The Wye Oak

by

Michael Edwards

On a night with a ring of ice around the moon, a small horse-drawn wagon made its way across the Mississippi, going east from St. Louis into Illinois.  An old man guided the horse along the bridge, careful to keep as far to the right as possible: even at this hour there were innumerable cars, headed both ways at speeds that made horse and driver alike nervous.  This wasn't the main bridge crossing the great river: precisely for that reason it was chosen, in the hope of avoiding the worst of the traffic.  Horse-drawn vehicles were not only a hindrance to the flow of traffic, they were illegal on main thoroughfares, their drivers subject to a fine and possibly imprisonment.  There were no longer any routes across the Mississippi, at this point, that were not main thoroughfares, interstates, freeways, super highways.  To cross the Mississippi under the full moon was to break the law.

The ripples brought to the surface by the current, or in the wake of riverboats, or from the gathering north wind, shimmered beneath the crystalline moon almost as if it were sunlight.  The old man glanced from time to time between the silver gray crossbeams of the bridge to the river below.  "We'll soon be across," he said.  The horse nodded its head, as if it understood.  "We'll get there before anyone sees us," he added as if to reassure his horse.

The thick bushes on the east bank finally emerged out of a dark blur to assume their given shapes, gaining color, texture, definition with every hoof beat against the pavement.  The lights of East St. Louis up ahead were growing brighter than the moon above; presently it became the moon's turn to appear out of focus as the city lights had earlier.  Not that a skyline like that of its grand sister across the river rose up, only the brightness of street lamps and intersections, which eventually outshone the October moon.

At last the bridge came to an abrupt end in a sharp right turn over the land.  The water, which had seemed from the bridge like a majestic sea carved through a deep canyon, now gurgled barely a stone's throw beyond the railing as the highway followed a shallow inlet before turning again eastward.

The wagon pursued one after another roadway, as if trying each for size, going first left then right then straight ahead until finally settling on a narrow road free of traffic.  For nearly an hour the wagon crept along this tree lined road, where the houses were a hundred feet back and the light was dim enough to once again open the moon's rays.  It came to a clearing, a large open field traversed by a rough-hewn path.

"We'll stop here," the old man said as he directed his horse to the path.  Once safely off the main road, he brought the wagon to a halt.  He got down, unbridled his horse, set some grain for it, then disappeared through the rear door of the truck.

"I won't let 'em get you," he said in a voice muffled by the tiny space within.  Then he laid down beside a basket and fell asleep.

The sun had been up a couple hours when a knock on his door awoke the old man.  Still groggy, a panic gripped him.  "It's them," he whispered.

"Anybody here?" a voice outside called, followed a few seconds later by "Hello?  Anybody in there?"

"I've got to say something," the old man whispered and seemed to grow calmer, bolder, by his resolve.

"Just a minute!" he called back.  He hurriedly made himself presentable then swung the door open and climbed out of the wagon.

"Who are you?" a middle aged man asked.  "Why are you here?  Don't you know this is private property?"

"No, sir, I didn't know," the old man replied.  "It seems I was mis-led; I thought this was a public park: nice open space like this."

"I don't think you'll find this many tree stumps at a public park," the man indicated with a sweep of his arm.  "This lot's being cleared for houses."

"You own it?"

"I do.  I'm the builder.  You'll have to move on."

"How many houses can you get on a lot this size?" the old man idly asked.

"Eighteen," came the crisp reply.  The builder surveyed the wagon, its driver, the dappled gray horse lying a few feet away.  "I don't suppose you'd be in the market for one," he observed.

"No.  I'm headed west.  Going back to the Sierras."

"Wouldn't want to keep you," the builder prodded.

"Let me just hitch my horse, and I'll be on my way," the old man said.

Just then a sound came from the wagon.  "What you got in there?"

"My cat."

The builder listened a moment, but no more sounds ensued.  He shrugged and walked to another part of his lot, as if to make sure nobody else had trespassed during the night.  Meanwhile the old man readied his horse, climbed into the driver's seat and maneuvered his wagon out of the path and onto the main road.

He drove another couple hours until, coming to another clearing, he again pulled off, this time onto a paved parking lot on the outskirts of East St. Louis.  This was a run down area, sparsely populated, with ramshackle houses and boarded-up businesses separated by lots strewn with litter and broken concrete slabs.  A feeble looking cafe stood at the far end of the lot.  First the old man disappeared into his wagon; then, emerging half an hour later, made for the cafe.

The cafe was nearly full, all the tables taken and only two seats left at the counter.  After inquiring if either were taken and being assured they were not, the old man sat down and ordered.  A couple of teenagers came in as the waitress was pouring coffee; one sat down beside the old man, the other tapped him on the shoulder.

"You got my space," the young man said.  "I said: you got my space!" he repeated.

The old man took his coffee and retreated to a corner, where he stood sipping it until the rest of his order was ready.  The two teenagers were laughing.  A woman motioned him over to her table.

"Why don't you join us?" she invited him to an empty chair.  He sat down and thanked her, glancing at the man sitting opposite the woman to make sure it was alright with him too.  He acknowledged the inquiry with a nod.

"We don't come here often," the woman said.  "Some of those boys are just plain hoodlums.  Too bad they didn't know about that stuff back then."  The man made a face.  "He doesn't like the idea," she explained.

"Damn right I don't," the man said.  

"What are you going to do about kids like that?" she asked.

"You live with it.  Like people always have.  That's not the way to get people to behave."

"It's a lot cheaper than jails and police and courts and all those lawyers to pay.  Don't you think so?" she turned to the old man to ask.  By this time the waitress had brought his food and, with his mouth full, he indicated he could not answer.  "The ones coming up are so good, so well behaved.  They never bother anybody.  Never cause any trouble.  I don't see what's wrong with it."

"You have a right to be who you were born to be - good or bad," the man said.  "If you're bad, you've got to pay.  It's your choice, and your right."

"And all the innocent people who get hurt - what about them?  Don't they count for something too?"

"You can't make the world safe for everyone - that's all.  You just can't."

"But at least someone is trying to!"

The old man continued eating till his breakfast was done.  "Thank you for sharing your table," he said as he rose.  "I've got a long way to go.  I'm heading west."

"Hold up a second," the man said.  "We're done too, we'll walk out with you. "

The three paid the cashier then left.  Perceiving the old man headed for the odd looking wagon, the woman asked "Is that yours?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"How odd.  What kind of work do you do?  Are you a preacher?"

"No, ma'am.  I do odd jobs, a little carpentry, digging ditches, some plumbing - whatever I can get."

"'The World Will End in 2025,'" the man read the sign printed in big blue letters on the side of the wagon.  "That was twenty-five years ago!  Looks like you missed the boat!"

"I've thought about painting over it," the old man explained.  "But it's kinda catchy.  It gets noticed.  People stop and ask me about it; they get to talking; I ask if they need any work done around the house.  It's gotten me lots of jobs."

"But do you believe the world will end?" the woman asked.

"Some day, I guess.  See I bought the wagon from a man I knew back home.  He traveled all around.  Met up with him in St. Joe.  He believed the world was about to end.  The year kept changing though.  It started out saying 'The World Will End in 2000.'  He'd go around warning people about the coming catastrophe: that's all he ever did, just go around warning people.  When 2000 came and went he changed his sign to read '2001.'  Then he changed it again.  And again.  And kept changing it for twenty-five years.  You can see where it's been re-painted if you look close."

"So did he die before he got to see the end of the world?" the man asked.

"No, he just got tired of waiting.  He sold me his wagon and moved to Florida.  I've got to go now.  Got a long trip ahead of me.  I've enjoyed your company."

"Did he sell you the horse too?" the man asked.  "He looks like he's as old as the wagon.

"No, I got him separate."

"What's his name?"

"I call him Wildfire."

"Wildfire?" repeated the woman.  "What an odd name."

"I call him that after a song from when I was a boy.  I don't remember the words, only the tune, and the title."

The couple started to move away when a sound from the wagon stopped them.  "You have a baby in there?" the woman asked.

"Yes, ma'am," the old man answered reluctantly.  "My grandson.  I'm taking him with me."

"What about his parents?"

"They don't want him no more."

"Why did you leave him out here?" the woman asked.  "Aren't you afraid, with all the kidnapping?"

"No, he's alright.  I keep it locked.  He's alright."

"I guess he's safe here," the woman agreed.  "But be careful when you get across."

"Across?"

"To St. Louis.  That's where all the kidnapping's taking place.  Over a hundred babies.  Just disappeared.  Don't leave him unattended for a second."

"St. Louis?" the old man asked in a voice barely audible.  "Across?  St. Louis across?  It can't be.  I just come across, just last night."

"This is East St. Louis - this is Illinois," the woman said.

"You were headed the wrong way, pal," the man observed with a laugh.  "That is if you're headed west."

"To the Sierras.  Where I was born.  I want him to grow up looking up every day at the oldest trees in the world.  Right where Nevada and California meet.  The most beautiful place on earth.  What was I thinking - what was I thinking, to come this way?  I was so scared they'd get to him before I could get gone, I guess I wasn't even noticing which way I was going."  A look on the old man's face said he had revealed too much.

"Who?" the woman asked.  "The kidnappers?  You were afraid of them?"

"Or was it the teachers, and their stuff?" the man asked.  "You wanted to get your kid away before they filled his head full of God-knows what - was that it?"

"I - I've got to be going," was all the old man said.  He readied his horse, climbed into the driver's seat, took hold of the reins and, without another word, set off, in the direction he had come from.

The couple watched him leave, watched his rickety old wagon bounce its way down the road.  They also watched the sky a moment, watched the high cirrus clouds thicken into clumps that looked like shattered blocks of ice.

"Going to be cold tonight," the man said.  "Might even frost.  Going to be an early winter, and a hard one."

"It's not right, taking that boy away like that," the woman said as they got in their car, a small, inexpensive make found in legions in this part of Illinois, where the standard of living had not caught up to the rest of the state.  "He deserves a chance to be a good citizen."

Before the man could start his engine, the cafe door flew open and the two teenagers came running out, followed by a man dressed in white, crying "You punks didn't pay!  Don't ever come back or I'll call the cops!  You hear me?  If I ever see you around here again, you're going to jail!"

One of the young men pulled a knife and held it up for the cook to see.  The other unzipped his pants and urinated on the pavement.  "Why don't you lap that up?  It's better'n anything you serve!"

"I'm calling the cops!" the cook cried

The teenagers burst out laughing then took off running through the parking lot.  They ran up to the car the couple had just gotten into and began making faces at the windows, then pushing until the car rocked on its wheels.

"You're lucky we're in a hurry or we'd turn this tin can over!" said one.

"Yeah, we got us two hogs back there waitin' for us to stick it to 'em!" said the other.

Both boys unzipped their pants and exposed themselves, laughing like hyenas, then took off running again, past the lot, across the road, and into a thick stand of trees whose fading yellow and red and green leaves had begun falling already.

For a moment the couple just sat there.  Then the man shook his head and started the car.  The woman, in a trembling voice, said "I'm calling the police, the minute we get home."

"They'll never find them," the man countered.  "All those kids look alike.  You go to describe one, you've described a hundred."

"Not them," the woman replied in an irritated voice.  "I know it's too late for them.  They're beyond redemption."

"Then who?"

"That old man.  It's wrong what he's doing."

"Just leave it be.  It's his grandson.  You heard him say he's going west.  The kid'll never bother us."

"But he'll grow up to be a hoodlum - just like those two.  Maybe he won't torment us, but he'll torment some innocent person somewhere.  It's not right."

"Not every kid who doesn't get his head tapped turns out like that.  I didn't.  You didn't.  No one we know did.  Just leave it be."

"I'm calling!" the woman resolved.  "When we get home I'm calling, first thing.  Just because we turned out okay: we were lucky, we had good genes, a good upbringing.  What chance does that boy have?  You heard that old man say his parents don't want him.  An old man like that isn't fit to raise a child.  He deserves a chance, and I intend to see he gets it.  Anyway, it's the law."

"It's a bad law," the man rejoined.  "As bad a law as those two punks were bad - only worse, because everyone knows they're bad.  But if you feel you have to, there's nothing I can do to stop you."

"It's the only Christian thing to do.  In your heart you know that, as well as I do."

The man shook his head wearily, as if left speechless by a superior logic.  "I guess," was all he said.

The moment they arrived home the woman made good on her promise.  They had barely pulled to the curb when she leaped out and ran up the crumbling sidewalk that traversed a tiny, overgrown yard, then past the big holly bushes that straddled the front landing; fumbled a moment with her key; then unlocked the door and ran inside the little yellow frame house with its tarpaper roof.  She was on the phone before setting her purse down.

"I want to report someone in violation of the Education Code," she began in a strained voice interlaced with breaths of air, calming down only after the last bit of detail had been related.

"There," she said as she hung up, "I've done my duty."

The old man moved slowly.  He might have speeded his horse up; but, like the wagon and driver, it was closer to the end of its days than the beginning.  He stopped every few blocks to let his horse rest.  Sometimes he could only pull to the side of the road, and had to keep a watchful eye out for traffic.  A few places allowed him to pull off the road completely, unhitch his horse, feed it, give it water, then tend to his grandson and his own needs.  He had all day: he didn't dare cross the Mississippi again until nightfall.

He eventually came again to the plot of ground he had taken for a park early that morning.  It still looked like a park to him, even with all the tree stumps and tattered bushes.  No one seemed to be around, so he decided to once again pull off and rest till it was late enough to make for the bridge.  He fell asleep rocking his grandson to sleep.

Once again, a knock on the door awakened him.  He readied himself to be chastised by the owner again.  Swinging the door open, he saw, in the twilight, not the owner but someone else.

"Sorry to bother you," a somewhat shabbily dressed middle aged man said.   "But I couldn't help seeing your wagon.  It's the one they're looking for.  Not that I'm here to make a citizen's arrest.  I'm no citizen, believe me.  I'm a fugitive myself.  See, that's why I keep this police monitor, keep it with me anywhere I go.  That way I know if they're still looking for me."

"Who's looking for me?" the old man asked.

"The police.  They say you're a kidnapper.  That's why I'm warning you.  I'm a kidnapper too.  One of the kidnappers.  You heard about us.  All those babies."

The old man instinctively reached out and pushed the fugitive back.  "Don't come any closer!" he warned.

"I won't hurt you or that child - I promise!  I swear I won't!" the fugitive said.  "All I wanted to do is warn you: that's all!  That's all!  I won't hurt anyone, not ever again.  I just wanted to warn you.  And to try and talk you out of it.  It's wrong - it's wrong!  Don't do it!  No matter how much they say it's right: it's not right!  It's wrong!.  That's all.  Don't do it!  Don't take that child.  He'll come back to haunt you."

The man retreated across the field and soon disappeared into the darkness that was swallowing up the eastern horizon.  The old man hastily gathered his things, hitched his horse to his wagon and pulled back onto the road to begin the final leg of his journey across the Mississippi, retracing exactly the steps he had taken early that morning - except that now he had an even greater sense of urgency.  He made his horse go a little faster, reassuring him over and over that they'd rest once they were safe.

The traffic was heavier than before but still not so heavy as to impede a horse and wagon moving across the northwest corner of East St. Louis.  Cars were able to pass the wagon without too much difficulty; only occasionally did the drivers engage their horns.

"They always beep at us to move, Wildfire," the old man observed.  "Used to scare you so bad, didn't it?  We'll rest soon.  I promise you."

There had been no police cars on any of the roads the old man took.  He was nearing the bridge; he could see the outline its lights sculpted against the darkening western sky.  Just ahead was the sharp left turn leading onto the eastern ramp.  As he maneuvered into the turn he glanced to his left.  A police car sat in the half-hidden cul-de-sac at the apex of the turn.  A horse-drawn wagon cannot outrun a squad car; even so, the old man made his horse speed up.

"We've got to beat him to the bridge," the old man told his horse as he gently lashed it with the rein.  Wildfire speeded up.  "I won't let 'em get the boy!  We can't let 'em get him, to stick their stuff in his brain!"

The corner was rounded.  The solid clop of horse's hooves on firm ground suddenly gave way to the hollow, ghostly clop of those same hooves on suspended matter.  They had reached the bridge.  They were now in violation of the law.  They started across, appearing, disappearing, re-appearing in the cross-current of headlights, one minute silhouetted, the next absorbed into the bridge's red, blue, yellow lights, then highlighted like a prop on a stage.

The old man heard the siren behind him; he could make out the whirling flash of light in the windshields of oncoming cars.  "Old fool," he said to himself.  "Heading east to go west.  Old fool."

He was nearing the halfway point when the police car passed him and abruptly stopped, a couple hundred feet away, blocking his path.

"In a blizzard he was lost," the old man recited, having suddenly remembered a line from his horse's signature song.  He stopped his horse.  He could hear the river below.  Not the gurgling flow of an inlet.  Not the turbulent rush of a raging current.  He knew the Mississippi, he had lived around it half his life; he had never heard it like this.  It was a sound he had only heard once before, when he was a boy.  He had gone to Nevada; he was on the western shore of Pyramid Lake, where Smoke Creek empties into it; an earthquake hit the region; the shallow waters rose and fell, emitting a wail like something had taken hold and was clawing its way through.

"Put your hands on top of your head and don't move!" the policeman was approaching with his gun drawn when he suddenly lurched forward and fell to the pavement, his gun flying from his hand.  An unearthly scream arose from the pavement where the policeman landed.  Not the scream of a man: the scream of a thing.  The scream of asphalt ripping open.  Followed by an even greater scream.  The scream of metal girders being wrenched apart.

The bridge began collapsing around itself.  Rivets flew everywhere.  The old man ran to his wagon.  Girders leaped into the air.  Guy wires coiled and snapped like giant snakes.  The policeman folded into the slivered asphalt, disappearing through an opening.  Cars bounced back and forth like rubber balls.  People were screaming, climbing from their cars, running in front of other cars, driving blindly, wildly through a crumbling roadway, leaping over the sides of the bridge, rolling around, clawing at their faces, grabbing one another, falling to their knees, throwing their hands up.  Rivets pelted those who tried to escape, gouging their eyes out, ripping their scalps off, tearing into their bodes from a hundred points.  Guy wires sliced and severed and mangled anyone coming near the edge.  Girders crashed upon the people, crushed their skulls, tore through them like spears.

Till the bridge was reduced to its barest essentials: steel, mortar and concrete.  Till the bridge was no longer a bridge, no longer a built thing, no longer of this earth.  Till it lost its moorings, its hold on the land.

Then it fell.  Not piecemeal but all at once.  Its lights had gone out, but the lights of cars and the whirl of the police light remained, a hundred searchlights searching for a bridge that was no more.  The river grew closer and closer, the sky farther and farther.  Another ring of ice circled the full moon, which had just appeared as a layer of clouds thinned out.

The old man felt himself falling, saw his horse falling, saw the people's cars searching the horizon for a bridge, saw the cars exploding one by one as they crashed against each other and slammed into the river, saw burning bodies leap from their cars, heard the roar of the explosion, heard the screams of the people, heard the siren hiss to a stop.  Then heard the water, saw it surround everything, felt it surrounding him.  The bridge was sinking, taking everything with it.  The old man pushed his way through the opening behind the seat into the wagon.  Water was drawing the wagon deeper into the churning river.  Wildfire was gurgling as he drowned.

The old man waded through his wagon to where his grandson was lying in a cradle.  "You can't have him!" he cried to the rising waters.  He grabbed the cradle.  Holding it in his arms, above his head, he made for the rear door.  "You can't have him!  You can have me, you can have my horse, you can have us all - but not him!"  The water was up to his chin.  With his feet in front of him, as he sank beneath the water, he kicked the door open.  From beneath the surface he saw the cradle float out the door.

The current had resumed its normal flow.  The waters, snapped into a churning vortex then forced to an eerie stillness, began their regular movement again.  The cradle floated downstream, beyond the bridge, beyond the burning debris, beyond the little wagon proclaiming the end of the world, now covered in silt and leaves and twigs.

The baby slept, and woke, and drifted off to sleep again, lulled by the rhythmic motion of the current.  The moon kept disappearing then re-appearing as the clouds thickened and thinned, always accompanied by the same ring of ice, in turn revealing then obscuring the floating cradle.

Little by little the current guided the cradle to the western shoreline, gently floating it into a yacht basin just below where US Route 40 crossed the Mississippi, finally bringing it to rest between the bow of a boat and the dock.

No one noticed the tiny ark nestled against the yacht, or heard the crying of its tiny voyager.  It was a week night, a Wednesday, October the 19th: not a night for boating on the river or relaxing on deck with a drink.  The only people about were those who watched the boats and dock at night; and they were caught up in the strange happenings upstream - the rumbling and crashing of metal and concrete, the flare of exploding cars, the muffled splashing of water.

"What the hell is it?" a security guard demanded of a handyman.

"Big fire," came the definitive response.

"Chemical plant, you think?" another guard joined in.

"Not big enough for that," a deck hand leaped from the boat he was cleaning to render an opinion.

"Must be a riverboat," another deck hand suggested.

"The Mississippi Gambler?" a man who had been tending the steel fence separating the dock from the street asked in some alarm.  "I got friends work on that ship!  God damn it, I got friends on that one!  God damn it!"

"Ain't no boat," the first handyman assured everyone.  "Didn't you see the way those flames shot up?  No boat's that long."

"Then what?"

"Like I said: a big fire.  Something stretching all the way across the Mississippi.  Great big fire."

"Did anyone notice the bridge?" a man tinkering with the alarm system asked.

"What bridge?"

"Over there: Route 40."

"What about it?"

"It shook."

"I guess so: the whole bloody friggin' river goes up in flames, you'd shake too!"

"No, it was something else."

"What?"

"Something else, that's all.  It shook before all those explosions - I guess they were explosions.  Before them!"

"Of course it shook first: that was way upstream.  Takes sound seven minutes to travel that far.  You'd see the bridge shake first, then you'd hear the explosion."

"Yeah, I guess.  It just felt weird, that's all.  Like...hell, I don't know what it felt like.  Just real weird."

The talk wound down, the men returned to their respective routines, the dock resumed its normal tenor; and still no one noticed the gift the river had bestowed upon the basin.  A couple hours more and everyone finished his assigned duties and left, except the guards, who gravitated to the boathouse to sit out their watch in comfort, going out to patrol the dock only every hour or so.

It began growing quite chilly; but the child in the cradle had been wrapped in a warm blanket; he felt no chill.  He awoke occasionally throughout the night, but each time the gentle ebb of the river rocked him quickly back to sleep.

Toward daybreak two men silhouetted against the marina strolled past one after another slip until coming to the biggest yacht in the basin.  One was the security guard, nearing the end of his night's watch; the other was the owner of the yacht.  The guard was tall, heavyset, an imposing man with a very dark complexion; his companion was of medium height and frame, with blonde hair made ashen by streaks of gray, and eyes a very pale blue, in narrow bands surrounding large pupils.

"You're sure there was no damage?" the yachtsman asked.

"No sir, Mr. Carter," the guard assured him.  "Nothing upstream came down this far.  Everything's fine.

"No debris?"

"No sir.  We looked it over from stem to stern.  It's just as you left it."

"You noticed nothing unusual?"

"No sir."

"And no one came around here who didn't belong?"

"No sir."

"Alright.  You can go now."

The guard turned to go.

"Hold it!  What's this?"

"What?"

"This."  The yachtsman pointed to the small wooden box wedged between the bow of his yacht and the dock, the morning light still too dim to reveal its true identity, or its occupant.  From where the two men stood, it looked as much like a piece of driftwood as anything else - and the guard said as much.

"A little early in the season for dead wood," the yachtsman observed.  "But I guess that's what it is.  Better check it out anyway.  A bomb can wear an innocent face."

"Yes sir, I'll go have a look," the guard acceded to his boss' request, going to the maintenance shed beside the boathouse for a ladder, which he draped over the side of the dock.  He had barely taken a step when a sound from below stopped him.  He listened, heard nothing further, started back down, then heard it again, this time louder and continuously.

"Mr. Carter," he called, "I think it's -"

"I know what it is!" Carter cut him off.  "Get it out of here.  Take it wherever they take lost babies.  Just get it away from here.  On second thought, I'll do it.  This is not a security matter.  I'll take care of it, you go on home.  One more imposter, more or less, won't matter a damn."

The eagerness with which Carter descended the ladder, scooped up the cradle and carried it back to the dock belied the cynicism which prompted the action.  "One blonde baby boy with big blue eyes coming up," he announced as he loosened the brown woolen blanket to get a look.  "When are the bastards ever going to stop trying to palm their brats off as -"

He stopped before he could complete his question.  The pupils of his eyes grew so large they almost eclipsed the irises.  He reached down into the cradle, beneath the blanket, and gently lifted the baby to get a better look.

"My God," he muttered.  "You're not a look alike, an imposter, a plant, a trick.  Where's your blonde hair? your blue eyes? didn't they even bother reading his description before delivering you?  Unless -"

Holding the baby in one arm, he rummaged through the cradle in search of anything that might give a clue to who he was: a note, some piece of ID, something, anything; but found nothing.

"- Unless you came here on your own.  Came downstream.  Came from up there.  Nobody sent you to pose as Bradley, did they? you're not a pretender to the throne.  You're a survivor.  My God.  You lived through that.  You're blessed.  And I'm blessed.  I've been given another son - you are a boy, aren't you?  No, I don't even need to see: I know you are."

He drew the child very close, clinging to him as much as hugging him.  His pupils receded, but a flood of tears now hid the pale blue of his eyes.

"You will be my son," he declared as he loosened his hold to lift the baby up before him.  "You will be Bradley Jerome Carter the second, son to me and heir to everything I have.  If I can never love you as I would have loved him, that'll be known only to me.  You will never feel slighted or loved less: I will never offend the God who sent you to me by giving you less than your due.  I promise you that."

He replaced the blanket about the boy and situated him safely in his arms.  "We've got to get you fed, and cleaned up," he said.  "And take you to school to get smart," he added with a big smile.  "My son will be given every opportunity.  Just as he was.  Nothing will be left to chance.  I swear it.  On everything I've built: I swear it!"

The sun had risen above the horizon, its glistening reflection beginning to drift across the Mississippi, sending shimmering eddies into the yacht basin and into a hundred other openings along the shoreline.  For an instant it caught amidst the spray of a fountain in front of the old city hall, a gracious stone building chiseled nearly two hundred years ago from limestone, granite and marble, stretching between Clark and Market Streets, between Twelfth and Thirteenth, and displaying the porticoes, columns, cornices and other architectural manifestations typical of 19th century state houses and city halls.  It became a museum a quarter century ago, when the last council session abruptly ended and the mayor was dragged from his chambers and executed in the courtyard.  Its use now was purely ceremonial: special occasions, black tie affairs, civic rallies - anything that needed an official aura, a stamp of legitimacy.

The press was gathering in the gallery of the old council chamber for a briefing at 9 A.M.  They were told to be early.  Each reporter was separately briefed in a small room off the gallery by a security guard, who reminded each of his social responsibilities.

"Your job is to report the news," the guard reminded each separate reporter.  "Not to seek it, not to examine it, not to infer anything from it.  But to report it.  Social irresponsibility is, as you know, a capital offense.  Even in the span of your own career you can think of those who failed to fulfill their sacred duty to the public."

Everyone present had been briefed by the time the briefing began.  The reporters had their notepads and pencils ready.  The Authenticator stepped from a small alcove behind the table where the council used to meet, and began at once to inform the audience what had happened, introducing himself neither as Professor Gorham Kirkus nor as the Director of Educational Authenticity.  Everyone in St. Louis knew who he was; anyone who did not know him had no business in this city.

"The T-Men have claimed responsibility for the bombing of Eads Bridge," this tall, patrician man with dark thinning hair combed back from his high forehead announced.  "There are no survivors.  The river is being dredged for bodies.  Once they are counted, they will be cremated.  Their automobiles, along with whatever possessions of theirs not destroyed in the blast, will become public property.  We will offer whatever assistance is in our power to the nationwide search for the perpetrators of this latest act of terrorism.  As you know, they are wanted in every city within this nation.  For the purpose of bringing them to justice - and only for that purpose - we will temporarily set aside our mutual differences to work in unison so that our streets and sidewalks and structures can once again be safe for the citizens of our cities."

The speaker removed his glasses and adjusted his tie.  "We will now permit questions from the gallery," he said, immediately holding up his hand to signal a halt to the free-for-all that erupted the instant he opened the forum.  "We will only take questions in an orderly manner, and only those questions that reflect responsible journalism.  You may begin, one at a time."

A string of questions ensued, each pinpointing one or another aspect of what was said.  Most were about the T-Men and their responsibility for what happened; a few concerned the victims and their ultimate disposition.  Then came an unexpected question from a rookie reporter, a question out of sequence and out of sync.

"There has been talk about structural deficiencies, inferior materials being used, poor engineering, insufficient testing and other irresponsible activities associated with the renovation of this bridge.  Will there be an investigation?" the young reporter stood up to ask.

"The bridge passed every safety inspection instituted within this turfdom," the Director of Educational Authenticity responded.  "The builder was cited with no violations.  It was structurally sound."

Another reporter stood up. "What about rumors of an earthquake?" he boldly asked.

"There was some seismic activity recorded - as there is from time to time in the Mississippi valley; but nothing of any consequence.'

"Is it because this building is so vulnerable that the Tungs have never made it their headquarters?" a reporter near the front of the gallery asked, indicating the surrounding chambers.

"The Tungs are afraid of nothing," Kirkus emphatically stated.  "The building can easily be fortified.  But it represents, too much, the old ways.  They prefer their traditional headquarters, in the heart of their original turf.  This part of town was last to accept them; they haven't forgotten that."

No one else stood.  A dead silence befell the gallery in the wake of these inexplicable questions.  Kirkus waited a discreet moment then announced an end to the briefing, thanking the reporters for their civic responsibility.  On their way out, the three reporters who had asked the last three questions were detained by the security guards for a special de-briefing.  Taken to a small room in the basement, they were asked to draw straws.  The one who drew the shortest straw was strapped inside a stone slab.  A tiny pellet was placed in his mouth just under his tongue, a thin wire implanted in the pellet.  The guards stepped away, extending the wire to the far corner of the room, where it was attached to a small black box.  One of the guards pressed a button in the center of the box, sending an electrical impulse to the pellet.  The guards and the other two reporters heard a muffled explosion, and in time with it saw the reporters tongue fly from his mouth.

"It's important to know what is and what is not newsworthy," the guards completed their de-briefing and sent the two remaining reporters on their way, leaving the third flailing, gagging and making strange screeching sounds in the stone slab.

All during the day the clouds thickened, the air grew colder, all the signs pointed to an unusually early snowstorm - like the one a year ago, to the day.  Yet no one speculated on the weather, not even the official meteorologists.  "There'll be some clouds overnight," the weather reports all advised.  "Wear a jacket to work tomorrow, it may be a bit chilly."

"All this equipment," a weatherman on a local TV newscast mused to a technician, "and all we can do is call for clouds."

"It would be irresponsible to say anything that might keep people home on a work day," the technician reminded.

