Syzygy

THE STORM

The rain had spread all up and down the coast. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, gusts made the roads slippery and the visibility poor, and five teenagers in a Toyota failed to navigate a curve.

Just off the road was a nine-foot boulder with a curious history. It was not related to any of the rock formations near it. Long ago it had been part of the California subduction zone, had been dragged twenty miles down into the earth, churned about, squeezed, And abraded. Then, over millions of years, it rose slowly back to the surface, in time to receive the full force of the car at seventy miles an hour. The flaming wreckage scorched it, but with nothing like the heat it had already endured. More than enough, though, to char the five teenagers to indistinguishable pods of ash.

Saturday, December 26th. 8:15 PM.

Since he was a Pedigrue, the police gave him every care. Lieutenant Kwiatkowski took his statement in the lieuten­ant's own office, sitting at the lieutenant's own desk. There was a thick motel tumbler of good Scotch on one side of him and a plastic airlines cup of hot coffee on the other, and two of the family's lawyers were sitting by the wall listening to every word. It didn't take long.

It would, actually, have taken quite a lot longer if the lieutenant had not hurried it along so. He was not impo­lite. Not to a Pedigrue. Just anxious to get the bare facts, and not much else. The curious thing was that Tommy could remember every detail, the color of Myrna's blood on his cream linen jacket, the expression of the murderer, the absolute hush for a second after the flat smack of the pistol shot. He had been supercool, Tommy had, receiv­ing every vibration. He still was. He noted the muddy trickle of rain at the corner of the lieutenant's window, the lock on the telephone dial, the American flag lapel pin on the blouse of the woman sergeant who was taking it all down. He sipped absently from either the Scotch or the coffee at random, taking time to be sure he got every particular exactly right. Even so the whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. The lawyer on the right came over close to him. "We'll stay with you for the identification, of course," he whispered, but Tommy shook his head. "You're sure? As you wish, Thompson, but please remember you're in shock. Please simply say nothing at all, to anyone. Certainly you should not volunteer anything about the young lady's, ah, personal life. "

Tommy waved him away, and then the lieutenant, too, courteously left him alone in the office—"to rest"—for no more than twenty minutes before they went over to the medical examiner's place for the really bad part.

But even the bad part was made as nearly painless as it could be. They had put Myrna's body on one of those rolling trolleys. It was in a little room by itself, none of those file-drawers of corpses you see on television. None of that smell of faint decay you imagined. No smell at all, and no sound. And no movement. The sheet was pulled back below her chin and her eyes had been closed. And the identification was only a formality anyway. "That's her," Tommy said, and was allowed to go. The lieutenant supplied a cop and a police car to drive Tommy wherever he wanted to go.

But there wasn't enough gas in the tank to take him where he wanted to go. Tahiti, maybe. The Gobi desert. The South Pole. Somewhere where no one knew him, and where he didn't have to speak to anyone.

On the other hand, he wanted to talk. The policeman was trying to be polite, but he had a little transistor radio going besides the regular police calls. It was almost all weather. There was a flash flood watch for all coastal and mountain areas, water was pouring over the spillways of the San Gabriel dam, traffic was blocked off on Topanga Canyon. "Bad storm," Tommy observed. "Sorry to take you out in it."

"That's all right, Mr. Pedigrue," the cop said, slowing down and observing with professional interest the flares and the slickered cops waving them around a three-car pileup.

"I guess you get used to this kind of thing," Tommy said, staring. If there were any mutilated bodies he couldn't see them. "It was quite a shock to me, though. And a real tragedy. She was a beautiful woman, Myrna."

He stopped himself then. He was being unnaturally talkative, and knew it, and knew that some of the things that were trembling in the back of his throat to be said were in bad taste. But he wasn't embarrassed; he was rather proud of himself for taking it so well. Still, who knew who this cop might talk to? "They've got the man that did it, anyway," he observed, and the policeman reluctantly switched off the transistor radio to humor this important person. Yes, the perpetrator was under arrest. He hadn't been charged yet, but there wasn't any doubt. He was crazy, sure. He'd been assigned a public defender at his request—he wasn't that crazy. He was probably being interrogated right now. It was not clear whether any of the other witnesses would be charged as accomplices, but some of them were still being questioned too. Not just about the shooting. Most of them disappeared long before the police arrived, but half a dozen had hung on, and the officers had found a little of pills and joints all over the floor, among the benches. So there was the narcotics angle, too. And, oh, sure, Mr. Pedigrue, most of them had records. Nothing really heavy. The tall black one had two felony convictions and had done time. One of the women had an active parole violation, but what it looked like to the cop, it was just another nut case. Like all those other nuts, you know? Squeaky Fromm and Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald . . . although, if you wanted the cop's opinion, that wasn't just a nut. No, sir. There were some pretty high-up people involved in that, stonewalling every investigation, and we probably wouldn't really ever get the truth on that one. You dig into those high-level politicians and you find they're just as goddam— At that point the policeman was happy to turn into the driveway of the Pedigrue estate, because he had just remembered who he was talking to. He put the floodlight on the door, and watched Tommy Pedigrue run through the rain until he was out of sight. If he had any wondering to do about his passenger it had to be deferred, because as soon as he had signed on again he had his orders. There was a man reported in trouble in Malibu Creek. It was going to be a long night and a wet one.

Tommy told the housekeeper he had to change out of his wet clothes and would see his father in the morning. She didn't question the fact that he was going right to sleep. She obviously didn't believe it, either, but that was not important. Tommy skinned out of the soggy linen jacket and realized that the dirty chocolate-bar smudge over the pocket was, actually, still Myrna's blood. He hurled it into the bathroom hamper and found a robe to wrap around his shivering body.

Maybe it had been a mistake to come here instead of going to his own home, but he didn't want to face his own home that night. This room was comfortable—this suite, rather—actually, this part of the children's suite that he had shared with his brother until Townsend went off to prep school and then into the world. His own closets were almost bare, so he wandered into Townsend's old room to find slippers and socks. His brother's room had been kept in strict tradition, with his Yale banner on the wall and his half-dozen Apollo blazer patches stitched to the bedspread and the one real basketball trophy be had ever won by the window. Tommy's own room was bare; he had cleaned it all out. But what remained, because it was not only a souvenir of his own childhood but Towny's as well, was the common playroom between, with its cupboards of rainy-day puzzles and games and its still marvelous HO model-train layout. Tommy had tried to get the train for his own kids, but Townsend would not hear of it; and then, of course, when Tommy 's marriage came apart there didn't seem to be any point.

The housekeeper knocked. "I thought you might be hungry, Mr. Tom," she said, wheeling in—what? A gurney? No. A cart with hot plates, sandwiches under a napkin, a pot of baked beans. "Your father's coming up to see you," she said as she retired. But she didn't have to. Tommy could hear the slow tiny elevator, and then the whine of his father's chair.

"You handled this very well, Tommy," he said.

Although Tommy was standing up at the dinner cart and his father sitting in the wheelchair, the old man domi­nated the scene. Not unusual; he always had. "Thanks, Dad," Tommy said gratefully.

"Has the woman got a family?"

"Myrna. Yes, there are some people back east. She had a husband, too, but they've been separated for a couple of years."

"I don't want trouble with her family," his father remarked.

"Her name is Myrna Licht, Dad. "

The old man studied him for a moment. "You've had a very difficult day," he announced, explaining to himself his son's small resistance. "We're going to have to clean all this up. All of it, Tommy. I've arranged an investigation of this Danny Deere's connection with those crackpots— privately. And I want a full report, complete with conclu­sions and recommendations, from those scientists of yours Monday morning."

Tommy had been filling a plate with baked beans and cole slaw; he put it down to express himself better. "I don't think that's possible, Dad!"

"Make it possible."

"You know how scientists are. They say they haven't completed their research yet. They don't have enough information—"

If his father had still had a foot, he would have stamped it. "Damn it, Tommy. For a million years people have been having to make decisions without knowing all the facts. That's the nature of the beast. That's what politics is all about. If they can't do it, we'll get somebody from the foundation to whip it together."

Tommy hesitated a moment, then resumed filling his plate. "I guess you're right, Dad."

"We'll talk about it in the morning." The old man spun his chair around to leave, then paused. "It's good to have you home for a night," he said.

"It was the weather, Dad. Half the canyon roads were closed because of the storm. "

His father nodded. "Thank God. The rain 11 be making the headlines, not you and your women."

Tommy ate half of what was on his plate, but he wasn't really hungry. He wasn't sleepy, either; the adrenaline was still charging his veins. He made himself a drink and went into the playroom.

The playroom was a good size, twelve feet by eighteen, or almost. One loop of the model train layout climbed up the side walls and completely circumnavigated the room; other loops were on folding shelves that completed the circle of track around the engineer's post. Tommy checked the controller to make sure everything was still connected, then let down the arms. The tracks still joined perfectly. From the marshalling yard he selected a Santa Fe hog pulling four Pullmans and a club car and sent it creeping across the bridge, then up the long grade to make the circuit of the room at molding level. Tommy had always enjoyed his toys. He had always owned a great many of them. Still did, although, as he had just discovered, some of his present toys bled on him when they were destroyed. He watched the string creep along the shelf of track ab­sently, contemplating a thought he had been fleeing from. The bullet that broke the Myrna-toy, of course, had not been intended for her. It could have been himself, not Myrna, who was right now lying in the medical examiner's file drawer. By rights it should have been. By rights his life at this moment should be over.

On Mount Palomar an astronomer left the darkroom to peer out at the sky. His budget of observing time had been rained out for six consecutive nights. Now, shivering in the mile-high air, he saw Jupiter and Saturn glowing through a break in the clouds, and wondered if the cluster of galaxies he was concerned with would show up yet that night. It didn't much matter. He wasn't going anywhere. Down below the clouds, rain was still soaking the Pauna valley. Little creeks like Frey and Agua Tibia ran a quar­ter mile wide, and the roads were under water.

Sunday, December 27th. 1:30 PM.

Danny Deere didn't own a pair of boots, but Maria had insisted on lending him her husband's. Or nephew's, or son's; at any rate, he was dressed for the weather. Joel took no chances, however. He was out of the car and at the door, with an umbrella over Danny's head while he escorted him to the door. "You sure you want to do this, Danny?" he chattered. "It's no day for a drive in the country."

Danny didn't answer, except to tell him to get the umbrella out of his face. It wasn't doing any good; the wind was as bad as the rain, and the drops came horizon­tally into his eyes and down the collar of his trench coat. Danny jumped into the car and began removing as much as he could of the rain gear while Joel ran around and started down the driveway.

Joel was watching him in the mirror. "He didn't seem like that bad a kid, Danny," he offered. "Uptight, sure. Messed up. But I never figured him for a killer."

"Watch the road!" Danny ordered, drumming his fingers on the armrest. He glowered at the condo as they turned into the freeway. It didn't look any better in the rain. The great crane hung idly over the near side of the building, two loops of cables swinging beneath it in the wind. There were no windows in the building yet, and the scaffolding that ran up one side showed just how far the work had got. Too far. It wasn't going to go away.

"Would you like me to turn on a little heat?" Joel inquired.

"Will you shut up?" Danny demanded, but his heart wasn't in it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, hoping Joel would think he was asleep. He wished he were. He didn't want to listen to the radio, because the part that wasn't about the lousy weather was about the lousy fink, Buck. He especially didn't want to think, because every­thing he thought was even lousier.

The trouble with pretending to sleep was that you some­times went ahead and did it. Danny roused slightly as the car turned off the Hollywood Freeway and began to move carefully through the drenched, almost empty city streets. But be didn't come fully awake till he felt Joel slam on the brakes and cry, "My God, Danny, look at that!"

"What? What?" Danny barked, but then he saw. They were slowing down as they approached the ashram, and it was a mess! Shards of glass spangled the sidewalk. The sign over it had been pulled down and swayed crazily in the wind. The black man, Robinson, was boarding up the shattered windows while a little girl in a poncho too big for her was handing him nails.

"Somebody really had himself a time," Joel marveled, pressing the button that rolled the side window down as he slid in toward the curb. Danny jumped up.

"Close that goddam window! Keep going. Don't stop! Right on by, you hear me?" He cowered down out of sight, but it wasn't necessary. The little girl looked at him with absent curiosity, but her father's attention was firmly focused on the boards he was nailing.

"You don't want to stop, Danny? I thought you said you wanted to talk to—" _

"Will you for God's sake keep going?" He lifted his head and peered back. From a distance the damage looked even worse than it had close up. He tried to tell himself that the storm had done it, but he knew better.

"Go where, Danny?"

