But Nodalictha said unhappily, "It isn't you, Rhadampsicus. It's me! While you've been watching the star, I've amused myself watching those quaint little creatures on the second planet. I've thought of them as--well, as pets. I've grown fond of them. It was absurd of me--" "Oh, but it is wonderful of you," said Rhadampsicus tenderly. "I love you all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy about them? I made sure they had food and energy." "They're going to be burned up!" wailed Nodalictha, "and they're so cute!" Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes--all sixteen of them. Then he said self-accusingly, "My dear, I should have thought of that. Of course this is only a flare-up, darling...." Then he made an impatient gesture. "I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in their little way, than as burned to tiny crisps." He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of a bridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride's lovely sixteen eyes. * * * * * Night fell on Cetopolis, and with it came some slight alleviation of the dreadfulness that had begun that afternoon. The air was furnacelike in heat and dryness. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. The stars were faint and red and ominous, seen through the smoke that overlay everything. So far, to be sure, breathing was possible. It was even possible to be comfortable in an air-conditioned room. But this was only the beginning. Lon and Cathy sat together on the porch of his house, after sundown. The other colonists had gone away to their own homes. When the crack of doom has visibly begun, men do queer things. In Cetopolis some undoubtedly got drunk, or tried to. But there were farmers who would spend this last night looking at their drooping crops, trying to persuade themselves that if Cetis Gamma only went back to normal before sunrise, the crops might yet be saved. But none of them expected it. Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had caught fire of itself from the sun's glare in late afternoon. Great clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars. Beyond the horizon to the west there was destruction. Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn't even asked to be taken back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it set. Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets of Cetis Gamma was at hand.