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He gasped, tried to hold his breath, gasped again, panting, then said, "Maybe. On... fire?"

I said, "It's too cold for anything to burn, Paulie."

"Bomb."

"Richmond's only a little more than a hundred miles from here. If somebody set off even a little atom bomb, we'd've felt the ground shake."

"Maybe we were asleep." Breathing easier now.

Overhead, the oxygen clouds seemed larger. "Maybe so. Or fucking. Hey, Paulie, you feel the earth move when you come?"

He didn't even laugh, looking away from the light, back up at the clouds and ... "There." He lifted his arm a little bit, trying to point.

Something was coming down towards us, a little glowing pinpoint of light. Tinkerbell, looking for Peter Pan. It was drifting our way, drifting like dandelion fluff on the wind, slowly settling. When it was close enough, I could see it was a little silver sphere about the size of a golfball. A vaguely luminescent soap bubble.

Paulie whispered, "Oh, my God." I don't remember ever having heard him sound so pleased in all my life.

The thing started to steam as it approached the ground, not quite hovering over the snowpack, steaming, shrinking, drifting lower. I suddenly realized whatever it was, it wasn't hot enough to sublimate the C02. Lower.

Lower.

Paphl

It exploded with a sharp hiss, momentarily ballooning to a bright softball of dusty light. Suddenly, there was an icy teacup in the snow where it'd been.

I said, "Well. Guess we know where the holes came from."

He looked like he wanted to kneel beside it. Impossible. He put his hands on his hips, clownish, clumsy, looking back up at bright clouds, visibly spreading across the black and starry sky.

I grinned. "Oxygen rain."

He smiled back, eyes incredibly bright. "Yeah."

I said, "Merry Christmas, Paulie."

How many times can a man awaken and open his eyes slowly? As many times as it takes. Until he's finally awake. Overhead, there was a clear blue sky, that fabled cornflower blue, with fine, faded white clouds so high up you could hardly make out their shape, more like faraway mist than clouds. There was a soft wind blowing and it was cool. Just cool enough for comfort, like when you've set the AC just right.

Just right to be naked.

I could hear the wind rushing in the trees, and there was another soft sound, a faint hissing, like the whitish noise you hear when you stand next to a field of ripe wheat rippling in the wind. Something else, too. Ocean waves in the distance. Sunlight warm on my skin. Sun hanging low in the sky, above remote, jagged white mountains.

All right. Mountains. I...

I sat up suddenly, feeling a hard jolt in my chest, looking around, bug-eyed. Oh!

Below me, stretching down the slope of a long hill, the Earth Bubble of the Storage Plenum, gift from the Gods of a Lesser Creation, was a vast, shallowly curving bowl, like a world inside a wok, rimmed by mountains that must make the Himalayas look small.

There were more hills, below the hills a sea, surrounded by white beach, beyond the beach, mountains, the Alps maybe, beyond the mountains, another sea, beyond that sea, a darkling plain, overhung by a boil of gray-white cumulonimbus.

There! A towering black anvil, lightning twisting from it, striking at the land below.

Mountains and seas and forking silvery rivers spreading out to right and left. Deserts, both yellow and red.

Beyond the curving land, down in the bottom of the bowl, hanging white mist. Then more landscape, so tiny it looked like a clutter of colored static, green and blue and gray, then the mountains below the sun.

Pellucidar, I thought, or that World Without End from a story I once thought of but never wrote, the one about the Space-Time Juggernaut.

And if the Gods told the truth, somewhere now, everyone is awakening. Everyone. People like me who think they've awakened on the bright sward of some personal Barsoom, fearful others, awakening to Heaven or Hell. Or Neterkhert.

Somewhere, a king of Kmt awakens, looks up in the sky, and screams Aton's name.