A disk of white/not-white appeared in the sky and swelled outward over the clean blue Vancouver sky, stretching out in all directions until all the world was blotted out. Bigger and closer it came, sweeping all before it, coming closer, closer—and then it passed through him, leaving darkness where daylight had been. Stars that were strangers to Earth shone down in a night that should not have been, casting a cold light that sent a shiver through Gerald’s heart.
The ground trembled again. Earthquake. Gerald shut his eyes and prayed. He had spent some time in Mexico and had developed a good set of earthquake reflexes there. It had been the first ground tremor, rather than the strange shifts in light, that had awakened him and sent him outside in the first place.
Again the sky fell, the cloud of nothing swelling out, sweeping down. The hole in the sky swallowed Gerald, swallowed the land he was on, and left behind still another skyworld. From horizon to horizon, it turned to fire, a hell-red glow, brightest in the north. The lush and lovely greensward of Vancouver looked as if it had been dipped in blood.
In that moment Gerald knew that this was Judgment Day. God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had decreed the long-awaited End of Days foretold for thousands of years. Here was the Rapture, the Shout, the Trump of Doom. He closed his eyes again and prayed, prayed hard. For who could be sure of Salvation? He thought of his wife, Marcia, far away on that station orbiting Venus, and a small part of him smiled. In Heaven, families long divided would be reunited. He prayed for her, too, and found some comfort there. An unbeliever, but a good woman, a kind and loving woman who followed her heart and used her God-given talents. How could a just Lord deny her Paradise?
If any of them survived this Judgment. Fear rattled his faith.
By a sheer act of will, he forced his eyelids open. Still praying, still praising the Lord with all his heart, he watched. He was determined to witness the End of all things. Few indeed would be privileged to see such a sight. He was to be a Witness of Doom. He did not wish to annoy the Lord by refusing to see the sight set before him.
But, all things being equal, to witness such events was an honor he would gladly forgo.
Wolf Bernhardt, astronomer, sat inside on the floor in the dark, with no thought for the sky. He picked himself up off the floor, moving carefully in the sudden darkness. The lights had gone out right in the middle of the first quake. He knew, already, that the quake and the gravity wave could not be a coincidence. He had no proof, no evidence whatsoever—but he knew. Somehow, the gravity beam had disturbed the San Andreas Fault—and the San Andreas practically ran through the parking lot of JPL. No wonder the temblor had been so violent.
But how could the microscopic power of a gravity wave jolt something as massive as a planetary fault system? It didn’t make sense. But the seismologists hadn’t predicted a quake, either. The Californians at JPL were forever boasting to visiting scientists that the seismo-predictions hadn’t been wrong once in the last fifty years.
Until today.
But how could a gravity beam do this? There had to be more to it. The gravities people out on Pluto had discovered something far greater than they had imagined.
The lights came back on, and Wolf got back into his chair. The autocamera came back to life and swiveled back to focus in on him. “Hello again to you on Pluto,” he said. “You may have set something off down here. There was a quake here in California, though we can’t know what caused it.”
More of the reserve power system was coming back on-line. He looked up at the communications status board and noticed that the comm line from Pluto had dropped out. Damn it! All the comm lines had dropped, and all the backups. “Pluto, it looks as though we have lost incoming contact with you. I will keep transmitting in the hope that you can receive me.” He glanced at another set of meters, displaying the readouts from the gravity-wave sensors.
And then he stared at the readouts. Impossible. Flat-out impossible. The Ring of Charon was supposed to be sending a steady pulsing signal from a single direction. The meters were showing a chaos of gravity signals of all strengths coming from all directions. Then, even as he watched, all of the readouts went dead at once. A warning bar appeared across the screen:
A strange little thud quivered past his feet, shaking the whole building. An aftershock? It didn’t quite feel like one. Too sharp, too abrupt and focused. It seemed to come from the direction of the gravity sensor lab, in a building a few hundred meters away. A new warning bar appeared:
God in His Heaven, what else could go wrong? “Pluto, we are getting some definitely weird results down here. I think that quake might have damaged the gear. Stand by. I will keep this message beam active while I check the situation.”
Wolf stood up and shook his head. So much for dreams of glory. Duty required that he check the system. But the experiment had failed, somehow. No one was going to get famous off this one.
He headed for the gravity lab, while the message system valiantly tried to send a blank carrier beam to a planet that wasn’t there anymore.
Wolf found a fair-sized crater where the gravity lab should have been, and fires still burning in the rubble.
Lucian breathed a sigh of relief as the airlock swung open. He had wondered if it had been a bad idea to head down into the depths during a quake—but now the move was vindicated. He didn’t mention it to any of the tourists, but the blinking yellow panel on the lock indicator meant that there was an air leak somewhere in the observation-dome complex. Had they stayed behind, sooner or later they would have been out of air. If the quake had likewise jammed the airlock door mechanism, they’d all be dead. The door stopped its travel and locked into the open position.
He noticed more than a few of his charges were hanging back, unwilling to enter the confined space of the airlock chamber. In a quake, claustrophobia was entirely rational. “Come on, folks,” he said, trying to assume the air of a bored tour guide again, weary of squiring his flock. If he treated them like sheep, maybe they would act like sheep. “Inside. The sooner we get into the lock, the sooner we can get out the other side. Let’s get into the lock.”
Still they hung back, until Deborah, the sensible young woman, squared her shoulders and strode purposefully into the lock. That was enough to get most of the others moving.
Lucian crowded them all into the lock chamber. He had twenty-eight people on the tour. Normally he would cycle the tour through in two runs—but one more good jolt and the lock might jam. Get them all through while he still could. Lucian herded the last tourist in, wedged himself in, and shoved his way over to the lock controls. He broke the seal over the emergency switch and punched the crash-cycle button. A siren hooted, and the normal white lighting cut out, replaced by blood red emergency lights. The domeside hatch swung shut at double time and bolted itself shut. The tourists crowded back from it.
The pump mechanism clunked and clanked, making noises that were unnervingly unfamiliar to Lucian’s practiced ear. Could the quake have screwed up the innards of the lock? What if it jammed? How long could the air last in here? It was a bit warm already, with all these people crowded into this small space. Then came the welcome hissing sound of the pumps equalizing pressure with the city side.