Lots of people doing their own thing for their own reasons: poets still writing poems; bank clerks coming home to play World of War Craft; DIY journalists roving the war-torn streets of Rio de Janeiro, pushing the shopping cart that held their makeshift production studio; the owner of Gourmet Groceries arranges apples, onions, and carrots to look like bands of red, white, and orange in an abstract painting; a Zip Code full of bobos who expect their produce aisle to resemble an art gallery; Tibet shoots silver iodide into clouds above Nagqu grasslands to deplete them of rain before they drift out of their airspace. A half hour later, China invades to claim the clouds. FB matches the faces of children at birthday parties around the world to faces in child porn, and police around the world move in…. All sorts of things that had never been measured before are measured—teacups in Iowa shaken by tremors in Japan—and rhymed in new ways—shark attacks to bathing-suit sales; spiritual well-being to virtual aliens killed; rain clouds to Chinese tanks; heirloom tomatoes to Modern art collections. Machines find more relations than they can possibly judge and draw in humans to do so for them: Alfred Safarzack among hundreds of other Christians searching images of ice melting on mountain tops for the telltale angular shapes that distinguish objects made by human hands—hopefully, Noah’s Ark; Kiran Ghosh, and thousands of other hobbyists going through the masses of photos of the night sky, one of which might have a faint smear, the telltale sign of a meteor on a collision course with Earth. Hive activity gives rise to a hive mind to evaluate, classify, rank, which draws in more poets, gardeners, birdwatchers, and retirees, their collective action emerging as a way of thinking together, a way of writing poems together, singing together, or evaluating crowds for potential mates, potential terrorists, volunteers searching for evidence of ancient tsunamis, searching for patterns of all kinds within this data sludge. So when Norman Blacklander came upon a flash mob glitter bombing members of the God Hates Fags Coalition to Save America, when he saw the cloud of glittering confetti, each piece a tiny mirror, it was natural for him to see it as one, large, hive-mirror; it was natural, when Dr. Janice Hookey was tasked with finding the wreckage of a slave ship, for her to turn to the hive to read the thousands of pages of 18th century ship logs for clues to where one might be; it was natural, when Richard Stone sat under a beach umbrella on his own private island, nursing a fruity drink, a tiny umbrella shading its ice, for him to think of scaling up: fruity-drink umbrella is to beach umbrella as beach umbrella would be to a hive of umbrellas in space, shading a planet….
The first slide reminded everyone that the largest mirror that could be manufactured was 9 meters in diameter, 2 metric tons of molten glass. The second diagrammed how directing the light from eight, 9-meter mirrors onto a single focal point, allowed them to act like a single telescope with a mirror 72 meters in diameter. “So why not direct the light from 100 mirrors, or thou- sands of mirrors, even if each was only the size of a piece of confetti?—glitter—the light from each piece of glitter shaped by computer into a single image.” Slide 4: “A mirror made of glitter instead of molten glass could be made any size, any shape. Weightless in space, a cloud of glitter 10 miles in diameter could be used to make the most powerful telescope ever imagined. If another satellite was placed between the telescope and the star it was aimed at—to totally eclipse the star—we could see the planets around it with approximately the same detail that astronomers in 1950 saw in Jupiter.”
Once the hive set about pouring over the images of the Mediterranean floor, looking for a bomb that had been dropped by accident, they found the telltale, angular shapes of human construction: the grid of a street; the foundation of a temple….
The Galileo Massive Cloud Orbiting Telescope (GMCOT) was a telescope whose mirror was a cloud of glitter, ten miles in diameter, shaped out in space by lasers the way whales can herd thousands of small fish into a tightly-packed ball. A billionaire paid to park it, like a beach umbrella, at a location in space so it could also be used to control the temperature on his island.
Astronomers first trained the telescope on what crowdsourcing had identified as a rocky, Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone. For years they’d been able to see the planet as a dark dot against its star, its atmosphere boiling away like steam from a teapot. What they hadn’t expected was how much it would look like Earth: stunning pictures of oceans and clouds and continents of an Earth-like planet only with a red cast to it….
And a collective groan went up from Earth, as though everyone had been given a look at what they were doing to their own planet, the way people baking in the heat of Seattle had once felt the anguish at what they had lost—the cold salmon streams, the natural air-conditioning of Puget Sound—back when they were still able to see snow at the top of Mt. Rainer off in the distance.