"Just keep driving! Let me think a minute." God, how rotten everything had gotten, and how fast!

For the first time in years, Danny wished he had some­one to talk to. Really talk. Joel wouldn't do, nor his lawyer, nor any of the women he scored in that big elevated bed when the mood moved him. None of the people he knew would do, because they were all wimps; what he needed was a friend, and he didn't have one.

The thing was, he had made some mistakes. Maybe a lot of mistakes. Maybe the worst of them was tipping his hand to that Keating woman. But who knew there was going to be a shooting? If it hadn't been for that— There was no point in thinking in that direction; it had hap­pened, and the shit had hit the fan. There was a time to cut your losses, and it was getting close to that time.

"I could just keep on driving like you said, Danny," Joel called, "but the driving's pretty hairy. Why don't I just park for a while?"

"Park, park!" Danny barked. "What do I care if you park? Just shut up, will you?" He looked around. They were on Wilshire, in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and there were very few cars in sight in the driving rain. Danny realized it wasn't just the weather; my God, it's still Christmas weekend! He wrenched his thoughts back. Cut your losses. How? He had a little time, he realized; this Christmas stuff wasn't a bad thing, because no busi­ness was being done anywhere. If the scam was irrepara­bly damaged it would be a day or two before it could be felt. And a lot could be done in a day.

If you had the cash.

"Joel," he yelled. "Head for the freeway."

"Sure thing, Danny. Are we going home?"

"No, we're not going home! Just shut up a minute." He was thumbing through his private address book for a num­ber he had never really intended to use. "Yeah, okay, here it is. Out Brentwood way. And move it, you hear me?"

The security was everything that Danny's own pretended to be and was not. The gate across the driveway had the same voice communications and electric lock as his own. It also had more. It had a closed-circuit television system— no, it had two of them! Two separate cameras! One peered inside the car while the other swiveled down to check the license number. A voice said something, and Danny gave his name to the air.

There was no answer, but after a moment the gate slid into its housing to let them in. Watching everything, it was not lost on Danny that four rows of tire spikes re­tracted themselves into metal plates on the roadway at the same time. Now, that was security. You could break through the gate, maybe. But you couldn't get much farther.

But what a house! Danny wrinkled his nose at the simple ranch house that appeared at the bend in the driveway—a two-bedroomer, one fifty, one seventy-five tops. It wasn't until he was inside the building that he realized this could not be Boyma's home. A place for admitting visitors, maybe, especially visitors Boyma didn't specially want. No doubt the place where Boyma actually lived lay farther within the estate, and no doubt Danny Deere was never going to see it.

No one frisked him, but the man who let him into the living room did a good job of looking him over. He was kept waiting for twenty minutes, then admitted to what had obviously been built as one of the bedrooms and was now Boyma's office. The mobster was behind a desk, but not sitting down; he was standing, seesawing up and down on his toes, his hands clasped behind him. "You saved me a trip, Deere," he said approvingly. "That's nice, for a friend."

"You were coming to see me?" Danny wet his lips. "Oh, about my source into that committee? Well, that one dried up, but I, uh, I'm working on a new one. What I came for, I want to borrow some money."

"Oh, you want money?" Boyma nodded, playing with the zipper of his maroon jogging suit. "How much?"

"A lot, Mr. Boyma," Danny said. His lips were very dry and he looked longingly at the wet bar at the side of the room. "Maybe as much as half a million dollars." It was easier to say than he expected it to be, but still—half a million dollars! He had never thought of asking anybody for that kind of money before.

"You got big ideas," Boyma said, letting go of his zipper. "You know what that would cost you? I got to go for ten points, you see."

"Ten per cent a week?" Danny yelped.

"It's inflation, Deere. You heard of inflation. I could put the money in the bank and get what we used to get on the street. Not counting you're a bad risk. First there's your guys shooting women—"

"No, Jesus, really, Mr. Boyma! I had nothing to do with that!"

"—then there's this other thing. I wanted to be friend­ly, Deere, but look what my friends found in that joint of yours." He opened a drawer and passed over a white flyer, letter-size paper, with a picture of the very condo­minium that blighted Danny's life every morning he looked out the window.

"Jesus, Mr. Boyma, I didn't know that was yours," he said, rubbing his throat.

"Nice little circular, right? But the units haven't been moving the way they ought to be, and what I found in that place of yours was this one. Somebody stole like two hundred of them and fixed them up, see?"

He passed over another, identical circular, but someone had mimeographed over it in green ink. It was now an underwater scene. Green fishes were swimming in and out of the upper stories, and wavy green lines overhead told the story. Across the bottom, in the same blurred green ink, a legend read: Don't you know IT'S OVER?

"I didn't know you were in it," Danny said desperately.

"Oh, yeah, I'm in it. I'm in it twenty-six million dollars worth, Deere."

"I'm sorry. Look! I'll go right down to the ashram now and tell them to lay off—"

"You won't have to do that, Deere, because I already had my boys put them out of business. No. You can forget about them. What we're talking about now is you. You're going to quit depressing the real-estate market. It isn't good for business, Deere, and it isn't good for you personally."

When natural gas is found with oil in remote parts, it is often flared off in immense, permanent flames. The only way to save the energy is to freeze the gas to -260° F and ship it as Liquid Natural Gas, or LNG, to where it can be used. The first LNG plant was built in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1944 the storage tanks turned brittle from the extreme cold. They cracked. The liquid gas spread quickly into gutters, sewers and cellars. Eventually it reached a flame. The firestorm that followed cremated 128 people and incinerated three hundred acres of the city of Cleve­land. The present LNG plants are very much better con­structed than that in 1944. They are also very much larger.

Sunday, December 27th. 7:00 PM.

It was not only gritty, grimy weather, it was a gritty and grimy world, and how suddenly it had become that way! Rainy Keating pushed the vacuum cleaner over the rug, with one eye on the window, and sometimes one eye on the telephone, and her thoughts grimier and grittier than anything else around. It was over an hour since Tib had called to say that he was coming over. She, wished he would get there. It was not a reasonable wish, because she only had to look out the window to see what was keeping him. But she wished. Failing that, she wished the phone would ring, even if it was only Tinker. But not even Tinker had called her that evening.

Rainy hadn't known Myrna Licht at all, really. Not as a human being, anyway. Only as a subject for offhand gossip, like any other of Tommy Pedigrue's girls. And then, when the shooting happened, she had been much too astonished to feel anything for the young woman whose life had been terminated. It was like any prime-time cop show. It was not a thing that happened to real people. It was a TV se­ries, full of uniformed police and plainclothes detectives and ambulance orderlies and all sorts of stock characters from the casting offices. There had been no sense of personal involvement. Certainly none of fear—though the murderer obviously was not going to give any further trouble, with that black man sitting on him.

Nevertheless she was feeling this sense of loss, and it was not the loss of Myrna, it was the loss of a kind of innocence. And not just her own. Los Angeles was an itchy sort of city at best, too big to be a community, too sprawling to unite on any ground except the common contempt for everyone who had not had the wit to move there. It was itchier than ever now. Not terror. Not even belief, in spite of the hundreds of people you saw walking around with smudges of black on their foreheads, copying the Jupes. They were not really believing, just displaying that itchy, resentful concern. Rainy put the vacuum cleaner away and began to fill the mister for her plants, wishing Tib would get there so she could talk to him about it.

When the doorbell rang she was more astonished than pleased; how had he got past the doorman?

But it wasn't Tib. "Good evening, Mrs. Keating," said the taller of the F.B.I, men, "may we come in?"

He didn't wait for an answer, just brushed past; of course, they hadn't let any doorman deflect them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds! "Come in," she said to their backs. "You know, I was kind of hoping I was through with you guys."

"Not just yet, Mrs. Keating," the short one smiled, shaking off his raincoat on the rug she had just vacuumed.

"You could have called first."

"No, we couldn't, because your phone's out. And we do have a few questions."

"Didn't you get my message? I passed on the citations about the Einstein effect—"

"Yes, you told us that," he nodded, "but you haven't told us about your relationship with a Soviet national, one Lev Mihailovitch." He reached out without looking, and the taller one put a gray-bound folder in his hand.

Rainy sat down, feeling more baffled than ever. "The cosmonaut, sure. I met him once."

The F.B.I. man looked at her quizzically, then referred to the folder. "At least once, yes," he agreed. "You were in his company for approximately three hours here in Los Angeles, at which time you are reported to have discussed what you termed 'secret police' matters with him."

"Oh, my God, what nonsense! We had a few drinks."

The agent turned over a sheet, then nodded. "Yes, quite a few," he confirmed. "Furthermore, he has tele­phoned you on a number of occasions within the past few days."

"Absolutely not! No, that's all wrong, believe me."

"I'm afraid we have information that it is so, Mrs. Keating." The agent took out a Kleenex and wiped his nose before reading from the list. "Let me see. Three times on the twenty-third of December. Then at nineteen hundred hours on the twenty-fourth and several times on the twenty-fifth."

"Now, that's absolutely untrue," Rainy argued. "You've made some dumb mistake. I wasn't even home most of that time!"

The agent waited patiently, looking at her. "Oh," she said, "wait a minute." She remembered the infuriating messageless beeps on her answering machine. "I suppose it's possible that he may have tried to call my number, but I wasn't there so he hung up."

"Or alternatively," said the agent, "when he finally found you in he went to an outside phone to make his call, in order to defeat^any, ah, monitoring of his own telephone in the hotel in Mexico City."

"Is that where he was? I didn't know—well, maybe I did, but anyway I certainly didn't speak to him!" She took a breath, and then anger broke through. "And how dare you tap my telephone! That's against the law!"

The agent regarded her frostily. He glanced at his col­league, and then said, "If you feel your civil rights have been compromised you have the right to make a complaint to the supervising agent. The number of our Los Angeles office is two seven two, six one, six one. Alternatively, under the Freedom of Information Act—"

"Oh, shove your Freedom of Information Act!" She was angry at herself as much as at the F.B.I, man, even angrier at the whole grimy world. "Listen. If Mihailovitch called me, I didn't know it. I haven't seen him or spoken to him since the ASF meeting, and I don't expect to, ever. Do you have any other questions before I throw you out of my house?"

Her cheeks were flushed, and behind the huge glasses her eyes were misting with anger. The F.B.I, man studied her for a moment before he glanced at his colleague. They exchanged a little smile; they had seen this sort of display many times before.

He put his raincoat back on. "If we do," he said, "we'll certainly come back to ask them. And do have a Happy New Year."

There had been many times in Tibor Sonderman's life when he had not known what to do next. Not surprising, in someone who had become an orphan at ten in Yugosla­via, desperate for an education and a place in the world in a country that was seeking both for itself. But he had always known what to do in order to find out what to do next. You study, you ask questions, you read what other people have written on the subject. Now he had not even that knowledge. He was stuck in dead center.

He was dithering. Upstairs to fill a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen sink; into his bedroom to glower at the rain; back down behind the fake bookshelves to sit before his computer and wonder what commands to give it. It was maddening. It was maddening in the literal sense, that the thought crossed his mind that he was going mad. He did not know what he wanted.

He ordered up the latest series of reports from the center for the study of transient phenomena—aurora sight­ings, a red tide, an ultra-violet nova in the constellation Ursa Minor—and when he had them did not know what he wanted with them. He stared at the neat typing on the CRT, uncomfortably aware that this logged-on time was costing money. Not his money, to be sure, since he was charging it all to Pedigrue's committee. But to charge it to the taxpayer was even worse. . . . Although you could argue that, he thought, because it was simply diverting tax money to a useful scientific purpose, i.e., subsidizing the database people, at no cost to himself . . .

He swore out loud. That was exactly the sort of mean­dering substitute for thought he had been guilty of all day! He should have given it all up and gone off to Rainy's when she called. Or he should have told her that the weather was simply too bad for driving and there would certainly be no cabs; either one, but what he had done had been to postpone decision by telling her he would come over later.

Firmly he picked up the telephone and dialed her num­ber, to tell her that, after all, he would not be over.

But even that definite act was denied him. There was no answer, only a weird quavering signal. Perhaps her phone was out of order because of the storm.

He groaned, turned off his computer, turned off most of the lights, struggled into his raincoat and left the house. Now he had no choice but to go, and he would be seriously late.

He would be very late, he discovered, driving along the rainswept streets toward the main avenues, because the storm was even worse than he had expected. Tib disliked driving and did it as seldom as he could; in moments of self candor he conceded that his preference for public transportation had almost as much to do with his driving skill as with his morality. With his little car skittish on the slippery streets and buffeted by the winds, Tib felt wholly inept; and not merely as a driver.

