The weather was clear, which meant it was cold. The lake down in the crater was the purest blue Doob had ever seen, the sky above it a lighter tint of the same color. He and all the others stood with their backs to it during the announcement. Some political genius on the president’s staff had figured out just how the imagery was supposed to work. The cameras were up on a scaffolding so that they could shoot downward, ensuring that the panorama of the crater, Wizard Island with its sparse covering of trees, and the snow-streaked mountain rim were all there in the high-definition backdrop of the shot. The message was there for anyone who wanted to read it. Between six and eight thousand years ago, an unimaginable catastrophe had befallen this place. The surviving humans had kept the story alive in legends of an apocalyptic struggle between the gods of the sky and of the underworld. Now, it was beautiful. The president and some of the other leaders were weaving that story into their announcements. Doob and the scientists around him—professors from great universities all over the world—couldn’t hear what was being said. The leaders were projecting their words outward into the world, and the sounds coming out of their mouths were swallowed up in the rushing of the wind over rocks and through trees. Doob, four meters behind the president, watched the wind mess with her hair. J.B.F.’s hair had been much commented on during the days before Zero, when such things had actually seemed important to commentators in the world of fashion and politics. It was dusky blond, streaked with silver. She wore it straight and shoulder-length. She was forty-two years old, which made her the youngest president of the United States, edging out J.F.K. by a year. She had flirted with politics during her student years at Berkeley but then opted for an M.B.A. and a stint with a high-powered business consultancy before taking a job at a clever but struggling Los Angeles tech firm. Under her leadership the company had turned its fortunes around to the point where it had been acquired by Google in a deal that had made her wealthy. She had married an actor turned producer, ten years older, whom she had met at a dinner party in Malibu. He already had dogs in various political fights, since a number of his films had been overtly political documentaries or thrillers with political overtones. Latino, with some family history of persecution under Castro, Roberto was something of a political chameleon, mixing libertarianism and populism in a way that intrigued both sides without repelling anyone save the most hard-core extremists. He got away with it because he was handsome, charming, and, as he freely admitted, not book-smart enough to puzzle out all the issues.
Having thus settled into a family life, and made a much-discussed decision to keep her maiden name, Julia Bliss Flaherty had swung her sights around to politics. She had narrowly lost a senatorial race in California. Visibly pregnant by the time Election Day arrived, she had soon given birth to a baby with Down syndrome and become a human Rorschach blot for all sorts of angst around amniocentesis and selective abortion. Making the rounds of talk shows to discuss those topics, she had drawn the eye of national political campaigns on both sides of the aisle. During the following presidential campaign, she had found herself in the unusual position of being on both parties’ vice presidential short lists. She was staunchly middle-of-the-road, with enough ambiguity in her politics to extend the Democrats’ reach rightward and the Republicans’ leftward. No one had expected her to end up in the Oval Office; that was never seriously expected, nowadays, of vice presidents. But the scandal that had brought down the president in only the tenth month of his inaugural year had elevated her to the presidency and made her hairstyle fair game for dissertation-length treatments in the press. Much of it was about those glints of silver. Were they natural, or artificial? If natural, why didn’t she get rid of them? The technology existed. If artificial, then wasn’t it really just a sneaky trick to make her look older, more serious? Either way, should a woman in today’s society need to make herself look matronly in order to be taken seriously?
Doob was pretty sure that no such articles would ever again be written after the announcement that J.B.F. was making today. And indeed he felt the requisite shame over the fact that he was paying any attention whatever to the president’s hair, on this of all days.
But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.
The announcements all started at the same time but some went on longer than others, the imams and the pope segueing into prayers. The president and other secular leaders, having finished their remarks, stood there uncomfortably for a minute or two, then began to shuffle away toward aides who enveloped them in big warm coats. Doob and the other scientists, as much a part of the backdrop as Crater Lake, were obliged to remain in place until the last prayers ended.
He thought he might come up here with Amelia and watch it happen. It would be a fine place to observe the White Sky and the beginning of the Hard Rain. During the announcement, he had seen a single bolide streak across the sky south of them, a trail of white fire bright enough to leave a slow-fading blue streak in his vision, popping apart into two, then five discrete chunks before it all went over the horizon. It was too far away for him to feel its radiant heat on his face. But people who had been closer to recent events reported that the warmth was palpable. It was also fleeting, since the bolides came and went at hypersonic velocities. But when the Hard Rain began in earnest, they’d be coming in thick and fast, their fiery trails crisscrossing the sky and then merging into a continuous sphere of broiling heat. Even those people who were fortunate enough—if that was the right word—not to get hit directly by a rock would be driven beneath cover. And it would have to be something like a sheet of metal that would reflect heat and not catch fire. That would buy them some time, but soon the air itself would become too hot to breathe. He had been wondering at what point during all of that he should just end his own life.