After the groan, silence. Maybe he was too old to get his first tattoo, as his wife insisted, but Roy thought there would have been more of a reaction to the news that the Earth was losing its atmosphere. He flipped through the book of designs the parlor had to offer, looking for the one he came in for, thinking how those who paid attention fell into arguing over whether the Earth’s loss of atmosphere was A) cyclical or B) caused by humans. He was always a voracious reader, and from what he could tell, people on the ‘A’ side mainly pointed out that atmosphere loss had obviously happened before without the help of humans: Mars had once had an atmosphere as lush and dense as that of Earth before the solar wind gradually stripped it away. And that was simply what was happening to Earth: it was turning into another Mars. Mars.2. What had saved the Earth before was the magnetic bubble it lived within and that channeled the solar wind to the poles as spectacular aurora borealis; but the strength of this magnetic field was cyclical, and indeed, not unrelated to the complete reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles every 450,000 years.
Unfortunately, this weakening of the magnetic shield was happening at a time of intensifying solar wind, the convergence of the two cycles amplifying the effects of each into the perfect storm that was stripping away the Earth’s atmosphere—and was accelerated by the thinning of the atmosphere brought on by global warming, fluorocarbons and other pollutants that broke it down, and made it easier to blow away, said those who claimed there was a human component—a component that multiplied the effect of the other two enough to knock the loss of the atmosphere into a permanent slide.
Even if the cycle didn’t end, Tom, his old rock-climbing buddy answered on FB (Roy loved the photo Tom used for his wall: a selfie he’d taken of the two of them 20 years ago, grinning in their gear on El Capitan, Yosemite Valley 1,000 feet below), even if the loss of atmosphere became permanent, it still had a projected lifespan of millions of years. So what’s the dif?
True, Roy thought. But still…. The Earth losing its atmosphere seemed like it warranted more than becoming a political football like face masks. Especially after the Galileo Massive Cloud Orbiting Telescope began sending back pictures of oceans and clouds and continents of that Earth-like planet that was already losing its atmosphere. Red Marble Earth, NGers called it, naming it after a photo that could have been of the Blue Marble Earth only tinted red, a blood-red, like the moon during a lunar eclipse, with a plume of atmosphere trailing away.
“This one,” he told the tattoo artist. “I want this one.” He tapped on the design that was a cartoon version of the Red Marble Earth. Maybe he wasn’t expecting the prayers for forgiveness that went up from ancients upon seeing their first eclipse. He didn’t expect anyone to give away their belongings or flog themselves in atonement, though some did, he had read, when Earth was about to pass through the tail of Hailey’s Comet and people thought it would poison the atmosphere. He didn’t think there’d be mass terror at the unknown, or overwhelming scale of the cosmos. Or the awe one might think would naturally follow. But anyone old enough, as he was, to remember the Earth when it was too big to be held in a single glimpse could remember how that first image of a blue, cloud-swirled globe suspended in utter darkness changed people. Once people were able to get a camera up high enough to look back and take a selfie of the entire planet, it was suddenly easier for everyone to think of themselves as Earthlings instead of Russians or Germans or Americans. On a finite planet. A closed system. Spaceship Earth, people called it. At least for a while. And yes, it was a little scary, the way Galileo’s critics must have been scared, looking through his telescope and having the centuries-old idea of Earth as ‘fixed, immovable position’ pulled out from under their feet and replaced with?— What? The unknown? Nothing? Or the thing every rock climber knows: once you step off a cliff, gravity is synonymous with destiny.
“That freak snow shower was really awesome,” the director of Christmas Town said, “because it gave us a good idea of how to dust with our own snow.”
The rolling hills of ancient Latina once provided an Arcadian landscape for villas with fabulous Roman mosaics, gardens, vineyards, and olive groves. Now, the hills channel raw sewerage, runoff from swine farms, a pharmaceutical factory, and steel mills into canals where the descendants of those ancient Latinas still bathe, fish, and get their drinking water. After giant rats became the only wild animals able to live there, Latinas began bulldozing their rolling hills to make new routes for the water; they planted weeds that could absorb toxins, creating a landscape that could coexist with the factories.
