Taylor leaned over the water, testing it tentatively. It seemed all right. It wasn’t brackish or foreign-tasting. He gestured to Nova and pulled the horse over. All three drank. Lustily, busily, as though it were the most important single act in the world.

Sated, Taylor flopped back on the sand, staring up at the remorselessly hot sky. Nova came over to him, lying down dutifully, and he locked an arm around her, still staring up.

His blue eyes slitted sardonically. It might be a sky anywhere in a normal universe. A mantle over New York on a summer day. Or Vermont or Kansas. Or Arizona . . . it was over New York, all right. A Manhattan or a Brooklyn or a Bronx buried under hundreds of feet of thermonuclear sand. What a travesty!

“Where in hell do we go from here?” he growled up at the sky. There was no answer. He twisted to look at Nova. “Or do we just stop off and found a human colony? And the kids would learn to talk better—sense than the apes.”

Suddenly he placed a bronzed forefinger on Nova’s lips. Those full, uncosmetized labias that made of her face an appealing miracle.

“Try to say the name I gave you,” he commanded softly. “No-va.”

She remained mystified and mute, as always. He pointed at her, conscious of the surge of her splendid body against its pitiful fragments of costume. Then he pointed again, each time repeating her name as if it were a litany.

“No-va . . . No-va . . . No-va . . .”

Still she remained mute, her eyes puzzled.

Then, and to his intense pleasure, she pointed her own finger at him, peering closely into his eyes.

“Taylor” Taylor said, understanding what she was after.

She pointed once more.

“Taylor,” he echoed his own name.

She squinted in the sun. “Taylor,” he said again, watching her mouth. Her lips were struggling with a sound but nothing came forth. A dumb and mute Eve. Beautiful but incommunicado.

From among the rags of his body, Taylor produced his identity tag. The metallic ID from another world, another time. He looped it around his own neck and pointed to it. The disc gleamed in the sunlight. Nova followed his every move, like a child trying to learn.

“Tay-lor—” he said, very slowly and carefully.

Her lips barely moved in a brave attempt at mimicry. But no sound issued. Taylor sighed. Nova frowned, still trying. He reached across and kissed her tenderly on the lips, as he struggled to his feet. It would take more time than they had now . . .

“Let’s find a home,” Taylor said.

Home.

It was not to be found in the limitless mass of wasteland. They plodded on, the horse dutifully carrying their combined weight. The sun beat down, a remote circle of fire far above in the leaden skies. Taylor guided the horse up a long slope that closed off any view of the horizon and what might lay before them. Nova clung to him like a frightened child.

Finally, they had cleared the crest of the slope.

Taylor halted in stupefaction, checking the horse with a violent tug.

It was a view from Hell.

A huge burial mound of scattered rock and rubble, stretching as far as the eye could see. Like some endless cemetery in which, like small and large tombstones, jutted the recognizable artifacts of a civilization long since destroyed and—ended. The ravaged and identifiable tops of Manhattan’s major skyscrapers shone dully in the glare. The pointed spire of the Chrysler Building, the powerful snub of the Empire State, the symmetrical squared roof of the RCA Building and the glittering, glasslike—

Taylor blinked, closed his eyes and opened them again.

The vision did not dissolve or shimmer or go away.

Bitterly, his heart dying within him, he knew he was staring at the remnants of a long-since-buried New York.

Nova murmured uneasily behind him. An animal sound.

A low, hissing wind stole over the devastated landscape.

“Well—” Taylor said softly, more to himself than to the girl. “Home sweet home! Just look at this graveyard, Nova. It’s the grand climax of fifty thousand years of human culture—yes. I wonder who lives here now. Besides radioactive worms.”

No answer came.

Like all dead things, ruined New York was inscrutable.

“Let’s go see,” Taylor said to the girl and urged their mount down the slope toward the big graveyard before them. There was still nothing but those masses of scrub and tombstones. Nova suddenly plucked urgently at Taylor’s arm. She beckoned wildly.

Taylor looked, gaping.

Unbelievably, a tremendous change had swept over the panorama below. A huge, inexplicable wall of fire had sprung up directly in their path. It seemed to have started in the shrubbery, cutting amazingly across the bare rock and sand, building into a raging inferno of heat and brightness. The horse reared on its hind legs, neighing in terror. The high barrier of flame, crackling and sending out great waves of scorching heat, completely concealed buried New York from view. It had seemed to vanish in the twinkling of an eye.

“What—what the hell’s feeding it?” Taylor bellowed hoarsely. “There’s nothing to burn.”

The horse had U-turned violently, almost flinging the two of them off. Taylor cursed and hung on. The crackling flames licked ever nearer, closing in on them. Now the horse took to the gallop, racing away from the unknown, plunging down the slope again, leaving New York and the incredible wall of fire hidden below the horizon.

“We’ll reach it another way,” Taylor said grimly, urging the horse forward in a flanking movement. He meant to circle the city and approach from another direction. From the inland side, far removed from the mysterious blaze and its source.

They passed the oasis once more, pushed on over the open, trackless dry wastes until the horse’s hooves touched a flattened plain which afforded easier going. The cloudless blue sky showed the empty horizon beyond the plain. Taylor made for it, conscious of a nagging confusion in his brain and Nova’s mutelike trust in him.

“Okay, here we go again.”

He had to talk, had to say something. Whether the girl understood him or not. Hearing his own voice was a measure of reality in a universe gone mad.

He turned the horse to make a second approach.

But the unrealities had mounted.

Scarcely had they started when a colossal clap of thunder shook the heavens and instantly, magically, black clouds roiled, the skies darkened overhead, and within seconds the world turned black. From below the far horizon, rods of forked lightning struck. The horse reared in bewilderment and terror. Like glittering stakes in an electrified fence, each lightning rod struck down to the earth. What was worse, they seemed to advance toward Taylor, the girl and the horse. Advance relentlessly to the accompaniment of vicious thunderclaps. And then rain, fiercely falling, hissing rain, sluiced down in blinding sheets. The sky, so recently blue, had opened up into a sea of dark fury. The horse kept on rearing, whinnying, bellowing its terror. Taylor fought the beast, keeping it from bolting altogether in the face of nature’s onslaught.

“Nature seems bent—” Taylor panted, “on wiping out our mistake. Hold it!” He struck at the horse, holding its head while Nova huddled behind him. Their drenched bodies fused in limp, liquid union. At a gallop, they retreated from the sonic, sodden storm. The horse kept on racing until the thunder and the rain diminished. Until they had found a blue sky again and the miracle of a nature gone beserk was behind them. Taylor reined the flagging horse to a standstill. Then he turned it around again for still a third approach to the New York that lay buried in the distance. He was determined—it was mad of him, he suspected—to go back to that dead land. He couldn’t have said why it was important to him.