What was once a comet is a pitiful remnant, a double handful of flying hills and boulders of dirty ice.
What was once a comet is a pitiful remnant, a double handful of flying hills and boulders of dirty ice. Earth's gravitational field has spread them across the sky. They may still reach the halo, but they can never rejoin.
Craters glow across the face of the Earth. The sea strikes glow as brightly as the land strikes; but the sea strikes are growing smaller. Walls of water hover around them, edging inward.
The water hovers two miles high around the Pacific strike. Its edges boil frantically. The pressure of expanding live steam holds back the walls of water.
And the hot vapor goes up in a column clear as glass, carrying salt from vaporized seawater, and silt from the sea bottom, and recondensed rock from the strike itself. At the limits of the Earth's atmosphere it begins to spread in an expanding whirlpool.
Megatons of live steam begin to cool. Water condenses first around dust and larger particles. What falls out of the pattern are the heavier globules of mud. Some join as they fall. They are still hot. In the drier air below, some water evaporates.