"I used to chase storms," the weatherman recalled.  "I thought it mattered to keep people informed.  I risked my life.  Now the only consideration is making sure everyone gets to work on time.  Productivity: the be all and end all."

"The economy's booming, man!  We've never had it so good.  Zero unemployment.  Dig it: zero unemployment.  The dream of the ages.  Per capita's the highest in history."

"Yeah, yeah, I know the drill.  But I love the weather.  I love what I know's going to happen - just because it's part of what does happen.  I love this equipment.  State of the art.  Except the only art is making something into nothing."

The weatherman told of clouds, but not of what his equipment showed.  The blizzard took the city completely by surprise.  Not only the earliest in St. Louis' history, but the strongest.  Something in the upper atmosphere sent a frigid air mass from northern Canada down the Mississippi Valley to congeal the moist gulf air that had seeped upstream into a blinding swirl of snow and ice and fifty mile an hour winds that did not let up till St. Louis lay buried six feet deep.  By nine o'clock Thursday night the city had come to a complete standstill.  Ninety percent of the city was without power.  Anyone trapped outside was buried alive; anyone trapped inside was trapped for good.

The weatherman was stranded, like everyone else; but, unlike most, he was not without power.  The TV station had a generator; it kept broadcasting sit-coms and movies and sporting events and public service announcements even if no one had power to receive it; and because it did, the weatherman kept his equipment going, kept watching the clouds swirl in red and green blotches across his monitor, back and forth, up and down, as moisture kept pumping up from the Gulf, cold kept flowing down from the Arctic Circle.  He could keep watching, as well, what was going on in other parts of the country, or anywhere in the world; but he watched alone: no one much cared what went on elsewhere, no one traveling on business considered weather a factor in his itinerary.  They listened to the weather report to hear how nice it would be on their way to work then went about their business.

"What you up to, Sandy?" the same technician who had spoken to the weatherman earlier again sought to converse.

The weatherman flinched.  "Trying to see the end of this," the weatherman replied.  "And please don't call me Sandy.  But there's no end in sight.  Now let's have a look at the Atlantic."

"Why?  It's a thousand miles away.  Why bother?"

"Because it's there."  He adjusted his monitor to pick up radar broadcasting from South Florida, explaining as he did that there was one last storm in the Atlantic: "a straggler, just cropped up out of nowhere.  It'll weaken soon - water's too cold; it'll head east north east; maybe end up in Newfoundland or the British Isles.  Too late in the season for anything - Jesus!  Jesus!  Holy friggin'!  Jesus Christ!  That thing's exploding - I mean exploding!  It's damn near halfway across the Atlantic!  What the hell!  That can't happen.  Not this time of year - not any time of year!  No meteorologist in his right mind would allow such a thing!  It's gonna wrap around and - Jesus Christ! it's gonna slam right into the Caribbean!   It's gonna gobble up half the West Indies!  And no one to warn them!  Damn those fools - damn them!  No one to warn anyone of anything!  All that equipment and the whole God-damn Caribbean's gonna blow!"

"Thought you said it was going north?"

"It is...sort of.  But it's so large - Jesus!  I mean...it's like...Jesus!  That can't be right!  Gotta be a fuck-up in the radar: it's gotta be!  No storm that ever was can go from a category one to a category five in less than one day - it can't!  The whole friggin' Atlantic's got to be boiling!  Not this time of year!  Oh my God!  Oh my God!"

"What's it doing now?"

"Not it.  Not it.  Oh my God!  They're picking up seismic activity - picking up a friggin' eight point earthquake in the middle of the Atlantic!  Eight?  Hell, it's past eight: it's off the God-damn scale!  It's gotta be spewing lava - hell, the whole ocean floor's probably alive with volcanic activity!  Of course: it's heating up the whole God-damn ocean!  It could have risen five - maybe ten - degrees in a few hours.  I mean: there's never been anything like this.  Never.  Not ever!  I gotta get out of here!"

"Ain't no one going nowhere man!  You think it'll reach here?  Hell, we could use a little lava right about now!  We're okay here, but my kid's all alone, probably freezing his balls off!"

"I don't mean now, tonight.  No, it won't reach here, don't worry.  You'll get to work on time.  I'm not talking about the blizzard, or the hurricane, or this city, or your kid freezing his balls off, or social responsibility, or only reporting  what's good for business.  None of that.  I've gotta get away, that's all.  I know what I've gotta do.  I can't be a weatherman in a place that censures the weather.  I see...I see it so clearly...what I've got to do.  I just see it, that's all."

None of what he saw affected his forecast: it was smooth, professional, restrained, with just the right patina of optimism and encouragement.  He read the script he was given exactly as it was written.  He showed his audience - what there was of it - the charts, the Doppler, the statistics, explaining away the worst of the readings as "ground clutter" or "echoes" or simply the erroneous readings of faulty radar.

"The official accumulation is eighteen inches.  In some places there could be drifts as high as several feet.  We urge you not to venture out till the road crews have cleared the highways.  Give them a chance to do what they have to do to re-open our city.  The snow is expected to taper off sometime after midnight.  The morning commute could be a little difficult, so be sure to allow extra time to get to work.  Looking at weather elsewhere in the world, there's a tropical disturbance in the Atlantic; meteorologists are keeping an eye on it.  This is Sanderson Spears, reporting the weather.  Back to you, Harley."

"Repeating our top story: dredging activities at the sight of last night's terrorist bombing have been called off due to poor visibility.  They are expected to resume tomorrow, however, and continue until all vehicles have been recovered."

Dredging did not resume, nor could it.  Besides the raging blizzard which reduced visibility to near zero, a new dredging crew was needed to replace the city's salvage crew, which, to a man, perished when the unexploded bomb, planted by the T-Men on a girder supporting the main span of the bridge, dislodged, floated to the surface, and was detonated by an acetylene torch being used to help sort through and untangle what was salvageable from the wreckage.  The bomb, according to a communiqué from the T-Men, had been set to explode Friday evening at rush hour, so that adequate warning could be given - the idea as much to disrupt the workday as to destroy the bridge.  Only the planting of the bomb, however, was reported - not the timing.  The torch short-circuited the detonator.  The bomb exploded with the force of several tons of TNT, sending a fiery spray of water two hundred feet into the air, a hellish backdrop against which, for an instant, was silhouetted dozens of body parts spiraling as if inside a tornado, the entire scene muffled by the blinding snow.  From even as close as a few hundred feet away, the blast looked like a peel of lightening, sounded like a giant clap of thunder, one peel, one clap, then the remains of forty men scattered about the hidden surface of the Mississippi to begin their final journey downstream.

In his mansion at the northwestern tip of St. Louis, industrialist Bradley Jerome Carter was only vaguely aware of what was happening outside.  He caught glimpses of the snow, saw a flash of light, heard an explosion, then rolled over to look at his new son again.  Ten - or twenty or thirty - feet of snow was nothing to a man who had the services of an entire city at his fingertips.  There was no power outage here.  He lay naked on a silken spread in the middle of his warm bedroom while the rest of the city shivered.  Beside him was the naked child he had found next to his yacht.  He took turns caressing the child and holding him close.

"I won't let you be hurt by what happened," Carter spoke softly to his new son.  "I won't leave your side till you know you're safe, and loved.  I'll get you through this.  I swear it."

The child fell asleep against his chest.  His wife entered the bedroom.  He motioned for her to come to his bedside.  "Lie down with us," he said.  She shook her head.

"I can't," she replied.  "Not yet.  It's too soon.  I'll be a good mother to him, but it'll be for your sake as much as his.  But I'm not ready to accept him yet."  She turned to go, then abruptly turned back.

"Why was there no ransom demand?" she echoed a question she and her husband and a hundred other couples had asked a thousand times before.  "They were all from wealthy families.  Not a single ransom note, for a single one of them.  Why?  Why?"

Her husband looked up at her with a hardness in his eyes.  "Bradley is no more," he said.  "I can't continue grieving for him."

"But don't you want to know what happened to him?"

"No, I don't want to know.  I refuse to think of him being torn apart by some crazed lunatic; or hacked to pieces as part of some Satanic ritual; or taken to another city by some rival gang to be made an example of, to have his eyes or his ears or his head returned to us in a box.  He is no more.  I am not with him.  I am here, with my son.  This is where I will remain - not out there, in some dungeon or some unmarked grave or some rubbish heap being eaten by rats and flies.  I am here, now.  That's all I will allow.  I'm sorry.  Carol!" he called to his wife as she was leaving.  "I am sorry.  It's only because I'm the way I am that I've accomplished as much as I have.  Our son is dead.  I can't dwell on him.  If I did, I could never close another business deal, or do what I need to do to keep the ones I already have profitable.  This city could not exist in its present form without me.  I'm sorry I wasn't a better father to your son."

"We can have another child.  You don't have to adopt someone else's child."

"No, we can't, we won't.  If I lose this child, as much as I love him, it won't be my own flesh and blood.  I will never put myself in a position to have that happen again."

"How can we have a marriage when there can never be a family?" his beautiful young wife asked.  Knowing he would not answer, she turned and left the room.

"Friday, October 22, 2050.  All employees are expected to be at work on time."  This was the message left on every call-in phone number of every business in St. Louis.  An entire world awaited the products St. Louis produced.  Ten feet of snow was not sufficient cause to keep that world waiting.

Friday morning the workforce of St. Louis tried every way possible to make it to work.  A few actually succeeded, only to be turned back at the door.  Power had not been restored; none of the factories had enough auxiliary power to begin operation.  Several hundred people died trying to get to work, or to get back home again.  Their bodies were bulldozed out of the way along with the snow they had died in.  Some were not yet dead; they screamed but their screams went unheard; they tried to move aside but the snow banks held them like quicksand; they were swept along in a ten foot mound of snow and dumped into the Mississippi, or else crushed beneath the giant treads of the bulldozers like they were twigs lying on the roadway.  The snows all over the city ran red with the blood of workers complying with their employers' requests.  The bulldozers, too, were splattered red; but, unlike the streets, they were hosed down then returned to their compound.

By mid-morning the sun reappeared; by mid-afternoon the temperature soared to ninety-six as an anomaly, as peculiarly unseasonable as the one that had brought the blizzard, allowed the hottest autumn air on record to drift northward, melting whatever snow had not been bulldozed into the Mississippi.  The streets of St. Louis began flooding as every alleyway, every sidewalk, every plot of grass and median strip began emptying its ten foot reservoir all at once.  The Mississippi, already on it way to cresting from the snow of dozens of towns and cities up and down stream being dumped into it, began, too, seeping its way into the shallower parts of town.

"Don't be surprised by an Indian Summer weekend," Sanderson Spears reported, as if he had no more noticed the heat on his equipment than the city fathers had in their official calculations.  Equally unnoticed were the violent thunderstorms on the horizon, translated for the general public into a "chance of a late evening shower."

"A chance?" Spears mocked his own forecast when it ended.  "Damn them all to hell for corrupting the beauty of what it took man ten thousand years to perfect!  We may as well go back to sacrificing our firstborn to the wind gods or the fire gods or the water gods.  Damn them all for undoing what science has done.  This was the last time I'll ever dishonor my equipment and everything it stands for: I swear it!"

He gathered up what he could carry and left the station.  He carefully put the equipment in his car, got in, and drove away.  He didn't go home first, he didn't gather up his clothes or toiletries or mementos: just his equipment.  The storm was already enveloping St. Louis.  The setting sun focused its last rays on the anvil top of the thunderhead before going completely dark.  Streaks of increasingly vibrant electricity shot across the clouds' bellies, turning black layers white and the gray outer rim a golden pink.

Sanderson Spears was just past the city line, heading northwest, when the deluge broke, from the southeast, fanning out to the north and west in a spray of hail followed by torrents of rain propelled by hundred mile an hour updrafts.  It rained all night, and into the morning, until ten inches of rain from the Gulf Stream became one with ten feet of melting snow from the Arctic to turn the Mississippi flood plain into a lake reaching five miles inland and standing five feet deep.

The magnificent yacht of Bradley Jerome Carter was lifted up along with a dozen lesser crafts and set on the dock, which gave way, causing all the boats in the marina to capsize.  His five acre compound in the center of Jefferson Park became a ten foot pond which swallowed up his bulldozers.  Even the first floor of his mansion was flooded.  And a bolt of lightening struck one of his factories, shorting a circuit, which started a chain reaction that didn't end until the factory blew sky high, lighting up the night like a thousand lightening bolts igniting at once.  Nearly a hundred people - everyone in the factory at the time - were killed in the blast. 

A thousand people perished in the storm and subsequent flooding, many of them on their way home from work Friday evening, some on their way to work Saturday morning, the rest simply unfortunate enough to be in low lying areas suddenly inundated by as much as ten feet of water.

A security team, at the recommendation of the Director of Educational Authenticity, was dispatched from the headquarters of the Tungs to the TV station in the north central part of town.  They broke in, demanding to speak to the weatherman.

"He's gone home," they were told.  They proceeded to his apartment, broke in, found no one, returned to headquarters, empty handed.

The Director of Educational Authenticity took to the airways with an urgent public announcement.  Every TV and radio program in the greater St. Louis area was interrupted.

"Every responsible citizen in St. Louis is asked to be on the lookout for Sanderson Spears, our local weatherman at station WRMC, a fugitive from the law.  Because he failed in his social responsibility to warn us that the Mississippi had crested and was nearing flood stage, he single handedly put the citizens of St. Louis in jeopardy.  He is directly responsible for the deaths of at least two dozen people, who died in the flooding.  He is considered armed and dangerous.  If you see him, call headquarters at once.  Do not attempt to subdue him.  Repeat: do not attempt to subdue him.  He must be made to pay for his crimes."

Spears had just passed through Kansas City when he heard the announcement.  He had been listening to a St. Louis radio station, to a broadcast of very old songs, some from a hundred years ago.  The song interrupted by the Authenticator's announcement was one called By the Time I Get to Phoenix.  The sound kept fading in and out, some of the words of the song were lost, but nothing of the announcement was lost, the power had been turned up so that everyone could hear, so that everyone could know that a good weatherman had gone bad.  Spears began crying.

"I didn't mean to leave my home forever," he spoke out loud.  "I just...I mean...I only...now I can never go back.  Damn you!  Damn you, you bastard!  You're the one who dictates how we report everything, not us!  Not me!  Damn you!  Damn you!  May you burn in hell for all you've done!  Damn you!"

He was now in Kansas, another old song was playing, ironically one called You Can't Go Back to Kansas, but the static was so bad he switched to another station, a Kansas City Station, which was also playing old songs and which faded to a Topeka station, then a Denver station, a Salt Lake City station, finally a Reno, Nevada station.  No matter where he went, the old songs followed him; and no matter where he went, he was still a wanted man - though nowhere as wanted as in St. Louis.  No one was likely to pursue him to the high Sierras, least of all with winter not far off.  The power of the federal government and the corresponding central organization that could have once tracked a man anywhere had waned over time.  Localities took care of their own affairs; only when someone or something attained national infamy did the federal bureaucracy engage.  Sanderson Spears was not a national menace, not a threat to national security.  He could go about the business of watching the weather with impunity, so long as he kept his distance.

Bradley Jerome Carter was honored for his civic responsibility at a luncheon in St. Louis' Union Station, hosted by a member of the Tung ruling council, a short, very stocky middle aged man wearing an impeccably tailored suit ever so slightly corrupted by an insignia depicting a forest of leveled trees emblazoned on the breast pocket.  The city fathers wished to express their gratitude for the use of Carter's bulldozers in clearing the snow.

"It's always a pleasure to honor a business partner," the host acknowledged.  "It makes us proud of our role in local government to know that a man we backed not only has helped generate and fuel our city's phenomenal economic success but demonstrates such an outstanding sense of social responsibility as well.  We commend his construction crew as well - many of whom, as you may know, are themselves Tungs; so we're doubly proud of the fast and efficient removal of snow from our roadways.  Even as we speak, that same crew is working with flood control to re-open the few remaining streets still closed when the Mississippi overflowed its banks. And make no mistake: we will track down, we will find, and we will bring to justice the weatherman whose treachery left us defenseless before the floodwaters - just as we have already dealt with his technical crew, their families, and anyone else we suspect of being part of the conspiracy to interfere with our city's productivity.  Nothing and no one will be allowed to sabotage the economic miracle our stewardship has helped create.  Zero unemployment.  One hundred percent productivity.  It's men like Bradley Carter who've helped us achieve the perfect society.  Let's all rise and give him the round of applause he so richly deserves."

The applause rose to fill the grand hall.  Bradley Jerome Carter, after a discreet pause, arose from his seat to address his peers.  "It's an honor to be honored by the members of one's community, and I thank you, though I can only accept half your thanks.  The other half belongs to the leadership of the Tungs.  Their vision, their dedication, their absolute sense of social responsibility has been an inspiration to us all.  No one else is so uniquely qualified to run our great city.  The measure of our success is a reflection of their know-how, their efficiency.  To say I'm a business partner of theirs is the highest possible tribute anyone could pay me.  With the Tungs guiding our progress, nothing can stop us."  He turned to his host.  "Vladimir: we thank you."

Carter led the assembly in another round of applause.  The Tung thanked everyone, then looked at his watch and said "We wouldn't want to keep you good folks from your jobs."  Everyone had a good laugh at his subtle hint, then took the hint and left.  Carter remained behind.

"Has the council considered my request?" he asked.

"It's being reviewed," the Tung replied.

"I'm anxious to bid on this project," Carter noted.  "It'd be great for business, Vlad, great for the city.  No one else in the mid-west has the equipment or the resources I can muster."

"We'd have to make arrangements with Kansas City.  Right now it's a bit tricky."

"We can't afford to let time get away from us," Carter gently reminded.

"Zero unemployment: yes.  But don't be too eager to hook up with the Kansas City crowd," Vlad cautioned.  "It hasn't been that many years since we were in all out war with them.  Don't rush in.  And don't dare go behind our backs.  You don't want to pay that price."

Carter acknowledged the warning with a nod of his head.  Then he left Union Station.  The Tung summoned his bodyguards and left through a side door which led to an awaiting limousine.

"Zero unemployment: to die for," the infamous T-Men issued a communiqué through one of its umbrella groups, the Missouri Militia, when the snow had been cleared, the flood subsided, the clean-up begun, and the deadly damage unofficially assessed.  "More than seventeen hundred people died in a blizzard and storm, most of them at work or trying to get to work," the communiqué detailed the carnage.  "Don't look for them, though: their bodies were swept into the Mississippi like so much rubbish; they're probably washed ashore someplace in Louisiana by now.  We ask - for no one else will: what price full employment?"

Few saw the communiqué; fewer read it.  The only voice anyone listened for or heard was the official voice, which reported a handful of deaths - possibly fifty; a number of suspicious disappearances; and several hundred walk-offs, who would not be eligible for re-hire, despite the difficulty of replacing them.  "Zero unemployment" meant there was no one who didn't already have a job.  The only way of filling the vacancies was to try and attract workers from other cities.  Overtures were made to all the major cities within a five-hundred mile radius; but none responded: they, too, were in the middle of an economic boom; they, too, had zero unemployment; they, too, offered incentives for their workers to remain on the job.

"The others will have to pick up the slack," the ruling council determined, with a chorus of approval from the city fathers and business leaders.  "They'll have to work harder.  We didn't corner the market just to lose it because a few disgruntled workers decided to jump ship."

No one objected.  The work was re-distributed and life went on as usual.  Everyone left home a little earlier in the morning, got home a little later in the evening.  The economic miracle continued without a hitch.

The river finally receded enough from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial for Bradley Jerome Carter to have his son christened in the Basilica of Saint Louis the King, the city's Old Cathedral, where his natural son had been christened.

"I want you to be there with me, Carol," Carter said to his wife the night before.  "I want you to stand beside me.  I know you resent him -"

"I don't resent him, Brad," Carol replied.  "He has no blame in any of this.  It isn't because I didn't give birth to him.  It's because our son is gone and I'm not ready to give him up for dead.  But I'll be there.  I haven't stopped loving you, Brad.  You know that."

"Sleep with me tonight," he said, not as a request or a demand but a simple expression of desire.

"And will we have to take precautions to make sure I don't get pregnant?" she asked.

He didn't answer.  He came to her, slipped her negligee from her shoulders and let it drop.

The Cathedral was empty.  It had been full the day Bradley Jerome Carter Junior was christened; every important person in St. Louis had been there.  No one had been invited to this christening.  The priest was there, Mr. and Mrs. Carter were there, the baby was there.  The ceremony had only religious, not social, significance, a grim acceptance of a child into God's fold, neither a celebration nor a welcoming.  The words the priest spoke reverberated like hollow discordant bells through the grand vaulted hall.  The drops of water spilling over the baby's forehead splashed like a dripping faucet into the baptismal fount.  A new little soul was offered up as heaven's newest servant.  The sun was bright, the air finally crisp and clean as an autumn day.

Emerging from the Cathedral, Carter asked his wife if she would go with him the rest of the way.

"You know how I feel about that place," she said.

"Thousands of kids have gone through there," he countered.  "Thousands.  No one has ever been hurt.  There's no reaction, no rejection, no infection.  No one has ever come out a monster.  The technique was perfected a decade ago.  You know that that had nothing to do with our son's disappearance - how could it have?"

"All I know is that on a Saturday morning we baptized him, Saturday afternoon we took him there.  A week later he was gone.  So were all the others.  Our son would have been smart enough - he would have had his father's brilliance.  He didn't need anything added to him.  No.  No, I'm sorry, Brad, I won't go there ever again.  Maybe it is just as well we'll never have another child.  You'd want to take him, I wouldn't let you.  It'd tear our lives apart.  I'm only sorry I don't feel enough for this child to try and stop you from taking him."

Carter decided to walk down Market Street to the Old Courthouse on Fourth Street.  His wife took the limousine home.  As the traffic rumbled overhead along the Mark Twain Expressway, Carter spoke to his new son about the glorious life awaiting him.

"This will all be yours one day, just as it's mine now.  I don't know where you're from or who your parents were, only that they're at the bottom of the Mississippi now.  Maybe you're already destined to be a genius.  But maybe not.  I can't take the chance you might not be able to keep what I've built.  You will be smart.  I'll see to that."

"The Little Red Schoolhouse" the Old Courthouse had been dubbed.   It wasn't red, nor had it ever been a schoolhouse; but in it was the office of the Director of Educational Authenticity.  This was where the best babies in the area were brought, the hub of a network of sub-stations scattered throughout the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, where babies from a hundred miles around were helped along their way.

"Be who God ordained you to be," a small bronze placard just inside the main entrance proclaimed.  The entrance, the foyer, the decor, everything about the building told of its past; parts of it were still a museum, though no longer open to the general public.  Only the city's elite ever came here; but it was not the building's past that drew them.  They were drawn by the future, which lay in a series of long forgotten courtrooms that had been carefully converted into a network of laboratories designed for style and comfort as well as science.

Bradley Jerome Carter made for a corridor to the right of the main courtroom.  He had been in the courtroom once, as a young man, to witness a trial.  A judge's ruling a few years earlier had stood as the Tung's last stumbling block; when they officially took control of the city they opened the Courthouse for one final trial.  The judge was pronounced guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in front of the bench as the audience looked on.  After that, all trials were held at the Tung headquarters on the Hill in South St. Louis.

The corridor ended in a door which opened to a brightly lit room vaguely like a doctor's office.  The floor was carpeted; the window draped; the walls a pale blue, void of decoration; the sole piece of furnishing was a clear plexiglas table in the center of the room, the top lit from underneath.  A young woman dressed in a white nurse's uniform entered through a door at the far end of the wall to the left.

"Good morning, Mr. Carter," she greeted her visitor.  "Professor Kirkus will be with you momentarily.  He's making sure the staff has everything in order."

Just then another woman burst into the room.  She was also dressed in white, but her uniform was wrinkled, stained, her blonde hair coarse and unkempt.  Instead of the first nurse's crisp, pleasant demeanor she presented an aspect almost as bizarre as the crazed, wild-eyed ranting and raving one never encountered anymore now that the streets had been cleared of vagrants and drug addicts and those who used to panhandle along the waterfront.

"Don't let them do this to him!" she practically screamed.  "Don't let them make a mistake again and have to correct it!  The Holy Innocents!  Don't let them take him!  Save him before it's too late!  The Holy Innocents!"

The first nurse discreetly summoned the security guards, who went up to the strange woman the instant they entered the room.  One took hold of her arm, the other grabbed the back of her neck.  "Come along now, Alice," they said as they led her from the room.

"What was that all about?" Carter asked.  "I recognize her.  She attended my son when he was here.  What did she mean about making a mistake?"

"I'm sure Professor Kirkus will explain everything," the nurse assured him.  "He'll be here momentarily."

"I shall be happy to explain," the Director of Educational Authenticity said as he entered the room.  "It's a simply enough matter: crazy Alice again."

"She didn't seem crazy three months ago," Carter observed.

"We only gradually became aware of the problem," Professor Kirkus explained.  "For a while she was able to function, then the dementia became all too evident.  We've tried keeping her on, to do simple chores; but it clearly hasn't worked."

"She seems to feel my son's in danger - why?"

"She has apparently fixated on those kidnappings.  She evidently recognized some of the names as being children she personally attended - such as yours.  It's quite common for a demented mind to see itself as the basis of everything that happens around it.  Doubtless she associates her attendance with their disappearance.  It's most unfortunate, but I'm afraid the time has come for crazy Alice to pursue another line of work.  She clearly cannot be allowed around helpless children any longer."

"Another line of work?  What job could she possibly hold down?  I wouldn't have someone like that in any of my enterprises."

"Ah, there's the rub," Kirkus acknowledged.  "There's really nothing she can do."

"What's going to happen to her?" asked Carter.

"There are still a few places left for people like her, who have outlived their productivity.  I'll see she's provided for."

"She seemed very certain what happened to my son.  I'd like to talk to her when she calms down - for my wife's sake."

"She may never calm down," Kirkus warned.  "As to any association with this place, or the procedure, all I can offer you is my own son.  He was treated the same day as your son; and he remains fine, no ill effects, no mysterious disappearance.  But then I'm not a wealthy man; it's unlikely anyone would kidnap my son."

"There have been no ransom demands - you know that," Carter reminded.

"Perhaps something went wrong.  Or perhaps it was Kansas City people, attempting to disrupt our economy.  There are any number of reasons why no ransom was demanded.  We can only try and piece it all together.  And pray for guidance.  And strength."

"I didn't think you were a praying man, Gorham."

"It is the function of an educator to understand the people he deals with," Kirkus observed.  "How else is he to educate them?"

The door opened again.  This time a man in a white lab coat entered the room.  "I believe you met Dr. Harvess the last time you were here," Kirkus introduced the man.

"Dr. Harvess," Carter acknowledged the introduction.

Harvess inclined his head, then turned to Professor Kirkus.  "Have you explained to Mr. Carter -"

Kirkus cut him short.  "I was just coming to that.  Brad, let me be perfectly candid with you.  This child you adopted is of uncertain heritage."

"He's my son now.  I want him made smart."

"And he will be, that was never in contention.  I simply want you to be aware that he's of the right age to have already received matter.  And since, quite clearly, he is not from any of the best families, he must be of ordinary parentage."

"Which is why I want him made smart."

"I understand that," Kirkus agreed.  "I thoroughly concur with your decision - it's the only right one under the circumstances.  I just want you to understand that if he has received matter already, it could not have been smart matter.  Given his social status, it would have to have been good matter."

"So?"

"The first may very well neutralize the second.  Now, there is no danger to the child's health or mental stability.  It's not like the two will interact in such a way as to put him in jeopardy.  But good matter - while fully compatible with smart matter biochemically - tends to stimulate sections of the brain that inhibit intellectual development.  It won't necessarily make a bright child dull, but it most definitely will keep him from reaching his full potential - an unfortunate but necessary consequence of rendering him socially responsible.  We'll certainly give your son smart matter, but if he's been given good matter, he's already destined to grow up docile and self-effacing - highly desirable traits in the under classes, but not very useful to the upper classes."

"If you give him a double dose," Carter suggested.

Kirkus shook his head.  "It doesn't work that way.  Quantity is not a factor.  We could give ten times the amount and it wouldn't make a difference."

"Can't you X-Ray his skull or something to find out?"

"No, believe me: once the matter is delivered, it's virtually impossible to tell even a day later where the point of entry was.  And since these are molecularly identical to what's already present in the nervous system, they cannot be detected.  At this point, Brad, you simply have to to take your chances."

"Then that's what I'll do.  God would not have sent me a moron for a son.  Please proceed."

Dr. Harvess brought a syringe from his pocket and uncovered a needle so thin it was almost invisible.  Carter placed his son on the plexiglass table.  As the steady hand of the doctor approached, the light from below helped silhouette the needle.  Slowly, the doctor worked the needle into the child's skull just behind the right ear to a depth of two inches; then, working the syringe with his thumb and forefinger, released two cc of a clear liquid into the boy's brain.  The needle was then withdrawn.  Carter picked up his son and left.

The snow lay eight feet deep in Donner's Pass, where Sanderson Spears was holed up for the winter.  Like so many places both famous and infamous, Donner's Pass had, over the years, grown into a tourist attraction, something of a resort, with a bronze plaque commemorating its history.  Late fall, winter and early spring was the off-season; the skiing was better a couple miles to the south, at Squaw Valley; there were empty cabins nestled amidst pine forests, some with paved trails leading to the front door, most stocked with enough provisions for a dozen tourists.  All were locked up for the season - but a lock could be easily jimmied.  The weatherman from St. Louis, whose radar admitted him to every corner of the planet, though he himself had never left the state he was born and raised in, not even for a vacation, could have wintered in luxury in any of the tourist cabins.  Instead, he chose one of the most rustic and most isolated cabins in the Pass, one barely able to sustain human life.

Even before he reached the Sierras, he already knew of a little weather station to the northwest of Lake Tahoe, due west of the confluence of Interstate 80 and California State Roads 267 and 89.  He stopped there in the early afternoon the fourth, and final, day of his journey.  Spotting a man out back working with a primitive looking signaling device, he walked around the station seeking to engage him in conversation.

"I haven't seen one of those except in old videos," he said.  "I didn't think anyone used them anymore."

The man turned to him.  "That's because you can't get parts."

"Here, let me give you a hand," Spears offered his assistance.

"You can hold it steady while I try and bypass this busted circuit," the man said.

Spears held the tall silvery cylinder a moment; then, after watching the man struggle to re-route the electrical impulse, released it and said "I'll be right back."  He went to his car, got something from the store of equipment and gadgets in his truck; returned to the cabin; and, saying "This'll do it," proceeded to take over the task of repairing the broken circuit.

"Where'd you get that part?" the man asked.

"From one of these," he replied.

"You carry one with you?"

"Uh-huh."

"You a meteorologist?"

"Yep, sure am," said Spears.  "Out of work right now."

"Aren't we all," the man added.  "Wish we could pay you and I'd ask you to stay."

"Could I stay anyway?"

"Man's got to eat, got to have a roof over his head.  Unless you're independently wealthy."