Center seat; Center row: Malcom sat in the theater hosting a Sci-Fi film festival: If the World’s Ending, We May as Well Go to the Movies! On-screen, yet another group of white scientists, white generals, and government wonks—white people—frantically worked to build a white rocket to leave earth before it blew up, or cracked in half, got too close to or too far from its sun, was invaded by aliens, or robots, or simply became too mucked up with shit to live on. Wait for it, wait for it, went the clock in his head as the money shot came on-screen: the new space station, blazing white, orbiting earth to serve as the port for ships carrying humans to a new, earthlike planet that had been discovered in deep space…. “Oh, hell no!” he muttered, even though he’d expected it. Hellllllllll noooooooo!: a white suburb, built inside a massive rotating wheel to create artificial gravity that allows white kids to play baseball; the crack of a bat sent a baseball through the kitchen window of a white women, while white men mowed lawns like in a super-high-def Norman Rockwell painting, the light pouring off the screen blinding white while Malcolm sat down in the dark, the poem “Whitey on the Moon” rolling through his head, and giving him the title of the next Sci-Fi movie he would make: They Came from Planet X. Without even needing to think about it, a plot began to unfold as if delivered by a god. Or maybe it was a lifetime of having lived it so immersively that every cell in his body understood.
[opening shot]
Camera behind a little white boy, waving goodbye out the rear window of a spaceship.
[cam pushes in]
Camera pushes in, then over his shoulder to show what he is waving at: the canonical blue-marble Earth, only now it’s brown, against a field of stars. The planet recedes into the distance as the spaceship accelerates away, and we hear the voice of the boy: “So long, ghetto Earth.”
[jump cut]
The Earth’s surface. Brown haze for air; a montage of landmarks, all destroyed: scavengers hauling away pieces of the Eiffel Tower in shopping carts; the Grand Canyon filled with garbage, New York Harbor dotted with rusting oil derricks—and in every scene, there appears to be a riot raging in the background.
[cam pulls in]
One of the riots: what seems at first to be screams and gunshots becomes more distinct as shrieks of glee—the mobs that had appeared to be roaming an apocalyptic landscape are actually having a mass celebration. Then a dandy steps forward from the mob, his skin panther black against his baby-blue suit, declaiming loudly to be heard over the party, “After the last white person left earth, all the Blacks they left behind broke into worldwide celebration!” This is our Griot—our storyteller, praise singer, magician, poet, historian—who describes what we see on-screen. “Grannies and preachers and players turning factories and farms and church aisles into dance parties. Mail carriers threw their letters into the air like confetti. No more KKK, no more skinheads, no more ‘heritage’ bullshit with their statues to Robert E. Lee. I mean, whose side, exactly, was Col. Sanders on? Even better than reparations—we got the whole planet!—even if it was a Popsicle sucked down to the stick. But hell. We’d worry about that tomorrow! For now there really was only one race, the human race, and not a single one of its members was three fifths of a person. No more presidents selling the enslaved from the Oval Office. No more preachers selling your children to found their Harvards. No more white people mailing postcards of your papa’s lynching—Wish you were here!—No more ‘black tax’: making less for the same job, getting less social security, dying before you can collect even that; loans denied, taxis and doctors avoiding your neighborhood like it was a toxic dump—which it may well be! No more, Confederate flags flying over U.S. courts like a Jolly Roger. No more Jim Crow, New Jim Crow, New-and-Improved Jim Crow; no more food deserts or ‘voter fraud’ (i.e. NWV). No more Dred Scott, Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, or open season (all the time) on—everyone’s got an opinion about—Black bodies; no more getting your tires slashed just because you wanted to play Santa Claus at the local mall, no more U.S. Public Health Service conducting syphilis experiments on you while you thought you were just getting a flu shot….
“And yes, people got excited—wouldn’t you?—and yes, some celebrations got a little out of hand, like the party-riots that sometimes break out after Super Bowl wins. In D.C., brothers broke into warehouses where 4th of July fireworks were stored and set them all off on the Mall in celebration of the first true Independence Day, each skyrocket launched at the white spaceship leaving earth behind—don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! Yoruba drummers started a dance line that circled the globe. In Mogadishu, men celebrated by shooting AK-47s into the air; brothers and sisters in Parisian cafés clinked espressos, lit cigarettes, then set to work on manifestos as to what the moment could mean….
