was lounging in Hetty's favorite rocking chair on the wide back
verandah, lighting a cigarette and Barney was perched on the porch
railing when the sky was blotted out by the dazzling violet light of
the blast. They were blinking in frozen amazement when the shock wave
smashed into the ranch, flattening the flimsier buildings and buckling
the side and roof of the steel-braced barn. Every window on the place
blew out in a storm of deadly glass shards. The rolling ground wave in
the wake of the shock blast, rocked and bounced the solid, timber and
adobe main house.

The concussion hit Johnny like a fist, pinwheeling him backwards in the
rocker against the wall of the house. It caught Barney like a sack of
sodden rags and flung him atop the dazed and semiconscious younger man.

The first frightened screams of the horses in the barns and corrals
were mingling with the bawling of the heifers in the calf pens when the
sound of the explosion caught up with the devastation of the shock and
ground waves.

Like the reverberation of a thousand massed cannon firing at once, the
soul-searing sound rumbled out of the desert and boiled with almost
tangible density into the shattered ranch yard. It flattened the
feebly-stirring men on the porch and then thundered on in a tidal wave
of noise.

Barney moaned and rolled off the tangle of porch rocker and stunned
youth beneath him. Johnny lay dazed another second or two and then
began struggling to his feet.

"Hetty," he croaked, pointing wildly to the south where a massive,
dirty column of purple smoke and fire rose skyward like the stem of a
monstrous and malignant toadstool. "Hetty's out there."

He stumbled from the porch and broke into a staggering run to the pile
of broken planks that seconds ago had been the tractor shed. As he
crossed the yard, a great gust of wind whipped back from the north,
pumping clouds of dry, dusty earth before it. The force of the wind
almost knocked the bruised and shaken Johnny from his feet once again
as it swept back over the ranch, in the direction of the great pillar
of purple smoke.

"Implosion," Johnny's mind registered.

He tore at the stack of loose boards leaning against the station wagon,
flinging them fiercely aside in his frantic efforts to free the
vehicle. Barney limped up to join him and a minute later they had
cleared a way into the wagon. Johnny squeezed into the front seat and
drove it back from under more leaning boards. Three