"A weatherman can always find food," Spears whimsically noted; "he knows better than a farmer when and where the climate's ripe for the growing.  He can always find shelter: he knows better than a park ranger when everyone else's packing up and heading south, or north, to get out of the cold, or the heat.  But he can't always find work.  Let me stay.  I know equipment, forward and backward.  I know the weather.  Or thought I did.  I've seen some strange things lately."

"And you can't tell anyone, for fear of making someone late for work.  Yeah, I know that one.  Sure: why not stay?  Help us out.  There aren't many of us left.  There no future in telling the weather, no one but ourselves left to tell it to.  I'm Jim.  Jim Jones.  Infamous name.  My dad read about some lunatic who went to South America and killed all his followers.  He always  said that was the kind of son he wanted: one who'd kill all his followers.  He hated followers, always said if it weren't for followers they'd be no evil because there'd be no leaders.  Anyway, I'm Jim Jones.  Princeton's my last name.  Jim Jones Princeton.  I follow no one.  I lead no one."

"Sanderson Spears," the weatherman from St. Louis introduced himself.  "I don't know how or why I got my name.  I don't know what my father thought about anything.  I don't remember him ever expressing an opinion about anything.  Then one day he had a stroke, and never spoke again for the rest of his life.  He died when I was eighteen.  Everyone said it was hard to tell much difference before he had the stroke and after.  But I could tell.  He taught me to use computers; from there I taught myself to use weather equipment.  I would have gone all over the country - I chased storms all over Missouri; but my mother was too afraid of losing her whole family, so I stayed.  Then she died, and then I became afraid of leaving.  I intended to spend the rest of my life reporting the weather in St. Louis.  I was going to die in my little apartment on Sixth Street and have my ashes scattered across the Mississippi."

"Now you're on the run," Jim Jones observed.

"Yeah.  On the run," Sanderson Spears freely admitted.

"You're safe here.  Long as you don't cross the Silvers - they're the ones who run Carson City - or the Spurs, over in Reno."

"Are they big enough cities to have their own gangs?" Spears asked.

"There are smaller towns than them that do.  Wherever people took drugs, they took root, then took over.  And ended the drug problem by killing anyone caught with drugs.  End of discussion.  You can stay with the wife and me till the season's over - or you can take your pick of the cabins in the pass: they're all empty now.  Or you can stay here: it'll be rough, though."

"I'd like to stay here," said Spears.

"Fair enough."

"And work with you."

"Welcome aboard.  Come on in, I'll show you around.  This place once belonged to the US Park Service till the feds stopped overseeing national parks and returned them all to the states.  So the Park Rangers were disbanded, their facilities put up for auction.  No one wanted this one - too rustic; it sat for twenty years till what was left of the National Weather Service took it over.

It was a log cabin, fifty feet long by thirty feet deep, with a loft in the center barely bigger than the gable which brought in the morning sun, and a nearly blackened brick chimney at the northern end extending the full height of the cabin.  Inside, it was as rough hewn as outside, with unfinished wood floors, wooden planks for wallboard, a high wood-beamed ceiling, and a high fireplace at one end.  Next to the fireplace was a separate room, a bathroom; and at the opposite end a pantry.  Otherwise the whole interior was one large room.  Almost every available inch of wall space was taken up in maps and charts or else equipment, either free-standing or sitting on an array of tables extending the entire distance of the two longer walls.  Wedged in between the fireplace and front wall was a large cot, covered with a gray woolen blanket.  Between two tables along the opposite wall was a refrigerator and a stove.  Scattered about was an assortment of chairs.

"As you can see, no one really lives here.  We just take turns looking after the place and monitoring the equipment during the winter - when we can get to it.  All year long, for that matter; but nothing much happens here till winter.  Maybe a storm, a mud slide, sometimes a brush fire.  Every year we think'll be our last.  But they haven't cut the forest down yet.  Just a matter of time though, now that the Pacific Northwest is just about out of timber.  So what do you think of your new home?"

Sanderson looked around, at the equipment, the walls, ceiling, loft - at everything; but especially the equipment.  "I love it," he said.

"This evening you'll meet the crew, they'll all be back from checking the perimeters, making sure everything we've set up still works.  It all seems to break down as fast as we can repair it.  It gets harder and harder to find parts.  But we make do.  We just don't seem to know what it's all for any more."

The evening was crisp and cool, not quite cold but almost.  Something was still left of the sunset, though all of its eastern sprays had turned gray; and much of the deep blue had bleached to a darkening white.  The smell of pine surrounded everything; taller mountains in the distance obscured the height of this plateau, making it feel like sea level.  Behind the weather station a campfire was burning; gathered around it were four men, two women, and two boys.

"Jim Jones is our unofficial leader," one of the women was saying.  "Not that he likes the term no matter how unofficial we make it.  But he's been at it longer, knows more.  Plus he can fix more equipment!"

"Don't let Winnell fool you," Jim Jones countered; "she can take apart any piece of equipment ever made!"

"But only you can put it back together again!" Winnell added.

"Pete here's the man with all the charts and maps you see on the wall - the man of thousand maps, we call him!" Jim Jones explained another associate's skills.

Pete had a crippling disorder which made his left leg shorter than the right, drew his right hand almost into a ball, and effected a permanent cock to his head.  "Well, the way I figure," he explained, "it'd take me ten lifetimes to cover the Sierras on foot.  So, whenever I can, I get a friend with a helicopter to take me up, and I can see it all.  There's Nevada, there's California, there's Tahoe, Yosemite.  But I don't think in terms of picture postcards; I see everything as points on a map.  You might point out it's already been mapped.  But I've discovered something: it's changing.  The whole landscape.  I can't explain it - none of us can -"

"I've got a geologist friend," added another of the men gathered around the fire.  "He can't explain it either -"

"- but it's changing.  It's all changing," Pete finished his thought.

"Joe almost became a geologist himself," Jim Jones said of the man with the geologist friend.  "Right, Joe?"

"Yep: almost.  Then one day I saw a hurricane - I'm from Florida.  I survived hurricane Elmo - category five storm everyone thought was going to be a dud.  That did it for geology.  Had to be meteorology, or nothing."

"How'd you get here?" Sanderson Spears asked.

"Same way you did - same way we all did," Joe replied.  "We got chased out.  Me, I reported one too many hurricanes: that was the year eight of them hit South Florida.  That was also the year we stopped naming hurricanes - and started pretending they didn't exist.  You don't tell people anything that's going to keep them home from work.  Not if you want to stay healthy.  So I left Miami and eventually worked my way here.  The rest is history."

A huge flock of birds flew across the clearing from one stand of trees to another, their rhythmic flow like a wave undulating out at sea, or a symphony given form.

"I've never seen birds flock like that this close to dusk," Spears observed.

"You see a lot of strange things anymore," said the other woman, Jim Jones' wife Betty, who had been silent up to then.  "It's almost like they don't know if it's safe to follow their normal route.  And they leave later and later each year to go south, like they're more afraid of what's out there than of the winter storms here."

"They know there's something coming," Jim Jones added.  "And because we're in the profession we're in, we know it too, kind of.  Only we cant relate it except among ourselves and whatever network of meteorologists we can reach."

"Like that hurricane a few days back," Spears said.

"What hurricane?" asked Pete.  "We didn't hear about any hurricane.  This time of year?  Couldn't have been much, could it?"

"I've never seen anything like it."

"How'd you see it?"

"Can't you pick up things from other stations?" Spears asked.

"If they're within a hundred mile radius, give or take," said Winnell Smith.

"Then you guys are in for a treat," Sanderson Spears promised.  "I'll begin setting up my equipment tomorrow.  We'll be able to tap into any radar, anywhere on the planet: across that hill, or on the other wide of the world - you name it!"

"Something told me it was going to be our lucky day when you showed up on our doorstep this afternoon," said Jim Jones.  "Welcome, Sanderson.  Sandy.  What do you like to be called?"

"Sanderson."

"Not Sandy?"

"No, not Sandy.  My dad hated nicknames.  I still feel uncomfortable with anything but the name he gave me, exactly as it was given."

The campfire began dying down.  The sky had turned almost black.  The stars came out all at once, as if a switch had been thrown.  The air grew cold.  The chirping of crickets in the background became an almost deafening roar, as if the insects had gradually surrounded the campfire and were now moving in for the attack.

The two boys had fallen asleep.  Betty picked up the smaller of them, Jim Jones the other.  "We'd better be going," he said.  The others seconded that motion.

"You have everything you need for the night?" Spears was asked, in varying forms, by each of the meteorologists before leaving.  He assured them he did.

When everyone else was gone, Spears went inside and lay down for a moment, intending to get back up and make a fire before turning in for the night.  He fell asleep almost the moment his head touched the pillow, and only roused toward midnight when the front door flew open and a figure silhouetted against the full moon stepped across the threshold.

"You're under arrest!" a voice crying out in the middle of the night cut through the darkness of the cabin.

The horizon was limitless, the helicopter high enough to admit four of the six states the project would span.  To the northwest, Colorado, trailing into the southeastern corner of Wyoming; eastward, Kansas; and to the northeast, the western most wedge of Nebraska.  Bradley Jerome Carter, with the help of the Tungs, who traded favors with the Kansas City Rollers who, in turn, agreed to cut a deal with the Denver Mountaineers, the Cheyenne Buckaroos and the Amarillo Cowboys, had won the contract he sought; his bid was neither lowest nor highest: it was the accepted bid.  He wanted to survey the site firsthand.

"I'm taking him with me," he told his wife as he dressed his son.

"I've never said I wouldn't watch him," Carol Carter pointed out.

"I know.  I want him to be there when I take my first look at the landscape.  I want to share it with him."

"What is this project?  And do you really need another business venture?"

"I want this one," Carter explained.  "I'm not really sure what it is.  I don't think I'm supposed to ever know entirely - but I will.  It's top secret.  No one even knows who's behind it.  Rumor has it it's the Feds."

"How can that be?  They haven't built anything in decades.  It's almost like they're not even there anymore."

"Oh, they're there alright," Carter assured his wife.  "This is going to be the biggest project in the history of the world.  When it's finished, it's going to reach from Wyoming all the way down to Texas.  No one else could possibly coordinate anything this massive.  No one else has the kind of resources it's going to take."

"But what is it?" Carol again asked.  "A dam?  Some new transportation system?  Something like the missile silos they once had?  Something underground?  What?"

"I don't know.  No one does.  All I know for certain is it's supposed to take almost two decades to complete.  I want to be part of it.  I'm a builder: I want to be there when they break ground for the biggest building project in human history.  But even more so, I want to see it before anything's done, to get a feel for the landscape.  And I want my son to be part of it too."

The ride took four hours, including a stop for refueling in Sterling, Colorado.  The sky over most of Kansas was dismal, cloud soaked; but near the border it cleared; a brilliant blue led the way through the foothills of eastern Colorado.  The cool air along the helicopter's path grew steadily colder as the vehicle descended; by the time it landed, the air was almost frigid.  The man who helped refuel said he'd never seen it so cold this early in the fall.

"Choppers get tricky when it gets this cold," the man cautioned.  "You've flown them a lot?"

Carter's pilot assured the man he had.  "No different from driving a bulldozer, except it's air you're pushing out of the way instead of trees and dirt or snow and debris.  Its all road kill, no matter how you look at it."  Something made him laugh.  "We had us a big snowstorm awhile back.  Lots of people got trapped out there in it.  When the Tungs say clear the roads, you clear the roads.  Bulldozed 'em right along with the snow.  They'd look up at me like they were pleading; I guess they were.  My job wasn't to pull deadbeats out of snow banks, it was to clear the roads.  By the time we got to the river it was mostly body parts.  Like I say: road kill."

Bradley Carter held his son to the window when they took off again.  "See down there?" he said.  "That's all going to be cleared.  And a trench a hundred yards wide's going to stretch five hundred miles, from southeast of Cheyenne to southeast of Amarillo.  And it's all going to depend on us to happen.  You're looking at the handiwork of the master builder of all time.  A thousand years from now they'll remember who I was.  That's my reward.  Immortality."

From Sterling they had flown northwest almost to the point where Wyoming and Nebraska meet; then they started back.  The sky, still blue to the west, was rapidly turning black to the southeast, making two in the afternoon seem like nightfall.

"We'd better take another route," the pilot called over the roar of the chopper blade to his passenger.  "There's an ice storm right in our path."

"I didn't get where I am by changing my course every time the wind blew," Carter called back.  "We came this way, we'll return this way.  If I have to, I'll fly this craft myself."

They were halfway between Smith Center and Lebanon, Kansas, flying just north of U.S. Route 36 - they had touched the geographical center of the continental United States - when a sudden burst of freezing rain forced them down.  Ice was forming faster on the blades than the friction of its turning could melt.  The helicopter began losing power.  The pilot had no choice but to land.  He looked over at his boss as if to say "I couldn't help it," then began looking all around as if instructions on what to do next had been written down somewhere.

The rain was smashing against the bubble top of the helicopter more like hail than sleet.  A chunk of something shattered the plexiglass into a network of fine lines.

"I'll go get help," the pilot half-heartedly suggested.

"You do that," said Carter.  "With any kind of luck, there may still be a job waiting for you when you return."

The pilot threw a poncho over his shoulders and leaped from the chopper.  He looked in all directions but found nothing to guide him.  He started eastward a few yards then let out a blood curdling scream.  His hands groped at his face as he staggered in a circular path.  As he turned toward the chopper, a crystalline dagger caught the reflected light from the bubble's interior.  This dagger was wedged in his right eye; blood gushed down his cheek and covered the front of his poncho as he struggled to pull the dagger from his eye socket.  Then another dagger plunged into the top of his head and he fell to the slippery ground.  A few moments of writhing on the ground screamingly trying to pull the daggers from his skull ended in a convulsive twitching of his whole body; then absolute stillness as one after another crystal dagger plunged into his lifeless body.

These same daggers were crashing against the helicopter with a force nearly equal to the bubble's resistance; in places the plexiglass was severed by the razor sharp blades, the tops protruding into the cabin.  Bradley Carter laid his son beneath the chopper's dashboard, for greater protection, then inched his way to where the daggers had pierced the bubble.  Holding his torchlight to one of the tears, he carefully reached up to touch the tip of the blade, only to have it disappear down his fingers.  The blade had turned to liquid.  The heat of his torchlight had melted the dagger.

"What the hell!" he exclaimed as he jumped back, his curiosity about the dagger evolving into a kind of terror at its melting.

He settled into the pilot's seat and began working the controls, the piercing screams of a dozen daggers raging just inches above his head.  "We've got to get the hell out of here! he vowed as he tried to lift the chopper off the ground.  He finally succeeded in lifting it a few feet, only to have it come crashing back down as the blade broke in half, sending pieces of blade and bits of shrapnel flying through the blackened rain.

The engine began smoking, slowing sending paper thin shafts of smoke into the cabin through the breaches in the bubble.  Remaining inside would soon no longer be an option.  Carter searched for something he could use to help shield himself and his son from the daggers.  A sudden gust of wind blew one of the doors open; he rushed to close it, his arm grazed by a dagger.

"The door!" he said.  "That's it: the door!"  He grabbed the toolbox and rummaged for a hammer, a chisel and a screwdriver, with which he managed to free the door from its hinges.  He wrapped his son in a thick blanket, placed a second blanket around his shoulders, and tied his son to his back, like a little papoose.  Then he lowered his head and asked God to protect both he and his son.  The instant the "Amen" passed his lips he ripped the door open.  In the same movement, he leaped from the chopper and lifted the door up over his head to shield him from the daggers that were still falling with a force almost great enough to knock him down.

He managed to keep his footing along the ice encrusted pasture that surrounded him.  He had already asked God to guide his steps, so he simply kept moving, without knowing where he was headed or why.  The shield he carried grew heavier with each step, his arms weaker.  He had been walking for nearly an hour, though he had not covered an hour's stretch of territory.  He nearly stumbled several times.

"I've got to lie down," he said to no one in particular.  "Try to get into a ball, so the door covers us both."  As he spoke, he struggled to effect the posture he proposed, finally managing to roll into a fetal ball, with his son strapped to his back, beneath the chopper door.  He shivered beneath his battered shield till he heard a sound.  He lifted the shield enough to identify it as the rumbling of an engine.  Then the slamming of doors.  Then the crunching of heavy boots over blades of ice.  Four pair of boots surrounded him.  Four pair of hands reached down to him, slowly lifting the shield from his body then helping to raise him to his feet while keeping the door over him like an umbrella.  Together they walked to a large brown truck.  He climbed up and got in the back.  The four who had helped him heaved the helicopter door and climbed in after him, shutting the truck door behind them.

In the half light of the truck bed Carter could make out the bearded features of four large men.  He briefly studied each face then addressed one of them.  "What was that?" he asked.

"Icicles," the man replied.

"What does that mean: icicles?"

"It means you survived an icicle storm."

"I've never heard of any such thing," Carter said in a tone of disbelief.

"I'm sure there's a lot you've never heard of," the man remarked.  "They're not allowed to report things like this - even here, which, for now, seems to be the only place they occur.  There are a lot of strange things going on no one's ever heard about.  The atmosphere is doing some pretty weird things.  You've probably never heard of fireballs either, have you?  Hailstones that are red hot and the size of grapefruit: they'll actually burn you, like dry ice; and they can also electrocute you, or ignite your clothes - just to name one thing.  It's because of the icicle storms we're here -"

"It rains icicles," Carter again expressed his disbelief.

"You just saw it.  They're still beating on the roof  - are you deaf as well as blind?" the man replied impatiently.  "We're here working with the locals.  See our suits?  These blankets?  Our men helped develop them: they're made of a metallic fiber that's strong enough, woven tightly enough, to keep the icicles from piercing through.  We might get a little bruised from the impact, but so far we haven't encountered one big enough to rip the fabric."

"So when does the project actually start?" Carter changed the subject.

"Project?  What project?  Our project's over, we've made the material, it's time to move on.  If we'd left a day earlier, there'd have been no one here to save you."

"I saved myself," Carter corrected the man.  "All you did was save me some steps - and I'm grateful to you for that.  So you're not connected to the project?"

"No, we're not."

"But you men are federal agents," Carter conjectured.

The four men burst out laughing.  When their laughter finally subsided, the man who had been talking apologized.  "Forgive our rudeness," he said, "but your characterization really is quite amusing - in light of who we are, that is.  Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Paris Commune, leader of the T-Men.  These are my lieutenants: Monte Carlo, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Sri Lanka."

"Do you have real names?" Carter asked in a disgusted tone.

"We did," Paris Commune admitted.  "But we learned - learned the hard way - all our members learned - that our real names put our families in jeopardy.  So we took pseudonyms: noms des plumes.  And you're Bradley Jerome Carter, who of course needs no introduction."

"Does this mean I'm your prisoner?"

"We take no prisoners," Said Paris.  "You're our guest.  We - we like to think - we saved you...and the child.  You save a man's life - or think you did - you're responsible for that life.  At least as far as the next town.  No harm will come to you, Mr. Carter - and certainly not to the child."

"Aren't you afraid I'll reveal your whereabouts?" Carter asked.

"By the time you did - if you did, which somehow I know you won't: oh, not because we rescued you, but simply because this whole incident is not important enough to you to bother with - but if you did, it wouldn't matter.  We'd be long gone by then.  You're not a threat to us; certainly the child isn't."

"You keep calling him 'the child'; he's not 'the child': he's my child!  My child.  My son."

"I thought you lost your son," Paris observed.

"And I found my son.  Not the son I lost, but one who was sent to me.  Washed up by the river."

"You found your son in the river?"

"Yes."

"Then we have something in common," said Paris.  "The great industrialist from St. Louis and the most wanted man in America: we both lost a son...we both found a son in the river.  I lost my son - one of my sons - because he was my son, his mother because she was my wife, his grandfather because he was my father: all murdered because my name was linked to them.  That's when I ceased being who I was, so that no one else would die for my sins.  I found a son the night I planted a bomb at the base of Eads Bridge.  Someone had thrown him in the Mississippi.  I swam to him before he could drown.  He has no name.  Nor will he have a name till he chooses one for himself.  The parallel ends there.  Your son will be able to take your name, mine will not.  Shall we make plans to meet a year hence - same time, same place - and trade 'daddy' stories?"

"I think not," Carter answered Paris' whimsical question literally.

"Nor do I," Paris agreed.  "I wish you could take a detour from your schedule long enough to see my son, though."

"I never take detours," Carter again responded absolutely literally.

"Take this one," Paris almost pleaded as a strange look came over his face.  "Please," he kept insisting.  "Please, take it.  You must see my son - you must.  I've never been so sure of anything in my life than I am that he's your son.  You must see him."

"Do you have any idea how many kids people have tried to palm off as my son?" Carter asked.

"I don't want to give this child up," Paris explained.  "I rescued him -"

"When you planted the bomb that sent me my son."

"That bomb did not destroy Eads Bridge.  We do not blow things up without warning people first.  But that's neither here nor there.  I don't want to turn this child over to you to be raised to become an oppressor; he deserves better.  But I know - I absolutely know, as if I had just read it on the wall of this truck - that he is your son.  You must come with us.  You must see him."

"You have the means to force me to do as you ask," Carter reminded his rescuer.

"But I won't - and you know I won't," Paris acknowledged.

"Then that ends the matter," said Carter.  "My son is dead.  Your certainty to the contrary is no match for my resolve."

"You won't even consider it?" Paris tried one last time, but Carter turned away and never looked back at him again.

The storm finally subsided as the truck drove down U.S. Route 36.  The driver stopped on the outskirts of Lebanon, Kansas, where a gas station allowed the industrialist from St. Louis to arrange for his return trip home.  When he and his son were safely accommodated, the truck headed north up State Route 191 toward Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Paris Commune, who had been absolutely stoic the day he discovered the bodies of his wife, son and father in the basement of their tract home; stoic when he laid them to rest; stoic when he handed his sole surviving son to someone else to raise, knowing he would never see his son again; stoic in all the ten years that had passed since he lost his family - Paris Commune, the leader of the greatest band of outlaws in human history, broke down and wept for the man who would not acknowledge his son's existence, and for the boy who, because of an irreversible decision, would never see his real father.

"I could always just show up on his doorstep with the boy," he muttered, half to himself.  "But even seeing his son, I don't think, would make him change his mind.  Being true to his decisions is all that really matters to him.  He sacrificed being a giant for the sake of having an empire.  He might have been the one to have finally lifted the yoke from the people's backs.  I didn't think anything could ever make me cry; but that has."

The same renegade band of clouds that hurled icicles at Bradley Jerome Carter and his son dumped a foot of rain as it rumbled through Kansas City; then, two days later, when it finally reached St. Louis, produced a gentle, soaking rain that brightened everyone's late autumn flower garden.  The Director of Educational Authenticity for Region Three glanced from his work occasionally to watch the raindrops striking the window of his third floor office in the Little Red Schoolhouse.  Professor Gorham Kirkus was setting up his region's master plan for the 2051 school year.  The curricula were being worked out by a bi-partisan committee of businessmen and political leaders, which Kirkus chaired.

"What the economy needs," he had stated the guiding principle of the committee's work, "is, has for the last hundred years been, and will continue into the foreseeable future to be, the sole determinant of what our children will be taught.  This is true not only for our Region but for all five Regions."

The Federal government managed the nation's educational system, the last stronghold of its power, through a series of compromises with the localities.  Kirkus and four other educators were given dominion over the fifty states - ten states apiece; his Region included Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado.  His primary responsibility was coordinating which type of children would be given a thorough education and which would be given only the basics.  There were smart children, who would be trained to assume positions of responsibility; and good children, who would be given training to hone the rudimentary skills they would need to perform the essentially menial tasks they would be assigned.

"And the special children," he mused as he worked.  A smile played at his lips.  "Stroke of genius, that one, if I say so myself.  A hundred years ago special meant retarded; now it means something else entirely.  We've done our job well.."

The phone rang.  "Hello," he answered.

"Professor Kirkus?" a crisp voice asked.

"Yes," Kirkus replied.

"Please hold for the Vice-President, sir," the voice announced, followed almost instantly by a big, booming voice the vocal equivalent of a slap on the back.

"Gorham: how in the world are you?  How's everything going?" the Vice-President of the United States asked.

"Going quite well, Mr. Vice-President."

"Now you gonna go and get formal on me, Gorham?" the Vice-President asked.

"No, Mitch, no such luck," Kirkus replied.  "It amuses my sense of nostalgia to accord you the kind of deference your predecessors took for granted."

"We're halfway to the 22nd century, don't forget.  The Pres - my boss, and yours - is no longer the main man.  Got a bunch of reformed hoodlums in every city that got religion when they got power running the show now, Gorham."

"Who think they do, Mr. Vice-Pres," Kirkus corrected the Vice-President.

"True.  They never quite got the grasp of what real power was, did they?  They still think it's based on brute force alone, don't they?"

"Guns and bombs and knives and whips and chains, oh my."

"How do we define it, Gorham?" the Vice-President asked.  "You're the man man there.  What's it all about?"

"It's about attitude, Mr. Vice-President.  It's a state of mind, and a state of being.  The hoods - the new warlords - don't genuinely see themselves as a separate class - a class above.  They're just regular guys who were able to extort more than most.  Real power is invisible, Mr. Vice-President.  Extrasensory.  Almost supernatural.  People know you have it."

"Leadership!  You're talking plain old leadership, Gorham."

"No, Mr. Vice-President, I'm not talking leadership any more than I am might.  I'm talking ruler ship.  Any barrel chested goon with a presence can be a leader - no offense -"

"- none taken."

"- but only the most exquisite people can truly rule.  It isn't enough to be willing to send millions to their death for a good - or bad - cause: power is the willingness to send them there simply to make a statement.  True power is not merely next to godliness: it is godliness, in human garb."

"Playing God, then that's it!"

"Being God: that's it."

"So now that we got that out of the way, how's the wife and kid?"

"They're fine, as always, Mitch.  Edwina is at home - waiting for her husband to get home so she can ask him how his day was."

"And little Reggie?"

"He is heir to what I've built.  He is a special child."

"Okay, Gorham, now that we've got the pleasantries out of the way, how's the project going?"

"As planned.  It's on schedule.  We're set to begin the middle of November," Professor Kirkus explained.

"Leg work's all done?" the Vice-President asked.

"Everything's in place.  All the contractors are lined up.  Ducks in a row."

"None of them are going to see the finished product?"

"Too risky, Mitch.  As each contractor's part is completed, he's no longer needed.  End of discussion."

"And the Tongs: you don't see them being a problem down the line?  They are bankrolling your general contractor, aren't they?"

"The Tungs - not the Tongs, Mr. Vice President: the Tungs -"

"You mean all this time I've been trading a U for an O - is that what you're saying?"

"I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings."

"One last question, Gorham: how's the weather?  On track?"

"The weather is behaving exactly as our forecast anticipated."

"Then we've got time to complete the project."

"We have a good two decades, probably longer. The project will be done in plenty of time.  It'll be there when we're ready for it.  Trust me on that."

"And will the Tongs - er, Tungs - be invited to join us?"

"I think not, Mitch.  They will be left to stew in their own juices.  Perhaps quite literally."

"I hear you, Gorham.  I definitely hear you.  So when it all hits the fan, we won't be singing The Gang's All Here, will we?"

"The gangs will be neither here nor there.  Just a stinking pile of rubble for the worms, should any worms remain."

"Big can of worms!  We'll see to it there's a big can of worms - just for them!"

"Amen to that, Mr. Vice-President."

Red Cloud was closed.  Every farmhouse, every tenant house, every home inside town limits was dark.  All the shops were closed and darkened.  The diner on the edge of town, the gas station across the street were closed.  It was a sign.  The people of Red Cloud were part of a vast network of outposts.  They believed in what the T-Men were doing; they had been helped by them and felt indebted, or else they remained neutral; either way, they kept vigil.  Activities out of the ordinary were report along a communications network reaching to the T-Men's headquarters in Wyoming.  A closed town along the way meant trouble ahead.  Federal agents had gotten a tip that a contingent of T-Men led by Paris Commune himself was in the area; they moved in.  They were waiting along Interstate 80 outside Grand Island, Nebraska, their cordon of men fanning out as far west as North Platte, as far east as Lincoln.  There was no way of evading capture this time.

The panel truck headed west along US Route 136 some twenty miles until it came to the town of Franklin.  There, it turned north, taking Nebraska State Route 10.  It passed the intersection with State Route 4; an hour later it crossed the junction of State Road 74 and US Route 6 at the town of Minden.  Within an hour it would intersect Interstate 80 at Kearney, Nebraska.

But it never got there.  No truck matching its description was seen anywhere along Interstate 80.  By midnight the Feds had commandeered every local law enforcement agency as far west as Salt Lake City, Utah, and as far east as Des Moines, Iowa; but the truck was never spotted.  For two days and two nights the Federal agents and their local allies kept vigil; then they cancelled the operation and went home.

Just south of Kearney was a state recreation area called Bassway Strip; on it, a camp ground; beyond the campground, a bluff.  Hidden by thick pine trees was an opening in the bluff; it looked like a small cave formed over the millennia by the action of wind and rain.  It was not a cave, however, but a man made opening, big enough to admit a vehicle the size of Paris Commune's panel truck, which entered at approximately eight P.M. and proceeded due north.

The Platte River stood between Bassway Strip and Interstate 80.  It was impossible to cross the river without encountering the Interstate.  Unless one went under the river, and under the Interstate.

The cave at Bassway Strip was but one of hundreds of openings along a network of tunnels running hundreds of miles beneath the Great Plains from as far north as Butte, Montana, to as far south as Santa Fe, New Mexico, as far east as Jefferson City, Missouri, and as far west as Boise, Idaho.

One of the T-Men, the newest member, the one calling himself Monte Carlo, expressed surprise at the sudden change of venue.  "Why we heading in here?" he asked.  "You expect one of those fireball storms?"

"No," answered Paris, "we expect an ambush.  Do you know where we are?"

"In a cave," answered Monte Carlo.

"We're in a tunnel," Paris corrected him, "fifty feet below the ground.  We won't see daylight again for another three days."

"I don't get it," Monte Carlo conceded.

"We're not wanton killers," Paris explained.  "But there is one thing we would kill for: to protect our escape route.  For a hundred years, silently, relentlessly, our people have burrowed beneath the Plains, constructing, foot by foot, mile by mile, the most extensive network of tunnels ever conceived.  For a hundred years we have kept our secret.  No one but us knows about it.  No one ever will.  Because if we even suspect someone of being a traitor, we kill him.  We could be wrong; there could be dozens - hundreds - of innocent men lying buried along these tunnels.  We don't dare take the chance.  This is our greatest resource, the most massive thing ever built by human beings.  Hundreds of miles in every direction, beneath rivers, beneath mountains, beneath towns and plains and forests.  I'm sorry: we cannot take the chance."