“After a while, after the euphoria wore off, the United (Black) Nations—which was now all of them—convened to rename the planet. After much heated debate, they decided on Planet X, after Malcolm’s namesake. And everything was cool. Buildings were designed along the principles of architects like Kunlé Adeyemi, the Nigerian, who designed A-frame schools out of barrels that could both collect rainwater for use during droughts and float the school during floods; entire cities took on the Sierra Leone aesthetics of smooth, pine staves, gently tapering to infinity…. They abandoned the broken power grid for solar panels and a 12-volt system to create sustainable, green suburbs of high-tech moss huts, skyscrapers with hanging gardens: a civilization by the people, for the people, with justice and liberty for all….
“In the meantime, out in deep space, that plan to colonize New Earth went the way it always did when white people decided that a world was ‘New’ just because they hadn’t heard of it before. Massacres. Invasive microbes. Disease & Dominion. They baptized what was left and called it a day. But after enough centuries passed, and even the seas of New Earth began to turn into cemeteries, they began to look around for another planet to invade, I mean save….”
“There’s another,” Dr. Guntle whistled, zooming in on a satellite photo. Deforestation was a disaster for the Amazon Basin but a boon for archaeology. Logging had already destroyed enough of the tree canopy to make some 2,000 ancient earthworks visible from space: berms, and roads and geoglyphs, built by people in cities the size of those in Europe, then lost. Not lost. Wiped out—by microbes carried by Spanish conquistadors.
‘An Eden, untouched by human hands,’ everyone had said of the Amazon, though it was now becoming clear that it was more like the way Detroit would look in 500 years if it had been left abandoned, unchecked jungle taking over deserted ceremonial plazas, burying networks of roads connecting hundreds of villages…. According to Arctic core samples, the years after Columbus were the only time that the carbon in the atmosphere decreased and it was because the Indians who had carved their cities and farms out of the Amazon, and created its very dirt—rich soil that made jungle growth possible—did so through controlled burns. Then they were no more. And the jungle grew unchecked for 500 years, swallowing whole civilizations as a sinking ship is swallowed by the sea, leaving the impression of a pristine wilderness, not a land shaped by human hands. Until now.
The first thing the Chinese did with the island they created to extend their shoreline, and thus their domestic waters, and thus their claim to its fish, was to arm it with surface to air missiles.
Every summer, Gabe’s parents took her to visit the city’s planetarium. In its sky theater, hundreds of seats were outfitted with control panels. The idea was that the audience could collectively control a Mars Rover to explore the planet, seen through a camera on the Rover and projected before them on the huge screen. As might be expected, it was like having hundreds of hands on a steering wheel, and all of them trying to make the Rover go where they wanted. There were the earnest dads, hers among them, who truly wanted to search for water; there were the kids who just wanted to play with the colored buttons; there were teenagers who wanted to drive as fast as possible, who did their best to drive the Rover off a cliff or into a crater; there were those who wanted to steer but didn’t know how, pushing the up button when they wanted to go down, or trying buttons at random; there were those who only wanted to do stupid things—look for rocks shaped like Elvis, or make the Rover do donuts in the Martian soil. Mostly, there was the great majority who simply didn’t want to be bothered. Over the years that her family went, the result was always the same. The individual people were different but she always ended up closing her eyes to keep from getting motion sickness, the immense view of Mars on the screen bouncing in slo-mo, careening this way then that as though the camera was in one of those beach balls lofted into a crowd at a rock concert, alternately showing random views of sky then dirt, then being violently punched and lurching in a new direction….
A Planet loosing its atmosphere has a tail like a commet
Soon after the sighting of Red Marble Earth, another Hive-mind project found Atlantis. Archaeologists had long known of underwater villages: Aghios Petros off the coast of Greece, and Atlit-Yam, off the coast of Israel, and other cities that had thrived along the Mediterranean coast before the Ice Age ended, and the melting glaciers raised the sea level 30 meters, submerging them. What they hadn’t known was that one of these villages was just the outer suburb of an even larger city, built on what had been a sandstone ridge caused by tectonic lifting and running parallel to the present coastline. A city there prospered until 8,000 years ago, when half of Mt. Etna in Sicily slid into the Mediterranean: a mountain-sized avalanche large enough to bury Manhattan under mud so thick only the tip of the Empire State Building would stick out. The avalanche hit the Mediterranean with as much force as the meteor that did in the dinosaurs; it rearranged the sea bed and sent a giant, 300 foot wave crashing across the Mediterranean at 450 miles an hour; the wave pointed every rock in the Middle East in the same direction, and wiped out coastal villages, along with what had been this Venice-like city. The rising sea levels finished the job and the city lay in the bottom of its watery grave for another 8,000 years until modern humans, with modern machines, destroyed the currents that kept the ruins buried, and the erosion of wave action gradually began to uncover this lost city, revealing the source of the story of Atlantis, the source for the story of Noah’s Flood. But why? And Why now?—just when Red Marble Earth was discovered. How could it not be a sign? A warning of some kind. Many searched the skies….