The difficulty with being a geologist was that, although a great deal was known about the structure of the Earth, not much of it seemed useful in predicting events. Plenty of instrumentation was deployed. Delicate strain gauges mea­sured the forces between the sides of geological faults. Theodolites and lasers gauged the almost invisible tilting of the ground as it humped itself up into wide domes . . . and then, sometimes, relaxed again; and, other times, exploded in tectonic violence. That great bloat in Palmdale had been rising and falling like a sleeping man's diaphragm, and every lift and fall had been metered for decades. But what did it mean? Could he, or anyone else alive, say that there was going to be a shattering earthquake along the San Andreas fault? Of course they could!—as long as no one asked embarrassing questions about time. It would surely happen. There was simply no question about it. But you could also say that about almost any point on the surface of the earth, even where no faults existed: sooner or later Chicago and Minneapolis would feel the ground shake beneath them and their structures sway into rubble, although it might be tens of millions of years in the future. For Southern California it would surely not be millions of years, and might not even be tens; but the social clock ran so much faster than the geological that pinpointing it within a few decades was not close enough to be of any help. Even less help in estimating damage. The best fed­eral study had guessed at a major quake within thirty years, probably, with a loss of life in the tens of thousands, most likely, and property damage in the hundreds of millions. At least.

And no one had listened.

At least, no one had listened—he fumbled for the word he wanted—had listened purely. The only ones who had heard were the ones who had polluted the message with their own poisons, the quacks and the charlatans, the politicians and the greedy pirates like Danny Deere.

Why would no one hear what he had to say?

He slammed on the brakes, swearing to himself.

He had been deep in his own thoughts, and had not seen what was going on. A mile back slickered emergency crews had warned him that he was proceeding at his own risk, and now suddenly he saw how great that risk was. Just ahead of him, on the canyon road that led to Rainy's apartment complex, the road seemed to be in the process of closing itself. A delta of glistening red-brown slime was building up on the roadway itself, and the gutters along the sides had become mud rivers.

And something worse was very near to happening.

Up on the hill was someone's estate. They had obvi­ously had experience of mud slides before, and so they had taken steps against them. They had built a cement tennis court, anchored to piles sunk into the hillside, to protect its border.

But it hadn't worked! Now the wash from the hillside had undercut the cement. The reinforced concrete beams that held it together were visible in his headlights, and they were bare. All the earth had been washed away, and only the pillars held it. One of the pilings, once eight feet deep in the ground, was now not touching earth at all; it hung in air over a gulley. Tib swallowed and eased the car past, watching the pillars for movement. He didn't stop shaking until he had reached Rainy's apartment, passed the doorman and was actually standing at her door.

And, wouldn't you know it, she was agitated about something herself, and obviously not very interested in what was agitating him. But what was agitating him should also have agitated her, so he spoke over whatever it was she was saying: "They're closing off the canyon road. They only let me in because I said I was going to evacuate my mother."

She stopped, regarding him. "Your mother?"

People who have been told that their senses of humor are deficient dislike explaining their jokes. Tib was an­noyed; it was not a big joke, he conceded to himself, but it wasn't a bad one. And for this he had driven eighty-five minutes through the worst weather of the year!

But he could see that Rainy was deeply disturbed. "It does not matter," he said, taking off his wet coat. "Please tell me what is the trouble."

"Those F.B.I, people! They've been here again and, listen, you won't believe this, now they think I'm in some sort of conspiracy with the Russians!" She repeated the conversation with the agents, and waited for Tib's response. He sat with his rubbers in his hand, not noticing that he was dripping mud on the new rug. His face was gray. "I thought you might think it was funny," she said. "I mean—I didn't. But I was hoping you'd talk me into it."

He sighed and put the rubbers in the bathroom. "Natu­ralized citizens from Eastern Europe have trouble think­ing such charges are funny," he said. "I am sorry. It is not funny. It strikes me that everything is getting terribly unfunny at once."

In a trailer on one of the access roads to Yellowstone Park, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist pondered a question of timing. His observations showed that the park was swell­ing like a balloon, as liquid rock squeezed its way up to the surface. Rock cores revealed that the entire Yellow­stone area had erupted in the past in scores of immense volcanic explosions, scattering ejecta over millions of square miles; there had been major eruptive outbreaks every few million years, and it had been several million years since the last one. Clearly, another vast eruption was due at any time, geologically speaking. The question in his mind was, did "any time" mean within the next million years? Or the next hundred? Or next week?

Sunday, December 27th. 10:40 m.

Although Meredith was really sick with anger and pity, when she allowed herself to think about it, her old man was taking it harder than she. He had been a day and a half alternately raging and grieving, and his emotional binge seemed to grow stronger, not less. To be sure, there was always a way of soothing him down when upset, equally good for herself; but it had worked three times already, and only temporarily.

Maybe food? While Sam took his mood off to exercise it on the telephone she considered making him something to eat. Something hearty. Something he liked. She opened the refrigerator and peered into the snowfield that was her frozen food locker. Of course! She took out a frozen pack­age of creamed chipped beef, scraped off the frost and puzzled over the instructions on the package.

Even by Meredith's own standards, she was not concen­trating on cooking tonight. Her concerns were both per­sonal and professional. Personal: Sam Houston Bradison had been the light of her life since they were both twenty, a long time ago, and she had never seen him so upset. The death of Myrna Licht had hit him hard. Not only because she had been his own student; because she had been a good one; because she had wasted her skills with those conniving Pedigrues; because, most of all, she had died of it in the long run.

And professionally, the storm was looming ever larger in her mind. The radio was full of it—when it was not lull of stale details and gossipy speculations about the death of Myrna Licht. There was nothing really unusual about heavy rains and mud damage at this time of year. Almost every year it happened. Almost every year the media went into a flap and a largish number of Californians went through a season of misery, and then it went away. It was like everything else about Los Angeles. Los Angelenos knew that car exhaust was strangling them, but they kept their cars. They knew that earthquakes were inevitable, but they built homes under earthfill dams. They knew that brush fires took an annual toll, but they moved into the chapparal. And they knew that every winter the rains came. This was no worse than other years, really. Not as bad, so far anyway, as, say, February of 1980; and that not nearly as bad as some of the real destroyers. There had been a winter way back during the Civil War when a warm hurricane from the Pacific struck and stayed. The combination of the downpour with the snow melt from the warm winds had filled the entire valley with water from mountains to mountains—what would they say if that hap­pened again?

She wished Sam would get off the phone so she could check the latest reports from the Weather Bureau, just to reassure herself that this storm was only a normal winter rain, maybe a little early, but not unprecedented; and certainly nothing to do with Jupiter!

She realized she was standing there with the frozen chipped beef in her hand and the refrigerator standing open as Sam came morosely back into the kitchen. "Your friend Tib doesn't answer, and Rainy Keating's phone is out, and the governor is supposed to be coming down here to 'inspect the emergency'. So I can't get anybody at all. What the devil are you doing with that stuff?"

Guiltily she closed the fridge. "I thought you might be hungry, dear."

"I'm too mad to be hungry." He snapped on the televi­sion set irritably, switching from one newscast to another without listening to any. He was wearing the hapi coat she had brought back for him from a conference in Japan, and his bony knees were bare; after the last time she had applied her sovereign remedy for stress it had not seemed worthwhile to dress again. "I've got political IOUs to pick up all over this state," he declared. "I'm going to see that the governor does something!"

He plucked a Christmas card off the tree and began scribbling on the back of it—names of his proteges and allies, the political family he had built up over forty years of teaching and working. There were four former students in the state legislature, and a dozen more in government jobs. At least as many more in the even more powerful position of lobbyists or special-interest pleaders. "I'm not going to let this pass," he said, and then, "Now who the hell's that?"

It was nearly midnight, no time for the doorbell to ring. Meredith peered through the spyhole anxiously before she opened the door, but of course there was nothing to be seen but formless wet shapes on the patio. A muffled voice called, "Hello, Grandmerry."

It was Dennis, and there was someone with him—good heavens, that black man from the Jupes; good heavens ' again! and with a little girl holding his hand. She opened the door and, without entering, her grandson asked, "Can I ask you for a favor?"

Sam got up and peered to the door. "Come inside and ask it, boy! You're going to drown out there."

They came in, Dennis looking worried, the black man self-possessed and wary, the little girl even more self- possessed and not wary at all. "I wasn't sure you'd let me in," Dennis told his grandfather, who grunted without answering. "But that place we've been living in is no good now—"

"It never was any good!"

"—anyway, we can't leave Afeefah there now. They've been asking for emergency volunteers on the radio, and Saun and I want to go out and help. So can we leave Feef here for the night?"

"Well, of course you can!" cried Meredith, smiling at the little girl, who studied her thoughtfully before allow­ing her a small smile in return.

Saunders Robinson patted his daughter on the head and steered her toward the woman. "We appreciate that a lot. And, look, I'm really sorry about what happened at the TV station. We had no idea."

Sam Houston Bradison was not a person to hold a grudge. "It wasn't your fault, although—" He stopped himself and changed what he was going to say. "If you two are going out to dig ditches you'll want better clothes than you've got on. Come on, let's see what we can find."

Meredith felt her heart warm toward her grandson. Was it a sort of penance Dennis was paying, for having been part of that lunatic bunch? If so, she approved it. And she realized what it meant: they would be out all the night, building dikes, cleaning runoff channels; no fun for anyone.

"What you got to do is, you got to put it in the boiling water, you know?"

Meredith realized she was still holding the packet of frozen chipped beef. "My mind was wandering—Feef? Am I saying it right?"

"My name is Afeefah, and it means 'chaste'. But you can call me Feef. "

"I thought I'd better make you something to eat."

The little girl shook her cornrows. "We ate. We been eating, one place or another, last couple hours, nowhere else to go."

"Sure you had a place to go, Afeefah. You're very welcome here! How about a glass of milk?"

She shook her head again. "Black people can't 'tabolize milk," she said seriously. "Anyway, there's somebody in your driveway."

"Oh, really?" Meredith peered out the kitchen window, but there was only Dennis's car to see. Still, she could hear a motor. "Somebody lost and turning around, I guess. I Well! Let's make up a bed for you, shall we? I bet you're tired, this time of night. "

Afeefah corrected her politely, "I most usually stay up later than this." But she trailed along happily enough as Meredith pulled out clean sheets and pillowcases. It was really very pleasant having her around, poor little thing! They could hear the men moving around in the mud room, finding boots and heavy-duty pants, but Afeefah did not seem anxious to be with her father, or worried about staying all night with total strangers—white strangers, to boot. And helpful, too. She stretched across the bed to catch one side of the sheet and carefully tucked it in, then, without being told, began stuffing pillows into the cases.

Meredith sought for a compliment. "How pretty your hair looks."

The girl acknowledged the validity of the remark. "I done it myself," she pointed out, in the interests of accuracy.

"You did it beautifully. Are you sure you wouldn't like something to eat?"

It took only a moment to establish that Afeefah was really fond of Twinkies, and of course there was always plenty of that sort of thing in Meredith's larder. It was good having a child in the house again, Meredith thought after she had told Afeefah where to find the junk food. At least twice a month she and her husband had debated getting rid of this house and moving to something smaller, now that there so seldom was anyone to occupy any of the children's, or later the grandchildren's, rooms; but at times like this she was grateful for them. She switched on the bedside radio, not so much for company as to make sure it worked in case Afeefah wanted it, and, of course, got a weather report. She paused with the coverlet in her hands to listen. The wind was from the south at fifteen to twenty- five miles an hour, pumping up moisture from the sea; the system was stalled. But at least—for the first time in many days—there did not seem to be another storm waiting its turn out over the Pacific. There was a worrisome low far out past the International Date Line, but with any luck at all it might not hit. At least, the coast would have a chance to dry out a little.

So the governor might make it through in the morning after all—sometime tomorrow, anyway. And then Sam would have a chance to—to do what, exactly? Her hus­band's discipline was political science. It was a good enough thing to study, but it led you to assume that everything wrong in the world could be made right by the right kind of election or the right kind of laws. And was there really any way to make storms and earthquakes illegal? Or was he just out for the blood of the Pedigrues?

She pulled the coverlet straight—more or less straight— and then stood up. Had that been the doorbell? Again? At this time?

Afeefah was there before her. As Meredith was hurrying to answer it Feef met her with a soggy brown-paper package in her hand. "He didn't want to come in," she said. "He just says to give this to this lady—" pointing to the name on the envelope.

It said in crabbed, foreign-looking printing: MRS RAINEY KETING PERSONAL. "How very strange," said Mere­dith. Outside she heard a car door slap tinnily closed, and when she looked out the little sports car was backing carefully out into the streaming street.

