"You wouldn't want to do that, Martin. For one reason, I've got Avis. And for another, it would be too late. The blast went off ten seconds ago."
He waved and stepped into the blackness.
Stan reeled over to the set and dialed Chicago. The sheet of blackness formed, wavered, and then faded back to the edges of the hoop.
He had lost, Stan thought, dazed. The city he had been born and raised in was one with the drifting atoms of the air.
Tanner had won, completely. And Tanner had Avis.
Stan huddled in the center of the room, his mind a melee of flickering thoughts. Then a noise at the window caught his ear. The noise of doors slamming and the starting of a thousand automobiles and people running through the streets. He didn't bother to look—he knew what it was.
The exodus of a billion people from ten thousand towns and cities was on the way.
There was six hours to go before the start of the brief, abortive war. Six hours before the air fleets would arrive at their destination.
A day later the Thuscan fleet would settle from the skies to begin the mopping up operation, the operation that would change the face of a green, water world to a world that would be another colony planet for Thusca.
A world in which the human race would play no part.