and ignored it. He wasn’t capable of sarcasm …and I wasn’t capable of busting him in the nose.
So we walked back down the ramp and I found my place on the truck and tried to sleep. I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off, but it was all pretend. The image of a planet burning like a lump of coal in a furnace filled my mind. I thought about Terraneau reduced to a cinder and Ava caught in the blaze.
If I made it off this planet, I would go to Terraneau. I would beg Doctorow to evacuate the planet. I would beg Ava to leave with me. At some point, I slipped into that frenetic state between sleep and consciousness in which I could never tell the difference between dreams and reality. I imagined myself walking through the ashes of Norristown, looking for Ava.
In my dream, the streets had vanished, and all of the buildings had vanished, all but the three towers that Doctorow used as dormitories. The three skyscrapers in the center of town still stood, but they had melted. Their straight edges had melted and they now had curves and convolutions and I realized that they looked like skeletal fingers sticking out of the ground. They were black, like the color of charred bone, and they reached up to the ashen sky, and I recognized them. The finger on the left belonged to Ellery Doctorow and the finger on the right belonged to Scott Mars; and though I desperately tried to deny it, I knew that the finger in the center was Ava.
“Ava!” I shouted. In my sleep, the name came out so slowly that it sounded like a wind that could blow apart rocks.
Freeman woke me from the dream. He tapped on my helmet until I sat up, then he said, “We can get out.” As I stood and stretched my arms, he climbed into the truck and started the engine.
Sweetwater greeted me on both the interLink and the little two-way as I slipped into the passenger’s seat. “Glad to see you made it,” he said, sounding unnaturally cheerful.
“What happened out there?” I asked.
“We were just telling Raymond,” Sweetwater said.
Breeze came on as well. He must have been sitting and Sweetwater standing, or maybe Sweetwater was on a ladder. They looked to be about the same size on the little screen of the two-way.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Breeze said. “We had satellites all around the planet looking for an explosion. From all we observed, it was a spontaneous event.”
Excited by a discovery that seemed to ignore the laws of physics, Breeze no longer stuttered. “The temperature over Odessa rose from seventy-two degrees to nine thousand degrees so quickly that our instruments recorded it as instantaneous. The same thing happened all around the planet—a spontaneous and uniform change in temperature to nine thousand degrees.”
“Which also explains why the Tachyon D levels dropped,” Sweetwater said. “The little devils consumed themselves. They burned themselves up like gas in a fire. Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to generate that much heat?”
The dwarf scientist squared his shoulders, and said, “Here. Here are some of the satellite images. You can see for yourself.”
Sweetwater and Breeze disappeared from the screen, replaced by the image of a city at night. Streetlights shone, but no cars roved the streets. Without lights shining in their windows, the buildings of Odessa hid in the darkness.
Then it happened. The
“Nine thousand degrees,” Sweetwater said. “It’s nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.” Sweetwater, the communicator, used analogies. Breeze, the scientist, spouted data.
The satellite footage showed a car parked along the side of the street. The paint dulled, metal sagged, and the car exploded. It flipped through the air, landing on its roof. It looked like a turtle turned on its shell. Moments later, its tires burst into flames.
Grass, trees, cloth awnings, and signs burst into flames. Steam rose up around an iron lid covering a manhole, then the cover launched and spun through the air like a tossed coin. By the time it hit the ground, the street had melted, and it sank into the tar.
Thick fog rose from the flaming wreckage of a grassy park. The steel cables along a suspension bridge stretched and drooped like melting plastic, finally giving way and dropping the bridge into the river below. The cloud of steam coming off the river was thick as linen.
I saw cars and trucks sinking into the street below them and thin coils of steam rising from cement sidewalks. I saw concrete shelters collapse in on themselves. Explosions occurred everywhere. A fire hydrant burst, sending a column of steam into the air. The camera focused on a skyscraper, the windows along the bottom of the building melting in their casings.
A counter appeared in the top right corner of the screen. It ticked off seconds and hundredths of seconds.
“Now this is curious,” Sweetwater said, the excitement obvious in his gravelly voice.
The camera panned back, showing more of the street. The windows of several buildings along an avenue exploded, spitting out shotgun bursts of glittering glass shrapnel that turned a fiery orange and melted in the air.
Sweetwater continued to narrate. “You see how the windows are bursting outward? We think it is because the atmosphere is rising. That means the pressure from the air trapped inside the buildings is not being matched by air pressure on the outside of the building. It’s all guesswork, of course, no one has ever seen anything like this before; but we think heat is causing the atmosphere to rise like a hot-air balloon, so the pressure on the outside of the buildings is dropping. Here, look at this!”
The camera moved in on a skyscraper. The building coughed glass out of its windows floor by floor, the damage rising quickly. Not all of the windows shattered. Some had already melted.
The image changed to show a forest, and the timer in the corner returned to zero. At five seconds, the trees in the forest lit up like match heads in a book that had been set ablaze. The trees did not ignite one here and one there, they all lit up at once, flaring into a brilliant orange.
The image changed again, this time showing a vast body of water, maybe an ocean or maybe a great lake. Then the heat started. Twenty seconds in, steam began to rise off the water.
“We estimate the heat penetrated no more than five feet deep,” Sweetwater said. “Any fish swimming close to shore would have been poached.”
To this point, the video feed did not show anything that might have caused the explosion I had heard when I awoke. Nor had it shown anything that would have caused the shutter at the top of the power station to burst inward.
On the screen, the timer showed eighty-three seconds and froze.
“It lasted precisely eighty-three seconds,” Sweetwater said, the former excitement missing from his voice. “At eighty-three seconds, the heat stopped, and the air temperature dropped sharply.”
The timer started counting. It reached ninety-six seconds, and there was the explosion. Nothing big or fiery, but something powerful enough to make weakened buildings collapse as it flushed enormous clouds of ash and soot into the air.
“What was that?” asked Freeman.
“The heat from the event lifted the atmosphere. We estimate that the atmosphere rose approximately 550 feet from ground level because of the heat. After the event ended, the atmosphere dropped back into place,” said Sweetwater.
Freeman said nothing. He sat silent and unmoving, his helmet hiding his expression. I whispered a constant stream of expletives to myself as I watched the destruction.
The video feed stopped, and the scientists again appeared on the screen. Breeze stared into a monitor on his desk instead of the camera. Sweetwater stared into the camera as if watching us.
Breeze looked up from his monitor and turned to face us. “I’ve reviewed the data again, and I still cannot find evidence of an initial explosion, not even a transfer of energy that might have set this off.”
“The only anomaly is the tachyons,” Sweetwater agreed.
“Does the atmosphere look stable?” Freeman asked.
“Completely stable,” said Breeze.