Lev Mihailovitch looked up at the house as he turned toward the freeway, hoping he had done the right thing. Was this Mrs. Dr. Bradison a black person? If not, was this child her maid's, perhaps?

But he didn't have any choice; the document was not truly of sensitive importance, but there were persons some­where who thought it was. He could not simply mail it. And he had been turned away from the road to Mrs. Dr. Keating's apartment, and her telephone had not seemed to work—it did not matter; it was done. He concentrated on driving. This weather was unpleasant, although Mos­cow's winters were of course far worse. The car was even more unpleasant. At the rental place at the airport it had looked enough like the special-order car they had made for him at the Togliatti works in the Soviet Union to tempt him, but it was not the same; the shift did not operate in the same way, the windshield wipers were automatic in­stead of being turned with one hand while he drove with the other; all of its parts were strange. In any case, driving in Los Angeles was a terror.

He paused at a traffic light to look again at the map, and confirmed his belief that he was going the best way. The Ventura Freeway. Straight over to the San Diego, then down Century Boulevard to the airport. In decent weath­er, no more than forty minutes. Today— One could not say, but surely before his plane was due to take off. If any planes were taking off. Even if they did not, it had been irregular for him to leave the airport at all between planes, and it was best not to keep his "companion" waiting at the check-in counter.

Of course, Lev Mihailovitch had much less fear of "com­panions" than any ordinary Soviet citizen. He was not ordinary. He was a cosmonaut, and cosmonauts were next to God. Cosmonauts were allowed to order special little sports cars and drive them at eighty kilometers an hour all over the city, with the traffic militiamen waving them on. Cosmonauts got five-room apartments on Gorky Street; cosmonauts got to buy at the best of the special stores. It was not a bad life, being a cosmonaut. It was even permit­ted for a cosmonaut to disappear from his party for a little while, now and then. Even if some attractive young capi­talist woman was involved—cosmonauts, after all, were men!

For someone whose mother had been a Jew, Lev Mihailovitch had done well. Even his internal passport had "Russian" stamped on it, not "Jew", and he was welcomed at the best "clubs in Moscow. A cosmonaut had all sorts of privileges . . . but not, Mihailovitch thought with some concern, the privilege of failing to show up when he was supposed to. It could lead to unpleasant consequences. It would surely lead to the asking of ques­tions he did not want to answer.

Perhaps, after all, he would regret the impulse toward chivalry that had brought him here. Mihailovitch craned to see his watch, failed, muttered to himself and turned on the radio to see just how late he was.

Of course, now none of the stations chose to give a time hack. He divided his attention between the radio and the road, not quite able to deal with either. How fast the radio announcers spoke, in this shorthand idiom that was so hard to understand! He made out that two house trailers had been swept away, and several cars, but could not make out where. (Along the ocean, surely? Surely not here!) Flood control channels were filling with silt; yes, fine, what did he care? And then he made out that some­thing bad had happened, or was about to happen, to the Pacific Missile Test Range. Dikes had broken, but whether that meant that the range was washed out he could not tell. That touched him more nearly. At least it might put his companion in a good mood! Mihailovitch himself, not so good. After all, the astronauts were comrades in the space experience. He wished them no harm. He had had many a good drink with the moonwalkers and the veterans of EVA experiences so like his own. Although the Pacific Range was not at all like the Cape, was a part of the space program with which he had no more to do than his astro­naut buddies—spy satellites and even worse!—still the people in California, too, were in some sense his family. They would understand his chivalry.

He reached irritably to switch off" the radio, could not find the unfamiliar knob, took his eyes off the roadway for a moment.

Mihailovitch did not see the van that skeetered across the freeway in front of him until it was broadside to his lane. His reflexes were instant. He swerved the wheel and missed the van.

At the last minute he knew that he could not, however, miss the divider that kept southbound traffic from north. He struck it and caromed off, winding up clear back across all four lanes, with two wheels up against the retaining embankment and the steering wheel in his lap.

When he realized that, though the car would not move again, he was hardly even bruised he was extremely grate­ful; on second thought, grateful twice. Grateful that he had formed the habit of fastening seat belts whenever he drove. Ten times more grateful that now there was a clear and unarguable reason to be as late as he liked. No questions would be asked of a simple car accident in a storm!

At a hearing on offshore oil leases an environmental scien­tist testified that carbon dioxide in the air trapped heat, and that the more fossil fuel was burned the more carbon dioxide would be in the air. He cited studies showing that in the century from 1850 to 1950, atmospheric CO₂ in­creased from 268 to 312 parts per million, an increase of 16%; and he quoted from a study by Siegenthaler and Oeschger to show that burning as much as ten per cent of known fossil fuel reserves, even if spread out over several centuries, would raise the C0₂ by 50% or more, a highly probable danger level. The commission listened patiently, and then,voted to approve the leases anyhow. All those empty gas tanks wanted filling.

Monday, December 28th. 6:20 AM.

When Joel de Lawrence was a contract producer he owned a stucco California ranch house, a sports car, a mistress, and a drug habit. The habit was sleeping pills. The reason he needed them was the insomnia of fear, the fear every­body on the studio lots always had that the front office would rise up one morning and pass a whim, and all that would melt away. As indeed it had.

That time in his life was decades past. Now he slept like an angel. There was no nagging late-night fear of loss to keep him thrashing about. He had very little to lose. Each night he drank two mild Scotch-and-waters while he watched the late news, and as soon as the last map of the weather report was off the screen he went to sleep, and dreamed better than he ever had in his life. The dreams alone were almost worth the loss of the hacienda and the starlet. It was Norman Mailer in the dream this time, scuttling into de Lawrence's elegant office with a cigarette hanging from his lip and a thick bundle of manuscript under his arm. "It's yours, Mr. de Lawrence," he said. "I've already talked to Redford, and he'll do the male lead. Bo Derek's eager to do Cynthia. And I won't let anyone but you produce it."

"Why me?" asked the dreaming Joel—not out of modesty, simply to understand the facts before deciding whether to grant the petition. "Well, Mr. de Lawrence, you won't remember me, but I've always admired your work. When I was here back in 1946, writingThe Deer Park, you let me come on the set one day. My mind's made up. If you won't take it I'll withdraw the script. . . ."

There was the faintest hint of muddy light at the win­dow. De Lawrence squeezed his eyes tighter and turned over. "I like your style, Mailer," he told his pillow, "but I'll have to think about it. ..."

But the dream was over. Mailer disappeared, and Joel de Lawrence opened his eyes to peer at the orange digits on his bedside clock. It was time to get up.

By the time he had finished showering and shaving the dream had vanished completely; he did not remember Mailer or the studio or any of the conversation. But his body remembered. He felt pleasantly relaxed, as though he had been making love. The coffee had brewed itself, and he had a cup while he dressed, peering out of his window. The pleasant lassitude began to slip away. The weather was really bad, the worst of the year anyway. From his window there was little to see except for the gardening shed and a corner of the four-car garage, but what he could see was wet and worrying. The earth could not absorb the rain as it fell. Rivulets were streaking the expensively laid turf. He worried about the driveway, which needed grading every month anyway, and was par­ticularly vulnerable to rainstorms; the shock absorbers on the limo were his responsibility. He wondered if the Mex­icans' repairs had fixed those annoying little roof leaks; should he take a look before Danny got up?

But Danny was already up. The phone from his bed­room rang peremptorily, and kept on ringing until Joel got to it. It was very unlike Danny to get up before seven- thirty; what was stranger, he was apparently dressed and ready to go. "Note, Joel, you know what I mean 'now'? So get your clothes on—"

"Oh, I'm ready, Danny. But have you been listening to the radio? A lot of roads are closed. " "So we'll take the ones that're open!" What Joel had not been able to appreciate from the window was the wind. It was blowing hard; between his door and the garage he was soaked, in spite of poncho and boots. The driving was going to be even worse than he had thought. So, no matter how much of a hurry Danny was in, Joel took time to make sure he was ready for it. The tires were all at pressure. The gas gauge said three- quarters full. When he opened the trunk the jack, the emergency flashlight, the flares, and the spare tire were all in good shape. He thought for a moment, and then shuffled around in the back of the garage where he kept things that he could see no immediate use for, but were too good to throw out. One of Danny's brief loves had briefly persuaded him to keep a kitten. The animal had lasted less than a week, but there was a sack of Kitty Litter, nearly full, on top of a stack of For Sale signs. Joel lugged it to the trunk. Sometimes you could put that stuff under a wheel when there was thin, slippery mud and it would get you out.

All this delayed him, and by the time Joel got to the front of the house Danny Deere was hopping from one foot to the other in anger. "What the fuck's keeping you, goddam it?" he yelled through the rain. He was wearing the poncho and rain hat again, but not the boots; and he was carrying his big dispatch case with the combination lock. Joel did not know what had happened between Danny and Buster Boyma; Danny hadn't said, and Joel hadn't asked. It wasn't good, that was obvious. Danny had been explosively silent all the way home. This, was not a good morning to cross him.

"You never go downtown this early," Joel apologized, starting the car down the driveway.

"Today I do! Move it!"

Joel nodded without speaking, keeping his attention on the washboarded road. The driving was as bad as he had thought it would be, but Danny didn't comment. Didn't say anything when they passed the Mexicans, all staring out at them from the shelter of their gatehouse porch; didn't even speak when they came to the condominium. Danny's attention was all inside the car. He seemed to have trouble knowing what to do with the dispatch case. First he kept it on his lap. Then he put it behind him. Then he put it on the seat and put his poncho over it, and finally he put it on the floor and leaned forward so that he was half sheltering it with his body. Joel recognized the pattern. It was the money syndrome. Every time Danny carried large amounts of cash with him he was antsy . . . but never, in all the years, as antsy as this.

According to the radio there had been seven inches of rain in the past four days, and the stagnating storm that was drenching the freeway now might dump another six inches. Might dump more. Along the sides of the freeways there were now little streams.

Since there was no more room for water between the particles of sand and grit and clay, every drop that fell from the sky rolled down the slopes. There was a trickle down every bank along the freeways, a stream flowing down each canyon. On the steep declines the rushing water picked at the dirt and carried it along. Because the gravel multiplied the force of the running water, the Los Angeles Flood Control authorities had stretched chain- wire catchment fences along every likely spillway. They stopped the solids and let the water harmlessly through.

But seven inches of rain was close to their design limits. Every catch-fence was now full. Rubble brought the levels behind the fences up to the fence tops. If new floods came, the water would spill over. Each catchment fence would become a six-foot cascade, and as the water struck the base of the fence it would erode the supports, and the fence would go down, and all the tons of uncompacted aggregate, mud and wood, rocks and gravel, would batter down toward the next.

It hadn't happened yet, but Joel de Lawrence's face was pinched as he watched the banks and roadways. There weren't many cars yet; that was good. There might not be very many at all this Monday morning, even after a holi­day weekend, because anyone with any sense would stay home if he could. Some slopes looked safe enough—the old cemetery near the on-ramp of the freeway was heavily grassed, because no one had mowed it in years; that was good. Some were already a jelly of mud, like the landscap­ing around the condo construction. And there were worri­some features he had never paid attention to before, the great rock that as long as he could remember had been embedded in a hillside a mile from Danny's home. Only now it was no longer exactly embedded, because the water had carved much of the dirt away from its base. As they inched past, Joel de Lawrence could see an emer­gency crew toiling up the hillside toward it.

Even worse, the whole Southland was beginning to stink. Joel could smell someone's ruptured drains even with the windows closed, and according to the radio there was worse. Down in Orange County nine million gallons of raw sewage were pouring out of San Juan Creek every day. Another quarter of a million gallons sluiced through Loma Alta Creek to the sea, after a mud slide had ripped a hundred-foot gap in a main. When Joel tried to talk to his boss about all of this the little man ripped his head off, so he concentrated on his driving and his thoughts.

In a way, it was very exciting—almost even pleasurable.

It gave a special focus to Joel's thinking. The inside thinking. The part that was as private as his dreams. He had trained himself to drive and respond to Danny with the outer layers of his mind, while inside he was busy with the skills he had tried to keep alive within himself for twenty years. Camera angles, special effects, casting, lights: not of films that he was going to produce, because he did not really believe he was ever going to produce any. But the films that he might produce, if the impossible oc­curred; even the films that he might have produced a quarter of a century past, back in the days before the studios had all gone into the hotel business and Joel de Lawrence had had a steady job. He could have done more! He could have gone just a little farther! He could have been the one to innovate that special saturating Francis Ford Coppola sound, or that Kubrick wash of color; he could have— He could have done many things, but he did not. He had shot pages of script and gone home at five o'clock, and it was no wonder he had wound up no better than this.

