, other than a thick, liquid “Gug-gugl-gurg” or two, was a dumb-
show informing Preis that in the last few minutes, Martin’s tongue and mouth had deteriorated so much that
he could no longer talk, his tongue a soup on the floor of his mouth, the skin now completely gone from
both sides of his cheeks, what was left of the muscles beneath on the left side just tatters of flesh, while
those on the right gone entirely.
That’s when Preis lost it completely and began screaming, screaming into the night like some poor
damned soul in Hell.
 It took about three hours more before both of them were dead, their flesh dissolved to nothing more
than dust and soup whirled away on the damp night wind. Only their rapidly deteriorating skeletons were
left behind, still roped to the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain, ephemeral testimony to what had happened to
them. Then those, too, were gone, reduced to powder mixed with a few small splinters of bone slightly
more resistant than the rest of their flesh to the obscenely virulent microbes which, grubbed up from the
floor of the Bay of Fundy and the continental shelf off the Maine coast by the titanic fingers of the asteroid
impact, legacy of federal incompetence and the US Army’s top-secret bioweapons development program,
had managed to render down two strapping, physically fit young men in their twenties to anonymous dust
in just under four hours. Catching up these last mementos of the lives of two young men gone far before
their time, the wind scattered them to the four quarters of the compass. And then only the pitons and tatters
of rope and clothing remained to hint at the horror that had befallen them.

When the asteroid hit the sea floor, the pressure at the point of impact was about 5 megabar,
equivalent to five million times normal atmospheric pressure, and the temperature in the vicinity of the
strike rose to 20,000°C. In under one-fifth of a second, the meteorite and the surrounding rocks for about
a third of a mile in all directions around the impact site were compressed to less than a quarter of their
original volume, and in reaction they vaporized explosively. The shockwave front, expanding in all
directions from the point of impact, at first roared outward at some 16 miles per second. But as the
seconds passed, it fizzled out after a few kilometers, finally allowing the battered crust of the Atlantic
deeps and the continental shelf the mercy of rest and recovery from the hammering brutality of heaven’s
wrath. Now, below the deepest point of the melt-zone, different zones of high pressure and temperature
can be identified from the differences in the way the rocks have been deformed as the pressures and
temperatures diminished in proportion to the distance of the shockwave front from the impact site.

Amherst, Massachusetts: 2:00 a.m. EDT 7/16/2022. Larry Blake, a senior student of planetary science
at Amherst College who planned to go for a PhD in celestial mechanics, was outside in the back yard of the
rented house which he and two other students shared, trying out his brand-new, $1,500.00 SkyQuest
Dobsonian telescope. It was a good night for viewing here, but he’d been plagued all day with a reasonless
uneasiness which made it hard to concentrate on anything. For some reason the normal sounds of the night
weren’t in evidence – no barking dogs, no cats fighting or mating in the neighborhood, even the crickets
silent. For the last several nights Mother Nature had been “doing a pout trip,” as Dora, the young niece of
one of his roommates, put it – the entire neighborhood gone . . . sullen, smoldering with concealed
resentment or perhaps some less comprehensible, even more poisonous and volatile, emotion. But this
afternoon, due to the unexpected incursion of a welcome cold front moving in from the Atlantic, the sky
had cleared completely, and right now the seeing was as good as it ever was here in this light-polluted city.
Even so, at any time a warm front could move in from the west and screw up the viewing, so he was
determined to get as much done tonight as possible, before the lid of the meteorological pressure-cooker
locked down over the city again. Muttering “Mother Nature is a bitch” under his breath, he shook himself
to throw off the mood, not altogether successfully, and turned back to his ’scope.
He had been focusing on the southeastern sky, checking Jupiter out, then Mars. He also wanted to get
a good look at Algol, in that same general area of sky, but much farther north. Still looking to the
southeast, he was fiddling with the scope, elevating it so that it could take in Algol, and was within a hair of
getting his subject perfectly in focus when the whole world suddenly became bright as noon, and he saw
enormous shadows extending southwest from himself and everything nearby. Slowly, apprehension
growing in him, he turned to look to the northeast, fearing the mushroom cloud he was sure he would see
rising there.
Instead, to his amazement he saw a brilliant bar of white light shooting upward into the sky from that
quarter, angled toward the northeast and rising somewhere around 40°-50° from the vertical as measured
west to east. Created by molten rock from the impact of a 250-meter wide asteroid off the coast of Maine,
it consisted of intermixed material from the asteroid, the ocean, the sea-bottom beneath, and the deep crust
beyond in which the asteroid finally came to rest, blasting back up into the pillar of vacuum created by the
asteroid’s fall to Earth. Weirdly, the Earth seemed to go even more silent than it has been for the last few
nights, as if it were holding its breath, waiting to see what was to come. Larry, who had no idea what had
caused this prodigy, found himself, in his growing terror, doing the same; he forced himself to breathe out,
then breathe in again, a deep breath, then out again, as he had learned to do in that Yoga class he’d taken
for a lark one summer. It didn’t help much – the light-show had only just begun.
 That hot, blinding-white bar of light began to widen and change color, becoming more and more
diffuse. From its base, or at any rate what appeared of it just over the tops of the low mountains between
Larry and the light-pillar, tiny specks of light began to fan out in all directions. Not even realizing he was
doing so, blinking polychrome afterimages out of his dazzled eyes to clear them enough to see close at
hand, tapping a stud on his watch to illuminate its face, he mentally noted the time, counting off the
seconds: at this elevation, sound should travel about 335 meters per second, or roughly 21 kilometers per
minute, and whatever produced that thing in the sky should announce itself soon with the rumbling roar of
a vast explosion. The seconds and then the minutes rolled by – and then the Earth begins to buck like a
maddened bronco. Only a fall into a thick stand of low shrubs kept Larry from being battered to death by
the earthquake now shaking all of Amherst and everything around it into corduroy, shaking it and shaking
it until Larry was convinced his clenched teeth were going to break, his eardrums and internal organs
rupture from the terrible hammering of the quake.
– And then it was over.
Hardly daring to believe he was still alive, slowly, carefully, aching in every joint, Larry pulled himself
out of the battered, torn shrubbery that had just saved his life. As he did so he notes dazedly that one of
the branches on which he had fallen had broken off, the sharp end puncturing his thigh, going deep into the
muscle, grazing the bone, somehow missing every major blood vessel in his thigh in the process. He pulled
it out, still not feeling the pain of his wound because of the tsunami of adrenaline that has just flooded his
system. Dark blood trickled sluggishly down his leg from the wound, heavily staining his blue jeans;
because the wound wasn’t life-threatening, he tuned it out of his awareness, forcing himself to concentrate
on more pressing matters.
His legs trembling so violently he was able to regain his feet only by using the shrubs and a nearby tree
to support himself, Larry looked around, trying to take in the strange new landscape that had replaced the
old familiar one. Reaching into his shirt, wholly unaware he is doing so, he began telling his Rosary, over
and over, by sheer reflex and nearly two decades of practice.
For, rather than the familiar tree-lined streets of Amherst, spotted by pools of mercury-arc streetlights,
structured by fences, hedges, business offices and condominium apartment buildings and houses large and
small, the city he had come to love looked the way Dresden must have the day after the Allies’ white-
phosphorus carpet-bombing turned it into an inferno in WW 2: everywhere he looked were mounds of
jumbled, smoking rubble which, minutes before, had been homes and businesses, trees down everywhere,
here and there the glow of flames as hot-points began to do their dirty work. As he stared, horrified, at the
desolation all around him, here and there he could hear a gradually growing pandemonium of cries and
screams, people begging for help, the wailing of cats and howling of dogs. A siren went off nearby – then
died out. Two or three more sirens went off – and likewise died away to silence. The quake had ground
Amherst to pieces, and some of those pieces were the emergency personnel, fire and police and paramedics,
their vehicles smashed to pieces by the quake. Absently he thought that it must have been at least a 9.0
quake, worse than anything in Massachusetts history or, indeed, that of the East Coast, as far back as
anyone knew, even the US Geological Survey people and paleontologists whose job it was to match the
geology of the region with major events of this sort.
And then he heard it: distant thunder coming from the northeast, a low bass rumble growing louder
and louder. The sky went black in that direction, the stars there blotted out – smoke?
