Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

"Come on over, darlin'," Fulton said. "Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky."

She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.

"Look," he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. "Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything."

* * * * *

I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting. The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.

The sun.

Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?

Did it matter?

I turned on the motel room's small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.

There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. "And as always," one of the newscasters said, "although we don't have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don't think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible."

"Today of all days," his partner agreed, "people will want to be close to their families."

I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.

The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.

The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.

I waited for more commentary, but the image was silent until it cut to a studio in the Midwest, the network's fallback headquarters, and another reporter, too poorly groomed to be a regular anchor, who uttered more sourceless and futile cautions. I switched it off.

And took my med kit and suitcase to the car.

Fulton and Jody came out of the office to see me off. Suddenly they were old friends, sorry to see me go. Jody looked frightened now. "Jody's been talking to her mom," Fulton said. "I don't think her mom had heard about the stars."

I tried not to picture the early-morning wake-up call, Jody phoning from the desert to announce what her mother would have instantly understood as the approaching end of the world. Jody's mom saying what might be a final good-bye to her daughter while struggling not to scare her to death, shielding her from the onrushing truth.

Now Jody leaned into her father's ribs and Fulton put his arm around her, nothing but tenderness left between them.

"Do you have to go?" Jody asked.

I said I did.

"Because you can stay if you like. My dad said so."

"Mr. Dupree's a doctor," Fulton said gently. "He probably has a house call to make."

"That's right," I said. "I do."

* * * * *

Something near miraculous happened in the eastbound lanes of the highway that morning. Many people behaved badly in what they believed to be their final hours. It was as if the flickers had been merely a rehearsal for this less arguable doom. All of us had heard the predictions: forests ablaze, searing heat, the seas turned to scalding live steam. The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month.

And so we broke windows and took what appealed to us, any trinket life had denied us; men attempted to rape women, some discovering that the loss of inhibition worked both ways, the intended victim endowed by the same events with unexpected powers of eye-gouging and testicle-crushing; old scores were settled by gunshot and guns were fired on a whim. The suicides were legion. (I thought of Molly: if she hadn't died in the first flicker she was almost certainly dead now, might even have died pleased at the logical unfolding of her logical plan. Which made me want to cry for her for the first time in my life.)

But there were islands of civility and acts of heroic kindness, too. Interstate 10 at the Arizona border was one of them.

During the flicker there had been a National Guard detachment stationed at the bridge that crossed the Colorado River. The soldiers had disappeared shortly after the flicker ended, recalled, perhaps, or just AWOL, headed for home. Without them the bridge could have become a tangled, impassable bottleneck.

But it wasn't. Traffic flowed at a gentle pace in both directions. A dozen civilians, self-appointed volunteers with heavy-duty flashlights and flares out of their trunk emergency kits, had taken on the work of directing traffic. And even the terminally eager—the folks who wanted or needed to travel a long way before dawn, to reach New Mexico, Texas, maybe even Louisiana if their engines didn't melt first—seemed to understand that this was necessary, that no attempt to jump the line could possibly succeed and that patience was the only recourse. I don't know how long this mood lasted or what confluence of goodwill and circumstance created it Maybe it was human kindness or maybe it was the weather: in spite of the doom roaring toward us out of the east the night was perversely nice. Scattered stars in a clear, cool sky; a quickening breeze that carried off the stench of exhaust and came in the car window gentle as a mother's touch.

* * * * *

I thought about volunteering at one of the local hospitals— Palo Verde in Blythe, which I had once visited for a consultation, or maybe La Paz Regional in Parker. But what purpose would it serve? There was no cure for what was coming.

There was only palliation, morphine, heroin, Molly's route, assuming the pharmaceutical cupboards hadn't already been looted.

And what Fulton had told Jody was essentially true: I had a house call to make.

A quest. Quixotic now, of course. Whatever was wrong with Diane, I wouldn't be fixing that, either. So why finish the journey? It was something to do at the end of the world, busy hands don't tremble, busy minds don't panic; but that didn't explain the urgency, the visceral need to see her that had set me on the road during the flicker and seemed, if anything, stronger now.

Past Blythe, past the uneasy gauntlet of darkened shops and the fistfights brewing around besieged gas stations, the road opened up and the sky was darker, the stars sparkling. I was thinking about that when the phone trilled.

I almost drove off the road, fumbling in my pocket, braking, while a utility vehicle in back of me squealed past.