Paris took a 45 from his pocket, aimed it and, before Monte Carlo had time to react, pulled the trigger.  The bullet struck the suspected traitor between the eyes, killing him instantly.  The body was removed from the truck and buried in the tunnel; a few words were said, mostly prayers to be forgiven if he had been innocent; then the bloodstains were removed and the truck resumed its journey beneath the great plains, emerging from the tunnels just to the south of Ravenna, Nebraska, to continue the journey above ground, eastward one hundred seventy miles on State Route 2 to where it intersected US Route 385 at the town of Alliance.  From there, it was due north into southwestern South Dakota until US Route 18 headed west from Hot Spring, South Dakota, forty miles into Wyoming.  Then it was US 85, again due north, till US 16 took a northwestern path from New Castle, Wyoming, to continue a few miles more to their headquarters outside the small hamlet of Recluse, Wyoming.

Nothing was said the rest of the trip regarding the new member left behind in the tunnel.  Upon their return, however, the Council was summoned for a special session; Paris Commune, their leader, presided over it.  There, the matter was discussed.

"We have to assess the chances he informed the Feds of our headquarters," Paris addressed the council.

"Wouldn't they already be here if he did?" a Council member asked.

"More than likely not," Paris responded.  "They know wherever we're headquartered is an armed camp.  A direct assault would be unthinkable.  They'd wait till our guard was down -"

"Our guard is never down," a senior member reminded his leader.

"But they don't know that.  Our discussion here, tonight, is whether to establish a new headquarters or remain here.  Even if we double our vigil, we couldn't anticipate their movements more than, realistically, a few hours ahead.  We've been here five years now.  It may be time to move on."

"Where?"

"That's the second thing we have to decide.  We could return to one of our former sites, or seek a new one."

"I say let's put it to a vote here and now," Paris' second in command, a very tall, thin man calling himself Mount Everest, suggested.

"Alright," agreed Paris.  "Shall we re-locate?"  All in favor."

A show of hands indicated a clear majority supporting the motion.  "Opposed?"

Of of fifteen Council members seated around the room, only four signaled their opposition.  "Then it's decided," Paris made the motion official.  "We re-locate.  Now we have to decide where."

"I say let's go back to Butte," offered one of the members.  "It's been twenty-five years since we left Montana - very few of us were even T-Men then.  They won't look for us there."

"That's precisely where they will look," another member countered.

"There's some truth to that," Paris agreed.  "The Feds are not very imaginative.  When they finally get here and find it empty, their first response will be to check out every place they've know us to be headquartered.  I say Montana is out.  Idaho is out.  Eastern Washington is out.  The Western Dakotas are out."

"I say let's head west," Mount Everest put forth.  "California.  The Sierras.  We know we'll be safe half the year there."

The ensuing discussion indicated a general support for the notion of moving to California.  "Then it's settled?" asked Mount Everest.

A round of "Yea's" was followed by one very loud, very clear "Nay."  Paris Commune alone spoke against the move.

"No," he said, "it's not settled.  It's far from settled.  We cannot afford to isolate ourselves for half the year from the very people we're committed to freeing from government tyranny.  We can't allow a safe haven to limit our range of activities.  If the Feds can't come to us, we can't go to them either."

"We don't have to go to the very summit of the peaks," Mount Everest reminded.  "We can settle in the foothills, make sure we allow ourselves access to the roadways; but still be high enough to be relatively inaccessible."

"I have a better idea," Paris countered.  "Go east, young man.  Go east."

"East?" the entire council repeated the word as if it were a dreaded curse hurled at them.

"That's right," Paris repeated.  "East."

"You can't be serious," a senior member observed.

"I can indeed.  We have great support in parts of the east - not as great maybe as out here, but more than enough to establish a communications network.  Plus, the Feds would never think to look for almost on their doorstep.  We could go perhaps years with a minimum of our resources devoted to keeping the Feds at bay.  We could devote more of our energies to getting the job we've undertaken done."

"What about our tunnels?  We don't have tunnels back east.  We have no escape route."

"We have no tunnels in California either," Paris reminded everyone.

"But we wouldn't be as far from where they are.  The possibility of extending the tunnels exists.  But across the Mississippi?  It's impossible."

"Nothing's impossible.  Including getting along without the tunnels.  It sickens me every time we have to take someone's life to protect the tunnels.  I don't want to have to ever do it again.  I genuinely liked the man whose life I took a few days ago."

"But where?  Where back east?" someone asked.  "We don't know the terrain.  We'll be like fish out of water."

"If the fish had not come out of the water a million years ago," said Paris, "we wouldn't be having this discussion right now."

"How will we find the right place?" someone else asked.

"The same way people have been finding their way from place to place for thousands of years: with a map.  I suggest we send a scouting party to evaluate the possible sites.  I'll lead that party myself.  When we've found the best place, then we can decide once and for all which direction we'll go.  All in favor?"

All were in favor.  "Then I move we begin our search at once, before the winter sets in: it'll come early this year."

When the meeting adjourned, Paris went to see his son.  As he watched the baby sleeping, he spoke softly about the man he had met.

"I'll always keep trying to return you to your father; but I know I'll fail each time.  It shouldn't matter, but it does and it will.  I'll never be a real father to you, because he'll always be there.  When I found you I thought you were mine; now I know you're not and can never be.  Damn him, I can't take what isn't mine.  I'll give you all I can, and pray it'll be enough - though I don't know who it is I'll be praying to.  He's so sure of his God: he'd have no trouble teaching you to believe.  But I can't.  I'm sorry, my little swimmer.  So very sorry."

He kissed his son goodbye the next morning and set off with three others to find a new home.  "You look after my son," he told one of his lieutenants, named Stone Creek; "he seems more comfortable with you and Mount Everest than anyone else.  And I've got to have Mount Everest with me.  So you get to play nurse-maid."

Paris and his men expected their search to take several weeks.  They concentrated their search on two areas: the extreme northeast, from Lake Ontario, along the St. Lawrence River, through upstate New York into New England; and the Appalachian Mountains, from West Virginia westward into the Tennessee-North Carolina panhandle.

They worked their way down the Appalachian Trail to the Great Smoky Mountains, ending up on Clingman's Dome, just over the border from North Carolina.  Below them flowed Little River; Paris led the party to a clearing in the forest of trees covering the mountain where they could look down onto the sparkling water.

"This is the highest point in Tennessee," he announced.  Then he took them to the other wide of the mountain, where an enormous tree stood in a clearing, surrounded by a few scraggly saplings whose growth was stunted from being in their parent's overpowering shadow.

"I grew up around here," Paris said.  "See that?" he pointed to a bronze marker of the kind used to note unusual historical objects.  "The irony of it never fails to move me.  I've stood here and laughed at that tree; I've fallen to my knees in tears; once I even prayed to it.  This is the most sacred spot on the face of the earth.  All your Mecca's, your Jerusalem's, your Machu Picchu's, your walled cities, your temples, your palaces - all your national treasures pale in comparison.  This is where we will build our headquarters.  Not right here: I wouldn't desecrate this spot by putting anything manmade on it.  But farther down, in the shadow of this tree."                                            

The full moon dwarfed the man in the doorway.  The night air robbed his voice of authority.  "You're under arrest!" came out more a request than an order.  A small hand fumbled for a light switch, finally finding one; but the impact of the sudden light almost blinded the arresting officer.

"Don't move!" he said as he recovered his eyesight.  "Alright, now you can get up," he changed his order.  "I'm taking you in.  Don't try to get away."

Sanderson Spears arose from his bed and faced his arrester, almost towering over him.  "Aren't you going to read me my rights?" he asked.

"You have no rights," came the reply.  "You killed my father.  So I'm making a citizen's arrest.  I'm taking you back to St. Louis with me."

"I didn't kill your father," Spears said.  "I've never killed anyone.  I don't think I could kill anyone."

"You're lying.  I heard them say you were responsible for my father's death, and that they'd make you pay."

"Who is your father?" Spears asked.

"He worked for you - at your station.  His name was Joe -"

"- Joe Matthews?"

"Yeah, that's it."

"My God!  He's dead?  He was the best technician I've ever worked with.  He didn't know the first thing about weather, but there was nothing about running a TV station he didn't know.  He's dead?  How?"

"You should know that."

"Where were you when you heard someone say I killed him?"

"I was hiding.  He made me hide.  He said don't come out till everyone's gone.  So I hid.  I heard the men come in.  They asked him about you.  I heard my father say he didn't know anything about anything you did.  Then they asked where I was.  He said he didn't know.  Then I heard a gunshot - I guess that's when you came in and shot him.  Then the men said you had killed him.  "We'll find him - both of them," I heard them say.  Then they left, so I came out.  And I tracked you, all the way here.  Now I'm placing you under arrest."

"How could you possibly have tracked me?"

"It was easy.  I knew who you were and what you looked like - I even had a picture of you from the TV magazine.  I figured you'd come west, so I came west too."

"I did not kill your father - I swear it!  I would never kill the best technician in Missouri!"

"Then why did they say you did?"

"They blamed me for the Mississippi overflowing too: do you think I caused that?"

"No."

"Why did they say I did, then?" Spears asked.

"To make you look guilty?"

"Maybe that's why they said I killed your father, too.  Who knows?  Maybe they knew you were listening, and said it deliberately to make you think it."

"They didn't know I was there.  They don't like you, maybe."

"No, they don't - no maybe about it."

"Oh."

"I'm very sorry about your father."

"I am too."

"How old are you?  And what's your name?"

"I'm almost fourteen," the boy said.  "My name is Joey."

"Are you hungry, Joey?"

"Maybe a little?"

"Then let me fix you something.  I promise I won't try to escape."

"Okay.  I trust you."

Spears proceeded to the other end of the cabin, followed by Joey.  "How about a sandwich?" Spears asked.

"Sure."

"When the sandwich was fixed and eaten and the boy no longer hungry, Spears proposed a compromise.  "Why don't you place me under house arrest.  That way you don't have to be afraid I'll escape.  How does that sound to you?"

Joey thought a moment before responding.  "If I fall asleep, you might kill me, too.  I should tie you up first."

"I promise I won't kill you if you fall asleep."

"And you won't run away?"

"I promise I won't."

"Okay," the boy relented.  "I trust you."

"First I'm going to make a fire," said Spears, "then we're going to bed."  He proceeded to place logs in the fireplace; managed to get them started; stoked the fire to keep it going; then motioned for the boy to come to bed with him.

"You want me to sleep in the same bed with you?" the boy asked hesitantly.

"You see any other bed?"

"I'd rather sleep on the floor," said Joey.

"There's only one set of covers, and it's going to get cold in here, even with the fire.  You're sleeping right next to me."

"Will it hurt?" Joey asked when the lights were out and they had gotten under the covers.

"Will what hurt?"

"When you have sex with me."

"What?  Have sex with you?  What the hell you talking about?" Spears demanded.

"My dad said you were queer for that equipment of yours," Joey explained.  "I know what queer means.  It means having sex with boys.  Forcing them to do things -"

"First of all, I'm not queer," Spears told the boy.  "Secondly, I have no earthly interest in you whatsoever; and, thirdly, I'm under house arrest, don't forget."

"Even in prison they rape boys," Joey countered.

"I'm not going to rape you, I promise, so go to sleep."

"I can't sleep, there are too many things on my mind.  I feel like talking - it helps to talk about things that bother you."

"I don't want to hear anything you have to say: you got that, kid?"

"Okay, I see.  You're into S  and M - I know what S and M's all about: the guys at school told me all about it.  I like to talk, you force me to shut up.  Then that's supposed to excite us so much that we -"

"I get the picture," Spears interrupted Joey's explanation.

"I'm not into S and M, but if it's what you want, I'll do it.  I'll shut up."

"Thank you Jesus!" Spears exclaimed.

"Amen," said the boy.  Then they both fell silent.  Within seconds Joey was asleep; a few minutes later Spears, too, had fallen asleep.  Before sunrise the fire had all but died; the autumn chill seeped into the cabin from every crevice.  The weatherman and his technician's son huddled, half asleep, for warmth.  The very earliest rays of sunlight prompted the weatherman from the comfort of his bed, to go build another fire.  Then he got back into bed next to his shivering bed mate and fell asleep a second time, holding the boy in his arms till he stopped shivering.

The sky first turned a deep crimson, close to the horizon; the two windows at the back looked like twin paintings.  Then, as the depth of color welled up toward the zenith, golds and purples diluted the red to a delicate pink fanning the awakening western recess.  Inside the cabin, the weatherman got up first, threw a couple more logs on the fire, then proceeded to the other side to brew some coffee and fix breakfast.

The smell of the food roused the boy.  When he got up, however, it wasn't to eat.  "I've got to go to the bathroom," he said.  "Do I have to go outside?" he asked.

"You sure do," Spears replied, then stopped the boy before he got to the door.  "No, you don't have to go outside.  There's the bathroom."

"Then why did you say I had to go outside?"  The boy looked genuinely puzzled.

"I lied."

"Did you also lie when you said you didn't kill my father?" Joey asked.

"Oh brother!" Spears muttered.  "You take things very literally, don't you?" he noted.

"I believe what people tell me, if that's what you mean."

Spears shook his head.  "Just go pee."

"I've got to do the other too," Joey said in the tone of a supplicant.

"Alright.  I amend my first literal statement: go pee and shit, wash up, and then report for breakfast.  Have I covered everything?  Oh," he added as an afterthought, "if you need to do any boy stuff while you're in there, feel free.  Okay?"

"I know what 'boy stuff' is," Joey said, almost as a boast.  "But I don't need to do it."

"You are a walking miracle!"

After breakfast, Spears set the tone for the day's activities.  "The first thing you've got to decide is who you're going to believe: me, that I'm innocent; or them, that I'm guilty."

"I don't know," Joey admitted.  "I wish I could believe both of you."

"Well, you can't.  What I say and what they say cannot both be true.  Think very carefully about it, because you can't go back.  The people you wish you could believe would kill you just like they killed your father: it's guilt through association with them."

"The Tungs, you men?"

"Them, and all the other gangs that have taken over every city in this country.  Your father was killed because he worked with me.  If your father hadn't told you to hide, they would have killed you too.  So you can never go back.  What I need to know is if you're likely to turn me in someday; because if you're still not sure who to believe, then I've got to leave this area, and it has to be today."

"I could always track you again," Joey boasted.

"No, you couldn't," Spears countered.  "Because I know how to use the weather to cover my trail.  I can literally disappear into a puff of smoke.  The only reason you found me is because I didn't know you were following me.  This time I will know - if I have to leave.  So you tell me - because I'll believe you: is it safe for me to stay here?"

Joey thought for a moment.  "If I can't go home," he concluded, "then I have to stay here, with you.  If I make you have to leave, then I'll be alone.  That is, if I can stay here with you."

"You can stay - for as long as you want.  So the only question remaining is if I can stay."

"You can stay, too," Joey decided.  "I won't turn you in."

"Good."

"I did lie to you once though," Joey admitted.  "When I said I knew what boy stuff was."

"You'll go straight to hell," Spears warned.

"You think I will?" Joey asked as a troubled look enveloped his face.

"Yep.  And when you arrive, I'll give you a great big kiss on the lips so Satan thinks you're a queer as well as a liar!"

The boy smiled, finally realizing Spears was joking.  Then he shrugged, as if joining in the fun, and said "I'll probably end up there anyway!"  But there was no hint of playfulness on his face.

As the day wore on, Spears became so involved in setting up his equipment that, when the others arrived and began asking who the boy loitering about watching the weatherman was, he had to stop and think who they were talking about.

"Ah: him!" Spears suddenly remembered.  "He's another victim of mob rule.  His father worked for me; when they decided I was to blame for the Mississippi flooding they went after anyone close to me.  They killed my chief technician.  Joey here was hiding or he'd have gotten it too."

"You brought him with you?" asked Jim Jones Princeton.

"Why didn't you introduce us last night?" Joe Riegen asked.

"He followed me," Spears explained.  "Showed up on my doorstep - no: in my doorway - around midnight."

"Where's he going to go now?" asked Winnell Smith.

"Nowhere: he's got to stay here.  He has no home."

"What about relatives?" asked Pete Hence.

"Hey Joey!" Spears called.  "Come and meet the meteorologists who set this place up."  The introductions complete, the boy was then asked if he had relatives anywhere.

"Yeah," he reluctantly admitted, "I've got relatives.  Some in St. Louis.  Some in Kansas City.  I don't see them too much  But I guess I could go live with them if you want me to leave."

"No one wants you to leave," said Spears.  "It's too dangerous," he said to the others.  "He has to stay here.  We can teach him to help set up equipment.  I have a responsibility to him: if I hadn't conjured up the river demons his father would still be alive.  I have to watch after him."

"It's okay by me," said Jim Jones.  The others agreed, too, that the boy should stay.

"Only thing is," Spears acknowledged, "I don't even know if he's interested in the weather."

"I am," Joey assured everyone.  "I like the weather okay - even if it did kill my dad."

"Good," said Spears.  "And with any kind of luck," he added, "you inherited your dad's skills."

The rest of the day was spent setting up equipment, the primary goal of gathering local data almost overshadowed by the secondary goal of exchanging data with other stations throughout the country.

"It's like starting from scratch," Jim Jones observed.  "For nearly twenty years the weather's been left simmering - no: make that smoldering - on the back burner.  It's like rediscovering all the technology.  Like some archeological dig."

"You can't help but be a little afraid, though," Pete Hence confessed.  "You start seeing too much, you might start telling others what you've seen.  A blizzard, or a hurricane, or a flash flood could put you on the most wanted list.  All the mobsters and gang lords'll be looking for you if so much as an hour's productivity is lost."

"We used to be the best friends communities had," Joe Riegen mused.  "Now we've their worst enemies - and for exactly the same reason we were their best friends."

A thud interrupted their talk.  They looked around to find Joey standing over a tri-pod and monitor which had fallen to the ground.

"You idiot!" Spears angrily addressed the boy.  "What the hell were you doing?"

"I just wanted to see how it worked," Joey answered.

"You won't be able to do that now, will you!" Spears retorted.

"I'm sorry."

"This equipment's valuable, it's not easily replaced," Spears sternly advised the boy.  "Be careful with it."

"I will," Joey promised.

Later, in private, Jim Jones admitted to Spears that he "kind of felt sorry" for the boy.

"This equipment - and what it enables us to do - is my whole life: you've got to understand that, Jim.  I won't have some idiot kid I didn't even want here in the first place breaking any of it.  I just - I won't have it, that's all."

They worked every day, sometimes from sunup, which came later each day, to sunrise, which came earlier each day, struggling to get the mountain terrain to accept the wires they planted deep enough to run beneath the Sierra winters; the bracing for their monitors, chronometers, barometers and other above ground equipment; and the casings for their radar dishes.  The mountain slopes fought them every inch of the way; the Sierras gave no ground.  Sometimes on a whim they broke a cable strong enough to withstand a hurricane: cold and hot and cold and hot and wet and dry all in the span of a few hours, weakening the cable to where the falling limb of a dying tree snapped it like a toothpick.  Or else a wind so dry and strong  - of the kind that never used to descend the eastern slopes - sent a spray of topsoil into the delicate diodes of a device set in a sheltered recess to protect it from ice and snow, jamming its intricate movements.

The mountains fought hard, but the meteorologists found harder, forcing the Sierras to a fragile truce that both sides knew would be broken at the first opportunity.

On the last warm day of the season, Sanderson Spears discovered a treasure.  He had driven southward along State Route 89, looking for a secluded, well protected site below Lake Tahoe to set up a remote monitor.  He came to a peak called Monitor Pass, just south of the town of Markleeville and some fifty miles southwest of Donner's Pass.  The name struck his fancy, so he stopped and searched the pass for a site.  He found his site - the perfect site - just above the base of the peak.  It was a cavern.  Just inside was something beyond his wildest dreams.  Someone, sometime, for some reason, had built a cabin, far enough into the cavern it could not be seen from the mouth, yet enough light filtered in to allow Spears to inspect it.  "This is going to be mine!" he vowed.  "My own station.  However long it takes to get going.  My own station - that only I know about."  He set up his monitor before leaving - "The first piece of equipment for my new station!" he reverently announced; then returned to Donner's Pass.

The relay was complete before winter set in.  To celebrate, the meteorologists gathered one last time around the campfire.  "We won't be gathering like this again till next May," Jim Jones reminded everyone.  "We did ourselves proud," he expressed his satisfaction with their work.  "We did one hell of a job."

"It too bad we can't share it beyond this circle," his wife Betty added.

"All this work; all this equipment," said Pete Hence.  "It's a little like getting all dressed up with nowhere to go."

"It took us almost a month to do what this equipment would have done in an afternoon," Winnell Smith noted.  "And now all of us can sit around a monitor and watch what's happening.  But there was a time when anyone could sit in front of their TV anytime of the day or night and see everything we can see."

"It's not for want of technology either," said Joe Riegen.  "Technology's kept pace, we haven't gone back to the cathode tube and transistor."

"It's for want of a will," Sanderson Spears pointed out.  "They don't want to know.  It's inconceivable to me.  But they don't want to know."

A smell interrupted their discourse - the odor of burning meat.  Everyone turned to the open pit where the food was being prepared.  A couple steaks were being charred almost to a cinder.

Spears, who was nearest, went over to the pit.  He grabbed the fork from Joey, who had asked to do the cooking.  "Can't you watch what you're doing!" he chastised the boy.

"I was thinking about my dad," Joey explained.  "He used to cook out all the time - even in the middle of winter.  He'd always let me help."

"Did you burn his food too?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Here: let me finish.  You go over there and daydream or something."

Later, when the fire was dying down, and it would soon be time to end this last get together of the year, Jim Jones managed to speak to Spears away from the others.

"I don't know if you've ever seen winters like we have here in the Sierras," Jim Jones told him.  "When the snows start, they don't let up till the Spring thaw.  You and Joey had better be able to get along, or you'll end up killing each other.  The only way out of that cabin is what you can shovel.  You might be stuck there for days - even weeks - at a time before you can even open the door.  You've got provisions to last all winter, you and Joey won't starve - or freeze.  But you're going to get cabin fever before the winter's over -"

"I'll be too busy," Spears assured him.  "I can spend twenty-four hours, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year - and still not have enough time:  You don't need to worry about cabin fever."

"And what about Joey?"

"Joey'll do alright.  He just has to learn to do things the right way.  He'll be okay."

"What if he doesn't learn - what if he can't learn? what if he's slow: what then?"

"Then he can do the shoveling!"  The next afternoon a cordon of low gray clouds overtook the mountains; by evening the first snow of the season began, by midnight half a foot had fallen.  Another nine inches fell overnight, then the clouds rolled away and the mid-morning sun turned untold millions of snow crystals into fields of fake diamonds.  Three days later another set of clouds rolled over the Sierras, leaving another six inches of snow in their wake.  A week later a foot fell.  Then, the day before Thanksgiving, the thickest, grayest clouds anyone could recall ever seeing in these parts funneled between Lola Mountain and Donner's Summit and fell three thousand feet into the clearing where the weather station stood.  I was dusk.  Pieces of cloud draped over the roof of the station and hung from the gable.  Softly, almost invisibly, it began to snow.  Three days later it let up.  Eight feet of snow lay on the ground; a howling wind piled fifteen feet drifts against the northwest corner of the station.

Bradley Jerome Carter celebrated his son's first birthday on the anniversary of the day he discovered the child against the hull of his yacht.

"When he was born is totally irrelevant," he told his wife.  "He is a year old today.  His becoming my son supersedes every event that preceded it."

"It isn't wise to discount those who gave him life," Carol cautioned.  "You dishonor their memory by setting your name so much higher than the gifts they gave him."

"They didn't have the will to survive," said Carter.  "Without that, nothing is of any real value."

"How could they have survived that disaster?" Carol asked.

"He did: my son did," Carter replied.

The Carters invited a select group of Missouri businessmen and women to join them at their lodge in the Ozarks to help celebrate little Bradley's birthday.  Each guest represented an interest Bradley Carter wished to secure for his newest business venture.  They came from all over the state - from Kansas City, St. Joseph, from Joplin, Springfield, from Jefferson City, Columbia - all eager to get in on the enterprise they had heard rumors about.

The day was unusually warm and humid for mid-October.  A canvas canopy had been hastily erected to protect the celebrants from the mid-day sun on the west lawn, where the festivities were scheduled to take place at four P.M.  Tables and chairs were set beneath the canopy; a counter for the buffet extended the entire width of the covered area, at the northernmost end.  And in the very center a pedestal sat waiting for the birthday cake.

In the distance, to the northwest, between Pineville to the east and Lanagan to the immediate north, half hidden in the purple haze of Indian Summer, was the Ozark Wonder Cave.  Carter planned to take his guests there before the party began, to give thanks to God at the foot of a natural altar formed of limestone deposits collected over the centuries in countless droplets of water.

"It may storm," Carol observed as the finishing touches were being placed about the pavilion.

"And?" Bradley Carter inquired.

"Maybe you should skip going to the cave."

"My son's birthday will not be observed till we've given thanks for God's blessings," Carter pointed out.

"Couldn't you do that here?"

"It has to be done where God wills it to be done."

By two o'clock the guests had all arrived.  Once they had been greeted and given a chance to freshen up, Bradley Jerome Carter announced the afternoon's itinerary.

"I'd like as many of you as care to do so, to join me in a little pilgrimage to the cavern you see over that way," he pointed northwest as he spoke.  "I'd like us to give thanks for all our heavenly Father has bestowed upon us.  I had hoped we could walk, but since it's a bit uncomfortable, and the weather does look a little threatening, we'd better drive.  The children will stay here, as will my son, along with my wife and whomever else wishes to remain behind.  So, if you're ready, let's be on our way.

All the men, and all but a few of the women, headed for their cars.  Momentarily, thirty five cars, in a procession headed by Bradley Carter's Rolls Royce, pulled out onto a spur of State Road 90, which, after a brief ride, led into US Route 71 and an almost immediate right turn into the grounds surrounding the Ozark Wonder Cave.  They stopped, got out, assembled for the final trek to the cave.

The clouds had overtaken them.  It began raining before they made it to the cave - not a downpour, but hard enough to require umbrellas.  In the distance, lightening flashed inside a pearlescent cloud; the very faintest traces of thunder could be heard.  The procession reached the mouth of the cave just as the rain began pounding everything in sight.

The darkness of the cave was broken by torches along the wall, which ran from the entrance to a vaulted room a hundred yards into the cave.  The procession followed the light to an altar four feet high, some ten feet wide, and a couple feet deep, the ceiling above it reaching so high the torches could not detect its presence.

"Come," offered Bradley Jerome Carter, "kneel with me before the handiwork of our Father.  Join me in giving silent thanks."

The party fanned out as it approached; each person knelt on the cavern floor before the altar.  Outside, the storm grew closer, the lightening fiercer, the thunder louder.  Flashes lit up the interior of the wonder cave as far back as the altar, every few flashes bringing one bright enough to lift its luminescence to the very ceiling of the vault.

Presently the prayers were done.  The pilgrims arose, proceeded back to the mouth of the cave, where a sudden wind extinguished the torches, but not the brightness, the lightening having already diminished the flames to barely a flicker in comparison.

"We'll wait out the storm here," Carter advised.

"About this project," one of the party breached the topic that had brought them all together.

Carter held up his hand.  "Not here, not now," he said.  "Business is best discussed over a cognac, after one has dined.  The storm'll soon pass: they come up quickly here, they pass by just as quickly."

As if responding to a pre-arranged cue, the storm began to quiet down almost the moment Carter's prediction crossed his lips.  Even the rain slacked up.  Everyone stood ready to return to their cars when, suddenly, they all saw something unlike anything they had ever seen in their lives.

"Look at that!" someone said.

"My God!  I've never seen anything like it!"

"That's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen."

"My God!  A sunset!  A sunset, in mid-afternoon, and coming from the east!"

"Who would have imagined anything like that could happen!"

They were all awe struck.  Except Bradley Carter.

"Stay here!" he ordered.  "Stay right here - you'll be safe!  Stay here till it passes!"

Even as he spoke he ran from the cave, his words trailing behind him like a shifting aura in an expanding universe.  He ran to his car, jumped in, started off - not over the road but down the ridge below the road, across an open field, heading back to his lodge at full throttle, every few seconds looking up through his windshield or, as he veered right or left to avoid an obstacle, out his side window, so as not to let whatever he was pursuing out of his sight for an instant.

He was pursuing the sunset.  The storm cloud, as it moved away to the east, broke in half - literally broke in two - revealing a blazing crimson band above the horizon.  Bradley Carter knew what it was - and what it was not.  It was not the most magnificent sunset anyone had ever seen, as his guests all thought.  It was a cloud on fire.

He raced across the open field, through ditches and streams created by the storm clouds, over mounds and bushes, past trees, and through fences, his car battered and scarred by forced impact with unfinished terrain.  A tire blew; he veered sharply, but quickly righted the car and kept going, his speed intact, his eyes never leaving the fiery cloud for more than a few seconds, as if his gaze could hold it at bay.

The cloud was east of his lodge, heading west.  Carter's aim was not to outrace it but to reach the lodge before it did.  Finally he reached the lawn where the pavilion stood awaiting the day's events.  He drove to the tent, where, huddled in the center, were all the children and the few women who stayed behind to watch them.  With them were his wife and son.

Everyone stared in amazement as the car they had been intently watching pulled beneath the tent.  They could hear a strange, crackling sound coming from somewhere above, but they couldn't see the tent beginning to catch fire, or the red hot balls pelting the canopy.  Till they began to look around, and saw the balls falling everywhere beyond the pavilion.  They children began to scream.

"Get in!" Bradley Carter ordered.  At first no one moved, as if transfixed by the fire balls.  "Get in!" he cried again, this time reaching out as he spoke.  But not reaching at random.

He had fixed his attention on his wife and son; he was reaching through the others gathered around his car to grab hold of them.  The fire covered the entire tent; it was seconds away from burning through.  Carter grabbed his son from his wife's arms, pulled the boy into the car; then grabbed his wife and pulled her inside.  All the while the frightened children were being pushed into the back seat by the women.

When the burning tent fell, Bradley Carter drove forward with such sudden impact that all four doors slammed shut.  Three women and three children were left standing in the blazing canvas, their screams disappearing in a deafening volley of fireballs.  They ran blindly seeking a way out.  They ran till the flames forced them to the ground and finished eating them.

The fireballs continued to pelt the car for another few minutes, then the cloud moved away, over the field, which became a solid sheet of fire, and toward the Ozark Wonder Cave, where Bradley Carter's guests were safely hidden.

The fireballs fell all around the mouth of the cave, but could not get inside.  The  cloud sat perfectly still, as if waiting for something to expose more victims.  Suddenly the ground rumbled and shook; stones began tumbling inside and outside the cave.  Even with chunks of rock dropping from the ceiling and walls, Bradley Carter's guests felt safe.  The stones began falling faster, whole slabs ripped away from the walls of the cave; the guests had to keep moving from one point to the next to avoid being struck.  They worked their way to the vault that housed the altar they had prayed before barely half an hour earlier.

The ground shook again.  The whole ceiling fell, trapping or killing outright everyone of the pilgrims.  Those who were killed did not feel the fireballs, which had finally found a way in; those who were trapped did.  They could not move, they could not free themselves.  All they could do was lie there under a heap of rocks and burn to death.  Their screams could be heard from the lodge, which was also in ruins.  It had withstood the fireballs, but not the earthquake.  The same rumbling that had torn the roof off Bradley Carter's chapel brought the walls of his lodge down, killing his entire staff of servants.  Only the women and children in his car were saved.  The rest of his party had perished.  There was almost no one left to celebrate his son's birthday.