Meteors begin to streak overhead, buzzing like the demons of the Vestibule of the Inferno, the biting
flies that forever torment those who chose neither good nor evil, only the line of least resistance. Bzzz . . .
shree . . . bzz . . . hissss . . . shree . . . More and more followed, close on the heels of those that had gone
before them, screaming like banshees as they passed overhead, touching down to the south and west like
spent artillery shells, the roar of explosions marking their impacts. More and more and more shooting stars
crossed the sky until they seemed to fill it completely in one blazing panorama of white fire; Larry realized
with a sudden shock that the discredited astronomers Clube and Napier were right, our ancestors didn’t fear
comets because they were superstitious, but instead because of hard, horrifying experience – the damned
things were dangerous as hell! Fireballs fell and fell and fell from the terrified, shrieking sky, more and
more fireballs streaking overhead, raining down on the appalled Earth like the flakes of fire that Dante
described descending upon the sinners in the lowermost round of the Seventh Circle of the Inferno, the
Violent Against Nature and Art, most missing Amherst but a few nevertheless falling short, falling on the
city one after another, adding catastrophically to the destruction there, fires starting up where some of them
fall.
 The sky overhead had now become a brilliant yellow, as bright as the northeast was dark, illuminated
not by one but a myriad daystars, albeit temporary ones – it wasn’t many more minutes until the shower of
fire began to abate, fewer and fewer meteors streaking overhead, until finally the spectacular light-show
came to a halt. Larry cursed the quake – it had shattered his wonderful boy-toy, the SkyQuest, and he
hadn’t had even one opportunity to get a close look at any of the meteors. But at least, he thought, sighing,
he was still alive – quite a feat, all things considered, given the battering the area had just taken from the
quake and the meteorites.
He looked up again at the northeast – and suddenly realized, appalled, that the darkness advancing on
Amherst from that direction wasn’t smoke, after all. Bright flecks gleamed here and there on that wall of
blackness, silvery reflections from the fat gibbous moon hanging high in the southern sky, red reflections
from a myriad fires between him and whatever it is. Smoke has an albedo as low as you can get, so what –
Oh, JesusMaryJosephGodSaveUs, it’s water! the mental shriek rose in him as that star-blazed ebon
wall came on and on toward the city, toward him, roaring like lions of Apocalypse, a black mountain of
water that had to be kilometers high, easily overtopping the mountains there in the northeast, smashing
everything ahead of it to splinters and rock-dust, rebar and I-beams twisted like pretzels under its giant fist:
Boston, Nashua, Fitchburg, Leominster – and, doubtless, Portsmouth and even, perhaps, Portland, as well,
all smashed to pieces by the great Hammer of God. Whatever it was had to have hit somewhere off the
coast of Maine, he thought dizzily, leaning against what was left of the storage shed in which he and his
roommates kept the lawnmower, car-tools, and similar tools best stored outside, near the places where
they’d be used, staring at that advancing black wall –
Moments later, the point was moot. Or not even moot. The water washed it all away, Larry and
Amherst and everyone else in the area, included.

The ejection phase begins a mere two seconds after impact. The ocean floor at the impact site,
rebounding from the tremendous shock of impact, flings titanic amounts of rocks, melt products, ash and
gases from the vaporized meteorite and surrounding rocks far into the sky. The enormous mass of rocks
and gas shoot backwards, away from the impact site, far out into the Atlantic, the ejecta front forming a
conical shape. The cone-shaped mass of hot ejecta races outward into the ocean surrounding the site at
the speed of an express train, stripping the seabed of its top layers of material as it goes, killing everything
living in it for miles around, from tiny plankton and shrimp to the unlucky whales, sharks, large squid, and
teleost fish that happen to be in the neighborhood. It also destroys a tiny scientific submersible being used
to collect core samples of the ocean bottom about 15 miles southeast of the impact site and an intelligence-
gathering Soviet nuclear submarine lurking some ten miles east of Boston, as well as several fishing-
boats, a cabin cruiser or two, a huge oil tanker, and numerous other surface vessels within a radius of
about twenty miles from the site.

. . . So far it had been one perfect bitch of a trip. He was beginning to believe the stories going around
that the Bermuda Rise, like most of the rest of the western half of the North Atlantic, had been pretty much
fished out, at least for commercial purposes. Outside of a pitifully small catch of menhaden, hardly enough
even for bait, this trip the crew of the fishing-boat The Downeaster Alexa had only managed to catch
several sharks, two stripers (which were no longer a legal catch, and had to be thrown back, except that one
of the sharks fastened onto one of the stripers and tore its guts out before they could set it free, that’s the
way it goes), and one hell of a lot of floating trash, especially those damned plastic things that held the
bottles together in sex-packs, and which were one of the biggest menaces to marine life that had ever been
invented. Two days ago, Carl Loftus, another crewman, trying to do some minor carpentry around the
boat, had ripped up his thumb – fortunately his left, or he wouldn’t have been able to do squat until it
healed up, which would have taken weeks – with a slip of his saw, almost took the end of it off; it had
begun looking ugly, like Carl was on his way to a major case of blood-poisoning.
Emerging from the galley of the fishing-boat, where he had just eaten half a bowl of chowder which,
frankly, better should have been dumped overboard rather than served up to honest men, George Masters
stepped out on deck, hoping for cool night air instead of the hot, stagnant atmospheric soup that prevailed
belowdecks. He should have been down there in his bunk, sleeping, consolidating his energy and strength
for tomorrow’s hard work – except tomorrow was likely to be just like today had been, stifling hot,
humidity at 102%, no fish worth the name anywhere near, only a few sick trash-fish and fucking mean
sharks and floating garbage for their nets. Since he couldn’t sleep anyway, he’d thought, why not get
something to eat, talk over the problems they were having this trip with other crewmembers, if they were
up, too, and take a walk topside to get some air?
Which is just what he’d done. Except the only one in the galley besides himself was Joe Thompson,
who was taking his turn as cook and galley-master, and Joe was in a rotten mood, going on and on about a
hex on them boat and all of them with her. Maybe the reason the chowder was so bad was that Joe’s mood
had somehow affected it – or maybe Joe had deliberately added poison to it, hoping to nail the boat’s
captain, a big Nantucket man named Roger “Skip” Jensen, for whom, for some reason, Joe had come to
cultivate a seething hatred. Why, George didn’t know, although he didn’t particularly like the captain all
that much, himself; but his dislike of Skip was nothing more than a rather mild distaste for some of Skip’s
less savory traits, such as the way he tended to show off his education at every chance, and his heavy
Nantucketter accent, almost a parody of the way people from that area talked, as if he were thereby saying,
Hey, I’m a real downeaster aristocrat, by God and Lord Harry, my pedigree here goes all the way back to
the heyday of whaling, and don’t you forget it! But as much as Skip sometimes got under George’s skin,
what he thought about Skip sure wasn’t the black, boiling thing that seemed to take possession of Joe
whenever he was anywhere near the captain, like Ahab and the whale, in that old movie he’d seen with his
girl on TV a few weeks ago, with Skip being the whale. It’d be a miracle of Joe didn’t murder Skip before
they got back to port – especially because, while none of the rest of the crew seemed to actually hate Skip,
not the way Joe did, they might not be all that quick to go to Skip’s rescue, either, should Joe take it into his
head to do something about the bloody antipathy he clearly felt toward the captain.
Be that as it may, the chowder and Joe’s company being what they were, George gave them both up
after about ten minutes and went up on deck, preferring solitude and a chance for cooler, less stagnant air to
either. Now, as he leaned against one wall of the cabin, staring off to the northwest, he thought about the
Alexa and the lousy luck they’d been having so far on this trip.
Joe was always going on about hexes on boats and ships. He actually had several books he’d brought
aboard with him that contained numerous stories about such things, everything from the Marie Celeste and
the Flying Dutchman to legends that went back all the way to Greece and Rome and even further, to
modern legends, stories about ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil’s Triangle, the analog of the
first over in the Sea of Japan or wherever it was, giant sharks that supposedly chased some fishing-boats all
over the ocean, strange solitary waves that suddenly appeared in mid-ocean for no known reason and
gobbled up boats left, right, and sideways, and even weirder things. Frankly, George thought, Joe’s
obsession with such things was more than a little creepy. He had the feeling that maybe, out of some
bizarre unconscious need, Joe was trying to draw such things toward himself and whoever he was with,
that, whether Joe was trying to do it or not, he was slowly becoming a magnet for trouble. Joe had shipped
on the Alexa twice now; both trips had been full of bad luck. On the first of those two trips, a couple of
years ago now, according to Pete Blasco, who’d gone out on that trip – at the time, George had been hired
on a different boat, so he only had the story second-hand, but he’d never known Blasco to lie or even
exaggerate much, so as far as he knew the story was true – a man had fallen overboard during a sudden
storm, and had drowned before they could get him back aboard. The skipper had radioed the news back to
port, and when the Alexa finally got back – she’d had to fight some odd currents and another storm to do so
– they learned that the wife of the guy who’d gone overboard, on learning of the death of her husband from
the town constable, had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. They’d had two small children, too, a little boy
of about six and a girl even younger, both now bewildered orphans living with relatives. A bad trip,
indeed.