A horrible thought came to Meadow as she looked through photos of the Ghost Forests that she’d shot back home: an entire forest that had died long ago, leaving only petrified stumps. The forest of ghostly white trunks had been a mystery for generations, the source of spooky stories, especially after a botanist counted tree rings, and determined that they had all been killed at the same time—drowned in salt water though they were miles from the sea. But how? Native legends told of the sea rising up to swallow whole tribes, but they had no written records. Medieval Japanese might, though, the botanist thought, and with the help of historians in Japan, he found stories of an orphan tsunami: a massive wave that had destroyed the coast but inexplicably had no earthquake—at least not until the botanist matched it to one that had reared up on his side of the ocean. It had been caused by the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, which was still pushing up against the North American plate, its pressure building, building…. When it finally gave, the Pacific Northwest would drop seven feet. The Cascade Mountains would spring back to the sea, as they had in 1700, causing a tsunami so powerful it wiped out much of Japan, 5,000 miles away. This time though, the earthquake would not occur under a vast wilderness on the U.S. side. It would be under Seattle. Or San Francisco. And it would destroy everything from Seattle to Sacramento—a real-life disaster movie. The geology was clear: an earthquake of this destructive power had occurred every 240 years for the last 10,000 years. Which meant it was overdue—by more than a 100 years. When Mount St. Helens blew its top, it was like two nuclear blasts. But more important, it was a sign that so much pressure was being generated again that it was now melting rock deep below—and a horrible thought came to Meadow: was that why William moved back to Oregon? The threat of a mega-tsunami that was making people start to leave the very thing that drew him back?
She could imagine him sitting in the metal shipping container he used as a hut, playing his flute as the earth turned to sea, a poetic communion with Nico, as if dying in a wall of water would restore some balance to the perversion of a son dying before his parents—
She felt guilty for not being there with him. For thinking she was the only one who hadn’t been able to get off the beach….
Had so many yawned at the sight of Red Marble Earth because we had been so well prepared? Wasn’t that the lesson of human progress?— Kepler removes Earth from the center of the universe; Darwin removes humans from the center of Eden; the discovery of thousands of other planets makes ours one of thousands. The same with bodies here on earth: that New Eden where bodies—those last boundaries between each other, as well as animals and plants—did not end where we did. We had been so prepared for the news that we were just genes, like so many other genes, on a rock, like lots of other rocks, that when confirmation came, it was easy for many of us to just shrug.
But not all.
Even before the Galileo Massive Cloud Orbiting Telescope sent back images of Earth’s red twin, he’d been drawn to Chichén Itzá by the sense of something larger than himself, or even the world, and he knew the people around him could feel it too. The ruins of the abandoned Mayan city rose out of the misty forest just like in its National Geographic photos. He wasn’t surprised to find so many backpackers, Germans, Japanese and other Birkenstockers…. What was surprising was the number of men and women who looked like plumbers from Milwaukee, or Star Trek conventions: people you wouldn’t expect, and looking mostly lost, as though unsure as to what was going to happen next.
Their motions were muted by the surrounding predawn jungle. But also, they were mostly silent, or spoke in whispers like people in church. He could hear distant birds. Even the local natives sat quietly at their souvenir stalls. There wasn’t any of the carnival atmosphere so common in places where the locals hawked their histories: Italians selling plastic gladiator swords outside the Coliseum. Mostly, these descendants of the Mayans who built these pyramids stood there in the dim light, looking toward the steps ascending the pyramid, the Temple of Kukulcan, as though in reverence for the ghosts of the largest American city that had been suddenly and mysteriously abandoned 1,500 years ago, waiting for….
