soundless phenomenon.

Eddie shut his eyes and buried his face in his pillow. This reflex action, partly as natural as terror and partly the result of training for emergencies at school, saved his vision. He might have screamed, had he been able to find his voice. Distantly, he heard human sounds that increased the sickness in his stomach. A gentle scene and mood, product of science, had been utterly shattered by forces of the same origin.

He did not see the fuzzy blob of incandescence that bloomed in the sky and expanded slowly for many seconds. In fact, no one saw it; only cameras, fitted with special dark filters, would have been able to do so. For living eyes would have been charred by that splendor.

He heard his mother calling his name. Keeping his eyelids tightly closed and an elbow bent over them, he fumbled his way to the hall, and to her. They dropped to the floor and huddled there.

Outside, voices died away. By then the devilish glory in the sky was fading a little, too, at the edges. Only the heart of the great blob still blazed supernally, with its millions of degrees of heat. Around it was a cooling fog of dust and gases that masked the hell within it.

The world grew still for a few moments, as it does at the center of a typhoon. Then there was a great, soft roaring. The shock wave of expanded, rarefied gases, speeding at many hundreds of miles per second, striking the upper terrestrial atmosphere, and pressing down. Eddie could feel the pressure of it, transmitted by the air—a light but definite punching inward of his flesh, from all sides.

Then there was a distant sighing of wind—air, super-heated and compressed, being forced outward. Next came the resurgence of human sounds, if they were truly that any more.

Someone was yelling, "Oh, God ... Oh, God ... Oh, God...." There was a crackle and smell of fire. Something blew up far off.

Then the earthquakes began. With a sharp snap, rock strata far underground broke. Then came a jolt. Eddie Dukas and his mother, huddled on the floor, were engulfed in a swaying sensation, smooth and vibrationless. Then the ground quivered softly. After that, there was a pause, as of something hanging precariously for a moment at the jagged lip of a chasm. Suddenly the pathetic hold seemed to be broken, and the whole world was seized by a tooth-cracking chatter. A pause.... Then it began again.

For a second 

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