On the day the world she knew was destroyed, Liz Tucker was content.

It started as a good day, a happy day. She'd returned home a week earlier from what she and other locals referred to as The Big City -- which meant any metropolitan area outside the Florida Keys. Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles -- all of them were alike, all crammed with people and homogenized high-tech corporate office buildings, the unimaginative streets filled with ground-car traffic, the skies with skimmers.

It was Liz's job -- as she saw it, anyway -- to make those cities a little less homogenized, to give the buildings some character, some uniqueness, a design and style that broke with the ubiquitous sleek high-rises that made every city look the same. Boxes, Liz called them. No matter how slender and sleek they became, no matter how far they rose into the clouds or how brightly they gleamed -- with their solar silver surfaces, reflecting heat in summer, collecting it in winter -- they were still boxes, and people should not have to live or work or eat or love in boxes.

Businesses and personal clients soon learned to call on Elizabeth Tucker, AIA, only if they wanted something new, something different. Not a high-rise surrounded by a green grass lawn and moving sidewalks.

Which was one reason Liz was happy at the moment: she'd received news less than an hour before that her design, one of several bids, had just been accepted by WelTech, one of the hemisphere's largest health firms. It was a major assignment: a trinity of office buildings connected by a landscaped park. Liz had convinced them to go with strictly indigenous plants and to add a small lake, which would attract native waterfowl. She would be able, finally, to help Chicago look more like Chicago, instead of every other city in the world. There would be ducks, swans, geese.

She was happy, too, simply to be home. Before work commenced on the project, she had a few days to herself to relax.

Which meant that she was currently thirty feet below the Gulf of Mexico's surface with her scuba gear. Just the basics: no need for a wetsuit here. The turquoise water was tepid against her skin. Warm as bathwater, amazed tourists always said.

There was no place in the world like the Keys; she was proud to be a local, a Conch. Fifty years ago, it had become a total tourist trap: fast food joints, strip shopping malls, wall-to-wall cheesy hotels lining the fragile, narrow coastline, hiding any view of the gulf. The place had been filled with people who wanted nothing more than to play golf, rub coconut-scented oil on their bodies, sit in the sun, and get unrelentingly drunk, people who had no appreciation for the special environment, for the unique wildlife, both of which had been endangered by pollution and other acts of human idiocy.

All that had changed now. Liz's house -- a historic landmark, a 1950s bungalow a short walk from the glittering shoreline -- was one of several in a quiet neighborhood punctuated by native flora and fauna: fat, squat royal palms, fan-shaped palmettos, flame-colored hibiscus and birds-of-paradise, graceful white herons, and the occasional flamingo grazing for bugs on the front lawns.

She'd grown up in that house; her parents had left it to her when it became clear that her brother didn't want it. Trip had always wanted to explore space; Liz had always made fun of him for it. What, Earth not good enough for you? He had taught her how to scuba dive, and when she'd been fascinated by the beauty of it, the sense of weightlessness, the freedom and excitement of exploring a totally different world, he'd said, Understand now? Space is like this... free and open, and full of things no one's ever seen before.

And Liz had retorted, Big difference. There are coral reefs here, and fish and a million other things to look at, all nice and close together. Space is filled with a whole lot of nothing. A lot of nothing between all those stars. It's cold and empty, and you can't even breathe....

He'd gotten her on that point. Can't breathe underwater, either. Does that mean we never should have invented oxygen tanks?

And then he started talking about his favorite subject, warp drive, which made the spaces between the stars seem a whole lot smaller. He talked about the possibility of life on other planets; if home was this great, what about the millions of other planets that had to be out there? And all the different types of fascinating aliens... The Vulcans weren't the entire universe, you know.

Liz wasn't interested. She loved the Keys, loved Earth, and wanted to make the places she loved better; that was that.

Diving always made her think of her big brother; she smiled, lips pressed tightly together to avoid gulping in stinging, bitter seawater, as she swam beside a huge manta ray, its boneless body undulating gracefully. She wondered where Trip was at the moment, whether he was exploring a planet as beautiful as the undersea world he had introduced to her. She'd taken the boat out, and at the moment, was swimming toward a coral reef, one of her favorite spots, always filled with an intriguing cast of characters.

Liz never got there.

The seafloor beneath her shuddered, sending up pulses of cooler water from deep below; a school of silver tarpon surged upward past her, caught in the strange rising current. She was caught too, catapulted to the surface. The tide was so strong, her mask was forced up to her forehead; she lost her mouthpiece. When she came at last to the surface, she grabbed the side of the boat and gasped for air. It stank of smoke, of something scorched.

Liz got a good look back at the shore, and gasped again.

The far side of the island was engulfed by a wall of flame -- stretching from the horizon up into the sky, blotting out the sun. The fire-wall was kilometers wide. It gouged deep into the earth, spewing debris in its wake -- everything, every life form, incinerated beyond recognition.

And it was moving, with the inexorability of a tornado, towards Liz and the gulf.

Oddly, she felt no fear. What she saw was too incomprehensible, too massive; what she felt was awe. At the very least, the Key on which she lived -- on which her neighbors lived -- would be obliterated.

Overhead, the dazzling sky was momentarily darkened by a rush of seabirds fleeing: cranes, pelicans, gulls. Their cries were drowned out by the roar of the destruction.

Krakatoa, Liz thought. An entire island blown away without warning by a volcano. One day there, the next, gone. The birds had been first to leave there, too.

But the wall of fire encroached too methodically, at too even a pace, to be a natural phenomenon. This horror was man-made; or perhaps, Liz considered, designed by a hand other than man's.

The gulf began to grow warmer than the smoke-filled air. Liz's impulse was to replace her mask and breathing gear, and dive down where it was cooler -- but a strong current kept her pinned to the surface, trapped near other unwilling victims: a pair of chattering dolphins, the school of now-thrashing tarpons, a struggling barracuda.

Get in the boat, her mind finally told her, cutting through her shock. Get in the damned boat and get the hell out of here.

White-foamed waves crashed against her and the small power-boat as the wall of flame neared. The current was so strong by this time that trying to find the ladder, clinging to it with her arms, took agonizing effort. She managed to pull herself up -- just enough to try lifting her leg up, stepping into the boat...

A great wave came along, and capsized it, forcing Liz for an instant beneath the water's surface. She bobbed up again, coughing, and opened her eyes, stinging from the salt. The boat was designed to right itself instantly -- but another wave caught it, and overturned it again, and a third swept it away from her reach. By this time, the sea was so rough, she could do nothing but tread water.

Liz began to sweat, despite the fact that she was submerged up to her chin. She had hoped, up to that point, that the water would protect her -- but it was beginning to roil from the heat.

She watched, amazed, as the stream of fire from the sky devoured the shore and any creature hapless enough to remain there.

Then it found the water's edge. A deafening hiss followed as steam rose high beyond the clouds, mixing in with the smoke; as Liz watched, the ocean disappeared, foot by foot, replaced by an ugly, fathomless crater.

Her skin grew red, scalded, as she watched the fire come closer. Her first thought, the more maudlin one, was that if she had to die, at least she was dying in the place she loved best.

Her second and last thought was, Bet Trip has seen nothing as wild as this, even out in space...

Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures