“So you didn’t see it after all. Not from below, anyhow! Maybe you were investigating it from a satellite?”

“No. Let’s talk about something else.”

“I get it now. Military secret.”

“Something like that.” Did it really make any difference? The damage had been done before Gus ever spotted his band in the sky, and there was no way to reverse it now.

“Well, the way I see it, this is no ordinary rain,” Gus said. “It’s a canopy-rain, coming down from the Saturn-rings.”

“Saturn is another planet!” Zena exclaimed, relieved to discover that he was after all off the track. It had seemed for a moment that he had somehow guessed the truth. The truth that she was still theoretically not permitted to divulge.

“I said Saturn-rings. Rings of ice, like those around Saturn—only they’re around Earth now. So the rain won’t stop—not for a long, long time. Maybe the whole world will flood. Right?”

Now she was intrigued. He was veering closer to the track again. “What are you talking about?”

“You know. You’re the meteorologist. I only know what I read.”

“That’s right. I’m the meteorologist—and I can’t make much sense of what you’re saying. What’s this about a canopy, or rings of ice?”

“That theory. How there were rings of ice around the world, long ago. And they melted down into a canopy, and then into rain—so much that the oceans rose up maybe a mile, and never did go down again. That’s what the Bible is really talking about, and all those other legends of the flood. And it’s starting again!”

“I never heard of such a thing!” Zena said indignantly. “There’s no fossil record of such large increases in the ocean level—not in the past billion years, certainly!”

“Oh yes there is,” he insisted. “Just in the last million years the ocean has changed—”

“Fluctuated, yes; risen, no,” she said. “You’re thinking of the last ice age, when so much water was taken up by glaciers and polar ice that the level of the world’s oceans dropped—then rose again when all that ice melted. But that has nothing to do with any canopy—”