where the sun had struck as he could.

He braced himself to leave even the partial shelter. There was a pile of
water skins near the base of the block, held in the charred remains of
an attendant's body. The water was boiling, but there was still some
left. He poured several skins together and drank the stuff, forcing
himself to endure the agony of its passage down his throat. Without it,
he'd be dehydrated before he could get a safe distance away.

Then he ran. The desert was like molten iron under his bare feet, and
the savage radiation on his back was worse than any overseer's whip.
His mind threatened to blank out with each step, but he forced himself
on. And slowly, as the distance increased, the sun's pyre sank further
and further over the horizon. The heat should still have been enough to
kill any normal body in fifteen minutes, but he could endure it. He
stumbled on in a trot, guiding himself by the stars that shone in the
broken sky toward a section of this world where there had been life and
some measure of civilization before. After a few hours, the tongues of
flame no longer flared above the horizon, though the brilliant radiance
continued. And Hanson found that his strong and nearly indestructible
body still had limits. It could not go on without rest forever. He was
sobbing with fatigue at every step.

He managed to dig a small hollow in the sand before dropping off to
sleep. It was a sleep of total exhaustion, lacking even a sense of time.
It might have been minutes or hours that he slept, and he had no way of
knowing which. With the sun gone and the stars rocking into dizzy new
configurations, there was no night or day, nor any way to guess the
passage of time.

He woke to a roaring wind that sent cutting blasts of sand driving
against him. He staggered up and forced himself against it, away from
the place where the sun had fallen. Even through the lashing sandstorm,
he could see the glow near the horizon. Now a pillar of something that
looked like steam but was probably vapor from molten and evaporated
rocks was rising upwards, like the mushroom clouds of his own days. It
was spreading, apparently just under the phlogiston layer, reflecting
back the glare. And the wind was caused by the great rising column of
superheated gases over the sun.

He staggered on, while the sand gave way slowly to patches of green.
With the sun gone and the sky falling into complete shreds, this world
was certainly doom