There’d been other stories, too. Some of them – well, suffice it to say that the chances that Joe
Thompson and Jonah had been separated at birth were about a hundred to nothing, and climbing. In fact,
the only reason captains hired him on anymore was that he was probably one of the best net-men who’d
ever lived, having inherited the trade from his father, who’d got it from his father, and so on probably all
the way back to St. Peter the Fisherman.
Even way out here, George could hear Joe muttering to himself in the galley. What was he doing in
there, anyway – cursing his enemies? Casting spells? Instructing a Voodoo doll as to just how he wanted
Skip to die? Maybe that’s why bad luck seemed to happen wherever Joe was – maybe he was a witch. Or
warlock, they called them. Either way, Joe was one scary guy. – Now it sounded like somebody’d turned
the radio on – maybe Skip had had as futile a quest for sleep as George had, and had figured that since he
couldn’t sleep, he might as well tend to business, and gone on the bridge to find out the latest weather
reports or something.
 The weather. These last few days the weather had been stinkin’ lousy, some of the worst George had
ever run into out here – not because of storms, because there hadn’t been any this trip, not so much as a
sign of one, nor a drop of rain. In fact, he’d have welcomed one good gut-ripper of a storm right now, with
gallons of cold water pouring into the boat from every angle and winds at 40 knots – it would’ve been one
hell of a lot better than what they’d had most of the way out from the boatyards in New Bedford, the same
as tonight: sultry and sullen as the inside of Satan’s boudoir, humidity thick enough to cut with a knife and
leave a flat edge, the air as moveless and stagnant as he’d heard it got sometimes down around the equator,
the reason tall ships once got stranded there. For some reason the least little sound carried much farther in
those conditions than they did during good weather; Skip, a know-it-all son of a bitch but a smart know-it-
all son of a bitch who had actually got his M.A. in oceanography from U. Mass right before he’d taken over
the family business and the Alexa from his dad and almost always knew what he was talking about, said it
was due to high pressure and an inversion layer that made the air at sea level a lot denser than normal. Skip
said that all other things being equal the denser the stuff sound travels through, the faster it goes, and the
less distortion there is in it. Sounded right – unlike what many landlubbers believed, even with all the
Discover channel stuff on about the oceans and their physics and all, you could hear one hell of a lot better
underwater than above it, in the open air, and water was a lot denser than air. If you didn’t believe that, just
you try running in water! Maybe Jesus could’ve done it, but nobody else, he thought, a sudden flash of
humor briefly curving his mouth upward.
Then, as he continued to think about the weather these last few weeks, the smile vanished, replaced
with a scowl. There was an additional aspect to the way the weather’d been that bothered him even more
than anything physical: it somehow felt like the world was holding its breath, ready to scream, and at the
same time the air seemed charged with a combination of terror and sullen rage like nothing he’d ever run
into before, even from Joe “It’s Gotta Be One O’ Them Hexes!” Thompson. The only word he knew that
that came even halfway close to describing it was “weird” – as if the Devil himself was hovering over the
world, gnashing his teeth, waiting for just the right time to smash it all flat, destroy everything. Nothing
else really fit.
But in fact tonight the air on deck wasn’t quite as bad as belowdecks. That horrible weirdness was still
there, all right, but since the sun had set, around four hours before, a breeze, set out of the east, had begun
blowing, growing in strength as the hours wore by. You could even sort of hear it, a thin, keening whine
right at the raw, ragged edge of audibility, like the voice of a damned soul somehow managing to filter up
through a graveyard to where the living could hear it. He’d even been able to hear it from his bunk down
below, in spite of the snoring of a couple of the crew. Not loud, not at all, barely able to reach him there,
but enough to add curiosity about it to sleeplessness as a motive for coming up here now. Sure enough, it
was cooler up here, maybe down as far as 70° or less, one hell of a lot better than it was belowdecks, where
it had to be at least 98°, and probably a lot more. There weren’t any clouds up there, not yet, and the rising
wind seemed to have completely dispersed the hot haze that had accompanied the air inversion or whatever
it was that was responsible for the last few days’ ghastly weather. The fat moon, just past full, hung high in
the sky, slightly west of south, the Man in the Moon smiling down on the boat and its occupants like some
jolly uncle. The sky was full of stars, hot, hard, diamond-bright points of light studding the heavens
everywhere. It was a beautiful sight, one which ordinarily would have cheered George, and would have
tonight . . .
. . . except the whole world was silent, so silent. He couldn’t even hear wave-crests overtopping and
spilling down into their troughs now. Not the cry of a gull, nor the sound a fish breaking water. Come to
think of it, he could no longer hear Joe’s muttering from the galley, nor the radio from the bridge. And
now it was actually getting cold, and the wind was still rising – maybe his wish for a storm was coming
true. He groped in his trousers’ pocket for his watchcap, which he always carried with him whenever he
went up on deck, in case he’d need it, and put it on. He wished he’d put on his heavy sweater – besides the
watchcap and his shoes, all he had on was a thin cotton undershirt and his trousers, all he could stand to
wear the last few sullen days, before this sudden change in weather. Was that a drop of rain he felt on his
face?
Suddenly there was a burst of sound from the bridge. The radio again?
Then Skip burst from the bridge, yelling, “It’s coming! We’ve got to get out of here!”
“What?” George turned to face Skip, who was running toward him from the bridge. Ten years
younger and twenty pounds lighter than George, Skip kept himself in prime physical condition, one more
thing that irritated George, who was always intending to go on a diet but somehow never did. It paid off
for Skip in many ways, not the least being his seemingly boundless energy and perfect coordination. Not
even glancing at his footing as he headed for George, Skip crossed the distance between George and the
bridge in what seemed to be two easy bounds. “What’s going on? Is there an emergency? Hadn’t you
better get the others up, too?”
“The biggest emergency of all time!” Skip said, panting hard as he came to a halt in front of George.
“I just heard on the radio –” Then his eyes went wide, and his jaw dropped.
“What the hell is going on, Skip?”
The younger man answered by reaching out, placing his hands on George’s shoulders, and gently
turning him around. “Too late,” he said, pointing to the northwest.
“Too – what?” George peered up into the clear, bright night. His gaze following Skip’s pointing
finger, he looked up, up, up . . . Funny, a few minutes ago, that whole area of sky was full of stars. Now it
was all black, dead black, like a wall made of the deepest, darkest part of Hell. Only when he looked
directly overhead could he see stars – stars stretching into the infinite south and east on one side, and, on
the other, to the northwest, that world-spanning, heavens-high ebon wall.
As Skip’s other hand clamped down on his shoulder hard enough to hurt, George suddenly realized
what he was seeing: “Oh, sweet Jesus – it’s a wave!! G- –” And then it hit, countless tons of frigid water
straight out of the Styx. And there was, once again, blackness and silence on the face of the deep, and a
floating spar accompanied by unidentifiable bits and pieces of plastic and wood, and nothing else to signify
that there had ever been a ship here named The Downeaster Alexa or the crew that had accompanied her.

At the asteroid’s point of impact, the seabed was rich in clathrates, gases trapped in matrices of rock,
such as methane hydrate. The impact pulverized the sea-bed, releasing the clathrates, allowing them to
mix with the ocean waters and thus with the atmosphere above.
More: Seismic spin-offs of the impact, earthquakes have begun ripping through northern North
America, eastern Greenland, and Iceland. In their passage these quakes are uncovering numerous caches
of ice-locked clathrates hidden for millennia beneath tons of rock and sediment making up the Arctic
seabed from the all-dissolving power of the ocean. After eons of lonely isolation in their mineral cocoons,
now countless megatons of clathrates suddenly belch forth into the oceans and then begin to percolate
upward to the ocean’s surface and into the atmosphere.
