Under the circumstances, it was a good landing.

I read once that the old air pilots used to say, 'Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.' Though I wasn't walking: I was running for my life.

I flung myself out of the airlock, saw someone coming down the slope toward me, yelled "Get back!" and sprinted for the hilltop.

He reacted fast, turned as I came by, matched my adrenalin-boosted speed: a young man, I noted from half a glimpse. Even in my panic flight, a corner of my brain observed coolly that there should not, could not, be humans here.

We made it into the lee of the ridge with a bare second's grace, flung ourselves flat on the grass (that, too, impossible). For a moment there was only the thudding of my heart, then the terrible light: even with faces pressed to the earth it was searing, as if the whole sky had been for a moment as bright as the sun. It lasted an instant, and was gone. A dreadful second of waiting, then the sound. Impossible to describe: it was really, if you can imagine it, a swallowing of sound. Not silence - the innocent absence of sound - but a kind of anti-sound. Anti-matter; anti-sound: the backwash of the implosion. The thing itself we never heard, could never have heard, only the air rushing in to fill the new-made emptiness.

It was mercifully brief. After that first negation there was just a quick wind, a cool rush of air. Then stillness, true silence, a light and ordinary breeze, and a bird's call not far away, a sound like two pebbles knocking together.

In the shocking quiet we looked at each other. It was a moment too big for words; it's beyond me even now to say what I felt; there were too many things in my head, and to list them on paper puts them in a sequence, in order, where really they were all together. Chaos.

I could see in my companion's face that he too was struggling for some kind of grasp. And he found it - found something, anyway - rolled over to peer along the edge of the hill into the sky above.

"Is it over?" he asked. A light voice, boyish, I thought: a voice that went with the beardless face. And speaking English, or something very like it. After so much that was impossible, this seemed merely unlikely.

Yes, it's over," I said, meaning the implosion, but thinking of many other things. My mission, my career, who knew what else but I was alive, which was at least half a miracle.

We scrambled to our feet, trod the few yards to the hill-top, and stood looking down. I knew

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Novel excerpts: Science fiction?
We want to hear your view. Write now!