"Maybe I'd better not. I don't want to goof the mission." "There's time. You'll want some sleep first." "All right. I suppose I'll need a steady hand to murder Noah and the rest." "And Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, and Noah's wife," said Dr. Gar, "and the three wives of his sons with them, as it was written. Especially Japheth. But not the animals, remember." "I understand that. If you think the Ten Commandments don't apply. Whichever one of them it was." "They were an element of the Mosaic Covenant. It, too, failed. Perhaps the Garic Covenant, if I may be so vain, will endure." * * * * * The waters covered the Earth. A moment ago, before he activated the attachment, Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan's spacecraft had been plunging towards the vortex of a ragged ball of dust and vapor, the destroyed Earth of World War V. Now, in the Adamic Year 601 (or was it the Edenic?--he couldn't remember, though Dr. Gar had let him study the Book), the waters stretched everywhere. Ahead the sun glinted in reflection from something rising above the surface. Ararat? He made out the twin peaks. He throttled back to scarcely more than mach one and flew over them, high. His second pass took him back along his own vapor trail. This time he spotted the tiny surface craft making for the solitary bit of land. He had to hand it to Dr. Gar. The old boy's space-time grid had hit it right on the button. Roy was too high to distinguish details but he imagined that Noah and his family would be on deck, full of the wonder of Mount Ararat rising, as promised, from the sea. But there was another wonder--the vapor trails that stretched for miles across the upper air. Did they, down there on the Ark, think them a sign of the Lord? Roy smiled ironically. They were a sign of the lord Gar and of his servant, Pilot Officer Vanjan, come to blast them into eternity and change the future, to give the animals a chance. Who would chronicle his role as the re-arranging angel, the unheavenly host about to gather up in violence the drifting souls below? Who, he wondered. Some simian scribe? Some unborn elephant prophet? An insectate scholar destined to evolve from among the creeping things that would inherit the Earth? Or perhaps the written word would die unborn under the fiery hail of his guns. No matter. These questions and more had been anticipated by Dr. Gar. Soon now, at the end of Roy's strafing run, it would be up to History to begin assembling the answers. He slowed to mach minus and sent out wings. He would have to dip close to see if the entire Ark's complement was on deck. The job had to be done right or Earth was kaput. Nothing personal, Noah, old boy. There they were, on the starboard side of the top deck, well out from under the pitch of the roof, craning their necks for a look at this miracle in the sky where they had expected to see only a returning dove.