As a result, global warming, already in effect, will soon be significantly accelerated, the methane and
other greenhouse gases thus released supplementing other factors and boosting temperatures overall. As
these gases are eventually re-sequestered over time in soil and ice by plant-life, and returned to the sea via
sediments washed into river-deltas and thence to the oceans, the average global temperatures will start to
drop somewhat, thereafter fluctuating over time due to a complex brew of factors ranging from
meteorological to mineralogical and ecological ones. In a way, this is fortunate: thanks to the vast
amounts of soot and other particulate matter kicked into the stratosphere by the nuclear war that is about
to start, together with the effects of the asteroid impact and its aftermath upon the world, if not for some
mitigating force a hellish Fimbulwinter would lock the world in glacial cold, perhaps for decades, perhaps
for millennia. But because of the clathrate excursions, the cold and the dark will be considerably
shortened and softened from what they might otherwise have been, turning the Saturnian season wrought
by the war into a relatively mild “nuclear Autumn” from which life and human civilization can eventually
recover, rather than a true “nuclear Winter,” from which they might not be able to.
Because the impact site was at the join of an almost vertical slope on the continental shelf and the
abyssal plain below, the strike did not form a recognizable crater, and the ejecta, rather than falling back
onto the site, as would have been the case had the asteroid hit farther out on the abyssal plain, or on dry
land above, instead fanned out onto the plain in an enormous blanket of pieces of broken and molten rock
of all sizes from dust-grains and tiny tektites on up to glowing blocks of rock a tenth of a mile on a side.
These have now piled up in layers ranging in thickness from more than a hundred meters around the
impact site down to a few inches where the fan of debris has petered out about three-quarters of a mile
away.
The first to fall were the huge rocky blocks of sediment, extremely hot at first but essentially unmelted.
These were followed rapidly by the melt products, including glass bombs, which were sprayed out from the
site for distances of up to 50 miles. Finer-grained ash and dust didn’t travel nearly as far, due to the
resistance of the water to their passage, perhaps only five miles or less. Wherever the ejecta blanket
passed, the underwater landscape was devastated – irregular lumps of rock scattered at random were
cloaked in a fine coating of muddy grey ash, and red-hot pieces of organic material penetrated the ash
here and there. Within seconds the sea-bottom and the water-column in the vicinity were scoured and
scalded clean of life by the catastrophe. In some cases, entire species of small marine invertebrates that
had become perfectly adapted to local conditions invariant for centuries, unable to adapt to any changes in
those conditions, are now gone forever, with no hope of replacement, because there are no populations of
them anywhere else in the ocean.
Meanwhile, on the surface, directly above the site, the blowback reached the water’s surface no more
than a second or two after impact. The waters of the Gulf of Maine flashboiled all the way to the shore, out
into the Atlantic, throughout the Bay of Fundy. White-hot water vapor roasted everything alive for miles
inland and, along the shore, for as much as 300 miles north and south of the impact site. Some of the
ejecta from the impact site actually made it all the way to the water’s surface and, from there, began their
journey high into the heavens. While a huge column of that material actually made it as far as the
stratosphere before pluming out and beginning to fall back onto the ocean and the land, a good deal of it
rose only a few hundred feet before beginning its descent, and where it fell, it killed, crushing and roasting
everything below with lava bombs, large chunks of rock, and incandescent mud.

In Madrid, Foreign Minister Tony Blair, staying with his family at the not entirely misnamed La Casa
del Rey, the five-star Hilton knockoff Spain provided for diplomats and other VIPs with business in the
city, had awakened early, before the other members of his family, feeling surprisingly energetic in spite of
becoming somewhat sleep-deprived the last few days because of the various parties and other gatherings
he’d been obliged to attend here in his role as visiting English dignitary. It was a little before 6 a.m.; at
this time of year at this latitude, the Sun was well up and the air outside would be warm, just right for a
stroll through the grounds of the hotel, the landscaping of which was actually quite lovely. It would give
him time to sort out the events of yesterday, which had left him a little dizzy.
For the last several days, Blair and his family had been at Gibraltar for a photo-op with a group of
American ships on their way from Naples to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Several months before, around the
world, working with seismographic and other data, USGS geologists had discovered sudden, unexpected
activity associated with the enormous pool of magma underlying Naples and much of the surrounding
region, which had, before then, been relatively quiet. No one was sure of its cause, or what it might
presage of the region’s future. But the presence there of a good portion of the US’s naval fleet mandated a
continuous watch on the phenomenon by the USGS and affiliated agencies, such as the IGS and its other
European analogues, to make sure that American and NATO ships and personnel stationed at Naples were
not in danger.
By mid-May, clearly it was no longer a question of if, but when the magma dome beneath Naples
would erupt. At that time, the US and NATO began preparations for pulling their ships and personnel out
of the Mediterranean and transferring them down to the American base at Guantánamo, Cuba. Through the
remainder of May and the following month, the geological activity around Naples was building to
terrifying levels, impelling the US Navy and NATO to speed up their preparations for evacuating the area
to a degree just short of what would have guaranteed potentially disastrous missteps. By early July, they
were ready to go, and on or about July 5, they began their exodus from the Bay of Naples, headed
westward, toward Gibraltar, arriving there on July 9-10. By then time earthquakes of magnitude 4.5-5.0
were rocking the Naples region on a virtually continuous basis, making the members of the two fleets very
glad that they now had the islands of Corsica and Sardinia as a shield between them and Italy’s west coast.
Whilst they halted there, a planned stop, for repairs and refitting, Blair and several other
representatives of the UK, along with the Spanish representatives, had joined the various American naval
officers and other officials there for the photo-op, to show their country’s solidarity with America, and to
discuss Gibraltar’s future in terms of international jurisdiction and that sort of thing. The UK now had
much the same relationship to America that Greece had had to Imperial Rome, dependent on America for
most of her defense capability and whatever political clout she might still have vis-à-vis the European and
Soviet Unions and the People’s Republic of China, and took every opportunity to show the world’s various
major bullies that she was still very much the pet and protectorate of her own, nuclear-powered bully, the
US. Blair wasn’t very happy about it – a devout Catholic and a man proud of England’s long, great history
(prior to the end of World War II, at any rate), he hated seeing his country toady to anyone. But better
toady to the US, which, in spite of its post-Clintonian downhill skid into socialism, had sprung from
England’s loins and still retained much of that heritage (albeit honoring it most in the breach), than be
forced to knuckle under to the overtly Communist regimes or, perhaps still worse, the terrorist regimes of
the Middle East. And it was, after all, part of his job. So he’d gone, making the best of it by taking his
wife and children along as well, giving them as well as himself a lovely Summer holiday abroad in Spain’s
sunny climes and historic landscape.
In fact, they’d gotten a little more than they’d bargained for, in the form of a fireworks show put on by
Mother Nature which, according to the geologists attached to the US fleet he’d talked with in Gibraltar,
outdid anything of its kind up to and possibly including the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. At 1515 hours
GMT (3:15 p.m. CEDT, Naples time), July 8, the manically active magma dome beneath Naples erupted in
an explosion so powerful that, as several astronauts unloading cargo on the Moon attested, it could quite
literally be seen from the surface of the Moon – and from Gibraltar, beyond the curve of the Earth as it was
– with the unaided eye, a vast, fountaining spear of sky-clawing fire that filled the heavens to the east and
northeast with an apocalyptic light-show. In the process, Naples and everything around it on the Earth’s
surface for a radius of about 32 kilometers simply ceased to be, whilst everything north to well beyond
Rome, east to the heel of Italy’s boot, and south to the Strait of Messina was converted within minutes into
a vast, churning desolation filled with the tumbled debris from the destruction of nearly every building in
the region, from great office buildings and the Vatican itself in Rome to the humblest peasant’s hut in the
fields of Puglia. For hours afterward, the eastern half of the Tyrrhenian Sea boiled from the heat of the
explosion, the sea-life that had filled it cooked until it fell apart or simply turned into nothing but loose char
within a few seconds of the onset of the eruption, the boats and ships on its surface and the submersibles
and submarines below presumably suffering the same fate – or at least, so it was surmised, for no word ever
came back from any of them, or from eyewitnesses, to tell what happened to them.