Carter stopped long enough to change the tire that had burst, then he drove back to St. Louis, without stopping again.  When he reached his mansion he instructed his staff to attend to the passengers piled into his Rolls; the women and children were still in shock and still in the same positions they had assumed when they jumped in.  Carter took his wife and son upstairs.

"I'll help you get him ready for bed," he told his wife.

"Brad," she asked, "what was that?"

"Some weather phenomenon," he casually replied.  "They call it 'fireballs.'"

"You've seen it before?" asked Carol.

"I've heard of it.  Now I've seen it.  End of discussion."

"Brad, we've got to warn people.  If it's happened before, it's not something isolated.  You've got to warn people."

"Carol, I'm not a weatherman.  It's not my job to tell people to come in out of the rain!"

"But they could be killed!"

"I've got a business to run," Carter pointed out.  "I can't run a business if everyone who works for me calls out sick every time there's a sunrise!"

"But, my God, Brad, all of you are always talking about social responsibility!  There is no greater social responsibility than to let people know what's out there!"

"What they don't know can't affect their ability to perform.  We cannot afford a workforce that spends half its time worrying about the weather.  Now I don't want to discuss this anymore.  I've got work to do.  I've got to line up another entire group of sub-contractors.  Good night.  I love you, Carol; but good night."

It took a year to replace the entrepreneurs killed at the Wonder Cave.  Each of them had been backed by the ruling bodies of their respective cities, just as Bradley Jerome Carter was backed by the Tungs; each had built up a vast network of supplies, suppliers and clients that no one else could simply move in and take over.  The project Carter longed to begin had to wait.

"For obvious reasons," Professor Kirkus told him, "we don't want to go out of state.  The Tungs exercise tremendous influence here; but outside Missouri they're just another big city mob.  They have ties, yes; they can make deals, of course; but they can't maintain the kind of control elsewhere that they have within these borders.  For all their sound and fury they're pretty small potatoes, in the final analysis."

"You talk pretty freely," Carter observed.  "Aren't you afraid the walls might have ears?"

"Afraid? of the Tungs?" Kirkus mused.  "The only person on this planet I'd be afraid of would be someone who has a better understanding of what it's all about than I do."

"And what is it all about?" Carter asked.

"That famous 'position' everyone jockey's for.  Most people imagine you have to be in the driver's seat to hold the reins.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Tungs see me as 'their man in Washington.'  They've discussed 'getting rid' of me; and, each time, they decide it's still in their interest to keep me around a little longer.  And yet, at the snap of my finger, they'd be history.  Afraid they're listening?  I'm the one who's listening.  It would never occur to them to spy on 'their man.'  It looks for the world like symbiosis, when it's actually predation."

"I don't care about any of that," said Carter.  "Let everyone else jockey for position - just keep the hell out of my way while they're doing it.  God put me here to build: to do and to build, because to do is to build.  This world is inhabitable not because of those who seek ways to rule it but because of those who, like me, take what it offers and turn it into something people can use.  I understand keeping the project close to the Tungs: the more hands we keep out of it the better chance of getting it done right.  But if their sphere of influence isn't wide enough to get me what I need, I'll look elsewhere."

"I wouldn't underestimate their priorities," Kirkus warned.  "It may look for all the world like their fortunes rest on your shoulders; they may risk losing everything by sabotaging their relationship with you - but don't doubt for one second that they'll do anything they have to to maintain their authority.  Even you are expendable."

"Like I said: I don't care about any of that."

The official ground breaking ceremony was held one week before the real one.  The Tungs being instrumental in getting the project started, they insisted the first ground be broken within their sphere of greatest influence: the greater St. Louis metropolitan area.  They made it clear to Professor Kirkus that it made no difference to them that the project would not even touch Missouri, let alone St. Louis.

"This is where we are," a fat, bald headed man in a five-thousand dollar suit told Kirkus.  "This is where the ceremony will be.  It's the ritual that counts, not where the thing'll actually be built.  We've decided the Merrimac Caverns would be perfect.  Arrange it."

"The leadership will all be there?" Kirkus asked.

"All of us, yes," the fat man replied.

It rained during the entire ceremony.  A canopy was hastily erected over the platform where the guests of honor, the fifteen member ruling council of the Tungs, sat listening to one after another testimonial to their social responsibility and civic mindedness.

Official representatives from all the major Missouri cities were there, though not among the speakers.  Civic leaders, officials of various charitable organizations, heads of foundations, plus a contingent from the federal government, headed by the Vice President, spoke glowingly of the many good works the Tungs had over the years taken credit for, the ceremony culminating in the Vice President's speech.

"The President has asked me to convey both his thanks and his congratulations for a job well done," the Vice President began, and ended five minutes later by taking up the golden ceremonial shovel the Tungs had had cast for the occasion.  A big man, husky, tall, with the face and bearing of a prize fighter, the Vice President underestimated his own strength, overestimated the tensile strength of the shovel; when he went to upturn the clod of earth, the shovel snapped as if it were a twig.  He stared a moment at the broken instrument, glancing from the handle, in his hand, to the blade, in the ground, and back.  An unearthly stillness had fallen.  The dignitaries looked first to their hosts for some cue how to react, then looked away.  The Tungs all had the same look of having been insulted.

"My apologies," said the Vice President.  "I keep forgetting," he quipped, "it's diamond that's the hardest substance - not gold!"  A few perfunctory chuckles greeted his quip, then the same deathly silence settled back over the gathering.

Professor Kirkus took over the dais.  "We thank all of you here for sharing this special occasion with us - an occasion that transcends the events surrounding it.  What's a little rain? what is the autumn chill? what is a broken shovel in comparison to the extraordinary achievements we have come here to honor?  The image we shall all take away with us is the image of fifteen noble citizens - the first citizens of St. Louis - seated by our sides in solemn dignity.  Let us all stand up and, by inclining our heads, direct our gratitude to our guests of honor - the ones who made all of this possible."

Everyone stood, everyone inclined their heads; then everyone walked to their cars, got in, and left, some headed northeast on Interstate 44 to St. Louis; some southwest to Springfield; others making their way to US 50, to Jefferson City and Kansas City - the Vice President in the latter group, his limousine heading for Jefferson City.  "Step on it," he told his driver, "I have a three o'clock meeting with the governor."

One week later, and by chance on the second anniversary of Bradley Jerome Carter's finding his new son, the real ground breaking ceremony was held, at the site where the project would actually begin: the point where Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska touched - a point southeast of Cheyenne, northeast of Denver, northwest of Sterling - where Kimball County, Nebraska, Weld County, Colorado and Laramie County, Wyoming met.  The dignitaries were all helicoptered in; no road abutted the bluff where the dais was set up.

The President of the United States attended the ceremony; the Tungs did not.  The governors of the six states the project would touch attended; the ruling bodies of the cities nearest the project did not.  This was a national, not a regional, and decidedly not a local, event.  The guests had been carefully chosen by Professor Kirkus to reflect the true scope of the project.

This time it didn't rain; this time the shovel didn't break.  This time it went without a hitch: a smooth, clean ceremony.

"Not to diminish the important contribution made by the Tungs and all the other city leaders," the President said as a kind of after note when his dedication was nearly complete, "but not to overstate it either.  This was conceived to be; is; and will continue to be a national undertaking.  We welcome - indeed: we invite - local participation; but the ultimate control is in our hands.  This is our project.  Begun this the nineteenth day of October in the year of our lord 2052."

Here the President, tall and regal, took the spade and, with it, turned up the symbolic clod of earth.  Everyone applauded.

"Thank you Mr. President," said Gorham Kirkus.  "And thank all of you for attending this ceremony.  And each one of you here: please accept my invitation to join us eighteen years hence, to celebrate the completion of what began today."

Everyone returned to their respective helicopters to be taken back home, or wherever they needed to be next.  The President's helicopter headed due north; he had a meeting in Regina, Saskatchewan with the Canadian Prime Minister, to discuss certain unusual weather disturbances, associated with the Aurora Borealis, first noticed in the Northwestern Territory.  Nothing, of course, had been reported on any American or Canadian television or radio newscast; but the phenomenon had caught the attention of certain very high public officials on either side of the border.

The President's helicopter touched down at Ellsworth Air Force Base just outside Rapid City, South Dakota, where his official airplane was waiting to take him the rest of the way.  An hour and a half later, the plane crossed the border just a few miles northwest of the Montana-North Dakota boundary; minutes later it crossed tiny Couteau Lakes, just inside the Canadian border, which was shrouded in a dense fog.  Regina was no more than half an hour away.  The fog over Couteau grew brighter, as if an array of spotlights covered the surface.  The President commented on it to his Chief of Staff.  The plane encountered the same kind of fog a few minutes later; this time, instead of looking down on it, the plane was surrounded by it.  It grew brighter, exactly as the other fog had: as if lights had been turned on one by one.

"Is it a storm?" the President wondered aloud.  But there was neither lightening nor thunder, just a sense of something vaguely electrical, as if whatever was brightening the sky ought to be flashing and exploding.  Suddenly the President's plane lost all power, as if somehow short-circuited.  The engines stopped dead in mid-air.  The plane began losing altitude, at first slowly then rapidly.  Within seconds it crash landed on a plain between the Moose Jaw and Souris River just north of the town of Yellow Grass.  It didn't explode, it didn't crack up; it remained largely intact.  Inside, everyone was dead.

A party of teenagers out boating on Couteau Lakes was dead.  A group of hikers along Moose Jaw River, where the cloud that enveloped the President's plane descended, was dead.  The entire population of the town of Yellow Grass was dead.  Anyone the fog or the cloud touched before dissipating was dead.  In the span of fifteen minutes nearly four hundred people perished, all of them electrocuted.

"Absolutely unmistakable," the coroner who examined the bodies assured the Prime Minister of Canada.  "Every one of these people died as a result of electrocution."

A plane was summoned to return the body of the President to the States.  The medical officer on board confirmed the coroner's preliminary findings.  The plane left, heading south.  The Prime Minister's private jet left also, heading east to Ottawa.  Deep in the horizon, from nearly a thousand miles north, the unearthly shimmer of an Aurora Borealis could be seen from the height the jet was flying.  The Prime Minister shuddered as he pulled the curtain across the window.  "This can't be," he mumbled as he sat there with his chin resting on his hand and his head shaking slowly from side to side.

"My fellow Americans," the Vice President, that very evening, went on television to address the nation, "it is with great sadness that I announce to you the death of the President of the United States.  He died less than two hours ago in a plane crash outside of Omaha, Nebraska, as he was returning from a vacation in the Rocky Mountains.  It is therefore with the utmost seriousness that I must also inform you that, as prescribed by law, I was given the oath of office by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court twenty minutes ago in the Oval Office of the White House.  Even as I am speaking to you, plans for the President's funeral are being formalized.  You will be kept informed of the arrangements, as well as of any developments as they occur.  Good night, and may God bless and keep us."

The body of the President lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda for three days.  During that time the new President had a special task force review his predecessor's private papers, and another task force assess the state of the nation.  The morning of the funeral he called Professor Kirkus.

"This is the first chance I had to call you," he almost apologized.

"I understand," said Kirkus.  "The demands of the office are enormous.  A call to St. Louis cannot be the first order of business."

"True," the President agreed.  "But it may be the most important.  Gorham: I have a favor to ask - a very big favor."

"If I can be of any service -" Kirkus let his voice trail off.

"You can: to me and to this nation.  Gorham: I'd like you to be my Vice-President.  I need a man with your skills, your polish.  You're good at handling people - my predecessor was too: that's why he was chosen.  What do you say?"

"I'm honored by your request, Mr. President.  But I have to decline."

"I wish you'd reconsider."

"I prefer to be heard and not seen, Mr. President."

"Well, as long as I can count on your help and support," the new President reluctantly accepted Kirkus' decision.

"Absolutely," Kirkus assured him.

"It's a mess out there, Gorham.  The stiff's not even in the ground - you are coming to the funeral this afternoon, aren't you?"

"God willing."

"Good.  If I can swing it, I'd like to meet with you.  Four o'clock he goes in the hole: not even buried yet and the rumors are flying!  The T-Men are already calling it a cover-up - a God damn conspiracy!"

"That's good," Kirkus mused.

"You don't understand," the President countered.  "They're all but saying he was murdered - God damn the bastards!  That's the first thing I do - my first official act: I round their asses up!"

"If I may be so bold, Mr. President," Kirkus hesitated politely as he spoke; "you have a great deal to learn.  One T-Man on the loose is worth more to us than a thousand T-Men behind bars.  Let the rumors fly.  It's good for business.  Conspiracy?  Murdering the President?  Let them think it - better still: encourage them to think it.  It enhances our authority.  It puts the fear of Jesus in the masses."

"I do have a lot to learn, don't I?" the President admitted.

"Leave the past behind you," Kirkus advised.  "Your 'family' is not on the run, it isn't the outlaw any longer, hasn't been for two decades.  You're part of the ruling class now.  Act like it.  Accept insults and accusations gracefully.  You'll be amazed how easily and quickly they roll right off your back."

"Will you help me get the hang of running the country?"

"I'd be honored."

The President had unwittingly played into the T-Men's hands: they were planning to hijack his predecessor's plane at Omaha.  He could not have picked a worse spot to fake the plane's crash: the T-Men knew the plane could not have crashed at Omaha because they were there waiting for it.  What neither the T-Men nor the Vice-President knew was that Gorham Kirkus had learned of the kidnapping plot and, on the strength of it, had declined the President's offer to accompany him to Canada then back to St. Louis, by way of Omaha.  It was Kirkus who recommended the strategy of staging the plane crash at Omaha, thereby setting the 'conspiracy' in motion.  He sat back in his overstuffed leather chair in the Little Red Schoolhouse and smiled.  Then he called for his limousine to take him to the airport.

"I'll stop at the hospital first," he told the driver.

His wife had given birth early that morning.  Mother and daughter were reported to be doing well.  "I can only stay a moment," he told his wife.  "Have you decided what to name her?"

"I wish you'd decide with me," his wife said.

"She's a girl.  It's best if her mother names her.  She'll grow up to be smart - not special, like her brother, but smart.  An intelligent name would be in order.  A cute name, a precious name, a pretty little name wouldn't quite do.  Avoid the Mary's, the Betsy's, the Judy's, the Sally's.  Best to stay away, too, from the Regina's, the Victoria's: the special names.   Something like Dianne perhaps.  Or Leah.  Or maybe Darlene.  I'm sure you'll come up with something appropriate to her station in life."

Three hours later Professor Kirkus was being ushered into the White House.  After freshening up, he was invited to meet with the new President in the Oval Office.

"Exactly what way are the T-Men useful to us?" the President followed up his earlier conversation.

"There must be enemies of the State, at all times," Kirkus explained.

"Isn't there a danger they might eventually overthrow the government?"

"The trick is to choose your enemies carefully.  Real enemies, who might one day overpower you, you either absorb into your hierarchy or get rid of.  Paper tigers - like the T-Men, who'll never entirely win the sympathies of the masses - you allow to flourish.  We want the public to think we're truly a force to be reckoned with -"

"We are!" the new President emphatically proclaimed.

"There is no such thing," Kirkus corrected him.  "It's an illusion - all power is.  We stand with a spotlight positioned to magnify our image.  The trick is to get the public to accept the image as the man.  They must be made to fear us, on some fundamental level; yet need us, to protect them from the boogey man.  A very old game, exposed every generation since it began, yet still going strong.  Once the dynamic has been set in motion, it generates its own reason for being.  All you have to do is just keep stoking the engine."

"I've got to give them somebody's head on a platter, to let them know straight out I'm tough!" the President insisted.

"Of course you do - and you will," Kirkus promised.  "Omaha is unique, therefore ideal.  It has two rival gangs seeking to run the city.  Nowhere else has there been a stalemate going on so long.  What you have to do is choose one side over the other - it doesn't matter which.  Implicate one side in the conspiracy the T-Men invented.  Help the other side round them up and destroy them.  Once they're all destroyed, link them to the T-Men, undercut their credibility.  Works like a charm - believe me it does - every time."

The funeral ceremony was as brief as it was solemn.  A longer ceremony had been planned, but the body had started decomposing.  The same phenomenon that electrocuted the President so disrupted his cellular structure that the elastic tissue holding him together started disintegrating.  By the time the procession reached the cemetery an odor emanating from the coffin made it only too clear what was happening inside.  A few words were said by the White House Chaplain, then the coffin was lowered and, even as the guests were leaving, dirt was being thrown over it.  A representative of the T-Men was secretly in attendance.  "Either they killed him in such a way that the embalmers couldn't slow the decomposition," he wrote in a notebook, "or else he'd been dead a lot longer than anyone let on."  Professor Kirkus alone knew the man taking notes was not a reporter, as everyone else assumed, but a terrorist gathering evidence to be used against the Feds - the real "T-Men," whose name the terrorists had taken a century ago.  The trip back to St. Louis was extremely satisfying for the Director of Educational Authenticity.

The man whose sense of smell told him a conspiracy was afoot was the newest member of the T-Men, a man calling himself Ginger Bread, a small, wiry man with a complexion so swarthy he was often mistaken for an Indian or Pakistani.

"Did anyone follow you?" he was grilled upon his return to the Smoky Mountain retreat the T-Men had carefully, stealthfully established in the  shadow of the tree its leader remembered revering as a boy.

"No," he answered, positing the same answer to several follow-up questions.

"You're absolutely sure?" Paris Commune brought the round robin to a close.

"I'm absolutely sure," Ginger Bread swore.

"Okay," the leadership finally relented.  "What did you find out?"

Ginger Bread took out his notebook and, with the deliberate effort of someone who wishes to report his findings exactly, read the note he had made.  "Either they killed him in such a way that the embalmers couldn't slow the decomposition, or else he'd been dead a lot longer than anyone let on."

"What prompted that idea?" Paris asked.

"It doesn't say," he replied, then seemed to realize the absurdity of his reply and tried to work his way around it.  "I mean, it doesn't have to say: I was there as well as my notebook.  I mean, it was me writing.  What I mean is, the coffin gave off an odor.  I've never smelled it before, but I knew it was the smell of death, the smell of decomposing flesh: that's something you just know instinctively.  He couldn't have been dead only three days and smelled like that - even if he had not been embalmed at all.  Or else they killed him with something that cause his body to rot prematurely."

"What do you recommend?" Paris asked, in the manner of a teacher quizzing a student.

"We should open the coffin and exhume the body and take some tissue to examine," Ginger Bread suggested.

"We may have to," Paris agreed.  "In the meantime, go on in the compound.  We'll meet you later."

When Ginger Bread was out of earshot, Paris asked the other Council members for their opinion.  "Do you believe him?"  Each one said yes, they did.  "You don't think he would betray us?"  They said they did not.  "Good: he can live.  But we'll keep an eye on him.  The Louisiana militia has a history of sending us recruits who turn out to be traitors.  We'll keep an eye on him for awhile.  His foreign looks make him potentially worth his weight in gold to us.  I hope he works out.  But if not, there's a bullet in here with his name on it."

Each state had a militia; some states tolerated these private para-military organizations whose roots extended back at least a hundred years; some stated outlawed them; some actually tracked down and killed their members.  All of them had in time become affiliated with and, consequently, under the influence of the T-Men, the only militia of national stature, the only militia hunted by federal as well as state law officers. 

"The T-Men hunted us," the official literature told.  "Now they've changed their names, they've become Educational Enforcers.  So we've taken their name, and hunt them now.  They've killed more of us than we have them - but we're gaining ground.  Time is on our side.  More and more of the people are with us every year."

Each state militia was required by their affiliation to provide the T-Men, as a form of tribute, a certain number of recruits each year.  The death toll among new recruits was extremely high, partly because they were sent on the most dangerous missions, partly because they were always under a cloud of suspicion: at the least suggestion of treachery they were killed.  It was an arrangement wholly disagreeable to the militias, but one they accepted for the sake of the protection and unity the T-Men afforded.

"We couldn't get their number one man," Paris Commune announced to the Council at an impromptu meeting, "so we'll get their number two man."

"The VP: the new President?" someone asked.

"No, not the mobster," Paris answered.  "The Director of Educational Authenticity."

"But which one?" someone else asked.  "There are five."

"There's really just one," Paris explained.  "The whole thing is Kirkus' brainchild.  The others are just along for the ride.  But we'll get them all - the whole educational establishment of this nation.  They're going to be at the National Educational Center next month, where they'll unveil their latest testing strategy."

"My God!" Mount Everest exclaimed.  "How can there possibly be any other way left to test people?  They're tested forward and backward and upside-down and then rightside-up again!  Tested for every damn thing you can think of: are they smart enough? are they productive enough? are they cooperative enough? obedient enough? dedicated enough? competitive enough?  What else is there to test?"

"It has to do with DNA."

"They already do that: to see if you're diseased or not."

"No, this is something else.  They've developed a way to measure your degree of social responsibility - or so they claim."

"They've already got more personality tests than anyone can ever evaluate!"

"They wanted something new.  They always want some new way to get the same old result.  The new and improved model, the latest and greatest: you know the pitch.  We've learned a lot from their mistakes.  When we finally take over, we'll have a pretty clear picture of how not to run the country.  Once we have Kirkus we'll take a lot of the wind out of their sails."

"Paris: we could have gotten him anytime we wanted," another Council member reminded.                                                                    

"Oh no.  No, indeed.  The Tungs watch him like a flock of hawks.  He's 'their man' but they don't trust him.  They never let him get more than a few feet or a couple hours out of their sight.  But they won't be in Reston, Virginia.  Security will be at a minimum.  We'll get them - him.  We'll set the course of education back twenty years!"

A cheer arose among the Council.

"They've made education a dirty word," Paris asserted.  "We'll clean it up.  They've made it just another cog in the great production machine this nation's become.  They've taken learning out of a man's soul and put in in his job description.  We need to take it out of the schools and put it back where it belongs.  We used to think corporal punishment was the worst thing that happened to our children in the schoolroom; the mere act of being taught now wears that mantle.  The schools have become factories where worker bees are fashioned.  Kirkus didn't start all that, it's been that way longer than he's been around.  He only perfected it.  People never pay attention to titles or they'd realize what he's all about.  He has exactly one more month to authenticate the education of America - then he's history."

"Why kidnap them?" Mount Everest asked.  "Why not just kill them and be done with it?"

"We can always kill them later," Paris pointed out.  "First we have to get them."

"We can always kill them later," Professor Kirkus repeated Paris Commune's words - words reported to him through his network of spies.  He knew, in detail, what the T-Men were planning, when it would take place, where, and even how it was to be accomplished.

"The trick," he told the FBI Director, "is to not let them know I know.  The strategy is to be rescued at the very last minute."

"You can't seriously be planning to go to the conference?" the Director asked in disbelief.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Kirkus replied.  "More to the point, I would not for the world do anything to tip my hand.  If I don't go, I run the risk of blowing my cover, so to speak.  I have to be there.  You have to see to it I'm not taken captive."

"Let's just round these clowns up, once and for all!" the Director declared."

"No, we can't: we won't.  You forget: all the bad guys your organization was created to fight and you've fought ever since its creation have now become the good guys.  The crime syndicate runs the country, more or less; they've become legitimate; the drug lords run the cities: they too bear the stamp of legitimacy; only the states are a throw-back to the way it used to be, a kind of no-man's land that still exist only from custom - the same bunch of crooks who always ran them still cling to the helm by a thumbnail.  There have to be bad guys running around out there, to make it all look good.  Their existence authenticates the apparatus of state.  I'm amazed how often I have to keep reminding others what power is all about.  We don't round up those whose actions justify ours.  I'd sooner take my chance of being kidnapped than risk being found out.  Wouldn't you?"

The day of the conference was cold and damp, with a bone-chilling breeze from the northeast.  The conferees hurried into the low brown brick building that looked like almost every other building in Reston; and made their way to the main hall, a kind of overgrown classroom with chalkboards and wooden folding chairs lined up in a series of rows facing the slightly raised platform where the guests of honor would momentarily position themselves.

When everyone in attendance was seated, five individuals - four men and one woman - entered from a sliding door to the left of the platform and took their places.  Professor Gorham Kirkus, remaining seated, began the conference.

"It isn't to stress informality that I didn't arise but rather to indicate that this is to be a working conference, in which we all participate equally - and all are expected to participate.  The five of us are each merely one of many.  We've set the agenda, true; but haven't set it in concrete: it's subject to change.  The important thing is neither agenda nor arrangement - and most certainly not ceremony - but education.  And, as time has shown again and again, the working dynamic that drives education is testing.  Learning, as we all know, is one of the prime social responsibilities - but without adequate testing to ensure compliance, it becomes just so much empty air.  We're not here just to discuss and design testing strategies and paradigms - there's much more to address as well - but it's number one on our list of priorities.  What new methods and technologies are available to us, and how might we best incorporate them into the ongoing goal of getting and keeping the most productive workforce anywhere in the world: that might not be the entire task but it's the greatest task facing us."

Dozens of methods of testing the populace were put forth during the next two days.  Some were taken under consideration; most were rejected as either unworkable or too expensive; but a few were adopted.  Chief among those adopted was a plan to use DNA to help police the workplace.  Anti-social behavior had been linked to certain banding along the DNA spectrum.  They would look for that banding among the workers; upon finding it, appropriate action would be taken.

"We need something uniform," a consensus regarding the proposed action was reached.  "We can't let each municipality dispose of its anti-social workers in its own way.  This is too important to leave in local hands.  We don't want one person boiled in oil over here and another frozen in a block of ice over there.  It's up to us to set the standard, and then compel everyone's acceptance of it.  Education is our specialty, our stronghold; we cannot allow local mentality to prevail."

The third, and final, day of the conference ended with a formal dinner at six in the evening.  All the conferees attended.  All the men were in tuxedos, the women in evening gowns.  At six-thirty the caterers came in.  At six forty-five their throats were slit in the kitchen and their clothes stripped from their bodies.  At seven the new caterers entered the dining hall, each brandishing an automatic gun under his apron.  At a signal from Paris, dressed as the head chef, the aprons were thrown aside, the weapons taken up.

"Everyone here," Paris announced: "You are all our prisoners.  Do not move, do not speak, or you will be killed."

Several of the women started screaming, several men tried to make it to the door: all were gunned down.

"I warned you," said Paris.  "Now I'm warning you again: do not move, do not speak, or you will be killed."

This time everyone complied.  "Take your hands out of your pocket - slowly!" Paris ordered Professor Kirkus, who removed his hands.  But it was already too late.  His index finger had already tripped the pager the Director of the FBI was carrying  Within second the building was completely surrounded.  Through a megaphone the Director ordered the T-Men to surrender.

"Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands on top of your heads!" he hollered into the phone.  As he spoke, Professor Kirkus counted silently, his lips moving ever so faintly with each number.  When he got to ten, he slipped almost unnoticed through an open doorway he had been standing directly in front of.  And as he did, the FBI agents stormed the dining hall.  A volley of shots rang out.  A third of the T-Men, half of the agents, and two-thirds of the conferees were wounded or killed in the exchange of gunfire, which lasted for ten minutes before the remaining T-Men, led by Paris Commune, escaped through the same door Kirkus had earlier used to make his escape.  And, like him, they quickly disappeared into the night.

While the other four Authenticators had been killed in the skirmish with the FBI, Professor Kirkus was driven to safety in the car waiting for him outside.  As the T-Men made their way to their truck, which had been left half a mile beyond the Center, they saw the car speeding away.

"He knew," Mount Everest concluded as the truck drove out of Reston onto the Dulles Airport road.  "Kirkus knew we were coming."

Paris shook his head.  "He wouldn't have been there if he'd known," he countered.  "But clearly someone knew," he added.  "Someone whose job it is to pry information out of traitors."

"You know who the traitor is?" Mount Everest asked.

"Has to be the new man."

The truck drove all night.  There was very little conversation.  Mount Everest asked why the caterers' throats had been slit.  "We never killed innocent bystanders before," he pointed out.  "Why this time?"

"They were serving our enemies - the enemies of the people.  They were no longer innocent."

"Everyone serves the enemy - in one way or another," Mount Everest observed.

"Then perhaps everyone's throat should be slit!" Paris suggested.

As dawn broke, the truck arrived at the Great Smoky Mountains.  The wind had picked up from the southwest, making the spruce and oaks sloped along the foothills look like they were shadow boxing against the rising sun.  Just outside Waynesville, North Carolina, the truck left Interstate 40 for US 19, continuing westward to the Cherokee Indian Reservation, where it picked up US 441, than a series of narrow winding back roads leading eventually to Clingman's Dome.

"Send him out," was all Paris said when he and the other survivors emerged from the truck.

The new recruit from Louisiana - Ginger Bread - appeared momentarily.  He approached at first eagerly; then, as if something suddenly told him of danger, he slowed his pace almost to a standstill.  Paris approached him.

"I think you know what I have to do," Paris said as he pulled out his revolver.

"But why?" the new recruit, whose face had suddenly gone as sallow as a corpse's, cried out.  "I didn't do anything!  I swear it!"

"I have no way of knowing that," Paris said as he raised the gun.

"Please!  Dear God, please!  I'm innocent!  I didn't do anything!  As God is my witness -"

The word "witness" was his last.  The bullet struck him in the middle of the forehead.  He reeled.  He was so close to the edge of the north face of Clingman's dome that he lost his balance and fell back.  His hand reached instinctively, grabbing a branch of a tree which was itself barely clinging to the side of the mountain.  In death his hand clung like a vise to the spindly needled branch; it had to be pried loose so that his body could be buried.

"Do you think he told them about our hideout?" Paris was asked.

"We'll give it a couple weeks, we'll watch, see what develops.  This is my home, but if we start to feel like we're being observed we'll pack up and go."

Within a week something happened that convinced Paris and his followers to stay.  Their old hideout near the town of Recluse in Wyoming was destroyed.  A small armada of planes flew overhead in the middle of the night, releasing a volley of bombs that set everything within a mile's radius of the hideout ablaze.  The fire burned uncontrollably for two days before it was finally contained.  When the embers had cooled sufficiently to allow a rescue team to enter what was once the main compound, all they found was a few dozen tiny mounds of charred bones scattered about.  The bodies had been burned beyond all possible recognition.

Every newspaper in the nation carried the same headline: "Headquarters of T-Men burns to the ground.  No survivors."

"No one could have survived that inferno," the coroner pronounced.  "We will never know for sure how many perished in the blaze.  All we can say is that the bones are human.  There is a point, however, beyond which all identification is impossible.  No one will ever know whose bones they are."

The head of the Educational Enforcers, a former hit man for the Chicago syndicate, a man hand picked by the Director of Educational Authenticity, was asked if the entire leadership of the T-Men could be presumed dead.  "As far as we're concerned, they can.  That doesn't mean we can relegate the organization itself to the historical dust bin just yet.  Like the Hydra, new heads can and very well may spring up to replace the old."

