by Jack Dann
It was kind of cozy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.
I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting. And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other's arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.
"We're going to die," she said.
"Maybe not."
"Get used to the idea. I have," she said. "Look at you, you're all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn't it been a lovely night?"
"Unique. I wish I'd known in time to take you to dinner."
Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. "Me too," she said when we could hear again.
"I wish I'd known this afternoon."
"Pecan pralines!"
"Farmer's Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would you have murdered, if you'd had the time?
"There was a girl in my sorority—"
—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.
The lights flickered, then came on again.
Too casually, Leslie asked, "Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?"
"It better be back to normal. Otherwise we're dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter."
"Dammit it, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Yellow dwarf stars don't go nova."
"What if ours did?"
"The astronomers know a lot about novas," I said. "More than you'd guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-nought yellow dwarf. They don't go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years."
She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn't see her face. "I don't want to believe it. I don't dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?"
"Something did."
"What? I don't believe it. We'd remember."
"Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?"
"Of course. We watched it at Earl's Lunar Landing Party."
"They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.
"Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half-melted.
"Sometime in the past—oh, say, the past hundred thousand years, there's no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn't stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side."
The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie's ear.
"We'd remember. It couldn't have been this bad."
"I'm not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn't do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who'd know? The sun went back to normal, that time. It might again. The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often."
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
"Then we could live through this," Leslie said hesitantly.
"I believe you've put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skål." I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
"Then shouldn't we be doing something about it?"
"We are."
"Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there're going to be floods!"
"You bet your ass there are, but they won't rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I've thought this through. We're in a building that was designed to be earthquake-proof. You told me so yourself. It'd take more than a hurricane to knock it over.
"As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won't get far tonight, not with the streets flooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that's what. That area won't stand up to what's coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It's going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight."
"Suppose the polar caps melt?"
"Yeah . . . well, we're pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah's flood. Maybe it's happening again. Sure as hell, there's not a place on Earth that isn't the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—"
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
"At least we've got food!" I shouted. "If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!"
"But if the power goes, we can't cook it! And the refrigerator—"
"We'll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs—"
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I'd been stupid; I'd waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease.
Leslie screamed, "We'll have to use the oven!"
Of course. The oven couldn't possibly fall on us.
We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it in on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie's thirty-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn't trust the rain as a water source; I couldn't control it.
The sound. Already we'd stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we'd be stone-deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie's place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damn few people when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I'd have been doing it anyway. You don't stop planning just because there's no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she'd probably thought of it herself.
The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I'd put all the food in Baggies.
Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.
For some time I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had e
aten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I'm not sure what I thought about. I didn't sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.
My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I'd been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Flood, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe . . . but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower floors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough . . .
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now . . . Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues.
And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I'd get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
THE LAST SUNSET
Geoffrey A. Landis
And when the last days have come at last, when the end of the world really is at hand and the human race is about to vanish from the Earth, perhaps the last thing to matter is the style with which you face the End . . .
A physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer, by the high-production standards of the genre, but he is popular. His story, "A Walk in the Sun," won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992; his story, "Ripples in the Dirac Sea," won him a Nebula Award in 1990; and his story, "Elemental," was on the final Hugo ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection, Myths, Legends, and True History, and he has recently sold his first novel. He lives in Brook Park, Ohio.
Like an enemy fighter in an old movie about flying aces, the comet came out of the sun, invisible against the glare until it was far too late. There was nothing left to do, Christopher thought, but wait for the inevitable impact, and to calculate where it would hit.
Chris was the astronomy group's pet computer whiz. The comet had been discovered by the astronomers, but the calculation of orbit, and hence finding the time and location of the impact, was his responsibility. He'd been extraordinarily careful with the calculation, checking the critical lunar perturbation by three different methods before he was confident of the results. It was close, almost a miss. Had the Earth been ten minutes further along its orbit, it would have been a miss.
It was a hit.
"Shit," said Martin, one of the astronomers. They were gathered in the computer division's conference room, not that the results couldn't have been printed out in any one of their offices. "Forty miles? The impact is forty miles east of here? You're sure?"
Christopher nodded. "I'm sorry."
"Huh? Not your fault," the astronomer said. "What irony. We'll be at ground zero, then, or just about. The fireball will be a hundred miles across. We won't even see it."
"No consolation," said Tibor, the second astronomer on the team, "but, if it matters to you, yes, we'll see it. It will take about a minute for the fireball to expand."
"I'm sorry," said the first astronomer. "I really wanted to see my kids grow up. I did." He was crying now, awkwardly. "Not that it makes any difference what I wanted. I'm sorry. I'm going home now. I think I want to be with my family."
Tibor looked at his watch. "Go ahead and call the newspapers, if you want."
"Why bother?" Martin said, already halfway out the door. "I don't see much point in it."