The 8.5+ earthquakes that tore through the Mediterranean Basin in the eruption’s didn’t leave Gibraltar
entirely unscathed, though damage there was relatively light, confined mostly to countless loose objects
knocked over, swamping of shallow-draft boats, and similar minor disasters. There was a nervous moment
or two when, thanks to a break in an electrical line a little too close to one of the dumps there for ships’
fuel, a fire broke out that threatened to do major damage, but the doughty Seabees, the men of the US
Navy’s Construction Battalion (what a gift the Americans had for turning the disadvantage of one or
another unpronounceable acronym into a catchy phrase and, in the word’s of his wife, Cherie, a “darling
little cartoon,” he thought, grinning – unlike so many of his countrymen, he liked the cheeky, scrappy
Americans, whom he thought deserved far better than the various presidential administrations they’d had to
suffer these last 30 years or so) had it out in a trice, and there was little in the way of serious damage, or
potential damage, beyond that.
Even so, his youngest daughter, Peggy, had been knocked off her feet by one of the rolling temblors,
so that she fell onto a patch of muddy ground, soiling her pretty frock and making her cry, and he himself
had nearly taken a header into a nearby post, avoiding it only by grabbing the post and holding on for dear
life until the ground stopped rolling. The rest of his family, between holding on to one another and
grabbing at nearby stanchions and posts, managed to stay on their feet until the quake was over.
Finally the fireworks in the east died away, leaving a vast, ominous, sullen red glow painting the sky in
that quarter that lasted for hours afterward, and the earthquakes died down to light aftershocks which,
occurring on the average every 20 minutes or so for the next 24 hours, were easily taken in stride. It was
then that Admiral Chaim Resh, the officer in charge of the evacuation of the American fleet from Naples, a
short, fiery man whose incredible age, 100 years and a few months, had neither brought his retirement from
his service nor dimmed his even more incredible brilliance of mind, had come up to Blair to give him some
very strange advice.
“Minister Blair,” he had said, “if there is any way you can reasonably do so, you and your family
should get the hell away from here and go to Madrid, or, at any rate, as far inland in Spain as you can.”
“Good God, why, man?” Blair had asked Resh.
“Have you been told about NEO 2019-C?” said Resh, getting straight down to business.
“What? No. What the devil is NEO 2019-C?”
“It’s – I’m not sure what clearance you’re vetted for, or I could tell you more. Let us say that
something is going to happen on or about the 17th of this month, and Madrid would probably be a very good
location to be in then.”
“Madrid. Why Madrid?”
“It’s well inland, for one thing. – When were you planning to return home?”
“Not for a couple of weeks, at least. Among other things, we were planning on visiting Port Ligat,
Salvador Dalí’s home, the Alhambra, and several other sites of historic interest. If things turn out right,
we’re hoping we can also visit the Basque country. Why?”
 “Good, good,” said Resh, bobbing his head up and down. Trying to read him, Blair made the mistake
of trying to look directly into the other man’s eyes. Though Resh’s general expression was pleasant, if
neutral, those eyes – the expression “thousand-yard stare” didn’t come anywhere near the look in those
haunted, icy-blue eyes. That man was sitting on secrets far bigger and hotter than the magma pool that had
just erupted under Naples. Blair realized without asking that he wasn’t going to get any direct answers
about the nature of those secrets. But very clearly whatever knowledge it was Resh was privy to, his advice
was worth taking. He knew something, something that might have a greater bearing on the survival of
every man, woman, and child on this or any other side of the world than what had just happened to poor
Naples. In spite of the fact that Blair, much the taller of the two men, overtopped by a good 17-18
centimeters, he felt somehow dwarfed by Resh. He had the feeling, doubtless exaggerated but unshakable,
that Resh was carrying the whole weight of history on his seemingly frail, narrow shoulders without any
trouble at all, and knew, unmistakably, that he was in the presence of a very great man – one far greater
than even Resh’s already stellar legends would have him.
“Madrid, you say. All right, what’s my window for departure from here?”
Resh smiled in approval. “The sooner you and your family can leave, the better. Do you need
transportation?”
“Well, we’ve got a rental car waiting for us San Roque when we get back there – we came here from
there in a diplomatic limousine, which will probably be taking us back there.”
“Any pressing engagements after you leave here?”
“No, but I do have to check in with the British consulate as soon as we leave here.”
“I can facilitate that – you can use a ship’s phone for that, can’t you?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Good. As soon as you make your call, if you don’t mind, we’ll get you and your family on board a jet
that’ll have you in Madrid in an hour or so. I can also have reservations made for you there at whatever
hotel you prefer while you’re in transit, unless you’ve already got reservations –?”
“We were planning to stay at La Casa del Rey in downtown Madrid when we got back there – it’s on
the itinerary we’ve put together for where we want to visit whilst we’re here. In fact, it’s where me and my
colleagues usually stay when we are in Madrid; it caters mostly to foreign ambassadors and that sort, and
does rather well by all of us, judging from visits I’ve had here before.”
“Good. I’ll have one of my aides make a reservation there for you while you’re on the way. And
there’ll be a rental car waiting for you when you land there – or would you prefer me to call the British
embassy there and have a limousine waiting?”
“Oh, I like driving. A rental is fine. I suppose I should call the rental agency in San Roque and tell
them to void the reservation I have there –”
“We’ll take care of that, too. And I’ll have a staff car take you to the airport here to catch that jet.”
Somehow, Blair never doubted that Resh could accomplish all of it. The hotelier at La Casa del Rey
wouldn’t dare refuse to reserve a suite for the Blairs, even on this short notice – Admiral Resh was just not
a man you could say “no” to when he had his mind set on something.
“This is all very kind of you, sir –”
“Yes, well, the milk of human kindness is fine, but I think you have things to do in the future, perhaps
great things,” the Admiral said enigmatically, grinning as Blair gave him a quizzical stare.
“I –” Blair began. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to get explanations from the American, at least not
for now, he said, “Will I be seeing you again, sir?”
“Oh, do call me ‘Hyman’,” said Resh. “My friends generally do. And yes, I think you will be, perhaps
as soon as a few days from now.”
“Hmm. Then you call me ‘Tony’ – Hyman.”
“I’ll do that – Tony. Now let’s get that car ready for you . . .”
Pulling out a cellular phone, Resh punched out a number, and began barking orders into the phone the
moment his call was answered. Ending the call, Resh grunted in satisfaction as he tucked the phone away
in his coat pocket. “Car’ll be here soon, my friend – well, here it is,” he said, raising his eyebrows, pleased,
as a black Volvo came toward them.
The two men exchanged brief, lupine smiles as they shook hands. Then, as Blair got his family into
the car, climbing in after them, Resh turned and headed back toward the docks and the gig that would take
him back to his own ship. Since then, Blair had heard nothing from Resh – though the signature of the
admiral’s passage was all over the frantic deference paid to him and his family by the staff at the auto rental
agency in Madrid and La Casa del Rey, and the extreme courtesy paid to them by the naval personnel
dispatched by Resh to get them to the city from Gibraltar. Would he ever see Resh again? He had the
strangest premonition that he would, and soon – a premonition enhaloed with presentiments of apocalypse.
What the devil was going on, anyway?
Oh, well, there was nothing he could do about it for now, he thought, as he strolled out onto the patio
behind the hotel. Surrounding the patio on the three sides not accessed from the hotel lobby was a lovely
garden full of flowering plants native to semitropical and tropical climes. He walked toward a magnolia
bush, heavy with flowers, its perfume –
What the hell was that?
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of something.
What the hell was that?
He turned to face northwest, from whence the flash had come.
Good God! Here it was, broad daylight, the Sun well up in the east – and the pillar of raw white light
he saw rising up, up, up over the northwestern horizon was so bright he had to squint to block out most of
the light, far brighter than the Sun.
He turned away for a moment to get the great orange-white fireballs out of his eyes. When he looked
back, the light-pillar, though beginning to fade in intensity, was still bright enough to make his eyes water.
No longer white, it was shot through with streamers and ribbons of every color of the rainbow and maybe
some beyond it – an old memory of something he’d read as a boy came to him, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The
Color Out of Space.” Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be natural – and yet, what man-made thing
could have brought it into existence? He’d seen newsreels and cinema reenactments of hydrogen bomb
tests by the US, the UK, France, even the Soviet Union, and horrendous as thermonuclear explosions were,
they weren’t a patch on this. He knew he was seeing something far beyond the curve of the horizon. Much
of most of it had to be hidden by the bulk of the Earth between here and there – just the part he could see
was titanic, which meant that the thing, whatever it was, had to be many miles in height, clear out of the
stratosphere! Was this what the American admiral had been talking about the other day when he advised
Blair to take his family and get to Madrid as fast as possible?
