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topmost branches of the forest streaked by a few meters below. In the final moment before the world ended, Tom had enough self-control and curiosity to think a final question: What killed us?
    * * *
    Third Strike. March 17, 2026;
Bathurst Island, Canadian Arctic.
    The oil rig could be worked by hand, but the cold was extreme and after the first day no one suggested it.
    Early on the morning of the third day, Cliff Barringer called a meeting of the four-man crew.
    "We've all been talking for the past couple of days in bits and pieces. I want to get organized and make some decisions. Nothing's working right, but I have no idea why. The good news is that we're in no danger, and we won't starve."
    "Or freeze," Judd Clemens said. He was the oldest of the group, with thirty years of Arctic experience behind him. "Dahlquist says we're sitting on the world's biggest oil and gas field."
    "We are." Dahlquist was the odd man out, a lightly built and nervous geologist half a head shorter than the others. "All the groups who have leases in the basin agree. The seismic data and chemistry indicate more light crude in the Sverdrup Basin than the Saudis ever had. But we shouldn't be burning it—good quality hydrocarbons are too precious for that."
    "So we take a little drop, give us some light and keep our asses from freezing to the ground." Barringer jerked his thumb toward the homemade lamps and the two oil stoves. "You want to turn those off, you do it over my dead body. Look, I don't want to talk morality. I want to review the situation and make some decisions. The communications equipment is down, we've not heard a word from outside, and the rest of the group are two days overdue. What do we know, and what do we do?"
    "We're still getting paid, aren't we?" Big Eddie Hansen was frowning. "I mean, we're here. It's not our fault if the equipment's no good and the others don't come."
    "Suppose they don't arrive until midsummer?" Cliff Barringer addressed his question to all of them, not just Big Eddie. "How long are we willing to sit on our duffs and wait? You may be more patient than me, but I want to know what's going on. When I turned in at nine o'clock three nights ago, everything was working—"
    "Later than that," Clemens interrupted. "Me and Eddie was outside watching the aurora. We come in at about half-ten when it clouded over, and everything seemed all right then."
    "So it happened sometime during the night. But when we got up, half our stuff was useless. I want to know why."
    "A lot more than half, I think. Radio and television communications. Computers." Dahlquist began to tick items off on his fingers. "Snowmobile. Rig pump controller. Hut thermostat. Fuel cells. Clocks and watches. Fluorescent lights. Electric oven. CD player—"
    "Enough," Barringer interrupted. "What is working?"
    "Everything mechanical. Oil stoves, and oil lamps, and the thermometer and can opener and hand pumps and the manual rig. Batteries still work. Everything simple. Nothing that uses electronics or elaborate controls."
    "Electronics? The snowmobile has a simple two-stroke engine—"
    "—with an electronic fuel injection system." It was Dahlquist's turn to interrupt.
    "All right. Look, you said all this yesterday. The question is, what can we do about it?"
    "About the equipment? Nothing. We have no way of repairing electronic equipment. It'll have to be heli-lifted south."
    "Which assumes that the helicopter arrives, when all we know is that it's way overdue. If we knew what was causing this—"
    "You know my suggestion. All this forms some strange sort of side effect of the supernova."
    "That happened down in the Southern Hemisphere," Clemens said, in the tones of a man with little interest in any event south of the Arctic Circle.
    "It did." Dahlquist became defensive, as though this was now regarded as his supernova. "The star that blew up is at sixty degrees south."
    "About as far away from us as you can get." Clemens proved that he knew a little