This: the tip of the pyramid suddenly became radiant, golden, its yellow stone illuminated by the leading edge of day’s first light. A gasp went up from the crowd. At the same instant, the shadow of a serpent’s head appeared at the top of the stairs. Slowly, as resolutely as the rising of the sun on this the equinox, the shadow grew, and moved downward—the jagged shadow of an ever-growing serpent with toothed scales along its spine—the plumed serpent Kukulcan—slithering down the staircase. A knot of middle-aged tourists gathered around a tour leader who lifted a green umbrella as they began chanting, “As above, so below. As below, so above….” A couple of hipsters stood off to the side smirking. But a young woman with long flowing hair ironed into zigzagging cascades broke from her group to throw herself into the path of the serpent’s mouth. A few wept. A look of rapture, and despair came over other faces—expressions one would expect from those at the appearance of their god, not tourists at some foreign weirdness; it was their god he knew, a god of time, something cosmic that they were part of as surely as the Mayan descendants around them waited for the believers to come over and buy some water or jewelry and whose ancestors had created the calendar that prophesied the end of the world in 2012. When it didn’t come, nonbelievers had laughed at them, pointing out that the apocalyptic end of the world that all these people thought the ancient Mayans had predicted was nothing at all like what the Mayans themselves believed: though their calendar did predict that this world would end in 2012, they also thought another, new world, would begin at the same time, the way we believe one year ends and another begins at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. Some refused to accept this interpretation, redoing their calculations to show that only the date was off: that the world would end at one of the equinoxes between 2012 and 2024. And if not then, soon enough. Maybe by a giant meteor hitting the Earth—the Earth passing through a distant meteor belt every 65 million years, the cycle by which life on Earth had gone extinct five times before, with the regularity of a metronome. Or maybe all the matter that made up this universe would come in contact with the anti-matter astronomers hypothesized, causing both to vanish in a flash.
But the theory that came to dominate was that the ancient Mayan calendar had been right: that the world did end, back in 2012, and it had happened exactly as the Mayans had said it would: one world, the world that had existed for all of human history, had ended just as another began, the new world continuing on just as the old one had before it: in silence, indifferent to whether its surface resembled the Amazon or the Sahara. For 2012 was the year that the ice bridge that had held a vast West Antarctic ice sheet in place, like a keystone in an arch, cracked. And as later shown by satellite photos, once this mountain of ice, an ice mountain that had existed for all of human history, a mountain of ice that for all of human history had pinned the West Antarctic ice sheet in place, once this mountain of ice collapsed, the rest of Antarctica had begun its tumble into the sea; ice shelves the size of small countries crumbled, setting mountain-sized icebergs adrift, their massive bottoms tearing up the ocean floor….
That massive ice-mountain had been like the finger of the Dutch boy who saved Holland by plugging a hole in a dyke to keep it from bursting. Except this Dutch boy had pulled out his finger. And now, the Earth had to find somewhere to put an extra ocean.
But melting tundra also released methane that had been trapped for centuries, the gases that moved between the atmosphere and oceans changing their chemical composition, the change in chemistry killing the algae and krill that fed on them, and the fish that fed on the krill; coral reefs died, as did the ecosystems they supported, taking with them mollusks, plankton, and all the animals that relied on them for bone growth, a quarter of all fish—the die-off of fish bringing down mangroves, marine reptiles, seabirds, mammals…. That is, as the oceans died, the planet began to transform into a different world—as it had 2.5 billion years ago when sunshine caused microbes to emit oxygen, creating our oxygen-rich atmosphere—the beginning of our world—and poisoning almost all other living creatures—the end of theirs. The Earth didn’t care who or what lived on it.
Only this time the change was our fault. And the error made by those who read the Mayan calendar in 2010 was that they thought the world would end according to a modern, rather than a Mayan, sense of time—instantly— instead of slow enough to let us live through the consequences. And he knew that at that moment, all over the world, believers were branding themselves in communion, just as they had on the equinox last year; a yard full of women prisoners in Russia were probably breaking out into seizures and mass hysterics, believing they’d heard the Earth yawn as they had last year; believers in France were camping on Bugarach Mountain in anticipation of an alien landing; in America people were buying ammunition; in Greece, ads run by stores were urging people to stockpile food, blankets, batteries, adding to the runs on fuel and food while the Greek Orthodox Church was issuing its annual Equinox Statement assuring congregations that the End of the World truly was at hand, but that it would be triggered by moral decline, not an alignment of planets….