Suddenly a whole lot of things he’d read and heard over the past few months, none of them seeming
significant by themselves, came together all at once in his mind, and he knew what it was: something big
had fallen to Earth from the heavens, something a few privileged souls had known about but hadn’t deigned
to warn anyone else about, something that just might be the reason that so many UK officials, like many of
their colleagues in other countries, had unexpectedly decided in the last few months to plan long Summer
vacations in the Southern Hemisphere, or even retire and relocate to that hemisphere, leaving their posts
vacant and, in some cases, their jobs undone. This last Spring and early Summer more than a little chaos
had erupted in Whitehall and elsewhere due to the sudden absence of top-level executives who had left with
little warning or notice without making sure that competent replacements would fill the slots they had
vacated. Everyone had remarked on it – unofficially. You had to be looking for just the right things to find
mention of it on the BBC or in the Times, and there was no official mention of it by any government
spokesmen at all, not here, not in America, nowhere.
They’d known, damn them! The bastards had known something was going to happen – that this, this
thing, whatever it was, that had sprouted up there to the northwest was coming! And they had done
nothing to warn the public about it, just quietly hied off for the hills and left the rest of us to whatever fate
lay in store for the world.
Resh had known, too, hadn’t he? But he, God bless him, had stayed behind to do what good he might,
quietly warning people the way he’d warned the Blairs, and who knew what else? Was that the real reason
the US fleet had pulled out of Naples, using the very real threat of incipient explosion of that monstrous
volcanic lava-pool underneath Naples as cover for evacuating not only the US fleet, but anyone else in the
Med who wanted to come along with the US Navy to Guantánamo? There, they might be safe. Apparently
the thing had been expected to occur in the temperate or even Arctic regions of the northern hemisphere, so
that anywhere south of, say, the latitude of London would probably be safe.
-- Inland. Resh had said that it would best to get as far as possible inland, hadn’t he? Oh, God, there
were going to be earthquakes, huge ones, weren’t there? Whatever it was must have done hellish damage
over there, the sort of damage that could get the Earth jumping around like a flea on a hot griddle. And that
meant there’d also likely be whatsits, tidal waves, tsunamis. How bad would they be? Resh had thought
they’d probably be safe here in Madrid, that it would be far enough inland --
Galvanized into action by the implications of what he’d been thinking, he turned and ran at top speed
back into the hotel, heading for the elevators. He barely made it back to the suite where Cherie and the
children were just now getting up, getting dressed, wondering where he was when the first rolling shock
hit. It wasn’t very big – the really big ones would only start coming at least an hour later – but it was more
than enough to send people shrieking into the corridors, screaming “Earthquake!” at the top of their lungs,
milling about in panic like a bunch of spooked sheep. What was it in human nature that seized on such
things as ready excuses to turn into febrile fools, yelling and screaming, forming up in mobs and looking
about for a club – or a torch? At least here, their fellow guests wouldn’t be looking for weapons or the
makings of arson. Mostly visiting dignitaries and their families, they were all too civilized for that. At
least, for now. But if it got much worse here . . .
On that pleasant thought, he burst into the suite he and his family shared, crying, “We’ve got to get out
of here at once! Get your luggage, now, and follow me!”
They didn’t leave at once, of course – there was the inevitable questioning by his wife and children as
to why they had to leave, a near-mutiny on the part of his oldest daughter and youngest boy, who had been
looking forward to getting together with a couple of kids from other guests’ families, a screaming tantrum
on the part of his youngest, who didn’t want to leave behind the collection of stuffed toys she’d brought
along with her and had sitting on dressers and chairs, ranked in order of her affection for them, far too
many to pack up on such short notice. Finally he shouted, somehow managing to make himself heard
above his family’s combined complaints, “You felt that last quake? There’s going to be another like it in
just a few minutes – and it’ll be a lot worse than the one we went through over at Gibraltar the other day!”
That got their attention at once. Cherie went pale. “Earthquake? More than one? My God, not
another Naples, is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s not anywhere near Italy, that I’m sure of – in fact, it’s over toward the northwest.
Way over there. But you can probably still see where it was. Come over here to the windows,” he said,
acting on his own words, striding over to the big windows in their suite opening on just that view and
throwing them wide. He peered out. “Look!” he said. “It’s still there!”
And it was, a vast, dark pillar of tumbled cloud, smoke, whatever it was, reaching clear to the heavens,
still glowing fitfully here and there where the Moon, which must be close to setting over there by now,
struck silver sparks from it, its eastern side beginning to take on the first, faint hints of rose and salmon
from the bare beginnings of Summer dawn. Wherever it was, as far to the west as it obviously was, it must
also be far north, if the Sun rose so early there. By his watch it was now about 6:30 a.m., meaning it could
be as early as 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. there – early indeed. Or was that fire, perhaps, or lava, that was beginning
to paint its eastern flanks with those delicate hues stolen directly from all the roses of Kew Gardens?
A soft touch on his shoulder brought him out of his wondering trance. “Tony, what is it?” Cherie
asked, the same awe wonder in her voice as was overwhelming him at the sight of that thing over there.
“I don’t know, my darling,” he said, unthinkingly slipping his arm around her shoulders, pressing her
close to his side for the warm comfort of her presence. “Whatever it is . . . I think it’s what set off that
quake just now. If so, there are bound to be more. I want to get us all over to the embassy as quickly as
possible – there’s going to be real panic here in Madrid, the sort that gets mobs rioting in the streets. The
embassy is the safest place for us now – they’ll have our Marines there, for one thing, and the gates are
very strong.”
“I believe you’re right,” she said, still staring, stunned, at that terrible pillar in the sky. “Let’s – let’s
get going, then.”
Without any urging on his part, she said to the children, who, gathered about their parents, were
staring, transfixed, out the window at the pillar, “No more fussing, now. You heard what your father said.
There will probably be more quakes here very soon. Get your bags together – no more than you can carry
with you, we may have to walk the whole distance to the embassy, or we may not, but in case we do, take
only what you can carry for that distance – and line up here at the door. I’ll get your father’s and my things
now. We’ll all have a lovely breakfast at the embassy, and you can play with the cats there, just like
before. Now, scoot!” she said, clapping her hands.
And they did indeed scot, as their oldest, Tania Marie, who loved to make plays on words, put it. Tony
was proud of them – the moment they realized this was truly serious business, they immediately put aside
their quarrels and fuss and ran to do as their mother had said. Even Peggy, their six-year-old, young as she
was, cooperated, though she did insist on giving a last good-bye to the toys she would have to abandon. As
for Tania, she did something that made her father even more proud of her: she simply began gathering up
Peggy’s stuffed dolls and tucking them anywhere they would fit into her own suitcases, telling the
astonished Peggy, “We won’t leave your friends here. I’ll carry them. All right?”
 Peggy’s answer, a smile brighter than the Sun, than that pillar had been when it first shot into the
heavens, was a gift to them all, something they would carry with them through all the terrible days ahead,
and keep them going when all else seemed to fail. His oldest child was no longer a child – and oh, what a
woman she would become! Moved to the heart, Blair quietly told Tania, “If the load gets too heavy for
you, I’ll be glad to help.”
Of course, his sons immediately volunteered to do the same, offering space in their own suitcases for
any left-over bears and mugwumps and tigers, o my! So it was that, one way or another, they got
everything packed, right down to the last floppy-eared stuffed toy and twisted tube of toothpaste, and were
able to leave the hotel within a handful of minutes.
The second quake, stronger than the first, hit just as they reached the lobby. Blair thanked all their
lucky stars that it had decently waited until then; otherwise it would have caught them in the elevator
downward, which they should not have taken at all, knowing another quake would likely be soon coming.
As it was, the quake, which made the hotel’s windows rattle in their casements, brought chunks of ceiling-
plaster and vases and framed pictures on the wall crashing down, and knocked several other guests in the
lobby off their feet, was strong enough to jam the elevator fast in the shaft. No one would be using it any
time soon. If they’d been on it and between floors when the quake hit . . .
With both hands occupied holding suitcases, he couldn’t use them to tell his rosary, so he made do by
telling it mentally, over and over, as he and his family quick-stepped to the door and out into the street.
God and His holy angels must be watching over them today – they’d been able to keep their feet in spite of
the newest quake, which hadn’t lasted very long, and make it out the door without being clobbered by
falling plaster or anything else as they did so.
