Running 2

Stepping into it was like stepping into an oven; it had to be a hundred and forty degrees in the middle of the night. By day the temperatures would have risen to the point that survival would have been impossible for a normal person. I doubted that my slime form would be much better all things considered, at least over the course of an entire day.

Ruth’s father had found himself in a desert world, or at least there was nothing but desert as far as the eye could see. If someone had landed in the Sahara on our world, they might have assumed it was a desert world. We’d only scanned a fifty mile radius, enough to know that the ocean was nowhere in sight and that there didn’t seem to be any life here.

Running across the sands was easy enough; they were hard packed and there wasn’t much in the way of wind. It was three miles before I reached the city, which looked to be made of massive stones. The sands had scoured away at the surface of the walls outside; drones had shown that the sun itself was red. The sun of our world wouldn’t change from white to red for more than five billion years.

***

Impossible