Yet—one picture could put it all back for him. And pictures were everywhere. What a film this storm would make! Not expensive, either; a simple story, with all this for background. Maybe a cop story? Maybe a bank robbery? The crooks getting away with the money, but some­how trapped in the mud—that could be a great car chase, the fleeing felons and the L.A.P.D. black and whites struggling after each other at fifteen miles an hour, be­cause the roads were so bad? He didn't need much. A script. A couple of bankable actors. A camera crew; not much else, because if he had a crew right now he could get all the background footage he could use, and there was the 61m! It was all so simple.

It was also fantasy. Twenty years of fantasies had taught Joel de Lawrence to know them. It could happen; but it wouldn't, and the reality of his life was this limousine, and this little man yammering at him from the back seat, and this miserable, blowing, soaking rain. When they finally got onto Sunset Boulevard it had taken them an hour to go a twenty-five-minute drive, and it took them another half hour on the Strip itself. Traffic barely crawled along, as half the motorists paused at every southbound intersec­tion, peered worriedly at the steep inclines leading down toward Santa Monica and Wilshire, and then drove along to seek a gentler slope. In spite of the early start, it was past nine when Joel finally let Danny Deere out at the back entrance of his building, and went to park the car.

Joel trudged back through the rain, rather content with his life. The fantasies were still there to be tapped when he wanted them. Listening to the horns of the cars on Sunset Strip he heard them as a musical score for the film he would (he knew) never make—not a score, but back­ground—maybe linked with some of those electric tonali­ties, by somebody like the Barrens (were they still alive?). And perhaps you could get a theme out of it, and the theme could be a hit single, and ...

The sound of Danny yelling dispelled the reverie.

Joel got rid of his sopping coat and tracked the sound to the telephone room. Danny had been in a bad mood ever since he came away from that mobster, Buster Boyma; so mad that sometimes he was even silent, nose pinched white with suppressed fury; not a time to cross him. Now he was not silent, simply inarticulate with rage. He stood in the phone room with that dispatch case cradled in his arms, yelling at his secretary and at the one telephone seller who had managed to get there that morning. All the desks should have been filled by now! But that was not the worst. The electricity was flickering worrisomely, and the one telephone seller was holding a phone pleadingly toward Danny Deere. There would be no soliciting from the office of Danny Deere Enterprises that morning. All the phones were out.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on dams, levees and other projects to reduce damage from flooding over the past few decades. Nevertheless, the losses from flood damage increase at a higher rate each year in the countries which have implemented flood-control measures than in the countries which have not.

Monday, December 28th. 8:20 m.

The fifth or sixth time Tib woke it was daylight. If you could call it daylight; the light was a greasy gray, and he could hear the rain still falling. He slept poorly with another person in the bed, that had been a truth for all of his life, but there was more to it than that. He could not sleep because his churning mind would not allow it.

Slowly and quietly Tib turned the covers back and let his feet down to the floor. It was a pity really that they had spent this night in her home rather than his. His own home was certainly not large, but at least there was a place to go—a very good place; he could have gone down to his workroom. He could even have worked . . . assum­ing, of course, his fluttering mind had settled on a course of work to do. But at least he could have thought, without the distraction of another person in the room.

He risked turning the light on in the bathroom, with the door almost closed so that only a sort of artificial moonlight came into the bedroom/living room/dining room that was all there was of Rainy's apartment. Moving slow­ly, barefoot and noiseless, he eased a chair around so that he could watch the rain splashes on the window and, at the same time, see the outline of Rainy under the covers less than ten feet away.

He had set himself for thinking. But the thoughts were stale. What kept coming back into his mind was geology, because geology was what he knew. But the problems were not scientific! They were moral. Tibor Sonderman had never been a religious man, but he had always had a great consciousness of sin. Sin was all around him. If it was not his own—not all his own—he shared the commu­nal guilt, because he did nothing to prevent it.

The sins that troubled Tib Sonderman had nothing to do with theology, and not even much to do with sex. They were social sins, and this city he lived in was Sodom itself by those lights. Los Angeles was a city of three million in a place where there was no reason for it to exist at all except for climate, and it was destroying that. It did not have water, but needed to steal it from the north. It did not have good communications, and so had to pave itself over with noxious freeways. It did not even have land to build on! It had only the valleys—which were not enough, and in any case should not be built on because they were capable of growing food—and the hills, which certainly should not be built on because inevitably, sometime, some­thing would shake down what you built. Especially in California! Viewed in the long time-scale of geology, Cali­fornia thrashed about like a frightened snake. Its string of volcanos popped one after another, like fireflies; the whole state twitched like a horse's hide in fly season with earth­quakes. It was not merely that it was certain that a vast earthquake would occur. What was certain was that there would be an endless series of them! forever! or at least for the next ten million years or so, until some great new cycle of fire began in some other part of the world. But by then Los Angeles, and everyone in it, and no doubt the race that had built it would long since have disappeared!

The risk was always there, no risk but a certainty; but there were times that were worse than others. Today was one. The rain exacerbated the geology.

How many days a year like this were there? Perhaps as many as ten? And how often did damaging shocks, say Modified Mercalli VIII or higher, occur? Maybe one every five years? Tib wished for his calculator, but the probabil­ity computation was not too hard to do in his head. Say the odds against a damaging earthquake on any particular day were 1800 to one. Say the odds against that day being one when the ground was saturated and ready to be shaken into thin soup—as happened in China, with half a million dead; as happened in Alaska, when buildings toppled into the gruel—were 36.5 to one. Then, cumulating them, once every 65,700 days, say 180 years, the lethal combina­tion should strike.

Once in 180 years did not seem like much. But Los Angeles was over a hundred years old; it was hallway there.

Rainy stirred in the bed. She lifted herself on one elbow and spoke to him; her eyes were open, but she was still asleep and in a moment she put her head down and closed her eyes again. Tib sat immobile until her regular breath­ing resumed. And he saw his error. Two errors! First, the city of Los Angeles of a hundred years ago was not the city of today, with split-levels and ranch houses dug into every hillside. The second error was more serious. He had been thinking geology again, and the question was still moral.

He was certain of that. But the precise formulation of the question eluded him. His orderly mind was crumbling in disorder; Tommy Pedigrue and the Jupiter Effect, the death of Myrna Licht, and the wickedness of Danny Deere were all spinning around in his head, and tranquility was not even a hope.

"You look," said Rainy from the bed, "like somebody who can't find his car keys." This time she was wide awake, and had been watching him without moving.

"What I think I've lost is my mind."

"Maybe you left it in the bed? You want to come back and look?"

"Oh, my God," he said, "how flattering you are." He came over to sit on the edge of the bed, kissing her good morning. All the turmoil in his head receded to a distant pinwheel whirl, no longer an obsession. "You do cheer me up, dear Rainy. I have noticed that since you got the federal police off your back you have been in a real good mood."

Rainy lay back, regarding him. "Think so? Um." She considered for a moment. "I would point out, my dear colleague, that, first, they are not entirely off my back; they were here last night; so your theory is not sufficient; and, second, that two things happened at the same time, i.e., it also happened that you and I became lovers. So it is not necessary, either; and a theory which is not both necessary and sufficient is no theory."

Tib gazed down at her. "It is funny that that should sound so strange to me. Is that what we are, lovers? Not dating' or going with'?"

Rainy picked up his hand, lifted it to her mouth and touched the fold of flesh between thumb and forefinger with her tongue. "It's what I would like us to be, I guess," she said. "Now! Your endless sexual indulgences have made you smell like a goat. Come shower with me."

It was not a thing Tib Sonderman had been used to doing, and he was awkward with her at first. Not for long. It turned out to be about as pleasant, in a gently sexual way, as anything short of intercourse, and marvelously relaxing as well. It even stimulated conversation, and he found he was telling her his perplexities and puzzlements. It brought them no nearer solution, but it seemed to bring Tib and Rainy closer to each other, while the water of Mono Lake and the Colorado River splashed over them and into the drain and Tib did not give it even a thought. In spite of the considerable sexual indulgences of the past eight or ten hours they might easily have wound up on the convertible bed again if Rainy had not heard a sound imperceptible to Tib, excused herself, wrapped herself in a towel, and disappeared.

Reluctantly, Tib turned off the shower. She had closed the door behind her, but he heard an exclamation, then sounds of scrambling around the room, then a brief low-voiced conversation of which he only caught one word, but that word was one he had not wanted to hear: Tinker.

He stood on the fluffy pink mat with the towel in his hand and a whole scenario unrolled inevitably before him. The name of the skit was Returning Husband Discovers Wife's Lover, and he was playing one of the leads.

How very embarrassing, he thought. Now, what were the traditional stage directions? Under the bed, in a clos­et, out the window? But none of those were available; not even his clothes were available. No. Of course they weren't. They were exactly where he had left them, namely draped across the kitchen chairs.

He might have gone on drying himself indefinitely, but he heard the door close, peeked out and saw Rainy, all by herself, wrapped up in a robe she had grabbed from somewhere, the towel turbaned around her wet hair, star­ing thoughtfully at Tib's trousers. She looked around. "That was Tinker," she said. "He said he was worried about me. He said the back road is open now, so we could get out if we wanted to. "

Tib nodded. Her face was so blank that he could not tell whether she was closer to laughter or tears. In the event, there was neither. She moved into the kitchen to start water for coffee. "He's really a sweet man," she said. "But we're really not married any more, and now I guess he understands that."

About seventy million pieces of solid matter strike the Earth's atmosphere every day. Fortunately, all but a few of them are extremely small, of the order of a billionth of a gram. But any person who spends much time walking, sunbathing or playing golf is, on average, "struck" by several of these micrometeorites each week—with so little force by the time they reach the Earth's surface that they are indistinguishable from ordinary atmospheric dust.

Monday, December 28th. 11:40 m.

Saunders Robinson got up from the canvas cot where Dennis was sleeping to get his fifteenth cup of coffee. He didn't even drink coffee. But he didn't want to sleep, not covered with mud, not in this high-school gymnasium with the canvas cots all over the basketball court. They had been up all night, shoveling mud into potato sacks up along Mulholland Drive for three hours, then back here in the emergency shelter for nearly another three. The Red Cross woman handing out the coffee had a radio going, turned down low in case any of the five or six families who had elected to try the shelters were really trying to sleep— few of them were—and reports were coming in from what seemed like the entire world: Mandeville Canyon, Rustic Canyon, Montebello, Pacific Palisades, all over the Santa Monica Mountains, Mount Olympus, the San Gabriel foot­hills, Encino, Monterey Park. The Pacific Coast Highway was closed (surf); so was the Ventura Freeway (slides). Malibu residents were ordered to boil their water. The governor had been asked to declare a state of emergency, and the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu was flooded.

There was not much loss of life. Quite a few highway deaths, but that was not unusual for a Southland Monday morning, where you could almost always count on one or two motorists winding up guillotined in a windshield, or with an engine in their laps. But the property damage! Half of Los Angeles had leaking roofs. Another half was worried about its houses slipping down the hillsides, and some of them were seeing it happen. The black family in the shelter had an unusual story: they had been burned out in the middle of the night, when their cellar flooded, silently and without fuss. The water had risen to the base of the natural-gas hot-water heater, half a foot a minute. It covered the jet, but the flame did not go out: the gas bubbled through the rising water and burned in spatters of flame at the surface. When it came close to the two- by-sixes that held the floor of the living room in place, they began to smolder. The smoke alarm woke the family in time to see their house burn from the inside, with all the water in the world surrounding it on all sides.

Robinson realized his fifteenth cup of coffee was empty, and wandered back to the urn for number sixteen. There were not many people in the refuge. Most threatened families had refused to leave their homes—or been afraid to. Of the forty people in the room that could have shel­tered five hundred, more than two dozen were volunteers like himself, from the Red Cross lady at the coffee urn to the handful of Tree People and casual volunteers who had responded to the radio appeal. Most of them were silent, staring around as though they were wondering what they were doing here. Robinson wondered that too. It had been his idea to volunteer, and the word "penance" stuck in his mind when he suggested it; but he knew he had beaten Dennis to the point of making it articulate only by moments. He debated trying to call Afeefah to tell her he was all right—mostly to see if she was—but the nearest phone was in the school office, and the effort seemed considerable.

A man came in from the rain. He didn't trouble to take his rain hat off, or even to close the door. He would not be that long. "Okay, troops," he called. "Saddle up."