Out in the street, they didn’t bother heading for their rental car in the garage, which was probably not
the safest place in the world to be right now. Instead, Blair tried flagging down a cab among the many
which, for some strange reason known only to God and taxi-drivers, were whipping back and forth through
the streets. For a miracle, the first one he hailed came to a screeching halt right in front of them. “I’ll open
the trunk from here – can you get your things into it?” the driver called out to them.
“Yes,” said Blair, going around to the back of the taxi, where a loud click announced that the driver
had indeed unlocked the boot. Gesturing to Cherie and the children to bring what they were carrying to
him, he quickly loaded their cases in the boot, which had just enough room to hold them all. Then,
slamming the lid of the boot shut, he and Cherie shooed their children into the back seat of the cab and got
in themselves, Cherie with the children and himself in the front on the passenger side.
“Where to, Señor?”
“The British embassy.”
Glancing back over his shoulder, the startled cabby, who, his name-tag informed them, was named
Diego Callas, said, “Señor Blair? I mean, Minister Blair?”
“That’s right. – Here, here’s fifty pounds,” Blair said, tucking a crumpled £50-note into Callas’s shirt-
pocket. “There’s fifty more when you get there. But please, please, get us there as fast as possible!”
“No problem, Minister,” Callas said, nodding. An instant later he had the cab in gear and was peeling
out down the street at top speed, cursing pedestrians leaping out of the way as the cab passed among them.
It was a minor – no, major miracle none of them were hit; a couple of times, they came awfully close to
running someone down, but never quite did so.
Judging from his driving, Callas knew the city very well. They pulled up in front of the embassy just a
few minutes later. “May I help you and your lovely wife and children with your things, Minister?” Callas
asked as they got out of the car.
“I – yes, if you could,” Blair told him. “Look, you’ve been very helpful, here’s something extra for
your trouble,” he said, handing Callas not the £50-pound note he’d promised, but a £100-pound note,
instead.
“Oh, Señor, really, this is too much –”
“No. No, it isn’t. I think you just may have saved all our lives. And you’re a damned fine driver,
too.”
“My pleasure, Señor,” said Callas. “Very well, but I would like to earn it. Here, let me take some of
your bags . . .”
Callas helping them, the Blair family quickly emptied the cab of their belongings. Then, with Blair in
the lead, Callas just behind him, they raced up to the gate. It took only a couple of minutes for the Marines
at the gates to pass them in – he’d already thought to get the leather portfolio holding his pass and those for
his family out and ready for inspection, somehow managing to clutch it with a couple of fingers of his right
hand against the handle of the suitcase he was carried in that hand. The Marines almost kept Callas from
accompanying the Blairs into the embassy compound, but when Blair explained why Callas was with them,
the Marines became sympathetic, giving Callas a temporary pass and also arranging for porters to come and
help them get their things into the British consulate’s offices quickly as possible.
Once the Blairs and their luggage were all safely inside and their luggage on board a cart that would be
taken to whatever rooms they would be assigned to, Callas, tipping his floppy black-and-white checked
beret and then bowing graciously to the Blairs, bade goodbye and hurried back outside, presumably to play
good (however profitable) Samaritan elsewhere in the city.
“Oh, I do hope he’ll be all right, Tony,” Cherie said, watching Callas with concern as the cabby left.
“I hope we’ll be all right, my love,” her husband told her in a low voice, pitched to keep their children
from overhearing.
She stared at him, one eyebrow raised – and had her unspoken question answered by another temblor,
this one, fortunately, much lighter than the one they’d just gone through in the lobby of La Casa del Rey.
Wincing, she said quietly, “Yes, there is that, isn’t there? Well, let’s see about getting settled and having
some breakfast,” she added in a louder voice, for her children’s benefit. “Since they’re going to send our
luggage along to our rooms, perhaps we ought to think about getting breakfast, first . . .”
Later, he thanked his lucky stars he’d had the foresight to get himself and his family over to the
embassy when he did. Not long after they arrived, the riots began, terrified mobs coursing through the
streets, seeking relief from their terror in the intoxication of mob action. The embassy compound,
surrounded as it was by well-fortified walls over four meters high and at least a meter thick, topped with
curls of razor-wire, broken glass, and sharp steel spikes, and defended by two well-armed platoons of
British Marines plus another of American Marines, wasn’t damaged at all by the rioting, which, outside the
embassy compound, was responsible for heavy damage to or the complete destruction of at least half the
major office buildings and residential structures in Madrid.
The earthquakes rumbling through Madrid all day and far into the night, however, did a good deal of
damage within the compound, cracking or even completely shattering and demolishing walls, leaving
nearly every window in the compound broken, heavily damaging many roofs, and killing two people
outright and seriously injuring a dozen more as a result of falling objects and big pieces of plaster. All that
day and half the next, Blair and his family huddled inside the British embassy, the hours not spent in their
rooms occupied with gathering in the lobby to watch the TV news or, when the TV station went off the air
and the power began to fail, to listen to the radio there, especially the powerful, generator-run shortwave
radio the Marines provided for them, which was able to pull in news from all over the world, most of it sent
out by ham radio operators rather than any commercial or government stations.
For World War III had broken out – that terrible pillar of fire so far to the northwest had been its
herald. Washington, DC had been hit with thirty or more megatons of thermonuclear destruction, and New
York City had suffered much the same fate, as had many other American cities. Paris was gone. So was
Moscow, and the Hague, Magnetogorsk and Tehran, Kabul and Bombay and Tripoli. And the United
Kingdom . . .
Every time he thought of what had happened to their homeland, Blair bowed his head, tears leaking
from his eyes, and prayed for his countrymen, almost all of whom, save those who, like he and his family,
had been fortunate enough to have been out of the country when the war broke out, were assuredly dead by
now. And for any survivors there, who, to quote the late Nikita Khrushchev, would surely now envy the
dead. From all reports, his country was now little more than a smoking, radioactive wasteland, about as
friendly to life as the naked sunward surface of Mercury. How could Great Britain possibly have done
anything to deserve so much hatred, so much sheer, raw malice? Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of
our death . . .
The earthquakes went on and on. By noon of the next day, Blair was beginning to despair for their
survival. How much longer would simple survival, let alone well-being, be possible here in the ever-more
dubious safety of the embassy compound? How much longer, in the teeth of those pounding earthquakes,
would those thick walls surrounding the compound retain their integrity? How much longer would it be
until those walls were finally breached and the screeching human tide poured in, desperate for food, full of
seething hate for those who had been fortunate enough to gain the security of the compound before the fun
began out there? Or until Madrid went the way of Washington and Paris and London?
-- “Minister Blair, someone is asking for you.”
“What?” Blair had been sitting, head in hands, in a big, overstuffed chair toward the back of the room
where the radio was set up, his wife and children near the front of the room, gathered around the radio
itself. That far back from the radio, it was hard to make out the terrifying things it was saying even by
straining hard to hear, and he’d been able to withdraw into himself for awhile, trying to think, trying to sort
out his family’s best options, and still be close to his wife and children. Now he looked up to find one of
the staff personnel, a young man who was employed there pretty much as what the Americans called a
gopher (another pun Tania had lovingly collected) bending over him, curiosity bright in the young man’s
eyes. “What is it?” said Blair.
“One of the American Marines wants you, sir,” the other told him. “He said something about a
helicopter.”
“A – what?”
“Come with me, sir, I’ll direct you to him.” So saying, the young man turned and began walking
briskly toward the building’s front doors. Wondering what the hell was going on, Blair rose and followed
him, telling his wife as he passed by on the way out, “I’ll be right back, Cherie. Something about a – a
helicopter,” he said, wonderingly. Her eyebrows rose in response – but she kept her counsel, merely telling
the children when they asked, ‘Your father will be right back. It’s all right,” then going back to trying to
comfort poor Peggy, who, retaining an unbreakable grip on her Pooh Bear, was becoming increasingly
hysterical in the face of all the quakes, the noise, the breakage, and the distress she could see her siblings
and mother felt in reaction to the mostly incomprehensible things that were coming from the radio.
Blair kept his promise, returning in just a couple of minutes. This time he wore a grin so wide it
threatened to split his head in twain. “Cherie, kids,” he said, “let’s get our things. It seems we have a ride
back to Gibraltar – our admiral friend seems to have arranged things for us. It’s waiting for us out on the
lawn in back.”
Just as the Blairs emerged onto the patio, they were met by a smiling USMC officer, Leftenant John
Caruthers, who told Blair, saluting as he did so, “Sir, Admiral Resh sends his regards, and wishes to have
the pleasure of your company in Gibraltar as soon as possible.”
