They moved to the shade of three coconut palms. The yacht was gradually lost on the blue emptiness of the Gulf Stream. For a while they lay on the sand, silent, resting.
Then Eleanor cried, “Look, Duff! Look!”
He barely glanced toward the sea. Then he threw himself on top of her and forced her to lie face-down on the earth. She gasped, struggled.
“Lie still!” he ordered.
A wave of pressure eventually swept the island, bending the trees; it was accompanied by an immense rumble. Only after that did Duff sit up. Far out on the sea a cloud made unforgettable by the news pictures rose toward the blue zenith. A many-hued, mushroom-shaped cloud with fire flashes eddying enormously in its midst.
“Atom bomb,” she whispered.
Duff spoke, too exhausted for emotion and yet unable to stop the working of his mind
“Maybe they destroyed themselves that way. Maybe they thought they — and it — would be captured. Maybe an accident. They could have got too many cases of uranium too close together — a last one, dropped down through a hatch. That might have done it.”
For perhaps an hour they watched the cloud rise, change shape in the strong winds aloft, and start to dissipate.
“Somebody else,” Duff had said, “should have seen it. Though there are darn few ships in these parts, I imagine.” His eyes moved from the distant, separating clouds to the beach; they followed its curve to the Bahama Banks, a glittering, empty infinitude of shallow sea. “Anyhow, it’ll show up on plenty of instruments and a slew of people will be down here, looking, pretty soon.”