They could see little outside the canvas top of the National Guard six-by-six, but there wasn't much to see. Dennis craned past Robinson's shoulder to peer out at the rain and the hillsides, accepting the penalty of blown drops in his eyes; it was nearly seventy degrees outside, and a lot hotter than that inside the truck. They were barely crawling along, on a stretch of the freeway that had been closed to all but emergency traffic for the past twelve hours. The driver didn't seem to know where he was going. Twice he started on a down ramp, stopped, mut­tered with the L.A. County Flood Control engineer in the seat beside him, and then grindingly backed onto the freeway again. It was lunch time, and Dennis was begin­ning to be very hungry. He had slept through the sand­wiches at the high school, and now he regretted it.

On the hillside just ahead of them the slope was rather gentle, and there were no split-level houses to dam and channel the water. The rain soaked in where it fell and did no harm. As long as it could. Until the ground was satu­rated, and the soil would not accept one more drop. Even then it only flowed gently down the gentle slope. It did not channel scabland trenches into bare soil, because the soil was not bare; it was once dense turf, now grown to weeds and tangles but all the better able to hold itself together because of that. And it did hold, through the first four-inch downpour, and the three days of lesser rains that followed, even through the three inches that had fallen overnight; but by that time on Monday it was no more firm than Jell-O. Worse. The structural integrity had been violated. All along the side of that hill, row on row, over a period of decades, holes had been dug. They were quite uniform holes, each one of them eight feet long^forty-two inches wide, and seven feet deep. The hillside had been perforated like the stub of a check.

At the farthest corner a wedge of dirt slid suddenly into the shoulder of the freeway.

Moments later, a hundred feet up the slope, the bonds that had held the soil together had lost all their strength. They surrendered to the gravity of the slope. A crack three hundred feet long zipped itself open, and the entire slope dissolved into mud, pouring thickly over the lip of the concrete abutments onto the freeway. The flow carried with it the rusted old flowerpots, the marble markers that had headed each hole, and the contents.

The first Robinson knew of it was when the truck slammed on its brakes. "Jesus, would you look at that?" somebody cried from the front seat. Robinson and Dennis pushed back to the crack in the truck's cover and peered out. It was hard to see anything, because they were down in a cut; far ahead they could see the construction work that they had been supposed to be heading for, with a huge crane vibrating in the wind. But they could not see just what was on the side of the road. There was an off-ramp marker, but there was no ramp. There was not even a shoulder. The truck had moved gradually over into the center lane, then even into the fast lane . . . and Dennis saw wonderingly that the other lanes were gone.

The road was completely blocked. The entire north­bound section of the freeway was filled with mud, a slide that went up twenty feet on the right to join the slope of the hill and filled all three lanes to the concrete divider on the left. "Back it up, dummy! Back it up," somebody squawked from in front, but the gears ground and the wheels spun, and the truck would not move. The mud had the car. "Oh, shit," yelled the engineer. "Now you've done it." And then, louder, craning toward the back, "Everybody out; from here on we walk!"

The dozen men in the truck looked at each other, then sprang from the tailgate. They barely made it. They slogged through the quicksand-flowing mud to the hillside and found it was coming to meet them. The only way was back, along the freeway, to a point where a retaining wall still held, and then they turned to look back.

The river of mud had already filled the inside of the truck. It was cresting over the top, like slow-motion surf, and riding the top, like a sort of surfboard, was a huge mahogany box, earthstained and crumbling. As they watched, the side ripped open, and the contents, staring emptily at the^storm, slid out.

From the hilltop a quarter of a mile away Manuel could not see the earthslide, but he saw the sad remaining cypress dip and bow. He crossed himself, not sure he had actually seen it.

Manuel was not a stranger to hard work, because you could not grow up to child-rearing age in the Sierra Madre without tens of thousands of hours of it; but in Aguatarde it had been his own land he fought for. Not Danny Deere's. Especially not this real-estate corporation who was hiring his family today.

Especially not when any man could see that it was all useless; the walls would stand or they would not, and what foolishness they tried with sandbags and plastic sheets would make no difference. In any case, the five men of his own family and the fourteen construction workers, all who had shown up at the job that morning, were not enough to make a difference. From his great car on the road the fat boss had been sending orders here, there, everywhere, some on the telephone in the car, some by his narrow- eyed men who plowed up through the mud in their nar­row shoes, destroying their cream-colored slacks and spoiling their pale trench coats forever. Manuel knew he had been demanding help from the county for many hours, but he was not the only one demanding. Meanwhile, a man had to think of himself. The young men were out there; Man­uel had found a spot on the second floor of the building, where the rain came in only in driplets from the canvas- covered windows and where, if anyone should appear, he could make a great show of putting the canvas back where he had prudently ripped it loose an hour before. It would be worrying if the person who came, if anyone came, should observe that his poncho was dry, so Manuel was careful to stand by the open window every now and then to soak it a little.

All this would pass. Everything always had. All the same, Manuel was not at ease in his heart. There was a worry he had never had before, and he could not know if it was real. He inclined to think that it was only a filthy imagining of his nephew Jorge's cousin Pilar, the puta. Against his orders, she had sneaked into his house in his absence, not once but often. Always she brought disgrace on the family, not to mention the sickness of the privates that his nephew and even his sons could not be persuaded to fear. She had been one of those people on television, with the shoe-blacking on their faces. Manuel himself had seen her on the six o'clock news, being chased by the doorman of a great hotel in Beverly Hills. Yet she had seemed for once in her life sincere! Was it possible? Was it true, as she had once told Jorge and Jorge Manuel himself, that those little nuisance earthquakes that hap­pened any time—one never even noticed them until one saw the reporter joking about it on the newscasts—these tiny shudders, with the ground so wet, could be serious indeed? He did not know. He did not want to know. He had nearer concerns. He had left the women with instruc­tions to move everything of value to the back of the truck, and to drive the truck for high ground at need. The Danny Deere might believe that his home was safe from natural disasters, but he was a man who could afford to be wrong; a poor man could not. Yet who knew if the woman would remember? Or if she could drive the truck without de­stroying it? There were many worries!

He observed that he was truly not needed, because at last the fat man's bellows had been heard; eight or ten new men were slogging up through the mud toward the work crews behind the project. That was good.

But not altogether good, Manuel perceived, because he was not there; and with all those men there would be a need for an underboss. Who better than himself? And an underboss could almost certainly demand more than the three dollars and fifty cents an hour that was all these scoundrels would pay for the risk of a man's health and life. It would be necessary to get very wet again.

But it was worth it. Manuel looked around at the room, sighed and left the building to climb toward the top of the hill. Just in time.

Buster Boyma had not set foot outside his car the whole time he had been there. It hadn't saved him. His russet- brown jogging suit was spotted with water and mud, the carpeting in the car was filthy, even his hands were smeared with soil. It gave Boyma pain to have his hands dirty; they felt dry and cracked. It was just one more thing to make him furious. For this he had failed to show at a grand jury hearing! His lawyer would smooth it over, no doubt, that was what he was paid for; but his lawyer would expect to be paid accordingly. And for what? His whole purpose in being here was to make sure his property was safe, but what good was he doing? He had kept the car phone busy with appeals to everyone in California for help, and where was the help? Fourteen volunteers were supposed to be on the way, but what good would fourteen men, shovels and bare hands, no earthmoving machines, no engineers even, do against this rain?

Somebody would pay for this! He had already marked a dozen somebodies, three or four of his own men, a lot more of the people in government who owed him. He yelled for his driver, off taking another message to the handful of workers on the hill—actually the same message, Do something! But the storm made it impossible to be heard, of course. . . .

The storm and something else. Something new was happening. Even over the sound of the rain and the wind, he could hear shouting.

Chapparal had once covered the hillside, but it had been ripped out to get the ground ready for sodding in planting. In two months it would be a handsome park, to compensate condo owners on the convex side of the curve for missing the ocean view on the concave—would be if any of it remained for two months. But the water was seeping under the plastic. Each drop carried one grain of dirt an inch or two. Many drops had carried much earth, and the cohesion of the soil was almost gone.

In spite of the best efforts of the men frantically batten­ing it down, the wind lifted a corner of the plastic. Five men rushed to fight it back where it belonged; the wind tugged at the places they had left. It bellied the edges between the stacks of cement blocks and the drums of wall-finishing that weighted the plastic down, and the plastic tore; and the whole hillside began to slide. A crack opened. One of the men saw it and yelled; the others saw it, and ran. None of them was caught, but the hill was on the move.

The foundations had gone down to bedrock, and they held. It did not matter. All they accomplished was to create a holding pond for the fluid mud. Earth and plastic, barrels and cinder blocks all slid together. They filled the lower floors of the condo with gluey mud and spilled over to block the freeway cut.

The workmen stared, astonished, at the building still standing and the giant crane poised over their heads. Each j one was certain that it would fall, but it did not.

But in the dammed freeway cut, a pool of water was forming.

Boyma stared, paralyzed with fear. He thought the crane was his enemy; he did not notice the row of temporary power lines. The crane swayed but remained erect; but the mud pulled the lines down with a rattle of artillery fire and great flashes of light.

"Now they've done it!" Boyma shouted. He was beside ( himself with rage at "them"—whoever they were—at ev­erybody! There was no one to yell at. Even his driver was gone, ordered to carry orders to the top of the hill. Boyma wanted to get out of there, to his comfortable home where he could change his clothes and plan his retributions—and wanted it soon, because he saw that a pool of water was forming along the freeway. He opened the door of the car to yell for his driver.

The men on the hill saw him and waved madly, but Boyma paid no attention. He shouted furiously as he stepped down into the water. The fallen power lines lay no more than twenty yards away in that same stream; and when he stepped into it he died.

The most violent earthquakes in the history of the United States stopped clocks in Boston, set bells ringing in Nor­folk, Virginia, created large, permanent new lakes in Mis­souri, Arkansas and Tennessee and destroyed 150,000 acres of forest. The epicenter was in New Madrid, Missouri. There was not many human deaths. There were not many human beings in the area, and especially there were no large buildings to fall and crush them, since the shocks began in December, 1811. Now millions of people live in the af­fected region. Many live and work in vulnerable high-rise buildings, and almost none of them have any idea that they are at risk.

Monday, December 28th. 5:50 PM.

What Rainy had expected to find at the Bradison house had not been very clear. The phone had rung, to signify that it was working again, and it was not Meredith but Sam Houston Bradison himself, demanding they come over to see the governor. He sounded peremptory and hurried. He'd been trying to get through for hours, he said, and did she know where Dr. Sohderman was so he could come too? At that point there was some slight embarrassment in Rainy's mind at how to explain that she knew very well where Dr. Sonderman was, and she had failed to get clear just why the governor was going to be at the Bradison home. Nevertheless, they obeyed, driving with as much speed as they could manage with caution, and as much caution as they could afford with speed; the rain was only occasional now, but the streets were still as likely to be flooded as not.

By the time they got there it was late. She half expected the governor would have been and gone by then, but apparently he was having his own troubles with the storm. What was happening was that a young black girl was dusting end tables while Meredith was straightening the books on the shelves. Sam Bradison himself let them in through the kitchen, where he was busily washing dishes and putting them away. Obviously the governor had not yet arrived, and, obviously, what Rainy found herself doing very soon after that was pushing a vacuum cleaner over somebody else's carpet. It was not what she would have chosen, not least because Tib had been drafted into the kitchen with Sam Bradison, and she could not hear what they were saying to each other.

Not that she could hear much of what anybody else was saying, over the noise of the antique Hoover. She was not even aware that Meredith had left the room at first—no doubt to flap over the bathrooms or the halls. The little girl was talkative enough, but not directly informing. She did not appear to know who the governor was, much less why he was coming. She managed to convey that her daddy was asleep somewhere in the house after a hard day of shoveling mud, along with Meredith's grandson, and that she didn't think much of Meredith as a housekeeper, but Rainy had already formed her own opinions of that. She pushed back an armchair to get at the accumulated pencil stubs and cigar ash underneath it, reconsidered, and carefully pushed it back again. By the time she had gone over all the exposed surfaces Meredith was back.

"I guess we're as ready as we'll ever be, " Meredith said, surveying the room with satisfaction. "You're really sweet, Rainy—and Afeefah, of course!"

"You would have done it for me," Rainy lied. "You don't get the governor coming every day. Speaking of which—"

"Yes?"

"Well—what is this going to be?"

Meredith sat down on the couch, pushing a scrap of paper Rainy had missed underneath with her foot. "It's all Sam's idea," she said. "I don't always understand Sam's ideas. Afeefah? That's good enough, honey. Why don't you just sit down and rest for a while?"

The little girl frowned. "Got to do the windowsills yet," she said. "Lady? You going to give the lady the thing that came for her?"

