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"I know. I know. As the pressure goes down, the drops will fall hard. Towards the end, they'll be falling like rocks."

He grinned. "Feathers in a vacuum."

Julia kept her eyes on her plate, eating slowly, as if ignoring us.

Connie said, "What'll happen to us then?"

"That's why we piled that extra dirt on the birm. Might help. Can't hurt. If things get scary, we'll go in the capsule and seal the hatches."

Her voice was soft, eyes on mine. "And... afterward?"

"We'll just have to see. I... "

The floor shuddered, rattling dishes and glasses together on the table, my wine rocking in its mug. I jumped up and ran to the lounge, looking out the big picture window into the brightly-lit garage. Nothing. Bulldozer at the door. The two cars. The nose of the Cat visible in shadow. The little door up to the hotel was still sealed, containing its coffer dam of concrete and dirt.

Over my shoulder, Paulie said, "Let's go to the cupola."

I nodded, looking at the open door to the tunnel. Nothing. Darkness. "Yeah. And maybe we better think about keeping that shut when we're not down there?"

From the cupola you could see there was a fire burning beyond our old observation hill, a big fire, enormous red flames licking skyward, pouring forth dense black clouds of smoke, like crude oil burning in a bowl, calling up images of the end of the Gulf War, when the well-heads were set off by Saddam's retreating heroes. Already, the smoke was towering up in a steep, jet-black column towards the bright green sky, with its muddy orange streaks and curls of vermilion lightning.

There were sparks of rain everywhere, falling faster now, pulling their pale blue contrails, popping as they hit the landscape, twinkling around the edges of the hot black smoke, flaring and veering from the fire.

Paul said, "Somewhere near downtown. Maybe a gas main explosion?"

"I don't think so. That's big. Farther away than you think, maybe on Palmer's Ridge. There's nothing up there but woods."

"Plane crash?"

"Jesus, Paulie. You know any planes that could fly in a -200 atmosphere?"

The flames were getting bigger and brighter now, showing long tongues of yellow in their midst, maybe from the falling oxygen.

Connie pressed her face to the quartz, then jerked back. I touched it. Cold. Cold enough to hurt. She said, "Are we in danger?"

I said, "Whatever it is, it can't spread far. It'll go out soon enough."

Paul was looking down at the little bank of meteorological gauges in a panel below one window. "Temperature's actually up a few degrees. It's that hot. Pressure's down more than I expected. It's around twelve psi outside."

I took a deep breath, feeling my heart flutter nervously. "Still okay in here. I guess we've got a tight enough seal."

I turned and looked at the hotel. It was surrounded by a boil of pale blue fog, tower of vapor reaching for the sky. There was something wrong with the roof, maybe shingles missing now, and you could see the occasional ball of light as a raindrop would strike and flare. Leaking? Hard to say. The oxygen probably would evaporate on the wood, but ... I said, "It's not going to last, Paulie. We need to think about closing the geothermal water valves, so we don't have a blowout when it collapses."

He said, "It'll go fast, once it gets cold enough."

"We should leave a video camera running in here, once we do. So we'll have a tape, after ... " After? Christ. What after?

Paulie snickered, turning away towards the tunnel hatch, headed back to the Quarters, where our dinner was getting cold. When I looked at Connie, she was still staring out the window, not at the fire, not at the hotel that'd been our home for a while but down the driveway at Gary's pickup truck. It was visibly dented, and the windshield was gone, no more than a few shards remaining, dangling around the rim, stuck together by safety-glass film. You couldn't see inside, not even when a raindrop would get in and flare up briefly blue.

Maybe they're eaten away. Maybe they're gone. She must've seen it the first time she came