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Page 15.

Hot sand crumbled between his toes and warmed his bones.

He’d fashioned a hat of skin and feathers to shield himself from the blinding sun in a powder-blue sky. He wore a stone knife in his belt and carried a bow and arrows. He thought it ironic that humankind had begun in the stone age and was now ending its days in the same manner.

As he walked on the beach, Alex kept a wary eye on several rippers that shadowed him from just across a sliver of fast-running tidal water in the bay. There were plenty of smaller mammals, but this was the top of the food chain, except for himself. They were a species that had not existed in human times. A typical adult weighed 120 pounds. It was thickly furry, brown, with claws like those of a bear on which it loped when excited or hungry. It had a smallish cat-like head with curling dirty-yellow tusks like a boar’s.

Here on the beach, a family of rippers trundled hungrily, a short distance beyond his reach, and he beyond theirs. He could smell their rank odor and hear eager snorts from dripping, glistening black nostrils. Their dark gaze followed him with hateful interest.

Alex had determined they would not rule his life. He kept his deadly bow handy. His arrowheads were coated with fecal matter that would cause massive infection and death upon the slightest wound. If they took him down, they would not go easily themselves. Every so often as the weeks and months dragged by, and these tormentors kept after him looking for their opening, he’d loosen a well-placed arrow that might connect with a thigh or neck. Then he’d take perverse pleasure over the next few days in watching the animal sicken and die in pain while its pals circled around it waiting for a meal.

Alex was lucky that day and bagged a gleaming golden sea bass with copper and silver scales that might have been manufactured by the finest of watchmakers—but this was nature at work, the master artisan.

He laughed as he splashed through warm ankle-deep water. The rippers were afraid of saltwater and stayed on their side of the sandbank as he made his way home to his own beach and then to the cliffs above it where he made his home. It would be good eating tonight and for days to come. He could already imagine how the fish would smell as it slowly roasted, and how its crackling skin would taste.

At that moment, a faint shadow briefly dimmed the sky.

Startled, he looked up. He stared across the wide bay with its rippling tidal waters. Before he saw anything, he heard an odd sound—a brief rumble and sizzle like a burning thing streaking through the air, like the rattle of a lightning bolt, echoing from horizon to horizon.

The rippers too were startled. They cringed, looking over their shoulders and then loping away into the bushes above the beach.

A chrome streak, like a fine silver or glass thread, appeared and instantly vanished into a forest across the bay two miles distant. He watched for any signs of fire or smoke, but none came. Nor was there an explosion. Alex had never seen anything like this before. Was it a natural phenomenon? Everything he’d found in the world turned out to be an illusion created by cruel nature—like a stone surface that resembled a road but turned out to have been made by glaciers advancing and retreating during the ice ages following the extinction of humankind, or like a distant skyline that turned out to be a rock formation after he’d hiked for days to get there at great peril to his life, or like a figure waving to him from a distant hill that turned out to be a sheet of moss caught in a tree and fluttering in the wind.

The sky was bright as ever, and a fine thread of vapor quickly dissipated, drifting away in the powder-blue sky.

He sighed, resuming his trek home. It meant another dangerous expedition to investigate, of course—he couldn’t pass up even the faintest hope of finding another human being alive somehow. Already, he was planning his journey: perhaps by raft this time, to avoid the predators on land. A quick trip up the beach, into the woods—it would probably turn out to have been a fist-sized meteorite, another dead end, another disappointment—and he’d make his way back to the only safety he knew.

He replayed the image of the streaking object over and over in his mind, down to the sizzling sound and the odd ozone smell. Did it have anything to do with that other mystery he’d so often pondered on moonlit nights: the unnatural-looking smudge that hung frozen in space beside the Moon? He resolved to find out as soon as possible.

The next day he was intrigued by thoughts of swimming parallel to the shore to explore the impact area of the mysterious sky object.

After making sure the rippers were busy in their valley, he clambered down from his sky island carrying his ladder. He used the ladder as a bridge between the sky island and a large boulder. He laid the ladder aside to prevent any rippers from crossing over and surprising him on his own turf.

Arrow at ready, he sprinted across the sand toward the water, where he would again be relatively safe from the rippers.

As he was halfway to the water, he saw them streaking toward him down the beach: two adult rippers in full sprint, moving like the wind. He dropped his bow and arrows on the sand, where he could retrieve them, and dove into the water.

He swam as hard as he could straight out.

He heard the rippers splash in the water behind him, and redoubled his efforts.

A rip current suddenly caught him and pulled him out.

He tumbled head over heels at the bottom of the water, rolling on the silty sand, suffocating for want of air—

—everything moved in a daze, and he heard the underwater mumble of waves and the rumble of crashing breakers above and the whisper of sand abrading his body—

—And then, past the breakers, the sea flung him clear, and he bobbed dazedly in three foot swells in an otherwise calm sea.

He was now about 150 feet out, comfortably treading water, getting his breath back. The two rippers had given up their pursuit and were tearing into his kill. He prayed that they would not completely tear the hide apart, though he could use scraps to make small pieces of this and that—for example, ties to bind the halves of a tunic together along the edges.

Should he wait until they were done? The rest of the pride was racing in for the feast. No telling how long they would lie in the sand, digesting. Now one of them left the dead animal and paced along the shore, looking after him. That answered his question.

He broke into an even, measured long distance stroke parallel to the shore. Once he warmed up, he was like a machine laying down yard after yard. The water was calm and pleasant and it actually felt warm. That was a commodity he could appreciate. Every few minutes he’d take a look around underneath, looking for aquatic predators, but saw only swarms of little fish and one grouper who ignored him.

Gradually, he was in line with the valley. He paused for a rest, treading water, and studied the lay of the land. His intended goal, the peninsula jutting out to the west, was still at least two or three miles off. It would be a long swim. Without his weapons, he might be best off returning to his beach—but the rippers would be busy on the carcass for a while. Even at this distance he could see the greenish-silver glow of fish feeding at the carcass. Best to wait it out, maybe swim a bit farther west and look things over.

In a million years, what would be left of civilization? Probably just about nothing. One or two good ice ages would race across the ground, scraping buildings off their foundations, leveling cities, leaving gouge marks. The earth might shift poles, or even reverse them. The South Pole could be in Hawaii, and southern Africa might be the new North Pole. A million years, a million possibilities. Even his own place of birth showed absolutely no sign of a human touch.

His cliff was a quarter mile to his right as he faced land, looking north. His cliff had split off from a long, low coastal range of foothills that ran as far to his left as he could see. Beyond those were more hills, each range twice as high as the first, until in the distance there were mountains. Everywhere he looked, he saw thick deciduous forestation, much as Alex had known in upstate New York. Only this was the ocean—had it cut its shore somewhere near Syracuse? Were Rome and Albany beachfront property?

The river that had cut out the valley he was looking at probably ran pretty fast in the spring, when the snow melted. It had carved its way through the foothills, opening a canyon a quarter mile wide.

As he rested, he turned playfully and did a somersault in the water.