My Library

obscuring the land below. We moved in steadily, and I was happy to see that the deep gray and brown rings were no longer there—which meant the blockage got cleaned up. Good! No more repeaters. But it was the new feature that pulled my focus and wouldn’t let it go. Around the earth was a single flat ring, much like the ones around Saturn, and it was radiating and sparkling, not from the reflection of the sun, but from its own internal source. (You will understand fully the meaning of the ring as we progress.) As we moved around, not through, the sparkling ring and headed inward, I became aware of another change. The M Band was full of communication, but no noise. No noise! That could mean only one thing—man had finally got it together. Further evidence was the lack of the haze M Band noise creates. No more random thought-clutter. This at least gave me a beginning percept of what I might expect. We came into a low altitude, at about eight thousand feet, and began circling the earth over the northern hemisphere, east to west near a 28-degree latitude just a few miles off the coast of what appeared to be Japan. The seas were soft light green, and gentle swells some ten feet from trough to crest moved majestically over the surface. Deeper, I could perceive schools of fish leisurely weaving along, not too fast, their track matching neatly the contour of the distant coastline—thousands of them, silver sides flashing as they made their quick changes in direction. There had indeed been changes if they schooled so closely to the shore, so many of them. It was familiar, yet there was a missing element. I scanned the ocean surface and knew immediately what it was. No ships. I reached out along the horizon and far beyond. Not even a rowboat or dinghy. I scanned overhead across the sky with its streets of white cumulus clouds. No aircraft, just gulls and terns sweeping and searching among the heavy swells, and higher than that, beyond cloud base—nothing. No jet contrails, no jets. Then we had crossed the coastline and were over Japan. Off to the north was Fujiyama, a white cone glistening in the sun. Below us was a neat carpet of tidy fields in large checkerboard squares, each a subtle shade of green—correction: much more than greens. Spotted