Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had caught fire of itself from the sun's glare in late afternoon. Great clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars.
Beyond the horizon to the west there was destruction.
Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn't even asked to be taken back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it set.
Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets of Cetis Gamma was at hand.
Cetis Gamma might, he considered, be in the process of becoming a nova. Certainly beyond the horizon there was even more terrible heat than had struck the human colony before sundown. Even if the sun did not explode, even if it was only as fiercely blazing as at its setting, they would die within hours after sunrise. If it increased in brightness, by daybreak its first rays would be death itself. When dawn came, the very first direct beams would set the shiver trees alight on the hilltops, and as it rose the fires would go down into the valleys. This house would smoke and writhe and melt; the air would become flame, and the planet's surface would glow red-hot as it turned into the sunshine.
"It's going to be—all right, Lon," Cathy said unconvincedly. "It's just something happening that'll be over in a little while. But—in case it isn't—we might as well be together. Don't you think so?"
Lon put his arm comfortingly around her. He felt a very strong impulse to lie. He could pretend to vast wisdom and tell her the sun's behavior was this or that, and never lasted more than a few hours, but she'd know he lied. They could spend their last hours trying to deceive each other out of pure affection. But they'd know it was deceit.
"D-don't you think so?" insisted Cathy faintly.
He said gently, "No, Cathy, and neither do you. This is the finish. It would've been a lot nicer to go on living, the two of us. We'd have had long, long years to be together. We'd have had kids, and they'd have grown up, and we'd have had—a lot of things. But now I'm afraid we won't."