That writer in the end had received worse than merely a big dripping face full of someone’s gluey gray splooge, hadn’t she? Yes, he admitted with a grim shrug, that hack was probably long dead now. That face of hers had been burned straight down to the skull with a flare of light as bright as a thousand suns together—and then in a millisecond the collection of gray matter which had conjured up that insipid tale out of cheap clichés and stale literary tropes had flashed into vapor as well. The author was gone. Her books were gone, too—most likely his copy was the last in the world. Perhaps he had even crunched the crawler’s treads through her scattered bones when he collected his prize. Oh, more likely she had been vaporized in some other incinerated city instead, but it was just possible—a
