"I understand that. If you think the Ten Commandments don't apply. Whichever one of them it was."
"They were an element of the Mosaic Covenant. It, too, failed. Perhaps the Garic Covenant, if I may be so vain, will endure."
The waters covered the Earth.
A moment ago, before he activated the attachment, Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan's spacecraft had been plunging towards the vortex of a ragged ball of dust and vapor, the destroyed Earth of World War V. Now, in the Adamic Year 601 (or was it the Edenic?—he couldn't remember, though Dr. Gar had let him study the Book), the waters stretched everywhere. Ahead the sun glinted in reflection from something rising above the surface. Ararat?
He made out the twin peaks. He throttled back to scarcely more than mach one and flew over them, high. His second pass took him back along his own vapor trail. This time he spotted the tiny surface craft making for the solitary bit of land. He had to hand it to Dr. Gar. The old boy's space-time grid had hit it right on the button.
Roy was too high to distinguish details but he imagined that Noah and his family would be on deck, full of the wonder of Mount Ararat rising, as promised, from the sea.
But there was another wonder—the vapor trails that stretched for miles across the upper air. Did they, down there on the Ark, think them a sign of the Lord? Roy smiled ironically. They were a sign of the lord Gar and of his servant, Pilot Officer Vanjan, come to blast them into eternity and change the future, to give the animals a chance.
Who would chronicle his role as the re-arranging angel, the unheavenly host about to gather up in violence the drifting souls below? Who, he wondered. Some simian scribe? Some unborn elephant prophet? An insectate scholar destined to evolve from among the creeping things that would inherit the Earth?
Or perhaps the written word would die unborn under the fiery hail of his guns.