Suddenly afraid, he rushed back to his skimmer, slid into the cockpit and took off, rising at a swift vertical angle from the dead jungle.
Toward the eastern coast of South America, he saw many fine hotels, with magnificent curves of beaches following the perimeter of the land mass on which the people had lived—already he was thinking of them in the past tense—and Jorik wondered at the absence of the blue O-C-E-A-N that should have bordered those beaches.
But as he glided outward from the coast, curving steadily northward toward New York, he saw that the beaches, with their pale silver sands, extended outward and downward toward only more land, soon becoming rocky, then turning at last into mud and ooze, with a sprinkling of blackish-green weeds. But no visible trace of the mysterious O-C-E-A-N.
Gwann, searching throughout Africa, fared no better. Only the silence, the rotting vegetation, and the absence of landlocked life. Higher in the atmosphere of the ghost planet, he saw many of the carnivores, but also smaller animals, soaring in gloriously colored groups, and seemingly harmless. There were times when he had to pass through literal clouds of these smaller beasts, whizzing and bobbing and gliding past him by the millions, only to vanish in the hazy distance with a blaze of color.
Africa having proven fruitless, Gwann directed the skimmer toward the opposite polar region from that which Drog was to investigate.
Like Drog, he found only land there, and no continent. The land was ocean bottom. He consulted his map, but there was nothing below his skimmer that corresponded with the cryptic markings: A-N-T-A-R-C-T-I-C O-C-E-A-N.
He turned his skimmer around and started back for New York.
Volval, cruising from the Alps to the steppes and back again, found nothing to explain the disappearance of the Earthmen. Many cities, many lands, hamlets and villages, huts and palaces.... It was the same every place. Silence. Fleeting glimpses of the carnivores and sometimes tinier-but-similar beasts. But no Earthmen.