The Age Atomic Read Online Free PDF

sometimes she had to go out and see it again.
    People were watching in Brooklyn, and they were watching in Manhattan. Phones were ringing, and there was chatter on police radios. Someone had called the coastguard. A dozen people were scrambling for cameras, and four newspaper reporters were right now pulling coats over their pajamas as they raced to get the scoop.
    She had to admit, she sometimes enjoyed the effect her presence had on others, on the living, the way her appearances in the city got attention. She listened as word spread, as heartbeats all over town kicked up a notch, as people told their neighbors to shut the hell up and as others began to pray.
    Evelyn McHale, the Ghost of Gotham. If only they knew what she really was.
    Fear. She wanted to visit everyone in the city, nod and smile and say yes, yes you should be afraid. Fear was powerful, primal. Although the universe was getting further and further away from her, her connection getting fainter and fainter, fear was her ally, its own special kind of energy that she could use, that helped her keep up with the world.
    A boat approached, and someone with a camera had arrived at the nearby dock, aiming his lens at the glowing blue woman floating over the river.
    Evelyn sighed. She didn’t need to breathe but she remembered how to sigh. She remembered sighing on that day. She remembered the effect that gravity had on her mass. She remembered the fall, the spin, watching the curve of the Earth, the vertigo, the fear, the hope, the blue of the sky and the grey of the ground and then the light, the light, the light. She remembered her hope that the Skyguard would save her evaporating as she remembered that there wasn’t a Skyguard, that there hadn’t been for years, that New York was unprotected. New York was protected now, of course. The whole country was. She’d taken up the job herself.
    Evelyn sighed again, and then she was gone.

 
    FIVE
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    It was blue and beautiful and dangerous, and Captain Nimrod never tired of looking at it. Perhaps it was his imagination, but standing in the light of the Fissure, he felt… invigorated? Not quite the right word. Young . That was it. In the light of the Fissure he felt young, and while he knew that was just his imagination, an impossibility according to the scientists employed by the Department to study the crack in space/time, that didn’t stop Nimrod closing his eyes and enjoying the warm bath of energy that swirled in the air around him.
    And it made sense, really it did. The Fissure emitted energies that he and his fellow scientists could barely comprehend, although he understood more than the others. Perhaps the energy from the Fissure was making him feel young as it bathed every cell in his body with deadly light, and one day he would simply drop dead, or perhaps do something unexpected like explode over his morning coffee.
    Perhaps, perhaps. Nimrod opened his eyes and watched the Fissure in both fear and fascination.
    Around the edge of the concrete disc in Battery Park, the usual complement of MPs stood. Nimrod wondered if they felt it too. Usually they guarded the Fissure while it was inside its armored egg-like shell. Opening the shell, exposing the moving, living space-time event was a special, rare event.
    Nimrod stroked his mustache. Of course, there was someone else who knew as much about the Fissure as he did: one Captain Carson, native of the Empire State. And right now Nimrod wished his counterpart from the Pocket would make contact. But the Fissure roared and roiled and…
    And there was nothing on the other side. It was a glitch, a temporary disturbance on the time-space conduit that linked New York City to the Empire State. That was all, had to be. An entire universe – even a small, city-sized one such as the Empire State – couldn’t just vanish.
    Could it?
    Nimrod brushed his mustache again. He couldn’t send any more agents through. It was futile; none had