The T-Men, from their new hideout in Tennessee, reading every paper they could get their hands on, listening to every report their radios and televisions could pick up, were more astounded by the news than anyone else in the nation - not only because they were hearing and reading of their own demise but because they had no idea how human bones came to be in their old hideout or whose bones they could possibly be.

"You don't suppose the local militia moved in?" one of the Council members asked at an informal gathering.

"No," the one man in the organization who had expressed the least surprise at the bizarre turn of events replied, "it wasn't them."

"Then who could it have been?"

"Transients."

"What kind of transients?" another Council member asked.

"The compound was turned into a homeless shelter," Paris Commune explained.  "All the bodies were nameless, faceless beings clinging to our castoffs."

Mount Everest, taking in the conversation from an easy chair in front of a bay window where he sat smoking his pipe and looking out at the night sky, shook his head wearily, as if finally it had all fallen into place and now made some sense.  "Of course," he said.  "What is it they say about the good deed never going unpunished?"

"To the contrary," Paris interjected.  "This particular deed was very well rewarded indeed."

Mount Everest looked at his leader strangely, as if trying to make a connection between the two disparate pieces of conversation.

"You're puzzled," Paris observed.  "It's very simple: we got to kill two birds with one stone - a handful of bombs in this case.  If the Feds attacked, as we knew they would eventually, there'd be a body count, which satisfies their requirements.  Even if they knew it wasn't us, they'd say it was.  As it turns out, they can say it without the slightest fear of contradiction.  Plus, a wretched, miserable, disgusting herd of worthless human garbage was disposed of.  There is no place in a decent society - and, make no mistake, there will be no place in our society - for those who refuse to carry their own weight.  The homeless, the shiftless - the vermin of this earth - will not be welcome in the world we help create.  They're of no earthly value to anyone on this planet - just a worthless pile of bones moving from place to place feeding on other's labors.  They've stopped moving now - a few of them at least.  Where in life they sucked the very air from our lungs, in death they afford us some room to breathe a little more freely.  Not a bad trade-off."

"I don't know you anymore," Mount Everest muttered under his breath as he returned to his pipe, his chair, his unobstructed view of the heavens.

The assassin smeared the blood of his victims across his forehead before returning to his cave.  He saw ten million people die that day.  He plotted his revenge meticulously, laying out every step of the way on a big grid.  He hadn't planned on watching ten million die, but he did, barely an hour before carrying out his own plan.  On a small screen he watched the beast slowly inch its way toward its victims; they never knew what hit them.  They were expecting a gentle monsoon as they always did this time of year; instead they got a monster, a super cyclone, a beast that stalked the Indian Ocean.  It started as a howling storm off the coast of Antarctica, then slowly pushed its way northward to tropical waters, where it stalled long enough to gain strength before beginning its murderous journey to the Indian subcontinent.  A giant blob with a tiny hole in its center swam up the Bay of Bengal like a great white shark chasing its own tailfin.  It carried winds of two hundred miles an hour beneath its billowing lid.  Then all at once it lunged onto the land, covering in an instant everything from Calcutta to Rangoon.  By the time its southernmost winds reached shore it had murdered ten million people.  Then it moved to the Himalayas, where it clung to the slopes long enough to dump fifty feet of snow and ice before disappearing in a whiff of smoke.

The tornado had been thwarted though, its path blocked by human intelligence.  "You may not have these victims!" it was told by those who watched it develop then trailed it from its lair to the schoolhouse.  "You may not take these children!" the gauntlet was thrown in its path.  No one can stop a tornado, but in clearing its path they can remove its victims from its clutches.

Eight feet of snow surrounding his cabin could not keep Sanderson Spears from wetting his finger to feel the wind's direction.  No one saw him and his young companion for four and a half months.  No one could get near the weather station; neither Spears nor Joey could roam beyond the length of the giant pine trees' shadows.  Joey did his best to keep a tiny trail open from the cabin to a small lookout where he could go, and stand, and look around, and clear his mind when the loneliness of his apprenticeship to this man totally immersed in his work overwhelmed him.

"What do you do out there?" Spears asked him once.  "Boy stuff?"

"I didn't think you ever noticed I was gone," Joey replied.

"I've got eyes in the back of my head, kid."

"Do you think I'll ever learn this weather stuff?" Joey asked.

Spears shook his head.  "No," he answered.  "But keep trying."

"I wish I were smart," Joey said.

"So do I.  It's a shame they didn't have that smart stuff back when you were born."

"What's that?"

"It's some kind of biological concoction they inject into your brain to make you smart."

"Is that what you have?" Joey asked.

"No, they didn't have it then.  Now they do.  Smart matter.  And good matter, for the masses -"

"That's what I have!" said Joey.

"What?  You have good matter?"

"Yeah, my dad told me they gave me that.  It was brand new.  To make kids good."

"Did it work?" Spears asked.

"I guess," Said Joey.  "I think I was a good kid growing up.  Just not too smart - but neither were any of the other kids I grew up with, so it didn't matter.  And at school they didn't expect a whole lot.  Just to learn a trade so I'd be productive when I grew up.  I never cared that I wasn't smart - not till now.  I wish now they had given me smart matter so I could learn the things you're trying to teach me, so I could be your assistant.  I wonder who they do give smart matter to?"

"Rich kids!"

"Yeah, I guess they do have to be smart," Joey acknowledged.

"There's supposed to be a third one, too," Spears mentioned.  "But no one talks about it, or knows anything about it, or what it does, or who it's for.  Special matter, for special kids.  Oh well, let them stuff anything into their babies heads they want; just leave me the hell alone to watch the weather take shape."

Only rarely did the boy shed tears.  Sometimes at night he thought of his father, and cried.  Sanderson Spears could hear him, a few feet away, in the cot Jim Jones had brought to the cabin for him, but never went to him.  Sometimes the angry words of his mentor reduced him to tears, and he would go outside to his lookout and let the icy Sierra wind dry his tears.  Once Spears followed him, stood at a distance watching him cry, but never went to him.

"You stupid idiot!" was a daily taunt as one thing after another Spears asked the boy to do went awry.

"Just don't ever go near any of my equipment again - you hear me?" Spears raged after the boy had dropped and nearly ruined a delicate computer hook up.  "And if I'm ever stupid enough to ask you to, kick me in the balls and spit in my eyes: you got that?  Huh?  Answer me: you got that?"

The boy could barely speak.  "Yes," he managed somehow to get out before turning to run out of the cabin.

"One day you're going to push him too far, you God-damn ass-hole!" Spears scolded himself.  "And you'll never see him again - which is exactly what you deserve, you fucking idiot!  He can't help being stupid: they made him stupid, the filthy shit-eating sons of whores!  They took a decent, normal kid and made him stupid, so he'd be more manageable.  Damn them all to hell - damn their stinking souls to the deepest, darkest, dirtiest pit in hell!"

On a late afternoon in April, as the spring thaw was setting in, a sunset that cast a reddish golden glow across the entire horizon and shot flaming shafts up to the mid heaven drew the boy and the weatherman to the lookout.  Both stood in awe of the sky.

"This is how I know there's a God," said Joey.

"This is how I know there isn't," said Spears.

"Do you remember when I thought you were queer?" asked Joey.  "And I offered to let you use me for sex?  I knew God would condemn me to hell if I did it, but at the same time He would know it was right for me to do it.  God loves us, but He will send us to hell if He has to."

"God sucks."

"That's blasphemy," Joey warned.

"No, it's not.  Anyone who would condemn someone whose heart is that pure deserves only contempt."

"I don't want you to go to hell, Sandy - I know you hate the name Sandy, and I'll never call you that again.  But I just had to call you that, just this once."

The sunset began turning gray, all at once, till it nearly vanished in a zigzag of clouds layered across the horizon.  Joey turned to go back to the cabin.  "You coming?" he asked the weatherman.

"In a minute," Spears replied.  "You go ahead.  Remember: to a weatherman these gray clouds are every bit as beautiful as the sunset."

When the boy was out of earshot, Spears whispered "You can call me Sandy anytime you want.  And I'll follow you anywhere," he added as an ironic grin contorted his mouth.

For the next three winters the same scene played out, as Joey grew from a teen to a young man and Sanderson Spears became more and more obsessed with his equipment and his weather.  Each winter the other members of the weather station said good-bye; each spring they returned to reestablish the link the snows had temporarily broken.  Ten feet of snow ushered in the second winter; the boy had to shovel twice as hard to make it to his lookout.  Six feet the next winter.  And eight feet again the fourth winter.

"This is where I came in," seventeen year old Joey quipped as he measured the first snowfall of the season.

"Joey: you should go stay with one of the guys," Spears suggested.  "They've all said you could.  That way you'll be around people.  You'd meet girls.  You need that.  What do you say?"

"If you tell me to go, I'll go.  If you give me a choice, I'll stay."

When the spring came and the snow thawed and the mountain passes began opening up, something happened that had never happened there before.  Sanderson Spears saw it first.  The moment the others arrived he told them of it, promising to show them the next time it happened.  Barely a week had gone by when it happened again.

Everyone in the weather station stared in awe at the series of screens before them.  Hence, Riegen, Smith, Jim Jones Princeton - even Betty Princeton and the two boys - all acted as if in the presence of a new life form.  "Look but do not touch" was the essence of their mesmerism.

"We don't get that weather pattern here," Jim Jones said in utter disbelief.

"To get here," Pete Hence speculated, reaching for a map of the States as if to support his claim, "anything from the Gulf of Mexico would have to cross hundreds of miles of semi-arid land plus the Rocky Mountains.  And the Gulf of California isn't big enough to generate that kind of weather system."

"Besides which," added Joe Riegen "the Sierras would tear it to pieces before anything from the north or west could reach it."

"The storms that blow in off the Gulf have almost doubled their intensity," Sanderson Spears announced in the manner of revealing a trump card.  "Even as spotty as the network of radar's become, I've seen storms tear through Tornado Alley that I know had to spawn dozens - maybe hundreds - of twisters.  And I've seen storms rip through Mexico, cross the Sierra Madres and come up the Arizona desert."

Jonas and Jimmie Princeton turned to their father.  "Are we going to have a tornado?" they each asked in turn, their excitement growing with every subsequent question they asked.  "Will it tear the roof off the schoolhouse and the shopping mall?  Will we all have to climb down into the cellar?  Can we watch it?  Will it pick up cattle, and bears, and dogs and cats?"

"I don't know," was all Jim Jones could say.  "We'll just have to wait and see."

"Is it likely?" Betty asked her husband, who turned to Spears as if for some kind of definitive answer.

"Is it likely?" Spears pondered the question a moment.  "I would say it's inevitable."

"But how would a tornado set in these mountain passes?" Winnell Smith interjected.  "They're not its natural habitat.  It could only touch down then dissipate almost immediately.  Would it be long enough to do any major damage, do you think?"

"That would all depend where it hits," Jim Jones pointed out.

The evening of April 15th witnessed an outbreak of tornadoes throughout the central plains that dwarfed anything in anyone's memory or anything in the record books.  Over two hundred separate tornadoes were registered on Sanderson Spears' equipment.  The meteorologists stared in disbelief as one after another cropped up on the radar that relayed them almost instantly to Spears' terminals.  What the radar did not pick up or relay was the patch of destruction wrought by each storm.  Even so, Spears had become so adept at extrapolating effects from their causes, his instinct so attuned to the interplay of weather and landscape, that just by watching the swirls and squiggles of varying color intensities he could pinpoint to within half a mile the site and to within a few percentage points the degree of destruction.

"There goes the Veterans Hospital in Topeka!" a deep red flash prompted him to say, followed a few seconds later with "Say goodbye to the Experimental Farm at Alliance, Nebraska!", then "Kiss Texarkana goodbye!"

"Isn't anybody warning them?" Betty Princeton asked.

"Probably not," her husband replied.

"Why?"

"Because it isn't safe to warn anybody of anything," Jim Jones reminded his wife.  "You know: the one about the messenger being blamed for the bad news."

"What if it happens here, like Sanderson says it will?" Betty then asked.  "Would we warn people?"

Everyone looked back and forth at each other, as if hoping someone else would speak.  "We would, wouldn't we?" Betty insisted to know.

"It's a decision we're not likely ever to have to make," Jim Jones said.

'But you just heard what Sanderson said!  Jim: we have two sons!  Would we want someone who knew they were in danger to just sit there and do nothing?"

"If there is a tornado - and yes, I do think Sanderson's right: there almost certainly will be - even if there's a thousand, it make no difference.  We have no mechanism for warning anyone."

"He's right, Betty," Winnell Smith added.  "It's not like the mid-west, where they have - or had, and hopefully still have the remnants of - a tornado warning system.  We have nothing here but word of mouth.  And when you have only minutes before it hits, it's impossible to get the word out."

Pete Hence and Joe Riegen each added his own variant of what they all clearly saw as a way out of a dilemma.  "That's true," Pete offered, "we don't have any way to get the warning out quickly enough."  "We'd need to be in the right place literally at the right time and we'd need something of the equivalent decibel level of a siren."

"If nothing else we could use the telephone," Betty half-heartedly suggested - a suggestion the two boys immediately picked up on.

"I could dial - I'm real fast - aren't I?  I can dial all ten numbers in about three seconds!" Jonas boasted.

"And I can talk really loud into a phone - isn't that what you always tell me: I could wake up the dead?" Jimmie maintained.

"Hey, slow down, guys," said Jim Jones. "As fast - and as loud - as you guys are, you couldn't get to everyone in time to warn them."

"So we just do nothing?" Betty again asked.

"There are options," Sanderson Spears finally spoke up.  "Not ideal ones, but possibilities."  Everyone turned to him.

"Like what?" they prompted.

"The factories all have the old-fashioned kind of public address systems - they're practically antiques; except that they've computerized their timing and messaging mechanisms.  A whistle blows when the workday begins, then again at lunch, then when the day ends.  I can break in, anytime of the day."

"With a warning siren, you mean?" Pete Hence asked.

"That too," Spears acknowledged.  "Except they wouldn't know what it meant.  Instead of that, just break in with a verbal announcement.  I could also jam the airwaves - TV or radio.  That's another option."

"How?" asked Joe Riegen.

"I have the equipment I need."

"How'd you get it?" Jim Jones asked.  "And where?  And when?"

"A little at a time," Spears explained.  "Whenever I could, any way I could."

"So that means we can warn people!" Betty eagerly concluded.

"Which puts us right back where we started," Jim Jones concluded.

A week later it happened - the inevitability Spears alluded to.  The mountain air was unusually warm for this time of year, and unusually humid.  From the western slopes the white band of a cold front crept slowly along the spine of the mountain peaks, one by one blanketing each peak it passed over.  By mid-morning a strong breeze from the south began coughing up dried pine needles and the myriad twigs that had blown loose during the long winter; in ravines and narrow valleys nearly choking the air with debris.  By mid-day the slow ridge of frigid air completely engulfed the Sierras and began to descend into the mountain passes.

A tiny spark, which opened a path to a jolt of electricity, marked the first volley in a war for control of the region.  The warm Gulf air had laid claim to it but the clouds of ice wanted it back, so they faced off and began their deadly combat, all the while the desert wind silently circling the combatants in ever narrowing bands.

Sanderson Spears watched the battle take shape on his monitors until he could stand it no longer.  He summoned the other meteorologists.  When they arrived, and before he could say a word, the giant anvil cloud stretching from Squaw Valley eastward into Lake Tahoe, and ringed with lightening, told them why they were here.

"Before the afternoon's over," said Spears, "at least one tornado will have touched down.  We've got to be absolutely precise as to where, and whether it threatens any inhabited areas.  It's no longer a question of if we should issue a warning but when and to whom."

For over an hour they watched the storm grow in size and intensity as it slowly continued across Lake Tahoe.  When it reached the eastern shore, and appeared to be headed straight for Carson City, it veered slightly north, cutting a path over Washoe Lake.  From there it kept its northeasterly course, its true target at last revealed.

"All we need now," Spears announced to his fellow meteorologists, "is to determine which part of town it's most like to hit.  You guys know what to look for.  Don't take your eyes off your monitor.  We'll have - if we're lucky - ten, maybe fifteen, minutes to get the word out."

They no sooner returned to the task of monitoring the storm than a sudden burst of color on each screen simultaneously pinpointed the vortex within the thunderhead that would become tornadic.

"What's over there?" Joey, who had been observing what the others were doing, asked.

"A school," Spears answered.

"Not 'a' school," Jim Jones corrected him: "'the' school!  The olive branch, the peace offering, between the Spurs and the Silvers."

"What do you mean?" Spears asked.

"The two gangs fought for years, then finally made a truce and built a school in Virginia City - roughly halfway between Reno and Carson City - where the children of both cities go."

"Jim: you call the school," Spears ordered.  "Joe: you make the announcement on the radio - I'll give you the word when I'm ready to jam their signal.  Pete: you'll make the announcement over the PA Systems once I'm ready with that."

"Sanderson," Jim Jones suggested as he dialed, "let's just leave it at calling the school.  Evacuate the kids.  That's all we need to do."

Momentarily Jim Jones was on the phone with the principal of the school warning him of the impending danger.  "Take the kids away from the school.  There's a ravine a couple hundred yards behind the school: take them all there.  Keep them as low to the ground as you can.  Do it now, this instant!"

As he was hanging up he heard Joe Riegen and Pete Hence making the announcements Spears had ordered them to make.  When the announcements had been made and the jamming signals ended, he repeated his earlier concern.

"We're just asking for trouble, doing more than we need to," Jim Jones said.  "I just hope and pray there are no repercussions."

"People have buried their heads in the sand long enough," Spears retorted.  "It's time to wake them up.  Oh my God!  There it goes!  There it goes!"

Every monitor in the room showed the same thing, from the varying angles indicated by the radar which fed into each.  A tornado touched down, in the exact spot the meteorologists predicted.  Their warning had been heeded; the school had been emptied in time.  All the children, as well as the teachers and staff, had been saved.  The school was a jumble of smashed windows, caved-in roofs, fallen walls, twisted girders and splintered desks.  But the children of Reno and Carson City were safe.  For one moment in time the meteorologists were heroes.  A week later they were dead.

April 15, 2054 became known as Windy Wednesday - not as facetious or sardonic understatement, but as the only official designation allowed.  The more than two hundred tornadoes that ripped a path from eastern New Mexico to central Wisconsin left the Plains so devastated that it never recovered.  Places like Texarkana were never rebuilt; bodies were left in the rubble.  For days cries for help were heard throughout the Mid-West.  Some were attended to and victims trapped in fallen buildings were rescued; most were ignored, and the victims eventually died.  Some of the victims were not yet dead when clean-up operations began; they were bulldozed or swept up with the debris, the need to clear the land as quickly as possible the only consideration.                                                                            

The elegant Central West End of St. Louis was devastated by a monstrous tornado that swept through Forest Park, zigzagged along Kingshighway Boulevard, careened across the Private Streets District then returned to its hiding place in a thick gray cloud which transported it to Peoria, Illinois, where it played havoc before going back into hiding.  It missed Bradley Jerome Carter's home by barely a hundred yards.  He knew nothing of his home and his family's close call, however; he was on his way to one of his factories, at the southernmost tip of the city, near the suburb of LeMay.  He had gotten word of its having been hit by a small tornado.  Damage was minimal, but the wing that housed the administrative offices had been ripped apart.  The entire management staff was believed to have been killed.  He could not afford to let his workers go unsupervised; they were in the midst of a major order, it had to get out by the end of the week.

When he arrived, he found the power out, and the workers huddled beside the fence that surrounded the factory.  He called the Chairman of the Missouri Power Company and demanded a crew be sent immediately to restore power to his factory.  Then he proceeded to his workers.

"Power will be restored within the hour," he informed them.  "I want every one of you at his workstation and ready to begin the moment the power comes on.  Anyone who's not, will answer to me.  Now move it, all of you."

"We're afraid it might come back," one of the workers said.

"Then I suggest you work twice as fast and get the work I pay you for finished before it does!" Carter retorted.

Half an hour later the factory was again in full operation.  Under Carter's personal and unwavering supervision the crew worked feverishly through the night to make up for lost time: time lost literally, because of the tornado, compounded by the loss of the management team, whose expertise drove the whole operation.

At six A.M. Carter, satisfied with the progress made during the night, allowed the whistle signaling the end of the shift to be blown.  "You may leave now," he announced over the PA.  "I expect all of you back here at three P.M. to begin your regular shift.

During the night Carter had assembled another management team.  It would arrive at eight A.M., in concert with the first shift of the day.  He planed to return to the factory in the early afternoon, following a meeting with his new subcontractors on the Mid-West project - a meeting scheduled for six-thirty A.M., across town.  He got in his car and sped away; and, as he did, he heard a loud screeching noise, like the sound of sheet metal being twisted in a vise.  He looked in his rear view mirror and saw cars being tossed in the air like rubber balls.  He stopped, backed up to get a better view, saw that the cars had stopped moving and settled into various postures.  Cries for help reaching beyond the compound gate made it clear that at least some of the cars had pinned some of his workers to the ground when they settled in.  Then, as quickly as it began, the screeching and the movement stopped.  When Carter had assured himself there was no damage to the factory, he turned once again to the road and sped away.

Everyone was assembled and waiting in the conference room of the Majestic Hotel.  Carter realized long before he reached the ten-hundred block of Pine Street that he was running ten minutes late.  The twister that tossed his workers' cars around had also thrown debris in the roadway, necessitating a detour, which added ten minutes to his trip.  He apologized for being late.  From all around the room came expressions of understanding.

"Tornado notwithstanding," he said, "it's unacceptable being late for an appointment.

Ten minutes later Professor Gorham Kirkus, who had called the meeting, entered the conference room.  "Thank you for coming," he greeted his guests.  "We have important work to do here this morning, so let me get right to the point: we're falling behind schedule.  Gentlemen, ladies: let me make one thing absolutely clear: this is not - repeat: not - a 'cost-overrun' situation, where we milk the public cow for all we can get out of her.  Nor is this a 'make-work' project calculated to satisfy some bureaucratic budgetary requirement.  Neither is it the pet project of some political leader eager to capture the hearts, minds and votes of the populace.  It was not conceived to enhance anything ancillary to itself.  It is that rarest of the rare: a thing entirely in and of and for itself.  The irreducible primary; that beyond which you cannot go.  You were chosen for your ability to get things done; had we wanted anything less, we would not have farmed it beyond our own ranks.  But you're not getting things done.  Why?"

Carter looked around the room at his subcontractors, stopping a moment at each separate face.  "I second that opinion," he announced.  "I too want to know why we're falling behind schedule.  I've secured the financing, I've cut away the red tape.  All the rest of you have to do is do the job you were contracted to do.  Why haven't you?"

"There've been unforeseen problems," someone suggested.

"There always are," Carter countered.  "If there weren't, any Joe off the street corner could manage it."

"These are not normal problems," someone else offered.  "We can deal with equipment failure, with illness, with topographical and geological anomalies - even with excessive rain, or dryness, or heat or cold.  Discontented workers, threatened strikes, boycotts: we know how to handle them.  But these things - my God: these things!"

"I've had men's skulls pierced by hailstones."  "I've had whole crews burned to death and pieces of equipment almost melted by some kind of lightening."  "I've had bulldozers picked up and tossed around like they were child's toys - and nobody sees what's doing it!  It's not a tornado: I don't know what it is!"  "We dig a trench, next thing we know we're burying our workers in it!"

Each contractor had his own horror story to tell.  Carter and Kirkus listened to the tales before dismissing them.

"I've seen these things," Carter said.  "I've been in them, I've come through them.  And I can tell you this much: there is no obstacle nature can set in your path that a man determined to do his job can't find a way around.  We don't want and won't accept excuses.  We want men who can get the job done, and we're willing to pay them whatever it takes."

"We pay them top dollar already," one of the contractors pointed out.  "This is not about money.  Word has begun to spread among the men who do the kind of work we need done.  They think it's jinxed.  They're afraid to go near the Project.  They talk about aliens, and poltergeists -"

"What in hell has the world come to," Carter asked, "that grown men entertain such lunacy?  Aliens? poltergeists?  If you have to get an exorcise to accompany your crews and hold their hands, then get one!"

"We need to give them incentives," Kirkus interjected.

"But we already pay them top dollar!" someone reiterated.

"Not that kind of incentive," Kirkus replied.  "This is perhaps a time and place for negative reinforcement: not what we'll do for them if they go, but what we'll do to them if they don't.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is the perfect time to cash in our chips.  We have sat by for a quarter century while the punks and the gangs and the drug pushers took over one after another city.  Besides the efficiency and convenience, we knew the day would come - indeed, it's come many times - when we'd need their expertise - their special touch - to get us through a difficult situation.  Now is such a time.  Scared? you say they were scared of poltergeists?  I want them so scared of the Tungs and all the other city fathers that they'll gladly and willingly fling themselves into the arms of the poltergeists, or climb aboard the first alien spaceship they see rather than face the wrath of their civic leaders - or put their loved ones in harm's way.  We could always call out the military, declare marshal law, round up all the workers and make them work.  But we prefer to remain the good guys and let someone else do the dirty work.  So we're all agreed, I take it: it's time for dirty work to be done.  I want us back on schedule this time next month.  Any questions?"

There were none. "Good," Kirkus noted.  "I'll leave it to you ladies and gentlemen to work out the details.  One month, and the Project must be on schedule."

The rest of the day was spent ironing out the particulars of the plan Kirkus had put forth.  It was late when Bradley Carter arrived home.  He was surprised to find his wife waiting for him.

"You didn't need to wait up," he told her.

"I just wanted to see for myself you were alright," she said.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"That twister this morning," Carol explained, "or whatever it was - they're not sure, they've never seen anything like it.  I was so worried.  I wish you had called, to let me know you were alright."

"A phone call does not change reality," Carter observed.

"But it reassures people."

"Coming through the front door, as I just did, reassures every bit as well," Carter pointed out.

"They said it picked up cars and then dropped them down again -"

"That's what a tornado does."

"- but only cars.  Not people.  They said workers at your factory were crushed by their cars.  As many as ten were killed when the cars fell.  For all I knew you were one of them."

"I had a meeting to attend.  I had just left the compound when all the activity occurred."

"You saw it?" Carol asked.

"In my rear view mirror as I was leaving," Carter replied.

"You didn't stop, and help anyone?"

"As I said: I had a meeting to attend.  If I stopped, if I'd stayed there and played the hero - though to what avail I'm not sure since I'm neither physician nor paramedic - the wheels of the machine I've built might have stopped too.  Then everyone would have suffered; they might have all been out of a job.  Doing what I'm here to do is infinitely more valuable than some grand heroic gesture which accomplishes nothing except wasting my time.  What I'm working on - what I had to leave the injured to those who are paid to treat injuries for - will guarantee a livelihood to as many workers as we can find.  Bandaging someone's head pales in comparison.  Good night, Carol."

Within a month the Project was back on track, lost time had been made up, enough workers had been recruited to bring the work to where it needed to be.  The word had gone out to every city in the nation: construction workers wanted, no questions asked.  Word of the dozens of missing children who turned up dead a day or two later had also gone out to all the workers.  Negative reinforcement had once again saved the day.

When Bradley Jerome Carter II turned five, he was sent to school.  As a child he showed great physical agility, great skill at sports - and very little interest in anything else.  The tests given him indicated a potential brilliance, almost bordering on genius; but he demonstrated no inclination for academic subjects.

"Normally," his father was told in consultation, "we encourage an interest in sports: it's something a leader of others needs.  In your son's case, however, we see this interest as an obstacle to his intellectual development.  We strongly recommend actively discouraging his participation in sports.  It's in his best interest - and certainly in the best interest of society.  Do you agree to work with us?"

"It's your job to make your students want to learn, not to force them to by denying them physical activity," Carter replied.

"It is also our job to apply negative reinforcement where it would be most useful," he was told.

"That is a term," Carter said as he arose to leave the meeting, "that I never want to hear again in reference to my son."

Professor Kirkus' son, on the other hand, loved intellectual activity, and excelled at it; but had no interest whatever in athletics - a trait his father actively sought to overcome.

"You will never rule," Kirkus told his son, "unless you discover what motivates those you would rule.  There is no better place than in the arena to discover that."

From that day on, Reginald Kirkus actively pursued every sport, but never mastered any.  He played, not to win, but to watch others trying to win, as his father taught him to do.  He and Brad Carter became rivals on the school grounds.  Reggie sought at every opportunity to lead the other students; but they always resisted.  Brad, however, while seeking to lead no one, was sought out by his fellow students in almost every situation.

"What does he have that I don't?" Reggie would occasionally ask certain of the other students, always to receive the same answer: "He cares about us.  We trust him to lead us."

"Trust will gain only a limited audience," Professor Kirkus assured his son.  "Fear is the stuff of real power.  The great leaders throughout history have always know this.  You, too, will discover it in time."

Reggie discovered fairly quickly the fine art of helping other students in their intellectual pursuits: giving advice with homework and essays, which they actively sought once they realized he was smarter than they were, even allowing them to copy his answers on exams, then offering vague hints of exposing their shortcomings.  By the end of the fifth grade he had as many followers as his rival.  He had taken his first step toward using human nature to his own ends.

"You've gone right to the heart of the matter," his father congratulated him.  "Amateurs spend their entire careers turning one man against another and reaping the meager rewards; whereas the pros learn early on to turn men against themselves and thereby reap the greatest rewards possible."

While Professor Kirkus instructed his son in the subtleties of power, Bradley Jerome Carter attended to his son's spiritual development.  Not the skills to capture the hearts, minds and souls of others but the faith to commend his own heart, mind and soul to God drove Carter's parenting of young Bradley Jerome.  Not to be the object of others' devotion but the subject and driving force of his own devotion was Carter's legacy to his son.

Sundays the Carters attended services at St. Louis Cathedral - still called the "New Cathedral."  They walked the ten blocks from the Carter mansion to Lindell and Newstead.  Even as an infant, Brad seemed aware of the mosaics that covered the walls and ceiling; he would reach out to the saints, the apostles, sometimes address them as if they were real and could respond.

"Is God going to be here today?" he asked when he was five.

"He's here every day," his father answered.

"Where?"

"Everywhere."

"Was He here last week?"

"Yes, He was."

"I didn't see Him," the boy said.  "Maybe I'll see Him this time."

"Not if you're looking for Him you won't," Carter explained.  "Just pray, and tell Him you love Him, and He'll show Himself to you when He's ready for you to see Him."

"Oh," said the boy.

"Do you believe in God?" Brad asked Reginald Kirkus one day at school.

"Of course I do," Reggie replied.

"Why?"

"It's to my advantage to believe," Reggie answered.

"In what way?" Brad asked.  "Because of your immortal soul?"

"Because the masses believe, so their rulers have to believe too."

"Oh," said Brad.

In Bible class he asked the teacher if God loved rich people more than poor people.  The teacher responded that God had entrusted greater responsibility to the rich and powerful, so their rewards were correspondingly greater.

"They make life possible for those less fortunate," Brad was told.

"How do they do that?" the boy asked.

"By giving them jobs."

Bradley remembered hearing about workers in his father's factories and construction crews who had been killed or who died from being exposed to toxic substances.

"But if they die on the job," he asked, "does that mean the rich aren't doing the work God wants them to do?"

