her, and then the rain pelted
down again and the sea was an angry sea and the air was supercharged
with ozone and another smell. Like seared flesh.

Like seared flesh.

She saw Adam Slade then. Slade was down in a foot of water, face down.
He was not moving and the water lapped around him, over him. She went
to him, walking slowly.

The men from the helicopter were there too. They had seen in that
final flash of lightning.

"Are you all right, miss?" one of them shouted.

"Yes. Slade?"

They turned him over. They looked at him. "Dead," one of them said.

"Dead," she echoed. She would have collapsed, but they caught her.

* * * * *

Then the rain really came down, not as it had come before, which was
hard enough. It came in huge globes of water and each globe was as big
as your head and if it hit it could stun you.

"Slade?" someone cried as the globes exploded violently in the surf
around them.

"He's dead. He'll keep."

And they went back to the helicopter with Marcia, to await the end of
the storm there.

When it was over, when the sky was not black but merely the color of
lead, they returned down the beach for Slade's body.

But Slade wasn't there.

"But he was dead!" Marcia said incredulously.

One of the men smiled. "He didn't go anyplace under his own power. He
was dead, all right. The storm took his body out to sea, is all."

They stood there for a moment, gazing out across the black troubled
water of the infant ocean on the infant earth. A billion years ago....

Slade was out there. Slade, dead. Out there with the tides and the
waters and the frequent electric storms--

"Out there with a million bacteriological parasites on his dead body
and in his dead body, which he brought with him," Marcia said,
dreamily.

"What are you talking about, miss?"

Out there in the electric dawn of earth, with the bacteria which lived
in his body as they lived in all other bodies. Out there with them,
dead.

Food for them.

Food and water and air heavy with ozone and the electric storms.

Marcia laughed hysterically. It was a story she wanted to write.

But she wouldn't write it.

Slade was a killer, condemned to die. But Slade, dead out there with
his bacteria, Slade evil to man and human society but not necessarily
evil in the implacable ways of nature or perhaps grimly, terribly
evil--Slade out there, dead on the bosom of the primordial waters,
Slade back in ti