And Hanson found that his strong and nearly indestructible
body still had limits. It could not go on without rest forever. He was
sobbing with fatigue at every step.
He managed to dig a small hollow in the sand before dropping off to
sleep. It was a sleep of total exhaustion, lacking even a sense of time.
It might have been minutes or hours that he slept, and he had no way of
knowing which. With the sun gone and the stars rocking into dizzy new
configurations, there was no night or day, nor any way to guess the
passage of time.
He woke to a roaring wind that sent cutting blasts of sand driving
against him. He staggered up and forced himself against it, away from
the place where the sun had fallen. Even through the lashing sandstorm,
he could see the glow near the horizon. Now a pillar of something that
looked like steam but was probably vapor from molten and evaporated
rocks was rising upwards, like the mushroom clouds of his own days. It
was spreading, apparently just under the phlogiston layer, reflecting
back the glare. And the wind was caused by the great rising column of
superheated gases over the sun.
He staggered on, while the sand gave way slowly to patches of green.
With the sun gone and the sky falling into complete shreds, this world
was certainly doomed. He'd assumed that the sun of this world must be
above the sky, but he'd been wrong; like the other heavenly bodies, it
had been embedded inside the shell.
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