"Oh, good heavens, thank you, Afeefah. Of course! Now where in the world did I put that?" She stared around the room as though it were someone else's, then disappeared down the hall. Rainy sighed and got up to help Afeefah with the windowsills.

By Rainy's calculation the governor was now more than an hour late for whatever it was he was late for, and she was beginning to get hungry. Or else she was about to start her period. Or, most likely, both.

Rainy was uneasy in her mind, and she hoped that was the reason; she was not sure just what she was uneasy about. Her—she said the word to herself again to get used to it—her lover, the Herr Doktor Sonderman with his middle-European ways, was probably not the reason. He had been very silent all day, and withdrawn except when they were making love; something was on bis mind, and it was trying to be on hers too, if she had only known what it was. She relished the chatter of her housecleaning associ­ate because it took her mind off that unfocused concern. Afeefah was seven years old and in her last school she had been in the top ten in her class. She didn't know what she would be in her new school, because she didn't yet know where they were going to live, but she wasn't worried. She was going to be a nurse when she grew up, that was why she was so good at cleaning, because that was mostly what nursing was, wasn't it? Unless if she got a scholar­ship, she explained, which she probably would do, in which case she would be an obstrician and help people have babies. And it was all right that Rainy was white, although her dad didn't like her getting too close to white people, because that was mostly because her mom had been white and she tooken off. It seemed unlikely that any seven-year-old really had that much to say about her life, but Afeefah showed no sign of stopping until Meredith came back into the room. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I put it away where I wouldn't lose it, and I forgot where. But here it is. Goodness! Are those sirens?"

She wandered off to peer out the window while Rainy unwrapped the little envelope. She recognized the name on the envelope as her own, but who it was from was obscure; even more obscure after she opened it, because all it contained was a Xerox—no, not even a Xerox, one of those oily thermo-copied things—of a typewritten paper. The difficulty was that the typing was in Cyrillic characters, totally opaque to Rainy.

Since the only Russian she had had any contact with was the cosmonaut who was of so much interest to the F.B.I., she supposed it might have been from him. But that did not solve the problem of what was in it.

The sirens were growing louder, very much louder, and then abruptly, right in front of the house, they cut off. "It's the governor," Sam Houston Bradison called from the kitchen. "Do let him in, someone."

Meredith was already at the door, holding it open while the governor's party sorted themselves out in the drive­way; besides the governor's own car there were two black- and-whites and one drenched policeman on a motorcycle. Tib joined Rainy at the window to watch. "Look what I got from, I guess, Mihailovitch," she said, handing him the stapled sheets. "Do you have any idea what it is? It's all Greek to me."

Tib unfolded the slick sheets and glanced at the head­ing. "Yes, I think I can translate—perhaps after we are through with this meeting. It is not Greek, of course, but Russian—but I also read a little Greek, you know."

It took Rainy all the time until the governor was there, introductions had been performed, and they were all seated before she made up her mind that that had been a small joke, or at least a pleasantry; it was good to know that his mood allowed pleasantries! Tib seemed quite interested in what was going on, studying California's trendy governor with his dove-gray, soft leather shirt and his mid-calf boots. But his interest did not extend to taking part in the conversation. He shook the governor's hand politely when they were introduced and retired to a straight-backed chair between the governor's secretary, or whatever he was, and someone who seemed to be a Los Angeles city councilman. He maintained a polite expression while the governor and Sam Bradison told each other how well they remembered each other, and while everyone else in the room told what they thought of the storm, and while Sam Bradison explained what he wanted the governor to do. Which led to Rainy's being asked to recount her experi­ence with Danny Deere, and Meredith to repeat some of the things her grandson had told her about the Jupiter Fulgarians. The governor listened attentively, frowning in the direction of his secretary. "Have you got all that, Jake? I want the A.G. to get on that right away. The only thing, Meredith," he added, turning back to his hostess, "I don't see what this has to do with the storm."

"Not a thing, Governor," Meredith assured him, but her husband was shaking his head.

"It does, you know. There's a climate of fear in this town, and it's been deliberately whipped up by people who make a profit out of it. Not just Danny Deere or the Jupes. I hold the Pedigrues responsible for a good deal of it. The whole committee was a fraud in the first place; there's no way to know whether the so-called Jupiter Effect is real or not, and the publicity given to it is dangerous. Really dangerous. I'm going to send you drafts of three bills I think you may want to offer the legislature, Governor. One to make spreading false warnings a crimi­nal offense; one to make people who do that civilly liable for damages; and one to create a bona-fide commission to examine the risks of catastrophe of all sorts, and recom­mend appropriate building and zoning ordinances. "

The governor nodded slightly. "You do that, Sam. I'll be looking forward to them. What about you, Dr. Sonder­man? Everybody else has had a chance to talk."

For the past ten minutes Tib's eyes had been in his lap, turning over and over the sheaf of papers Rainy had given him without really looking at them, deep in thought. He looked up. "Yes," he said. "Thank you."

And then he was silent, pursing his lips thoughtfully, until Rainy began to fidget and the governor's slight smile grew strained.

"You see," Tib said, "I wish to disagree with most of what has been said here. Not as to facts, but as to implica­tions." Afeefah was passing around the room with a plate of salted nuts, and Tib absently reached out for a handful. "For example," he said, "Dr. Bradison, the Dr. Sam Bradison, concludes that you require better licensing ar­rangements so that, for example, no one will build a skyscraper that will fall down, and that in my opinion is useless. Nearly useless. One should build well, but it is impossible to build any structure so that it cannot be destroyed. " He chewed thoughtfully for a second, and then went on.

"I wish to try to do something that one does not usually do in public, that is to speak to you in truth in the strong sense. That is to say, not only the absence of untruth but the entire conceptual statement, and with no attempt to manipulate the listener. Do you understand me? I will not tell you what I want you to hear because I have come to certain conclusions of my own and want you to take certain actions. I will tell you what I believe to be objective fact, and then I will tell you the conclusions I, myself, have drawn. What you then choose to do you must decide for yourself. I am open-minded about this," he added fairly, "because I have little expectation that anything you do will matter.

"In the first place, you see, all works of man are tran­sient; nothing survives. Even the pyramids will go within a certain not very large number of thousands of years. They will be survived by a few artifacts, for a time— abandoned open-pit mines, let us say, or radionuclide waste dumps—but in a finite time even those will be subducted down into the magma and cease to exist as organized matter. This is a geologist's point of view; I am speaking, obviously, of the very long term. But it is im­portant to understand this principle, because in the short term it is nearly completely true as well."

The governor's secretary opened his mouth, but the governor shook his head without looking at him and Tib went on. "So to try to achieve permanent safety is impos­sible over time. The only question is, how much time? While I have been sitting here, I have been trying to calculate some rough risk assessments. I have taken very round numbers to make the mathematics easy, but I think they are not orders of magnitude wrong, at least.

"There is a general distributed risk attached to anything on Earth: a dwelling may burn, or be struck by a nuclear weapon or some other instrument of war, or someone may destroy it in a riot or out of vindictiveness, or it may be destroyed by a large meteorite, or annihilated in many other ways; and all these events may occur regardless of what building codes you enact or what caution the owner displays. I have given a number to this general risk, point zero one, one chance in a hundred of being destroyed in any particular year, so that, on average, one can expect any given building to survive for one century of useful life. I do not know that this estimate is correct, but I would suppose that if anything it is, on the average, quite high.

"But let us now move this hypothetical building to a new location. Say, one of the Hollywood hills. Let us say its back yard is covered with chapparal, like my own house, and subject to the Santa Ana and to mud slides, also like my own house. In certain areas, at least, we can estimate the danger of fire at, again, one per cent per year; and the danger of mud slides also at one per cent a year, and now do you see what has happened? The danger is now three times as great, and the house has now a useful life expectancy of thirty-three years four months. Add to that the risk of earthquake, which I will put at one per cent for certain areas: life expectancy has now been cut to twenty-five years. Add to that that this particular house is, let us say, built in the flood channel of an earthwork dam, and we now have a house which in all seriousness cannot expect to survive until its mortgage is paid off.

"And for some hundreds of homes in this area, perhaps for quite a few thousands, such calculations can be made and this is the result. To own such a house is to play Russian roulette.

"Similar calculations, of course, can be made for other risks, and for loss of life or health as well as of property; I have not attempted to do this, since I have no expertise in these last areas.

"I believe that is all I have to say," he finished.

The governor's secretary looked nervously at the gover­nor, seeking to learn whether he should laugh, swear or applaud, but the governor took his time giving him an indication. He too had been hitting Afeefah's party foods, and he finished chewing before he said seriously, "I ap­preciate what you're saying, but I'm not sure just what action government can take."

"You have understood me exactly," Tib said, nodding. "I, too, am not sure that there is any."

The governor sat back. He was a man who had made his reputation on understanding what the general run of politicos did not, counter-culture people, artists, scientists, doomsayers, idealists, and the like. "Thank you, Dr. Sonderman. Now. Before we go, Sam, would it be possi­ble to see your grandson and this young lady's father for a moment?"

Tib got up and came over to Rainy's chair. "I think they have no further need for us. May we go home now?"

He seemed sunk in gloom in the car. The downpour was now only a sort of greasy drizzle, and Rainy felt secure enough to watch him out of the corner of her eye as she drove. "I think you confused them quite a lot," she offered.

He sat up. "Yes. " He looked out the window for a while before adding, "I must work this out for myself."

"Shall I take you to your house?"

"No—not unless you wish to be alone," he said. "My car is, after all, still at yours. Oh," he added, "I forgot your paper. Let me see, can I turn on this little light in the glove compartment?" He leaned forward, peering at the first page. "It appears to be a scientific paper by a T. T. Khrembullin from, how would you say this, from the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. I do not know his name, but he is an academician, therefore important. The title you would call 'Second Order Gravitational Focusing Involving Major Planets'. There are a number of equations which I imag­ine you will be able to read as well as I, since they are not in Russian but in mathematics."

Rainy started to smile, to show appreciation for another pleasantry—the second attempt at humor in only a couple of hours!—and then what he said struck her.

"Major planets!" she cried. Tib turned to look at her inquiringly. "Yes, major planets! The planet Jupiter, for instance! Fasten your seat belt, Tib, I want to get home and read that!"

A wind gust of twenty-five miles an hour can turn your umbrella inside out. The highest velocity ever recorded in a hurricane in the United States was 183 miles an hour; there were higher velocities, but not recorded, since the wind blew the instruments away. Since the force exerted by a wind, and therefore the destruction it can cause, increases as the cube of the velocity, peak hurricane winds are not merely seven or eight times stronger than a stiff breeze, they are nearly four hundred times as damaging.

Monday; December 28th. 7; 10 PM.

The best thing that happened in a bad, bad day was when they were stopped on the freeway and shunted off to city roads. Good things come in disguise. It looked at first like just one more disaster, and Danny Deere met it as he met i them all. "Oh, shit, Joel, now what? Can't you for God's sake just get me home?"

"Sure thing, Danny," Joel said over his shoulder, "but the road's blocked. Looks like that whole condo development's down the tube."

"Down the tube," Danny repeated in sudden delight.

Well! You always get a little something for a consolation prize, and this wasn't a bad one. Anything that saved his view and bitched that bastard Boyma at the same time couldn't be all bad. He chewed the news over, tasting every crumb, because it was a hell of a lot better than thinking about the rest of his day.

Which had been a bummer from the minute he woke up. He drummed his fingers on his attache case, which still contained exactly the $87,950 he had put into it when he awoke and emptied his living-room safe. No business was done that day. By the time the fucking phone com­pany got the fucking phones working, the first call he got was from his fucking lawyer, and it was all bad news. He had made a bad mistake talking to the Keating woman the way he did.

"We got to go clear around up the hill, Danny," Joel called. "See, a lot of the freeway cut got flooded, and I have to—"

"So do it, for Christ's sake!"

"Sure thing, Danny. Danny?"

"What?"

"Are they going to pull your license, Danny?"

"Just drive! Drive! Let me worry about that!"

But there wasn't any point in worrying about it, because either they would or they wouldn't, and the fucking law­yer just spread his hands and said there was a lot of heat, oh, yes, a lot of heat. The whole Pedigrue family was out to get him personally, and even old man Bradison had been making phone calls all over the state.

Danny sighed, and stared out at the unfamiliar side roads. He opened the dispatch case just a crack to feel the neatly banded bills, thinking it might soothe him. And actually it did. When you had money, what did you care? He had plenty! The worst they could do would be to put him out of business maybe, maybe eat him up with a few hundred thousand in fines and lawyers, maybe make him look bad—so what?

