This time Steel was prepared. His right fist came up and across Stahl's thick chin. The fat man toppled backward, tottered against the railing, and then went over.
At that moment, Lois Harmon ran up the ladder. Steel caught her and pressed her face against his chest. "Don't look."
But he looked. He saw Stahl ride for an instant on the shaggy white sea below, beat with his hands frenziedly against the mass of animals under him, and then slip down into the mass like a pig slipping into a meat grinder.
His scream was an era dying....
The bright sunlight playing across the shimmering ice waste, the young rivers of melting snow—the telenews cameras ate it up.
The telenews men didn't seem to care whether they had an audience or not. They had the video cameras set up on the sun-drenched Terminal roofs, sending the picture to receiving sets that probably hadn't a single watcher throughout the world. The population of Earth had swarmed to the surface en masse and tears of thanksgiving mingled with the melting snow.
"Nobody seems to care that the lower levels have already filled with water," the announcer chattered hysterically into his portable mike. "Nobody seems to care how this thing happened. The only thing that matters is that it did happen—the greatest thing that ever happened!"
"And they'll never know how it happened," Lois Harmon said. "Dad would have wanted it that way." She and Steel sat in their plane on the Terminal roof, listening to the announcer, watching the joyful mob that stretched across the ice as far as they could see.
"Yeah," Steel said quietly, "every clue to the old world will be washed away clean. Everything will begin new." And, he thought, Floyd would also have wanted it that way. This was what he'd died for. Even the memory of that upper level chill would soon be gone. He watched a group of mothers holding their sickly white babies up to the warmth, a horde of small boys and girls whose cheeks already glowed with the strength of a new race.