“Leftenant, we are at your service,” Blair told him. “Where do we –”
“Right over here, sir. – Here, Mrs. Blair, please let me help you with your bags,” said the leftenant,
taking both of Cherie’s bags and leading the Blairs to the waiting US Navy Seahawk helicopter which sat,
quivering like a racehorse eager to be let out of the gate, ready for takeoff, in the middle of the lawn behind
the British embassy.
Ten minutes later they were in the air, rising high above the smoke-filled ruins of Madrid, turning to
the south, toward Gibraltar. Admiral Resh had sent the helicopter to pick them up and carry them as
quickly as possible to Gibraltar, where they were to board the carrier HMS Defiant, which would follow
and catch up with the US fleet on the way to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They hadn’t been forgotten. God
still had something for them all to do . . .

Instantly gigantic tsunamis, kicked up by the impact as well as by the earthshocks generated by it,
begin to radiate out into the Atlantic, up into the Bay of Fundy, downward toward Cape Cod. Fortunately,
because of the topography of the undersea terrain at the impact site and that of the nearby landforms, most
of Europe is spared the worst of them. The coastal areas along the Atlantic of France, Portugal, and
Spain, however, are savagely raked by the tsunamis into huge mudflats filled with the corpses of men,
women, children, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and various species of wildlife, along with
uprooted, crushed and mangled trees and bushes, farmers’ crops, and all the detritus of a smashed and
eviscerated civilization . The British Isles, on the other hand, aren’t hard-hit by them – but that doesn’t
matter very much, because, very shortly, they will be transformed into a radioactive moonscape in which
the few, dying survivors prayed for the mercy of death.
The entire process is over within 15 minutes or so. The asteroid is now part of history. On the
continental shelf, a slumped area far above the impact site remains to mark the asteroid’s passage, and the
heavier rocks and ash kicked up by the strike have begun to fall from the sky. The muddy ash and rapidly
drying dust resulting from the strike that made it into the higher levels of the atmosphere will, of course,
remain in there for much longer, interacting with gigatons of debris from the other catastrophic events that
will fill the next 48 hours, affecting climates for years after the impact. Water from the Atlantic, flash-
boiled upon impact by the asteroid, has sterilized much of the New England coast, but never touched the
virulent pathogens which, buried at the moment of impact, were subsequently released by the tsunamis;
only when the tsunamis began racing back and forth through the North Atlantic Basin were the pathogens
uncovered and carried by the tsunamis up onto the shores of the Atlantic Rim countries.
 Ironically, it took longer for marine shockwaves to hit the Maine coast, so close to the impact site,
than it did for them to hit Greenland and Europe, from whence they ricocheted back to the western Atlantic
and the New England coast. Those first shockwaves, radiating out and out to the north and east and
southeast, swamped countless boats and ships and churned the North Atlantic sea-bottom until the sea
above it was a warm soup of thin mud leavened with the remains of whatever life had dwelled in it just
prior to the impact. They also, however, did other things, the consequences of which won’t be known or
well understood for a long time after, things which, in some cases, are to make even more dire effects on
the world than the strike itself and its immediate aftermath will have made.
Those shockwaves that radiated to the northeast, toward Greenland, struck the western and southern
portions of that continent with so much force that they calved off enormous glaciers from the vast
Greenland icecap. These icebergs, of course, will melt at a much faster rate than the glacier itself, because
of their far greater surface-to-volume ratios than their parent. For the next few months, far more cold
water will be thereby released into the North Atlantic than was ever the case since the Little Ice Age, three
centuries before. As a result, for the next few years the Gulf Stream, dependent on solar heat for its
maintenance, will be slowed down to such a degree that it will shift far to the south and almost come to a
halt. In turn, that will cause western Europe and eastern North America, thrown into a frigid Nuclear
Autumn by the debris kicked into the stratosphere by the asteroid strike and the war immediately following,
to become even colder than they otherwise would. Fortunately, within two or three years, as northern
Summer succeeds Summer and more and more of the detritus is washed from the sky by the seemingly
endless precipitation following the Two-Day War, the Gulf Stream will return almost to normal. But that
first northern Winter after the War . . . that first Winter will be something straight out of the Ninth Circle of
Dante’s Inferno, especially in Scandinavia and Russia.
Russia, especially, will suffer the tortures of the damned during that first horrific Winter, which, in
Russia, will last for at least five years before finally yielding to something like a normal Summer – another
reason why the Soviet Union, unlike the West, will never recover from the War: one more global menace
gone for good, among the odd but welcome gifts the War will give to the world. And for decades, even
after more or less normal seasons return to Russia, her Winters will continue to be far harder than any
before in living memory, the snow piling up to record-breaking heights and still continuing to fall, Spring
each year coming very late and Autumn ending all too soon. As a result, even a century after the end of the
Two-Day War, most of Russia will be as devoid of human life and industry as Siberia alone had once been.
As for Siberia, it will become a cryogenic nightmare with at most two months or so of good weather
out of each year and 10-month Winters so cold that dry ice actually forms in some places, carbon dioxide
freezing out of the air, riming the ground and everything on it in lethal white shrouds. Rumor will have it
that atmospheric nitrogen is known to liquefy out in those areas of Siberia closest to the Arctic Circle, an
obvious impossibility, given the temperatures at which gaseous nitrogen turns into a liquid (-195.8°C =
-320.44°F, far colder than a Martian Winter, a temperature attainable on Earth only by the use of very
advanced technology). Even so, at times during that first century after the War Siberia will indeed get cold
enough to make steel unworkably brittle and hardwood boards crumble into sawdust; freeze the Yenisei
solid from bank to bank, bottom to top, and from Lake Baykal to the Karal Sea for nearly 11 months out
of the year; and otherwise make a damned good stand-in for an Eskimo Hell. And with Hell’s own
refrigerator standing with the door open right next to it, for most of any given year Russia will be in nearly
that desperate a condition, as well. Truly, the global warming that will finally begin making itself felt
again five years after the end of the Two-Day War will be all that keeps Earth’s Northern Hemisphere
from entering an Ice Age that could last at least as long as any previous ones. If not for that, civilization
could never recover from the devastating assaults dealt it by the asteroid impact and the War – nor would I
be here to write this now.
As far as Russia is concerned, of course, right after the War that won’t matter all that much, what with
so many of her important centers of industry, commerce, and government having been replaced by bomb-
craters, and the winds blowing from the west bringing endless benisons of deadly hot fallout from what
was left of the British Isles. Then there are the ghastly new plagues, which, sweeping the world after the
War, will average four human lives in five dead in Russia during that first unspeakable year after the War.
Indeed, in some areas of Russia, nine out of ten oreven ninety-nine out of a hundred will die of those
plagues. Frequently those Russians not killed outright by the new pathogens that directly attack human
beings will die more slowly, but just as surely, from starvation due to what the plagues affecting crops,
stock-animals, and wildlife will do to what food sources are left in that unhappy country. Others – infants,
invalids, pregnant women and the lives gestating within them, the elderly, the mentally incompetent –
though spared by the initial horrors of the War and somehow avoiding the plagues, will succumb to lack of
proper care and nurturance because the physicians, nurses, technicians, and others on whom their
continued existence and well-being have depended have died or run for the hills to escape the fallout and
the plagues.
Bad as it will be, though, it could have been so very much worse. That the asteroid impacted at a 45°
angle just when and where it did, so that it burrowed under the continental shelf rather than hitting the
continent or ocean floor more or less orthogonally, was truly a gift from God. Otherwise, if the bolide had
hit the ocean, it could have punched a hole all the way to the mantle through the seafloor crust, much
thinner than continental crust, in which case the impact would have been followed by volcanic upwellings
like those that formed the Hawaiian Islands – or the catastrophe about to occur in the Pacific Northwest
five hours from now. On the other hand, if it had hit land, it could well have cracked the continental plate
where it hit, causing earthquakes an order of magnitude or more greater than those it actually did, maybe
going all the way to the mantle, also evoking catastrophic volcanism. Either way, thanks to the weird
angle at which the asteroid entered the atmosphere and hit the planet, together with the actual locus of the
impact site, the consequences will turn out to be far better for humanity and Earth than they might
otherwise have been. In this, only a dedicated fool couldn’t see the hand of Providence, a sign of God’s
mercy, without which human life and perhaps Earthly life as a whole might have ended forever on our
world.
Even so, however, at the time most didn’t see the asteroid strike, nor the events following hard on its
heels, as a blessing of any kind . . .