"Now what, for Christ's sakes?"

Joel was slowing. "It's Manuel and his boys, Danny, they're waving to us."

A supernova explosion of a star close enough to greatly damage or even wipe out life on Earth occurs about once every seven hundred and fifty million years, according to Carl Sagan. About six have occurred in the time since the formation of the Earth. About nine more will occur before our own Sun makes life on Earth impossible.

Monday, December 28th. 8:10 PM.

As soon as they were inside her apartment Rainy flung her coat at a chair, spread the Russian-language typescript on the kitchen table and took her calculator out of its case.

Although Tib was convinced he had made a fool of himself in front of the governor, he felt peaceful.

"Forget Manuel! Just keep going! I want to get home!" They were at the top of the little crest above his property now, on the old access road that the trucks had carried I avocados along before the freeway was built. Danny glanced at the woebegone wet Mexicans contemptuously. What­ever they wanted, they were no problem. Or no problem except to themselves, because likely enough he'd have to fire all their asses right off the land—so what again? Let the goddam trees go. Joel could handle everything else around the house. Of course, they'd have to recalculate Joel's salary—

He lunged forward as Joel slammed on the brakes. "Oh, ! my God, Danny, look!"

And Danny looked, down at the muddy lake that had been his estate, where the slide into the freeway had blocked the runoff, where the old avocado trees rose out of three feet of water, where his house itself was awash to i the middle of the first floor and the basement completely submerged, where all the chalks and canvases and pigments of all the paintings and sketches and playthings that i were his treasure were now sodden trash, not much different in appearance from the mud along the roadside, and not much more valuable.

The storm outside was coming to an end, and so was the storm within. Nothing had really happened. Certainly nothing to compare to the people you heard about on the radio, trapped in cars, pinned against their own bedroom walls by avalanches of mud, carried away in storm drains. Nothing like Rainy, who now had some fascinating data to play with, or even like Sam Bradison, who at least had a new crusade. And yet he felt a sense of release. He moved over to the kitchen table, admiring Rainy's blind concen­tration as she worked with calculator and pencil, scrib­bling notes to herself on lined yellow pads. He brushed against the orrery on the windowsill, sending the planets clashing against each other, and Rainy looked up, eyes unfocused behind the huge glasses. "Give me the pages you are not using," he said, "and I will make an abstract for you in English."

She nodded, and pushed most of the sheets toward him. He put them in order, captured one of the yellow pads and studied the handwritten notations at the top of the first page. "This is interesting," he said. "This paper was withdrawn from publication by the author, on instructions from someone who signs only initials."

Rainy nodded absently.

"I suppose that was why Mihailovitch smuggled it to you, then. I think he took some risk."

She looked up. "Could we hold that down for now, Tib? I'll just be a little while."

He pursed his lips and shrugged. It took him only a few minutes to make a quick synopsis of what the paper had to say, mathematics aside, and occupied only a small part of his mind. When he was finished he amused himself by spinning the orrery with one finger, while the greater part of his mind continued its slow circling toward some sort of decision, until Rainy sat up, her eyes glowing. "Oh, Tib," she said, "this is great. Here, look at this."

She sketched quickly on a lined yellow pad. "Remem­ber the drawing of the sun as a lens? That was right—up to a point. But what this person Kerfloozilim, or whatever his name is, says is that Jupiter too did some focusing. Here!"

She pointed to the sketch:

"On the left we have the star that was the source of the radiation, then comes the sun, gravitationally focusing the radiation, then old Jupiter! Remember? We know Jupiter and the sun and the spacecraft were in an exact straight line, because we were about to observe a transit! So the focusing effect became a real telescope, not just a magnify­ing glass, with a second lens!"

"I see, " Tib said, watching her face instead of the diagram.

"I wonder if you do," she said, but she was smiling. "The focusing was really tight! Not just the radio and light but everything, X rays, infra-red, ultra-violet. My poor old Newton-8 got clobbered with a heat ray!"

Tib tried some focusing of his own. "Ah, yes. I do see," he said, "but I don't understand all of it. If this works, why doesn't it happen more often? For instance, why don't we see flares on Saturn and Uranus every time they go by Jupiter and happened to get in line with some star?"

Rainy shrugged. "I don't know. Because they're; too big? They're very large heat sinks, and if a couple dozen square miles at the top of the atmosphere got hot. we'd never notice it. Mostly because they're never in a line! All the planets go around the sun in the same general plane, the ecliptic, but each one's orbit is tilted a little compared to the others—and a little' means anything up to millions of miles. . . . Tib? Are you listening to me?"

He said heavily, "They thought I made a fool of myself, didn't they?"

"You mean the governor and all? Certainly not!"

He shook his head. "I think I did. I forgot KISS."

She looked puzzled, but offered her lips. "Yes, thank you," he said, kissing her and then smiling for the first time in some while, "but that is not what I meant, I meant K-I-S-S, the acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Put sim­ply, I should just have said I will sell my house."

Rainy took off her glasses and sat back to look at him better. "Tib, dear," she said, "—KISS? Even KISS-er?"

"Yes, I realize I am obscure. All right, I will spell out the steps. The slope behind my house has always been a danger, either of fire or of mud. It is not surprising that no one will listen to what I say when I myself live without regard to risk. I see that I have been deceiving myself. I have tried to set an example in, for example, limiting energy consumption, but it is not enough."

Rainy was staring at him, shaking her head—not a nega­tive; it was wonder. "Are you planning to set yourself up as a model for the human race?"

Tib considered. "Yes," he said at last. "Exactly, although I know it sounds vain. But it is also Kant's categorical imperative."

"And you think people will listen to you?"

"No," he confessed, "I do not. Let me admit to you how much vanity I have: I was thinking, while we were driving here, that I might retain a publicity agent, so that I could appear on more radio and television shows. Or write a book, or in some way find an amplifier for my own voice. . . . But those are fantasies, of course. So I will settle for less. I will sell my house. To be quite consis­tent," he said, looking suddenly troubled, "I should sell my car, too, and that means I should not live in Los Angeles, should I?"

"Oh, now wait a minute, Tib," said Rainy, feeling sud­denly threatened. "Your job's here."

"There are other jobs. "

Rainy pushed the papers together thoughtfully. "I'll miss you if you leave Los Angeles," she said.

For a moment they sat silent, and then Tib said, "I think I've made a fool of myself again. Please excuse me, Rainy. I think I will go to my own home now."

The moon shows about 30,000 meteorite craters; the earth, which has about 50 times the cross-section capture area of the moon, presumably would have nearly a million and a half visible signs of something large striking it from space if it were not for the fact that air and water erase the traces. Even so, some traces remain quite visible, like the Barringer Crater in Arizona, and others are suspected. A few astronomers think Canada's Hudson Bay is a drowned meteorite crater. Even fewer suspect that the entire Indian Ocean may be. North America would not survive another impact like that which may have created Hudson Bay; the earth would not survive another Indian Ocean. An impact like either of those is quite unlikely in any given million-year period; but it is not impossible; and it is not the only impact from space that could greatly affect human activities.

Tuesday, December 29th. 5:10 AM.

When the telephone rang, Tib was not in his bed, and was not at first sure just where he was. There was no light, he was fully dressed, he was alone. As he fumbled for the phone he realized that he had fallen asleep in his work­room. Since there were no windows he had no idea of the | time.

He said hello, and the voice that answered was Rainy's, queerly strained, almost jubilant. "Did I wake you? That's a silly question, of course I did. I haven't been to bed yet myself. I'm at the Lab."

Tib found the reading light and snapped it on, and the familiar tiny room appeared around him. He was not yet fully awake. "The Lab?" he repeated.

He could hear the smile in her voice, "just listen, okay? Are you awake?"

"No—oh, my God." He had just discovered what time it was. "Rainy, believe me, I would listen better if I had i some coffee. Let me call you back in a few minutes."

"Just listen!" she cried. There was a scraping noise on I the telephone, a wait, another scraping noise. Then silence.

Tib said tentatively, "Rainy, are you there?"

Her voice came from off the microphone, and impa­tient. "Hang in there, will you? . . . Ah, there it goes."

There was a second of tape hiss and then a blast of sound. Tib yelped and pulled the phone away from his ear, half deafened; even at arm's length he could hear perfectly what was coming out of it. What it sounded like, more than anything else, was some sort of motion-picture sound effects, the cry of a computer about to decide to wipe out the human race, or a mad scientist's laboratory. It clicked and beeped and rattled, and it went on for a full thirty seconds.

Then there was a click as it was switched off, and Rainy came back on the phone. "Did I get it too loud for you? I'm sorry; 1 guess I'm kind of fatigued. Do you know what you were listening to?"

"No, should I? Or wait—" Tib pursued a vagrant memo­ry, then pounced on it. "Your spaceship? The noise it made when it blew up?"

She said with satisfaction, "You're very quick, old Tib. Exactly. The noise my spaceship made when it blew up, although I've slowed it down by, let's see, I guess this one's about eight hundred times. And do you know what it has, Tib? It has structure!"

"Structure?"

"Oh, wake up, man!" she cried. "Don't you understand what I'm saying? I've been up all night playing it, slowing it down, playing it again, and I'm sure. I put it on an oscilloscope and measured it, and it's regular ... and it doesn't repeat."

He stood up and switched on the wall lights; this was not an occasion for shadows. He was wide awake now. "If I understand what you are saying, Rainy, it is—it is that you believe this to be a—message?"

"A communication," she corrected.

"I do not see the difference."

"A message would be directed at us. I doubt it was. The focusing focused everything, light, heat, X rays—and radio; and so we heard a broadcast that otherwise would not have been detectable in any way. I doubt very much that it was intended for us, and I don't know what it was. A love letter, a warning, a weather report, a navigation beacon—I don't know. But it's definitely an artifact, and it comes from another star. I've even located the star. It's a K-6, not visible to the naked eye; it doesn't even have a name, but it was in line with Jupiter and the satellite and the sun . . . and it was where the communication came from. Tib? The human race isn't alone any more."

They were both silent for a moment, and then Rainy finished, "So come on up here, Tib! I want you to help me announce it."

"Me? What would I have to say, Rainy? I'm not an astronomer."

"No. But you're a person who was saying just a little while ago that you saw no way of being heard, and now there's a way."

Tuesday, December 29th. 11:25 AM.

The noise in the Von Karman Auditorium was extreme; people were still coming in, summoned at the last minute, and for each new batch of TV and press, of scientists from JPL itself and all the surrounding schools and laboratories, the tapes had to be repeated, and Rainy had to answer the same questions again: "How can you tell?" and "Is this really proof?" and, over and over, "Are you sure?"

But of course no one was sure! In science one was not sure, one merely made an assumption and then contrived tests to see how nearly it was true. And of course Rainy was trying to explain that, as politicians and press, scien­tists and scholars whispered to each other and wondered.

Sonderman gazed at the list he had been doodling be­fore him. It was headed "Childish vices", and it said:

Nuclear war.

Waste of irreplaceable resources.

Lack of prudence.

Failure to learn.

And that summed them up, he thought, and the last was the worst of the four.

The tape came to its hissing, moaning end for the tenth time and Rainy, eyes blinking against the lights, tired but still on her feet, held up her hand. "That's enough of that," she said. "Now I would like to introduce my collab­orator in this work, Dr. Tibor Sonderman."

Tib rose and walked slowly to the podium, giving the audience a chance to sort themselves out. The press con­ference had been arranged on short notice; there had not even been time to set up chairs, and the people staring at him were moving around in knots and clusters. Strobes flashed, TV lights burned his tired eyes, and the buzz of talk did not die down. He cleared his throat and said:

"I have nothing to add to Ms. Keating's report as to the receipt, for the first time in human history, of a communi­cation from an intelligent race other than our own. I wish only to comment on an implication of this fact.

"To discover that intelligence can arise is not in itself surprising, for we already knew that this is possible. It has happened here on Earth. What is surprising is to discover that an intelligent race can survive its technology. We now know that at least one other race has. It has passed the point of being able to destroy itself, as we are able now, and has gone on to some further stage; and that is new. This fact gives us hope. And it also gives us a purpose, and certain obligations. For what we know now that we did not know before is that the human race is not necessarily under sentence of death, and so certain childish and dan­gerous follies can be abandoned."

They were looking at him in perplexity and surprise, but not, at least, in hostility. And the TV cameras, those remarkable amplifiers of the voice, were rolling. What he said would be heard. "So we may now set behind us the kamikaze society," he said, gaining confidence with every word, "and now, with your permission, I will tell you what it appears to me we must do, in order to survive and take our place in this congeries of cultures that we now know to exist among the stars."