Tibor tossed the page of printout on the floor. "Yeah. Guess I'm going to go home, too." He looked up at Christopher. "You know, you're lucky," he said, shaking his head. "You're not married. Never thought I'd envy somebody for that."
"Some luck," Christopher said softly, but by then the astronomers had both left, and he was alone in the bright silence of the conference room.
An hour and a half to the end of the world. There was no sense running, Christopher knew. When the end of the world falls like the sword of God out of the sky, there was no place far enough to run. He walked back to his office and stared at the books and papers piled helter-skelter across his desk. They didn't matter. Nothing mattered now; nothing at all.
He closed the door.
Kara was in her office two doors down, reading a journal. She was the newest hire in the University Research Institute's computer division—she'd been there only a year—but of all the group, he liked working with her best. Occasionally they went out for coffee together; once they'd gone to a movie.
She looked up when he passed her door. "Say, Chris, where is the astronomy group off to?" she asked. "I was just looking for Tibor, but he's not here, and his car's not in the lot."
"He went home early today," Chris said. "So did Martin."
"Oh," Kara said. "No big deal. Guess I'll have to catch him tomorrow." She went back to her reading.
Christopher worked well with her, but sometimes he thought he didn't really know her. Kara was four years younger than he was, and at times the difference seemed like an abyss. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was gently flirting with him, and then a moment later she would be nothing but business, friendly and casual in a completely professional way. She was smart and extremely competent; he never had to explain anything to her twice. He liked working with her.
She was a bit shy, he knew, although she hid it well. One time he'd seen Kara with her kid sister, and the difference had been striking. She'd been simultaneously more grown up, and also younger, laughing and kidding. That day, he thought, was probably when he'd fallen in love with her. He'd known better than to try to make a pass at somebody he worked with; far too often, that led to disaster.
But he'd thought about it many times over the last year. And now, he thought, he could do it now. Now that nothing mattered.
"Hey, Kara," he said, and waited for her to look up again. "Coffee?"
She looked at her watch. "Well—"
"Come on," he said. "You need the break. It's after four."
She looked at the stack of papers on her desk, a bit neater than the piles on his, but still formidable. "Thanks, but I can't. I've really got a lot of work."
"Oh, come on. If it was the end of the world, would any of this really matter?"
She smiled. "Well, okay. Give me five minutes."
It was more like twenty minutes before she came by his office. Chris spent the time writing names on a list of people he ought to call, then crossing them off again.
They went down Thayer Street, to a coffee shop popular with undergraduates, and grabbed a corner table. It had been raining all day, but the sky had finally cleared, and the late afternoon sun glinted in the puddles. Chris's stomach was wound tight. He had to say something now, but he couldn't find words. He felt like he was in high school again, dry-mouthed at the thought of asking a girl to dance. And, indeed, what could he say? He realized that he didn't want to threaten their friendship with a pass, and suddenly knew th
at he wasn't going to ask her anything. It would be too crude. He wanted her to like him too much. He felt like a fool. It was the end of the world, and even so, he was tongue-tied. Nothing could change him.
Kara didn't seem to notice his silence. Perhaps she had things on her mind, too. He didn't even know if she had a boyfriend. She never mentioned one, but why should she? There was so much he didn't know about her; so much he would never get a chance to know.
Christopher turned away, pretending to watch the sunset reflected in the puddles, and worked hard to blink away his tears. Two minutes left. When he thought he could speak without his voice breaking, he said, "Say, grab your coffee, and let's go sit by the observatory to watch the sunset."
Kara shrugged. "Okay."
Walking down the street, on a sudden impulse he reached out and took her hand. She gave him a sidelong glance, but didn't pull her hand away. Her hand was cool, her fingers surprisingly small against his palm. It was enough, he decided, enough just to walk down the street with her and hold her hand on the last night of the world. It was not what he wanted; he wanted to hold her close to him, to spend his life with her, to share all her secrets and her joys. But holding hands was enough. It was a promise; a promise meant for a someday that, now, would never be. Holding her hand would have to be enough for a lifetime.
Opposite the sunset, a deep red glow was rising silently into the sky, backlighting the clouds low on the horizon. "Look," he said, and she turned around and stopped, her eyes brilliant in the glow.
"Why, it's beautiful," she said. "I've never seen a sunset do that before. What is it?"
The red stretched nearly from horizon to horizon now, and in the east it was turning an intense blue-violet, brighter than the sun. "It's the end of the world," he said, and then, at last, there was nothing left to say.
DOWN IN THE DARK
William Barton
But, as a contemporary sage once said, "It's not over until it's over."
Here we visit the frozen moons of Saturn, in the wake of a cosmic catastrophe that has destroyed all life on Earth, to a time when the human race has been backed into the tightest of tight corners and is on the verge of extinction, for a compelling and somberly lyrical study of how flickers of light can sometimes show up from the most unexpected of sources, even at the blackest of times, even when you 're down in the dark, and it seems that all hope is gone.
