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prey. Then we came along and took over."
    Took over with our helicopters that could seek them out, our power sleds that could outrun them, and our guns that could kill from half a mile away. But without those aids, Nature's balance tilted back the other way. No need now to pity the bears.
    In the dark hut, Barringer groped his way to where Dahlquist had sat. A full-sized polar bear weighed half a ton. It was ten feet from nose to hindquarters, and it could run faster than any human. The wicked claws would rip the walls of the hut like tissue paper.
    Had Dahlquist found time to do his "bit of tinkering," enough to make the rifle work? Barringer was about to find out. Then, and only then, would he have an idea of his own possible future.

1
    March 21, 2026.
    Art Ferrand woke just before dawn. The only bedroom of the house faced due east, and he lay at ease until he could watch the disk of the rising sun neatly divided by an east-west line of fence running down the middle of the yard.
    Day 41, and the vernal equinox. In a normal year, at this latitude and altitude, the crocuses would be about ready to flower.
    But this was not a normal year. Yesterday, the tulips and azaleas had been in bloom in the front yard.
    Art rolled over and climbed carefully out of bed. Gingerly, he put weight on his right leg. Some aches and pains were easing, but some would be with him forever. At sixty-two, lost cartilage did not replace itself even with the telomod treatment. His knee was probably as good as it would ever be, and that wasn't so great.
    He leaned on the windowsill and peered south-southeast, down the slope of the hill. That way, line of sight but much too far off to be seen, lay Washington. What did the city look like now, on Day 41? It was hard to picture—and hard not to try.
    The little house sat at fifteen hundred feet on the edge of the Catoctin Mountain Park, woods above and steep fields below. He noticed that the red Maryland dirt of the fields was hidden by healthy green. Another anomaly. Like the flowers, the grass was a month and more ahead of schedule. The sky was as it had been for the past three days, with clouds coming in slowly from the south. If today followed the same pattern, afternoon would be overcast and evening would bring heavy rain.
    Most people would say the house was little more than a log cabin. There was the bedroom, its small bathroom fed by rainwater collected as runoff from the sloping slate roof; and there was the other room, on the west side, a combined kitchen/living room/library/storehouse, with a little porch where Art could sit and watch the sunset.
    He had come here on February 22, when most people still regarded the event of Day 1, February 9, as nothing more than an astronomical oddity, on a par with a bright comet. No, less than that. The Alpha Centauri supernova, like the star system that gave rise to it, was never seen in the Northern Hemisphere. An invisible event, trillions of miles away, might be something to excite the scientists. For everyone else it seemed to have no connection with the real world of jobs and day-today worries.
    Art was a consultant specializing in networks and feedback analysis. As one of the increasing number of people with no permanent job, he had more offers than he could use. He took work when he felt like it, and found plenty of time to listen to the news reports and range the science web. He was also free to go wherever his instincts told him.
    The astronomers had certainly been excited. There hadn't been a naked-eye supernova in the Milky Way since the seventeenth century, and now here was one that in celestial terms was close enough to spit at. Not only that, according to current accepted theories of stellar stability, Alpha Centauri could not go supernova. That led to lengthy and intense debates among the astronomers. To Art, it all suggested that a better theory was definitely overdue. As one lady analyst said, defensively, astronomy was not a field in which