"No," replied the teacher.  "It means those workers didn't follow the safety precautions set up for their protection."

Brad also remembered hearing about workers who had been executed by the Tungs for trying to make the munitions factories safer.  He mentioned this to the teacher, who reminded him that only managers could improve the working conditions because only they understood what was needed and that for the workers themselves to attempt it would jeopardize everyone's safety.

"Anyone who would try to improve things without understanding all the ramifications is the same as someone who collaborates with the enemy in time of war.  We all know what happens to traitors," the teacher pointed out.  "Why should it be any different with workers who try to subvert and sabotage the rules set up to protect them?  They're jeopardizing everyone's lives.  God will always intercede on behalf of His children, whom He dearly loves."

"Oh," said Brad as he looked around the room at his classmates, who seemed to be hanging on their teacher's every word.

The Tungs worked very hard to make the annual field trips they sponsored a special day of the children.  This was the tenth year the fifth graders of St. Louis were bussed to the Tungs headquarters in South St. Louis on South Kingshighway.  They spared no expense.

The five story stone structure, all that remained of a row of warehouses destroyed thirty years ago in a fiery shootout with the police, had been sandblasted and re-faced; the woodwork and security bars freshly painted; the windows cleaned inside and out; the brass doorknob and golden placard polished; the grass in front neatly mowed; the shrubs carefully pruned and shaped; the sidewalk, steps and portico hosed down.  The various rooms the guided tour would take the children through had been gone over with a fine tooth comb, cleaned and spit-shined.  The displays had been carefully arranged to underscore the tour guide's descriptions, explanations and historical presentations.  A video and slide show had been professionally prepared.  Refreshments were laid out on a side bar in the Council Chamber at the very center of the building.  The ruling Council assembled on the front steps to welcome their guests, as their security guards watched from either end of the building and from peep holes on the second floor.

Ten middle-aged, pot-bellied, balding men wearing expensive dark silk suits with the same appliqué emblazoned on the breast pocket greeted the children as they arrived.  Bradley Jerome Carter II and Reginald Kirkus were among the visitors.

"Welcome," the Council president, the vice-president, the secretary, the treasurer, the chief enforcer and the five other voting members took turns addressing the assembled group, as if they constituted a formal reception line.  Then they motioned the children into the building.

The entrance foyer was just large enough to accommodate the children; it had been designed that way when the field trips first began: walls had been knocked down, the rooms they formed made part of the entrance.  It was elegant but austere, ivory the predominant color, with touches of blue and gold; everything ornamental was angular, no curves or warm colors softened the effect.

"We'll begin the tour here," the Council president announced once the children were settled.  "Mr. Caverall, our public relations director, will conduct the tour.  The rest of us will accompany you, should you have any questions.  Mr. Caverall: you may begin."

The children were led first through a series of rooms, each serving some kind of bureaucratic function; a brief explanation of each function was given as the children filed through.  Then they were taken upstairs to a large, colorful room filled with rows of chairs.  They were asked to seat themselves in an orderly fashion.

"We will see a video now," the guide said.  "This will give you some idea of our background."

The video began with an enormous explosion which leveled and blackened an entire forest.  The voice over explained that "This was where it all began.  Our name, our logo, our entire reason for being.  This was the Tunguska Blast of 1908.  No one knows for sure what caused it.  When we banded together and formed our group, here in South St. Louis, seventy-five years ago, we chose explosives as our weapon - a revolutionary concept back then: most groups still relied on knives or guns exclusively.  Life was not easy for us in the early years.  The reactionary forces that controlled the city persecuted us.  They hunted us like dogs.  Two-thirds of our members were killed in the first ten years of our existence.  We were unsophisticated, unprepared to wrest power from the corrupt officials who ruled the city.  We didn't call ourselves anything in those early years; the officials called us 'The Blowhardts.'  Then we saw the connection between what we did to help rid St. Louis of corruption and what happened in Siberia.  That was when we adopted the fallen trees as our logo and took our present name, the Tungs.  Gradually our fortunes changed.  The turning point came thirty years ago, in this very room.  The forces of repression mounted a full-scale assault on our compound, which at that time consisted of this entire block.  Fifteen buildings stood side by side.  During the attack the buildings on either side of this one caught fire and burned to the ground; but this one remained standing.  This room was our arsenal; all our explosives were stored here.  We waited till just the right moment, when our attackers thought they had won and were coming out from their cover to finish us off.  Then we unleashed an attack that wiped them out, to a man.  Within five years we had driven the oppressors out and taken control of the city, to begin what has come to be known as the most productive years in St. Louis' history."

The narrative was embellished with a montage of historical film, still shots, computer graphics and drawings.  After the video, a series of slides of the various projects the Tungs had been instrumental in either initiating or bringing to fruition was shown.

Next the children were led to the basement, a laboratory where the real work of the Tungs was done.  Here the research to refine and improve the explosives the Tungs had taken as their trademark was conducted.

"It was in this laboratory," the guide explained, "that our researchers perfected our crowning achievement.  Limited nuclear technology.  You see those pellets over there, behind that window?  They are explosives - as powerful as bombs but with a very limited range.  We've development some small enough to slip beneath a fingernail; and when it's detonated, the fingernail is blown off, but nothing else is harmed.  These are excellent tools for getting criminals and the socially irresponsible to confess to their crimes and their anti-social or counter-productive behavior.  Thanks to these, the good citizens of St. Louis can sleep a little easier at night."

Finally, they were brought to the Council Chamber, in the center of the building on the first floor, where refreshments were waiting.  The President of the Council stepped to the fore this time, to personally address the children.

"Before we eat," he said in a voice gruff but pleasant, "let me take a moment to reiterate how fortunate you boys and girls are to live in a city where explosives are used to maintain social order.  Each city has its own ruling body.  Each city's ruling body has its own weaponry, its own way of enforcing its rules and disposing of its enemies.  The others seem quite primitive by comparison.  Kansas City, for example, where the Rollers use some kind of blowtorch: very primitive, very twentieth century.  And in Los Angeles, the Cripps still use knives: their preferred method is to slit the throats of their enemies.  In Chicago, the Bloods use guns: they are, as you can plainly see, unscientific, throwbacks to a more primitive era.  In Philadelphia, the Liberties bludgeon their victims.  In New York, the Jets do it with music: they've developed metronomes that emit a series of piercing sounds that short-circuit and cause massive hemorrhaging of their victims' brains.  But that's enough of other city fathers: you get the picture.  About the only thing we have in common with them is our overriding concern with security.  That's always been a top priority of ours.  But, ever since that terrible incident a few years back when the city fathers of two western cities were wiped out in a single afternoon, security has been our number one priority - and the number one priority of the ruling council of every city in America.  Because, I'm sorry to report, the madman who committed that unspeakable atrocity is still at large, still spewing his venomous lies over the airways.  He's eluded justice so far, but he'll be caught, and dealt with.  The day will come - mark my words - when he'll be torn limb from limb for his vile crimes against humanity!  Rest assured of that.  In the meantime, please help yourselves to the goodies we've set out for you."

Enveloped in a silver-blue haze that seemed to be drawn from the farthest reaches of the afternoon sky, the Great Smoky Mountains expressed the purest essence of the name they had been given; and made it clear that the names of all natural formations should derive from their particular identities rather than from somebody's claim to their ownership.  The sun was already behind Clingman's Dome when Paris Commune led his six year old son up a narrow winding path to the promontory overhanging their encampment.  Before they even reached the massive rock protruding straight out from the side of the mountain, the afternoon sun, no longer hidden, struck them with a white hot glare that made them both turn away until their eyes adjusted and they could resume their climb.

"We'll be leaving this place soon," Paris told the boy.

"Why, father?" the boy asked.

"It's time for us to move on," Paris explained.  "We've been here longer than at any other place.  We've been fortunate, but our good fortune can't last.  You must never forget who we are: we're wanted men.  Outlaws.  We're migrants, in the truest sense of the word.  Our chosen path is one of constant movement.  We have to always stay ahead of our enemies.  I wanted to show you this place before we left, just as my father showed it to me when I was a boy.  I didn't show it to you sooner because I didn't want you ever to think of it as an ordinary place, where anyone could come to walk or play or just be there.  I know you've wondered about this.  I've watched you looking up, I could tell you were wondering why I never brought you here."

They walked a few more steps.  "Can you tell where we're headed?" Paris asked.  The boy pointed slightly to the left of where they were.  "That's right," said Paris.

A hundred yards ahead was a tree, a single tree, not part of a forest but standing off by itself, a huge tree, an oak, not only tall but enormously spreading.  The man the the boy slowly approached.  The tree grew larger with every step.  Its branches reached to the sky and to all four points of the earth.  In front of it, lost in a deep shadow cast by the tree, was a plaque on a stand set into the ground.  The man read it aloud.

"The Wye Oak," he read the first line, etched in larger print, like a title.  Then he read the body of the message.  "Named for a very old tree on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a tree I saw as a boy, but a tree no longer standing.  A tree finally felled by the wind on June 6th, 2002.  This tree resembles it most of any I have ever encountered.  I hope no one will be offended that I have named it after another.  I pray it will stand as long as its namesake.  I beg humanity never to harm it."

"Who wrote that, father?" the boy asked.

"No one knows, no one will ever know.  He had the grace to leave himself out of his tribute."

Paris led his son to the base of the tree.  He motioned for the boy to set his hands on the trunk, as he himself did.  They stood motionless, leaning into the tree.

"Nothing must ever happen to this tree," Paris instructed his son.  "It must never be cut down, no matter what.  No one must ever be allowed to harm it.  A human life is precious, and must not be wantonly taken; but I would take the life of my own son if he should ever attempt to cut this tree down. Nothing must ever destroy it."

"What would happen?" the boy asked.

"The world would end.  All life would be over.  There would be nothing left on this planet but bare rock and endless stretches of sand.  As long as this tree remains there is hope.  No matter what happens, there will always be hope.  I swore when I was a boy that I would defend this tree to the death."

"I swear that I will, too, father," the boy looked up into the thick branches and said.

Then they both turned and left, retracing their steps along the perilous path that had led them here.

Within a week, the T-Men had packed up and gone, never to return to this camp again.

"Are we going to Maryland now?" Paris' son asked.

"No," Paris replied.

"They have beautiful trees in Maryland, don't they?"

"They have beautiful trees everywhere."

"What is Maryland?" the boy persisted.

"It's a small eastern state.  But we're going west," Paris told his son.

"Back where you found me?" the boy asked.

"Farther than that."

The Council agreed with Paris that six years was long enough to remain in any one place; and that, even though there had been no hint of trouble, nor the slightest indication of their being detected, it was time to move on.  Mount Everest alone voiced any objection to moving.

"We've never had so long a period of tranquility," he pointed out.  "For six years our lives have been almost normal.  For six years it felt like what we're supposed to be all about, and what we're fighting to bring to our fellow countrymen.  A quiet, peaceful life, free of the madness our unbridled productivity has generated.  But then, again, it's made me think too much of my wife and my children -" A strange look came over his face.   "- Not that I want to forget them, or what the Feds did to them.  So I guess it is best to move on.  Living a normal life is only a dream for men whose lives have been ripped apart.  Still, it was nice to work the earth and watch it give back a thousand fold what I put into it.  But I'm not a farmer; I'm a fighter. A killer.  So: where to next?  Have we decided that?"

A broad grin enlightening Paris Commune's face told the Council that yes, that had been decided.  Everyone turned to Paris and waited.

"You can't go home," he half-spoke, half-recited.  "At least, no one will expect you to.  It's the last place anyone would look for you.  Not that we've ever had a 'home,' per se.  Not a literal home anyway.  But a spiritual home.  A place utterly destroyed and therefore a part of the supernatural: something like Plato's Idea: an Idea of a Home, simply because it exists only in the realm of Mind.  We're going back to Wyoming."

"Recluse?" someone asked.  Paris nodded in affirmation.

"We'd have to build from scratch," said another Council member.

"Build on the rubble of our old camp?"

"Exactly," said Paris.

"And the bones of those who were sacrificed," Mount Everest pronounced ominously.

"The rubble of our old camp," Paris echoed an earlier sentiment.

"Mark my words, all of you:" said Mount Everest, "we will seal our doom if we commit this blasphemy.  Those are the bones of our surrogates, who died in our place.  Leave them in peace."

"He's right," first one then another Council member agreed.  "It would be inviting disaster to go back.  Even you said it was no longer a literal place but supernatural.  Maybe it really will come back to haunt us."

A lengthy debate ensued; but, in the end, Paris Commune won over the Council.  They agreed to his proposal.  Mount Everest, too, went along with the majority.

"For my part, it doesn't trouble me that I'm shortening my life," Mount Everest acknowledged, "only that I'll be living out my days in another man's grave."

Everything was gathered and packed onto a small convoy of trucks, just as it had been when they left Wyoming to head east.  The trucks all bore commercial logos so that nothing would appear out of the ordinary.

"I like the irony," Paris had noted each time the T-Men formed their convoy.  "We hide under the banner of that which we're fighting to destroy."

"Trucks are bad?" asked Paris' son, perceiving at once what his father's words referred to.

"No, son, they're not bad.  They're noble, useful tools when used with reason, for man's benefit.  They're only bad when they become an end in themselves - a symbol for the misuse of commercial might.  A truck should never be used as a steam-roller.  Or a bulldozer as a hearse."

Four days after leaving Clingman's Dome the convoy arrived at Recluse, Wyoming, without incident, having stuck closely to the major interstates, beginning with Interstate 40 out of Knoxville, Tennessee, all the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it picked up Interstate 25 to Buffalo, Wyoming, backtracking eastward along Interstate 90 to US Route 14/16, then to a series of smaller roads leading to the burned out campsite.  It was evening when they arrived; the sun had already set, leaving only shadows behind.  Everything was a shadow: what was left of the trees, spindly misshapen husks bending toward the sunset; and what remained of the compound, a few stone fireplaces and blackened chimneys, hollowed out foundations filled with charred splinters and a putrid black liquid.

The T-Men stared in disbelief.  They had seen devastation before; they had caused devastation.  They had seen this very spot burned and destroyed - on television. Then television moved on, as the T-Men themselves had always moved on past the destruction they had wrought.  But they had never witnessed the aftermath of devastation, the disgusting accumulation of detritus, the ravaged landscape, the air of death enveloping a whole mountainside.

For awhile they wandered about the ruins as if in a daze.  Then Paris' son calmly walked to one of the burned out buildings, knelt down, reached his hand into the thick black muck that had collected in a pool and, raising his hand as if from the dead, smeared the black stuff across his forehead.  He then stood up and calmly rejoined the others.

"Why did you do that, boy?" asked Mount Everest.

"It's the mark of Cain," he answered.

No one questioned him further; no one asked how he had come by that expression; no one sought his meaning.  He refused to wash the smear from his forehead; it became like a badge of honor, or a tribal marking which, in time, faded as the air, the rain, the simple act of rolling over at night in his sleep gradually wore it away.

"Maybe that's the name I'll chose, father," he told Paris.  "Cain.  You said I could choose any name I want when I become a man.  Maybe I'll choose Cain."

It took six months of steady work to rebuild the compound, the T-Men living out of tents the whole time.  They had arrived after the spring thaw, the rain their only obstacle, or the occasional wind storms.  By winter their compound was complete.

"Should we call it Phoenix?" some members jokingly asked.

Mount Everest took exception to their levity.  "This is not a rising out of the ashes," he said.  "It may look like it, but it isn't.  It's beating the ashes until they themselves rise to assume a new shape: not the new from the old but the old disguised as something new."

Of all the people living in the compound, only Paris' son took Mount Everest's words seriously.  He often sought out his opinion.  "You believe what we're doing is wrong?" he would ask, or some variant thereof.

"Yes, I do," Mount Everest would honestly reply.

"So do I," the boy would agree.  "But I'm glad we're doing it.  You have to do what's wrong sometimes to be strong.  A leader has to lead his people in every direction to test their loyalty."

"Your father told you this?"

"No, I just know it."

"But you're a boy: you're not even ten years old!  You're not even eight!  How could you know these things?  Or even know to think about them?"

"I just do," the boy would reply.  "They're in me.  I can see them.  I don't need father to tell me.  I just know."

"So Paris is preparing you to be his successor," Mount Everest observed.

The boy smiled, a smile as innocent as his eyes, the color of the sky half-hidden behind cirrus clouds, or his hair, the color and texture of corn silk.  "Father doesn't know yet," he said, then moved on, leaving his innocence to torment his father's second-in-command.

The first order of business was planning to sabotage the massive government project - a project so secret the T-Men had only learned of it that year, though it had been in the works a full five years.  And only by accident had they learned of it at all.

A stretch of excavation unearthed a spur of the vast tunnel system the T-Men had dug over the past hundred years.  It ran from beneath the town of Lamar in Eastern Colorado southeastward to the town of Kendall in Western Kansas.  It was supposed to push as far as Dodge City, but a thousand more pressing matters kept postponing it until it was virtually forgotten.  It had never been used as a getaway, and only a few times as an execution chamber and graveyard for some new member whose loyalty had been compromised.

On a foray into Pueblo, Colorado, to disrupt the catalogue arm of the Department of Consumer Affairs, which was planning to update its annual listing of all the groups in the nation suspected of being aligned with or fronts for the T-Men, Paris Commune had an almost overpowering feeling that the Agency had been tipped off.  On the strength of that impulse, he ordered a last minute change in their plan.  Instead of hitting at eleven P.M., when the second shift was ending and the third shift beginning, and the area was most vulnerable, the contingent hit at nine P.M., going right to the thick of a production schedule.  Two of his men were killed, but the plan was executed essentially intact.  The presses were blown apart; over a hundred workers, managers and security guards were killed; thousands of pamphlets littered the rubble.  Then the T-Men left as suddenly as they had arrived; but instead of leaving the area entirely, they remained hidden, just beyond the plant, till eleven, when, just as Paris intuited, a contingent of Federal agents arrived and began quietly surrounding the plant.  At that point Paris signaled his men to leave.

A new member had accompanied Paris' men, sent from a militia in upstate Michigan.  On the pretext of making their escape, the contingent made for Lamar, some eighty miles east of Pueblo, and the tunnel.  A quarter of a mile into the tunnel, the van stopped.  Paris pulled out his gun, raised it, and, without a word, shot the traitor between the eyes.  They were in the process of digging his grave when something with the feel and sound of an earthquake shattered their grave digging.

Barely half a mile ahead, the tunnel had suddenly caved in.  Instead of rocks and debris, however, what fell from above were bulldozers and men.  Paris reacted instantly, ordering the lights of the van turned off, the digging halted, and the body returned to the van.  When everyone was in, he heaped into the driver's seat and backed the van, in total darkness, to the tunnel entrance.  It took over an hour.  Once out of the tunnel, he proceeded, over land, in the direction of the cave in.  On a bluff overlooking the area, he and his men saw dozens of pieces of equipment lining a deep trench several hundred feet wide; easily three times as many men as equipment; and, to either side of the trench, enormous mounds of earth.  The trench ended where the tunnel intersected, but stretched as far to the northwest as the eye could see.

"My God," said Paris.  "Have we been blind that we haven't seen this before?" he asked.  "We've come this way before: look how far that extends.  We're bound to have crossed right over it!  Are we fools not to see what's in our own back yard?  What the hell is it?  What in God's name is it?"

Paris' question went unanswered.  Nothing the T-Men did brought them any closer to learning what it was.  Their rudimentary network of espionage proved woefully inadequate to that task.  They were primarily men of action; their existence was tied to planning and executing acts of sabotage against the Federal bureaucracy - not information gathering.  All they were able to learn was what their common sense already told them: this was a Federal project, as far reaching and massive as anything ever undertaken.  To which their innate distrust of the government added that it was something they must stop at all costs.

One after another plan was made, only to have them all thwarted at the moment of execution.  The mechanism sabotaging them was always the same: the force guarding the Project, every inch of its way, far exceeded anything the T-Men had ever encountered or anticipated.  No matter where they chose to strike, or when, the security at that particular worksite - and the work seemed to be round the clock - was too great to overcome.  They dared not attack; their losses would be too great: not merely the loss of men, but the even greater loss of credibility.  They had never failed, never been defeated; an air of invincibility and invulnerability surrounded them: they could not jeopardize that, even if it meant standing aside while the enemy's Project slowly progressed.

"Someone is betraying us," Paris told the Council at a special meeting he called.  "Someone who knows our every plan, our every move.  One of us in this room is a spy.  I'll find him, rest assured.  It'll come to me, as it always does.  He won't continue giving our plans to the enemy.  He'll pay."

As Paris was speaking, Mount Everest arose from his seat, towering above the other council members.  When Paris finished, Mount Everest spoke.

"It's me," he said, in the manner of making a proclamation.  "I'm the one. The spy.  The betrayer.  The man who's been sabotaging your plans."

Without a word, Paris withdrew his gun, raised it, and aimed; then lowered his arm.  He shook his head as he addressed his first lieutenant.

"You would have let me shoot: why?" he asked.

"Because I'm guilty," Mount Everest replied.

Paris motioned for the other Council members to leave.  He watched until the last one had left and the door had been shut behind them.  Then he turned back to his lieutenant.

"Charles," he addressed Mount Everest by his real name, "there is no one on this planet I trust half as much as you.  I would sooner betray the cause myself than you.  Why would you offer yourself as our betrayer?"

Following Paris' lead, Mount Everest addressed him by his real name.  "John," he said, "I can't bear watching you take another innocent life.  Those you killed may have been guilty, but they were never proven guilty, so they died innocent men.  I'd just as soon you take my life as put me through that again.  I wouldn't lift a finger to stop you, you know that, because you're our chosen leader, and we stand behind you or we'll all perish.  But I can't bear the thought of another innocent man's blood on your hands."

"Charles: I'm not a wanton killer.  I've never taken a human life just for the sport of it, or because I knew I had that life in the palm of my hands.  Everyone I've killed has been absolutely, unquestionably guilty or he'd be alive today.  I knew, Charles - in my mind I was absolutely certain - that they were guilty, ever last one of them."

"John: listen to yourself!  Listen to what you're saying.  You're equating what goes on inside your head with what happens out there, in the real world.  That's a madman's view of reality.  To be guilty in your mind is not the same as being guilty in reality."

"Of course it is: it's exactly the same thing," said Paris Commune.  "Charles, you were not born, nor will you ever become, a philosopher, for all your depth of thought.  Or you'd understand.  Reality and mind are one.  Not the literal 'mind,' true; but that literal mind is only a reflection of the universal mind.  Thoughts are truths.  Every man I killed was proven guilty by the fact that I thought him guilty.  Nothing on this earth, or anywhere in this universe, could ever prompt me to think you guilty.  I could sooner put a bullet through my own head than yours.  I'm sorry, Charles, but when I find the man who's been thwarting our plans, I will kill him.  And anyone who stands between us."

The eminent Dr. Immanek Douglas, arguably the world's most renowned anthropologist, lamented the loss of the bones found at the cave-in.  "Colorado Man," he had whimsically dubbed the bones.  At a press conference in New York, where he had flown directly from Pueblo, Colorado, upon learning of the disappearance of the bones, Dr. Douglas assured the world that "a preliminary assessment convinced me that what we had here was proof positive of Pre-Pleistocene settlements on the North American continent.  Indeed, had we been able to carbon date them, I would not have been at all surprised to find those relics among the oldest known extant remains of Homo-Erectus.  Sadly, they've disappeared.  I'm told certain Native Americans believed them to have been from the Anasazi, an early tribe of Indians utterly vanished in time.  I can state categorically they were not Anasazi bones.  I can only hope they will be returned to science, their rightful custodian.  If they are not, I doubt we will ever quite overcome the loss of so valuable an anthropological find.  We, of course, intend to fully explore the ancient caverns where the bones were discovered.  I have no doubt it will yield a veritable gold mine of scientific data."

"Where, exactly, is this cavern?" a reporter asked.

"It would not be advisable, at this time, to reveal its location," Dr. Douglas responded.  "We don't want a bunch of amateurs and sightseers tramping around down there, possibly making off with priceless artifacts or, at the very least, disturbing the site and hampering the work of science."

"But is was near Pueblo, Colorado, was it not?" the reporter persisted.

"I'm not at liberty to say anything further.  Thank you all for attending this conference.  I shall keep the press posted of any further finds or the recovery of the missing bones.  Thank you."

Dr. Douglas never returned to his dig.  He became inexplicably convinced it had all been a hoax.  Not wishing to say so publicly, he eagerly accepted a government grant to go study fossils in Africa, where he contracted a mysterious ailment and died, just days before the Great Rift nearly split the continent in two.

Immediately upon removing the bulldozers and men that had fallen into the cavern, the site was cordoned off.  Twelve workers had been crushed to death beneath the falling equipment; four bulldozers had been damaged.  All work within a one mile radius was halted.  Word had leaked out; the scientific community had gotten wind of the cavern; pressure was brought to bear upon the Federal government to allow a team of scientists to visit the site.  Dr. Douglas headed that team.

"Get them out of there, Gorham" Bradley Carter demanded.  "My men are standing around playing with themselves when they need to be repairing the damage, sealing that cave shut, and finishing the trench!"

"I haven't forgotten the deadline," Professor Kirkus assured Carter.  "I hasn't changed.  Your men will have to work twice as hard to make up for this divertissement.  Be that as it may, these are influential people, we need them on our side, we can't ignore their requests.  Let them sniff around a few days.  When they find nothing they'll move on, and that'll be the end of it.  A couple weeks lost, the scientific community assuaged, then it's back to business as usual."

A "couple weeks" soon became a couple months, then half a year, as the scientific team slowly, painstakingly sifted through the sediment on the cavern floor, inch by inch, until at last they struck pay dirt.

"Over here!" a pasty faced young man excitedly cried.  "I found something!"

Dr. Douglas, who happened to be there on that occasion, came running.  He knelt down, reached down into the reddish-brown dirt, felt what his young protégé had discovered.  Everyone had gathered around.  "It's a bone," he pronounced as he looked up at the others.  "I've found a bone."

It took six weeks to uncover the entire set of bones, which was finally revealed to be the skeleton of a human.  Euphoria greeted the revelation.  The world was at once apprised of the discovery, though cautioned that possibly another year remained before the skeleton could be fully identified and catalogued.  "It won't even be moved for another three to four months," Dr. Douglas informed the scientific community which, in turn, carried the word to the general public.

There ensued all manner of speculation as to its origin, and its clearly ceremonial burial, its arms carefully arranged over its chest, its hands folded as in prayer.  Some said it was an Indian, possibly of the lost Anasazi tribe.  Others pegged it for a Spaniard, perhaps even Hernando de Soto.  Still others maintained it to be much older.  Some said it was a new species; some that it was the "Missing Link" or even an alien - all of which speculation Dr. Douglas took into consideration but refused to be swayed by.

Before long, the element of superstition crept in to sit beside the scientific method.  Among the workers, specifically, superstition took hold, in light of the inexplicable occurrences that had plagued the Project since its inception.  Many threatened to leave, to go home, even though they were being paid during the work stoppage as if they were still working.  Word got out of their discontent, their threats.  Federal troops were sent in, stationed the entire length of the trench, to make sure no one walked off the job.

Bradley Carter had had enough.  One night, very late, when the scientific team returned to their campsite, he crept into the deserted cavern and, carrying a black plastic body bag, made his way to the great anthropological discovery.  He gathered up the skeleton and heaved it into the body bag, zipped up the bag and drug it out.  He piled it into the trunk of his Jaguar and drove to an abandoned quarry, where he dumped the bones into the acrid smelling lake that had formed from rainfall and run-off.  He watched under the light of a half moon as it slowly sank beneath the surface.

"Homo obstructus: get thee behind me!" he quipped.  Then he turned and left.  "A hundred years from now," he mused, "another ass-hole will come along and claim him for science all over again.  Till then, may he rest in peace."

Almost immediately, every strange occurrence happening anywhere along the trench was ascribed to the stolen bones.  The workers became more convinced than ever that they would be plagued as long as work continued: not only had the ancient grave been disturbed, the skeleton unearthed, now it had been removed entirely.  Some even came to believe it had gotten up and, of its own volition, stolen away from its desecrated resting place.

When Dr. Douglas became aware of these superstitious notions, he expressed concern that the whole site could be in jeopardy; he demanded an armed guard be posted around the clock to prevent further looting.

"You've got to get that fool out of there!" Bradley Carter insisted.  This time Professor Kirkus was in complete agreement.

"He has taken up too much of our time, you're quite right," Kirkus asserted.  "I've orchestrated an anthropological expedition to the heart of the African Veldt.  Vague rumors of yet another oldest set of bones ever discovered.  Somewhere between the Rift Valley and the slopes of the Ruwenzoris.  That should keep them looking for the next twenty years.  There is a price, of course, for the grant: his disclaimer of the Colorado site - and since the body's gone (can't imagine who took it!), there's nothing in it for him any longer, so he'll readily agree that Colorado Man was all a great big hoax.  By next Monday the site will be up and running.  Just make sure your men aren't 'up and running.'"

"If I have to stand there, with a machine gun pointed at my crew, I will!" Carter assured Kirkus.  "If they think a pile of old bones is a threat to their well being, wait till they see the guards open fire the first time someone walks off the job!"

Guards were posted every ten feet.  Their orders were to shoot to kill any construction worker caught leaving his worksite before the end of the day.  First they cried "Halt!"; followed by "Return to your workstation at once!"' followed, if the worker still kept going, by a volley of gunfire.  Before long, what had been an almost daily occurrence became first a weekly then a monthly occurrence, then occurred no more at all as the men gradually resigned themselves to their work schedule.  The superstition remained; the strange weather disturbances continued happening; men kept dying in bizarre ways; but no one tried to escape.

"We might be burned alive, or stabbed by an icicle, or carried off in a twister, or electrocuted by a cloud - but at least we won't be shot in the back.  A possible death is better than a certain one any day!" the general consensus went.  "Besides: whatever's out there'll get the guards same as us!"

The night of January 10th, in the year 2059, long after the cave in eastern Colorado has been shored up, allowing the trench to once again continue its way toward Texas, a blizzard hit the newest worksite, some twenty miles east of Elkhart, Kansas, on the Kansas-Oklahoma border, due north of the town of Hough, Oklahoma.  The workday had ended, most of the workers had gone to their tents; about half the guards and a few overseers remained at the site.

All at once, as if from nowhere, a blinding snow surrounded the trench to about a hundred yards on either side.  None of the guards, overseers or workers trapped at the site could see far enough ahead to move more than a step or two, the blowing snow as thick as gruel; so they stood where they were, perfectly still, as if to avoid detection, while the raging snow enveloped them.

From the tents, just beyond the trench's periphery, the sleeping workers, unaware of the storm, were awakened by cries in the night, which grew louder and more horrifying with each passing moment, until they were an almost deafening din of shrieks.  The workers bolted from their tents and ran toward the screams; then stopped dead in their tracks.  The clouds had parted, the moon shone through, revealing the blizzard's remains.

"My God!  What is it?" the workers began asking among themselves.  "What is it?  God in heaven what is it?"  They began backing away, as if from a beast set to spring upon them.  "What in hell?  What kind of monstrosity is that?"

They stood vigil the rest of the night, transfixed before this thing engulfing the trench.  Then the sun finally came up, and brought it into clear focus.  "Oh my God!" they almost all said in unison. 

Standing before them was an iceberg.  A solid block of ice some seven hundred yards wide, as many yards long, and perhaps a hundred feet high, opaque like an iceberg, but with a rough, sandy texture instead of the smooth, glassy look of an iceberg.  Coming closer, the men could see an infinity of tiny white particles frozen in suspension.  Coming closer still, the block of ice dissembled before them to a block of snow, so densely packed it had turned solid, admitted only slivers of light, and revealed the tiniest bits of color within.

As the sun rose in the sky the block of snow began to melt.  Flakes began spewing, as if driven by a tremendous centrifugal force.  The faster the flakes flew the quicker the block disintegrated, until finally nothing was left of it.  All the snow melted, and as it did it released, one by one, the men trapped inside.  The bodies fell in a heap, blood spewing from every pore.  The men had been crushed to death within a matter of minutes as the snow froze solid around them, the pressure so intense that not even a drop of blood could escape until the meltdown; then it all spewed at once and flowed into the trench as the workers stood watching, unable to believe their own eyes.

"We saved their kids!  Whatever else happened: we saved their kids!  That's all that matters!  Hell, if anything, they'll make heroes of us, give a parade in our honor - maybe even thank us by helping the weather station!"

Jim Jones Princeton smiled, but cocked his head to one side at the same time.  "I hope you're right, Sanderson," he cautiously stated.  "There's a madness out there.  It was there in my father's time, and his father's time.  Productivity is everything; we can't get enough.  Nothing else matters.  It's gone beyond obsession: it's madness, pure and simple."

"Jim: that's tomorrow's workers - tomorrow's productivity!" Sanderson Spears reminded his colleague.  "Even if they didn't care about them as kids, they can't be so short-sighted not to see what losing that many potential workers would do to their economy: it would be devastating."

"I hope you're right - we all do," Jim Jones said.  "It's just...I don't know...everything you say makes sense...in a sensible world.  We offer facts - truth, in all its glory, with all its warts.  I hope you're right, Sanderson."

"Trust me, I am.  I guarantee it."

The weathermen went about their business in the days following the tornado exactly as they had in the days preceding it, their main task, as always, to monitor the equipment they had set up in the Sierras.  While Spears seemed as concerned about what was happening on the other side of the world as what went on here, and devoted as much time and energy to keeping the relay equipment he had set up at various points, up to two hundred miles away, to intercept radar signals from the outside, in good working order as to inspecting the local set-up, the others spent their time closer to home, both in their actions and their focus.

On Saturday of that week, early in the day, when the others had just arrived at the station, Sanderson Spears announced that he was going to Boundary Peak, the highest point in Nevada, some hundred and fifty miles south-southeast of Lake Tahoe, to set up a new relay station.

"I'll be gone till at least tomorrow afternoon, possibly longer," he said.  "Joey'll be okay here overnight."

"You're not taking him?" Jim Jones asked.

"No, he'll just be in the way," said Spears.  Oblivious to the look of disappointment on the boy's face - a look the others clearly caught - Spears added that he'd given up expecting anything out of him.  "He's a good kid, I guess.  Maybe to some that would make up for him being an idiot.  Who knows?  It takes all kinds."

Unnoticed by his mentor, Joey slipped out of the cabin and made for his lookout.  Jim Jones and the others took that opportunity to try and dissuade their colleague.

"Why can't you take him with you?" Winnell Smith asked.

"He needs a change of scenery, he's been cooped up here too long," Pete Hence said.

"It'll be like a field trip - every kid needs a field trip now and again," Joe Riegen added.

"Take him along, Sanderson," Jim Jones rounded out the quartet pleading Joey's case.  "You're all he's got.  He looks up to you."

"Which is no reason to risk his ruining yet another piece of equipment!" Spears retorted.

"Just take him," Jim Jones summed up the argument.  "It'll work out for the best - mark my words: come Sunday, you'll be glad you took him.  You'll see."

"Oh, the hell with it, I'll take him," Spears conceded.  "Come to think of it, he's just dumb enough to screw up our whole operation."  Spears looked around.  "Joey?" he called, followed by "Where the hell is he now?"

"Out there," Jim Jones said.

Spears went almost automatically to the lookout.  "Joey," he said, "I've changed my mind.  I want you to go with me, so go get your overnight things and we'll be on our way."

Joey looked up at him.  "You don't have to," he said.  "I'll be alright - honest.  And I won't bother anything - I promise."

"All the same, I think it's best if you go."

"Are you sure it's okay?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

Three and a half hours later they were hiking up Boundary Peak, each carrying a backpack full of weather equipment and overnight gear.  The path Spears chose was treacherous, but they made it to the point he had mapped out without incident.  It was barely halfway up; nevertheless, it afforded an ideal location for the equipment Spears intended setting up.

As Spears had feared, Joey managed to lose his grip on a circuit he was helping maneuver into place.  It fell down the mountainside.  "Idiot!" the weatherman stormed.  "God damn idiot!  I should never have let them talk me into letting you come along!  But never mind...just...never mind.  I can work my way around it for now.  Next time I'm here I can re-do it.  Alone!"

It started getting dark, so they set up the small tent they had brought; built a fire; ate supper; sat around awhile, neither saying a word; then got out their sleeping bags and crawled in, insulated from the cold night air.  Once they were bedded down for the night, in the darkness Joey worked up enough nerve to speak.

"I'm sorry," he said softly.  "I'd give anything if I could do something right.  I try not to do stupid things - I swear to God I do.  I pray - all the time I pray - that God will help me learn how to do things the right way.  I know He's listening; and I know He'll show me the way.  He knows I love you, and He won't let me keep disappointing you forever."

Spears had fallen asleep the moment he sealed his sleeping bag around himself; he slept so quietly Joey didn't realize he was already asleep.  After awhile, when it became obvious to Joey his mentor was not going to acknowledge anything he had said, he shut his eyes, wondering how it would feel when he finally shut his eyes for good - not wishing it, but just wondering about it.

The next morning Spears returned to his relay to finish setting it up.  He neither invited Joey along nor ordered him to keep away.  Not knowing what was expected of him, Joey sat for a long time on his sleeping bag.  Then he got up, folded the bags, struck the tent, put their gear into the car, and fixed breakfast.  By that time Spears had returned.  They ate breakfast, again without a word; finished packing; and left.  It was late afternoon when they arrived back at Donner's Pass.  Except for Jim Jones, everyone seemed to still be at the weather station: Winnell's pick-up, Joe's motorcycle, Pete's specially equipped roadster were all parked out front.

"That's odd," Spears muttered to himself.  "They don't usually hang around Sunday evening."

Joey entered the station first.  "Take this in," Spears had ordered as he handed his assistant some left-over cable.  Momentarily the boy returned, still clutching the cable, his face as pale as a ghost.  He went over to Spears and began tugging at his sleeve, to get his attention.

"What is it now?" Spears snapped as he turned.  The look on Joey's face softened his manner.  "What is it?" he asked.  Joey could not manage to form any words, so he motioned for Spears to follow him.  This time he wouldn't enter; he stood aside.

"Oh my God!" Spears exclaimed, over and over, as he looked around the room.  All three - Winnell Smith, Joe Riegen, Pete Hence - lay face down on the floor, in a pool of blood, each with a gaping hole in the back of their head, Winnell at the west end of the cabin, Joe at the east, Pete in the center.

As if acting out a ritual play, Spears went to each body to feel its pulse.  "You guys are now officially dead," he pronounced.  Then he noticed something: beside each head was a silver dollar with a bullet hole in the center.  "It's their trademark," he said as he picked first one then another off the floor.  "The Silvers.  Carson City's finest.  They'll pay - they'll pay, I swear it!"

Then he went to the door and called Joey.  "Get in here!" he ordered.  "We gotta bury them.  You gotta help me carry them out of here.  At least, it's something you can't hurt if you drop!"

Joey looked around the room.  The color was beginning to return to his face.  "I guess you wish for sure you'd left me behind now," he said in a broken voice.

With the back of his hand, with a violence and a suddenness that threw the boy off his balance, Spears lashed out and struck Joey across the face.  Blood gushed from his mouth as he flew to the floor.

Spears pointed a trembling finger at him.  His knuckles were bruised, his skin torn.  "You ever say something like that again and I swear by that fiend you pray to I'll kill you myself!  So help me I'll kill you!" he raged.  "Oh Christ!" he cried in a voice suddenly filled with panic.  "Oh shit!  Oh Christ!  Oh shit!  Jim Jones: I've got to warn him!  Forget these guys: we'll bury them later.  Come on!"

"I'll stay here," Joey said.  "I'll only get in your way."

Spears reached down, took hold of Joey's hand, and pulled him to his feet.  "You go where I go, punk!  I'm not letting you out of my sight - not ever: not ever!  No one's gonna do to you what those bastards did to these guys!  Now come on: move it!"

Spears took every back road he could: the back roads were deserted, he could drive as fast as his car would go.  In less than half an hour he was there.  He slammed on the brakes, jumped out, ran to the house and knocked.  And knocked again.

"Jim!  Jim Jones!" he called.  "Open up!"  Their car was in the driveway; they had to be home.  He knocked again, called again.  Still no answer.  He reached out to the doorknob.  His hand trembled so much he had to steady it with his other hand as he tried the knob.  It gave no resistance.  The door opened.  The weatherman crossed the threshold.

"Don't let it be.  Please, please don't let it be," he muttered.  He walked through the house, eventually coming to the family room.  He entered.  He stared around the room then raised his head and wailed - not a scream, not a cry, but a wail.  In the family room lay the family - Jim Jones, Betty, Jonas and Jimmie; all four Princetons lay side by side face down in a pool of blood, a gaping hole in the back of each one's head.  Beside each head was an ornamental rhinestone spur.

"The Spurs have it," he said as he reached down to feel each body's pulse.  "Mr. Lincoln, two hundred years back, said 'The Nays Have it.'  I say the Spurs have it.  They have an appointment with death - and I'll see they keep it, I swear I will.  The Spurs and the Silvers: I swear on...on..." he fumbled for something to take an oath on, something he believed in.  "...on Joey's life - the only life in the universe worth a damn - I swear on his life I'll take theirs.  I swear it!"

When the dead were buried - the weatherman and his apprentice turned gravedigger for the night, knowing that if they didn't bury their colleagues quickly they would lose the chance forever, gathered the Princetons, took them to the weather station, and buried all six bodies somewhere deep in Donner's Pass: when the funeral was over, the oath Spears took began moving its tortuous way toward realization.  He planned every detail, charted every movement, calibrated each separate dynamic.  He worked for six months, setting it all in place as if revenge were nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle whose final piece, when laid in place, would trigger the act itself.        

He left the weather station every day - his new station, the one he had secretly set up in the cabin he found at the mouth of a cave at Monitor Pass: there was no going back to Donner's Pass, he and Joey gathered what equipment they could and left it forever - every day he went into Reno and Carson City, ordering his assistant to stay put.  He spent half the day, every day, in those two cities taking note of everything.  The surface of his mind became a map, with two focal points about which everything else configured: the headquarters of the Silvers in Carson City, and of the Spurs in Reno.  He drew a tight cordon around these two points on his map.  Every street, every building, every alleyway and storm drain was noted and rated as a possible conduit to and from the focus of his stake-out.

He quickly learned the power of regularity.  At first his trips drew attention, suspicion; then, as days went by and he appeared again and again, at the same exact time, people grew so accustomed to his being there that he became a part of the daily routine, virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the community.  No disguise could have accorded him greater cover.

"You're going to kill them, aren't you?" Joey asked one day.

"You going to warn them?" Spears, in turn, asked.

"No: they'd kill you if I did.  And you'd die with evil intentions in your heart.  Your soul would be lost forever."

"Oh.  So if I were good and had only good intentions, it'd be alright to kill me," Spears presented the boy a dilemma.  "Only as a bad guy am I worthy of being spared."

Above all else, Spears sought to learn their routine, so that he could find the weakest link in their security system.  As he came and went each day, he observed the comings and goings at their respective headquarters.  Right around noon both the Silvers and the Spurs seemed most vulnerable, this window appearing to reach forty-five minutes into the noon hour.  He practiced traversing the thirty-some miles between Reno and Carson City until he was sure he could make it in twenty minutes.  Then, as a final test, he entered each headquarters at the times he designated, to assess their vulnerability from within.  Finally satisfied that it could be done, all he waited for was the right moment.

It wasn't a sign he wanted: how could a man who believed in nothing look for a sign?  But it was a sign he got.  From a storm he had tracked from the Antarctic coast to the Bay of Bengal, where it slowly, inexorably metamorphosized, exactly as an earlier storm had, into a monster set to devour ten million unsuspecting people.  Monday, October 19, 2054: a day set aside by nature as a day of death.  The time was right.  The weatherman readied himself and the automatic weapon he had procured in Virginia City.

"Nature calls," he said as he left his cave and headed north, first going east on California Route 89 to US Route 395, then due north to Carson City, where he parked six blocks away from the old State Capitol Building and walked to his appointment.

Black gulls from Lake Tahoe flew overhead, squawking as if to warn the townspeople.  Everyone was watching the birds: they had never come here before; no one was paying any attention to the man with the odd shaped package tucked under his arm.  He moved unnoticed along the city streets.  The gulls circled, in ever narrowing bands like the isobars of clashing weather systems.

"Good morning!" Spears began addressing the people he passed.  He had never spoken to anyone before; today he spoke to nearly everyone he passed, as if deliberately seeking their attention.  

"Good morning!" he altered the cadence of his voice to the level of their preoccupation with the gulls.  "We've never met, but I've seen you so often I feel I've known you all my life!" he would add now and again as he marched toward the Capitol.

Then, a little farther along, "Good morning!  I'm Sandy!  I'm new to these parts" - sometimes eliciting a response, sometimes a nod or a smile in passing.

Until finally he made it to the Capitol.  The black gulls circled directly above its flattened gray dome.  He looked up once, gave them the thumbs-up, then ascended the granite steps and went in through a thick bronze door.  He casually worked his way along a steely corridor to the Silvers' council chamber, the old State Senate Chamber, where they always met this time of day; where he knew they would be meeting now.  He opened the gray metal door, stepped in, shut the door behind him, took a few steps, and stood there, twenty-five yards from the gathering, on a terrace looking down.

"Excuse us!" someone called up to him from the center of the council table that graced the front of the Chamber.  "We're in here!  Please leave!"  It looked like an orchestra pit from where Spears stood motionless.  "Did you hear me?" the man repeated in a louder voice.

Spears nodded.  "Actually, I was looking for the city morgue anyway.  But since I'm here, I'd like to leave something with you," he said as he removed the package from under his arm.

"He's got a bomb!" someone yelled.  The fourteen men leaped to their feet.

"Wrong!" Spears yelled back as he pulled the gun from the sack and began firing around the room.  He unfurled a hundred rounds in the space of a couple minutes, back and forth in a steady rhythmic motion calculated to hit everything in his path.  His calculation was flawless.  Presently, all the mad scurrying to get away ceased.  Nothing stirred.  Fourteen blood soaked bodies lay huddled around the marble chamber floor.

"It's a gun," he corrected the Councilman's evaluation of his parcel as he slipped it back in the sack and made for a side door.  He stopped beside a Silver chieftain long enough to swipe his index finger through one of the wounds and rub the blood across his forehead.  Then, still unnoticed, he left the Chamber, exited the Capitol, and casually headed back to his car.  The gulls had gone, the sky was quiet, the only noise was here on the ground.

"What's all the excitement?" he asked some people who came running past him.

"Someone heard gunshots!" came the reply.

"Hey, this is the wild west!" he quipped as he glided down the sidewalk.  Occasionally someone would stop and point to his forehead.  "An old war wound," he would say.  "Got it at the Battle of Truth.  You wouldn't believe the carnage they left behind!"

Within ten minutes, he was in his car again, heading north to Reno on US Route 395, which became South Virginia Street inside the city limits.  Halfway through the city, at California Avenue, he parked and walked the remaining six blocks to the old Court House, now the Spurs' headquarters, where he repeated, almost step for step and word for word, his earlier adventure - with one slight variation.  There were no gulls overhead to compete for the people's attention; his "Good mornings" were spoken head on and eye to eye.

"It's afternoon," someone pointed out.

"It still feels like morning," he explained.  "Ever had that kind of day?"

"What's that on your forehead?" someone else asked.

"Must be blood," he replied.

"You okay?"

"So far." 

"You ought to see a doctor."

"I am a doctor.  I replace eyes: you know: an eye for an eye."

The courthouse was small, a brick facade, a flat roof.  He went in through a small green side door.  Momentarily, he was standing in the old Courthouse where the Spurs met to conduct the city's business.  He looked around.  There were polished wooden planks behind the conference table, dark wooden beams overhead, a small windows with bars along the Eastern wall.  The council members, seated at an oaken table, seemed unaware of his presence though he was only thirty feet away.

"Excuse me," he called.  "Am I in the right place?  Is this where the bodies are?"

The twelve Councilmen looked at him, twelve balding middle aged men in expensive silk suits.  "What bodies?" one of them asked.  The heat came on, the compressed air buzzing into the room like a big fly.

Spears took out his gun.  All twelve men jumped up.  "Yours," he answered as he pointed the gun and began firing in the same rhythmic motion he had earlier used, a motion that mowed all twelve men to the floor.  When all movement ceased, except the spurting of blood from their wounds, he went to the nearest body, dipped his finger in a small pool that had formed in the chest cavity, and smeared it across his forehead, just above the other mark.  Then he replaced his gun and made for the small green door.

Coming out of the Courthouse, he encountered two policemen.  "There's been some trouble in there: they need help!" he reported.

"Looks like you need help yourself!" one of the cops said.

"I'm okay: I got out in time," Spears replied.  "Better hurry though.  They need you!"

"Thanks!" the cops said as they ran inside.

Spears watched the cops disappear through the same green door he had just come out of.  He shook his head and smiled as he walked away.  A siren rang out, disturbing some pigeons roosting in a cornice of the Courthouse.  He noticed where the sidewalk was cracked in places just beyond the Courthouse.  He struggled a moment trying to pry a concrete chip loose, but couldn't, so he moved on.  "Wish I had a friggin' souvenir," he muttered.

He made it to his car without incident.  He continued north on Virginia Street until coming to Interstate 80, where he turned left, heading west, into California, to just south of Donner's Pass.  He paused a moment and bowed his head before picking up Route 89 South, completing the loop back to Monitor Pass.

Returning to his cave, he threw his gun down.  Joey looked at him, at the blood on his forehead.  "The mark of Cain," the boy said.

"You gonna arrest me?" Spears asked.

The boy shook his head.  "They'd kill you," he said.  "And you'd be damned.  I'd never see you again for all eternity."

"How 'bout that!" Spears mused.  "So what's for dinner?" he then asked.  "I feel like celebrating."

"There'll be more," Professor Kirkus assured Bradley Carter.

"How do you know?  And if you know, why didn't you let me know?  I had geological surveys done: they didn't reveal that cavern or any other."

"They're not geological formations," said Kirkus.  "They have nothing to do with the topography of the region.  They're man-made.  We knew you'd encounter two; I had every intention of letting you know in plenty of time to deal with them.  The truth is, the one you encountered was unknown to us.  It's never been mapped.  I didn't think it had ever been used; although it must have, at some time, for the bones to have been there.  These are not caverns; they're tunnels.  Part of an elaborate escape route.  The T-Men have built a vast network of inter-connecting tunnels criss-crossing the plains.  Actually, an astounding feat; there's really been nothing like it in the history of the human race.  It even dwarfs our project.  Of course, it was constructed over a period of a hundred years, give or take.  Needless to say, the T-Men have no idea we know about it - which is just the way we want to keep it.  I'm told they've killed hundreds of their own members in order to keep us from learning about it - an irony I find rather scintillating.  The bones of Colorado Man were nothing more than the remains of a dead outlaw.  Only a self-promoting fool like Immanek Douglas could have ever thought otherwise!"

"As long as there are no more surprises awaiting my men, I could care less who's built what where or how!" Carter dismissed the tunnels and their builders.

"Oh, I assure you the landscape from here on out will be exactly as it appears, allowing for the two more tunnels you'll encounter along the way," said Kirkus.  "My one and only goal is to make sure you stay on schedule.  There is no other motive directing me."

"I hope not," Carter replied in a half threatening tone.

It was only after the boys' rescue that Kirkus' daughter Andrea took notice of Bradley Jerome Carter II.  She had seen him often in school; she knew he was her brother's rival; her friends in the fourth grade were crazy about him.  "He's the cutest boy in the sixth grade!" they all assured her.  Yet she saw nothing to set him apart from any of the other boys.

"It's not that unusual to be cute," she told her friends.  "Most of the boys here are cute, most of the girls pretty.  It's the homely ones who really stand out."

"Oooh!" the other girls declared with tremendous disdain.  "Who wants to be ugly?"

"Reggie does," Andrea noted.  "He says a leader should be unique."

"That's not the same thing as being ugly," her friends pointed out.

"Oh yes it is," she insisted.  "People want to be unique just about as much as they want to be ugly."

"Then you must think your brother's a doll!" they teased.

"I didn't say he was unique - only that he wants to be," Andrea countered.  "If you have to want to be, then you'll never be."

"Maybe Bradley's unique - and cute!"

"No, just cute.  With his big black eyes, and his jet black hair.  Just cute, that's all."

"It's not all," one of the girls taunted.  "My brother says he's got a big you-know-what, that boys have - that makes him unique!"

Andrea joined the other girls in wicked laughter.  "Now I know everything there is to know about him!" she quipped.

The sixth grade took a field trip in May to Meramec Caverns.  As with the fifth graders' annual field trip to the Tung's headquarters in South St. Louis, only representative students from each school were chosen.  Three busses were filled; at nine A.M. sharp they took off from three different points within the city, all three converging outside of Webster Groves for the hour's ride along Interstate 44 southwest to the town of Stanton.  The kids talked and sang and moved around on the bus, much to the annoyance of the drivers; but since these were special children, of some of the first families of St. Louis, they were not reprimanded by their chaperones.

Both Bradley Carter II and Reginald Kirkus were among the children chosen to make the field trip.  Neither joined the other children's activities during the ride; Reggie got up once, while the others were frolicking, and moved to the seat next to Brad.

"Why aren't you playing?" he asked.

"It makes the driver's job more difficult," Brad answered.

"These are all your followers: make them stop!" Reggie goaded.

"I don't want to control them," Brad explained.  "If they really got out of hand, to where our safety was jeopardized, I'd ask them to stop."

"Would they?"

"Some would."

"But not everyone?" Reggie observed.

"Why should everyone obey someone else's command?" Brad asked.

"Because that's what power is," Reggie boasted.

"Oh."

The three buses arrived within minutes of each other.  The passengers disembarked.  The teachers who chaperoned the outing assembled the children in the parking lot, then led them through the Visitor Center to begin the tour.  There was a slight rumbling far underground.

"Nothing to worry about," the tour guide assured the children and their chaperones.  "We get these small tremors this time of year.  It's all part of the Spring thaw.  Come back in July and I guarantee you they'll be gone!"

The rumblings continued intermittently throughout the tour.  It had nearly come to an end when Reggie proposed that he and Brad go off on their own to explore the cave.

"They don't show us half of it," he said in a lowered voice.  "They don't even let us near any of the stalactites: they're afraid we might get hurt and sue them!  Come on, let's go!"

"Just the two of us?" Brad asked.

"If you have to have your lieutenants along, I guess it's okay - but no more than one or two!" Reggie insisted.

"No, I don't want to get anyone else in trouble.  If I go, it'll just be me."

"Well?"

"Let me think about it."

"I knew you wouldn't do it!" Reggie expressed in a triumphant tone.  "You're scared to go against those in power.  You're just an ordinary, everyday Joe, scared of his own shadow."

"I don't mind going off to explore," Brad replied in a calm, reasoned tone.  "I don't really see a reason to - I don't really care what else is in here; but if you want, I'm up for it."

The two boys set off, first escaping the group by falling to the rear of the line, then slipping behind a formation till the others had moved on.  They wandered from room to room within the vast underground network, each room, as they drew farther and deeper into the cavern, growing colder, clammier than the last, though they never strayed entirely from the ring of lights set up to illuminate the natural wonders on display, interspersed with man-made adornments, such as the Jesse James gang.  When they had gotten as far from the lighted areas as they dared, the light so distant and dim they could barely see the huge jagged icicles clinging to the mossy ceiling above and rising from the slimy floor below, they started back.

"We could go farther," Reggie said.  "I've got a flashlight.  See?"  He triggered the light, which reflected off a sea of stalactites and stalagmites only a few feet ahead in a nearly blinding diffraction.

"This is far enough," said Brad, who moved ahead to where the light shone and just stood there, staring, reaching out to run his hand up and down the giant icicles.

"I've been here before," he said.  "Or somewhere just like this.  But I was being lifted, I wasn't walking."

"Maybe there were icicles in the river when your dad found you," Reggie suggested in a taunting voice.  "You know you're a foundling, don't you?  Otherwise you'd never have been made smart.  They'd have made you a good little citizen, who does everything he's supposed to.  Instead they made you smart - but I'm special!  Any rich kid can be smart but only one in a million can be special - and I'm that one!  They only give it to the chosen ones.  And if the wrong snot-nosed little brat gets the special stuff by mistake - even if he's a rich snot-nosed brat! - they take him out and drown him like a stray kitten!  They throw him in the river!"

"Is that what they did to me?" Brad asked.  "Did I get the wrong stuff by mistake?"

"No!  The mistakes were all made before you came along, so don't imagine you're special!  Those brats are all at the bottom of the Mississippi!"

"Where was God?" Brad posed a rhetorical question in a voice so low his companion failed to hear the question.

The light continued to shine into the icicles.  Brad continued stroking them, with both hands now, as if he were searching for something, trying first one then another until he found it, his search taking him deeper into this ever tightening ice menagerie. 

Suddenly the light flickered and the ground rumbled.  The light had loosened from Reggie's hand and fell to the floor, still aimed into the icicles.  Brad turned back toward the light.  The ground rumbled again.  A deafening roar began deep within the chamber, moving nearer the boys, the nearer it grew the more definite its cadence.  It was like the shattering of glass.  Brad began running toward the light, away from the approaching din.  Almost to the shore of his icicle sea, a third rumbling knocked him to the ground.  The sound pursuing him finally caught him.  The last stalactites clinging to the ceiling were wrenched loose and came crashing down around him.  Slivers of the shattered growths tore at his arms and legs, barely drawing blood.  He tried to crawl away, then stopped.

"What?" he said, turning as if responding to a call from within the chamber of broken icicles.

At that instant, a final stalactite broke free and fell, its jagged tip piercing Brad's chest.  Blood spurted from the wound onto the crystalline stone.  The light from the shore shone deep into the crystal now slowly turning red.  Brad raised his head and stared into the obelisk standing over him.  He began reciting a prayer.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name.  Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."

Then he stopped reciting.  "I can't lie here praying and waiting for God to come save me," he muttered, his voice strained, his words garbled.  "God can't save anyone, ever again, just as He could not save my father's son from being drowned like a stray kitten.  I see so clearly, in the shaft of this weapon.  I can never again believe.  The God my father worships - the God I loved as a reflection of my father: He is no more."

Brad closed his tear filled eyes and, with a sudden violent lurch that forced a gasp from his throat, arose from the ground.  He managed to steady himself and, re-opening his eyes, to guide his steps back into the light, one hand grasping at anything sturdy - the wall, a column of stone, one formation after another - to keep himself upright; the other hand holding the crystal protruding from his chest, as if it were a treasure too precious to let go.

He left Reggie's flashlight where it was, but maneuvered it around with his foot so it shone away from the chamber, lighting his way through the maze of stalactites and stalagmites too large to have been shattered by the earthquake, until he came to the recessed lights marking the boundary of the claimed caverns.  From this boundary on, his path was unimpeded by nature, the debris millions of years had left behind had been cleared by man.  He finally emerged, from the half hidden recess he and Reggie had gone to explore, into the main chamber, where the tour was just finishing. 

The other students, the chaperones, the tour guide all looked at him at first as if he were one of the animated displays; then, as it registered that he was one of them, and wounded, they ran to him.  Two of the chaperones took hold of him, one on each side; Reggie Kirkus came over and skillfully maneuvered himself in the place of one of them.

"I can manage," he told the chaperone he displaced.  "He's my friend."

Brad was led out, in a daze, and taken in an ambulance to the local hospital; from there, once he was stabilized, he was transferred to St. Louis for emergency surgery to remove the stalactite and repair his chest.        

Every newscast in St. Louis on the night of October 29, 2062, began with the same headline.  "It is with great sadness that we report the death of Joseph Manseur, President of the City Council.  Mr. Manseur died after a brief illness."  Variations of the highlights of his life followed the lead in.  "He was an integral part of our community for the past thirty-seven years, an innovator who took civic responsibility to new heights.  He and the civic organization he led turned our economy into the envy of the nation.  Under his leadership unemployment has remained at zero percent; productivity has risen at a steady rate of three percent per year; inflation bottomed out at one half of one percent per year, then disappeared for good.  As President of the Tung ruling body he forged alliances with every sector of the business and labor community.  A patron of the arts; the head of numerous charitable foundations; a staunch supporter of quality public education, Mr. Manseur truly represented all that is good and noble in our community - and he will be greatly missed."

The entire St. Louis aristocracy, as well as State and Federal officials up to the Vice-President of the United States, attended his funeral.  Inside a cast iron casket specially designed to resemble a bomb, Manseur was laid out against a red satin lining wearing his favorite turtleneck, a thick white one, and the traditional dark blue silk suit bearing the Tung's emblem on the breast pocket.  He was lad to rest in peace, following a brief eulogy by his second in command on a foggy gray day in early November.  When the funeral ended and everyone left, the gravediggers came and lowered the casket into the ground and filled the hole.  From a distance, a middle aged woman with wild, staring eyes, unkempt grayish blonde hair, and a jagged scar across her throat  watched the ceremony, watched the lowering of the casket, watched the dirt filling the grave.  When the gravediggers left she approached.  She took a blood-stained knife from her purse and thrust it into the soft moist earth.

"Knowledge is power," she said in a deep, rasping voice.  "You didn't know why you did it: you just did it.  But I knew exactly why I did it.  That's why you're a mere butcher while I'm an angel of vengeance."  Then she turned and walked away.

"Aim first," Paris Commune had always told his son.  "Take careful aim.  That's the only way to learn.  Until it comes to you so naturally you need only lift your weapon and fire, you must hold it up almost to your eyes.  Squint your eyes at first, to better focus; then learn to focus without squinting.  Then, in time, learn to focus with your hand - let your hand become an extension of your eyes."

They boy was four the first time Paris took him to the firing range.  By the time he was twelve he had become a marksman whose expertise was second only to his father.  Having mastered the skill, he seemed to lose interest.  He came to the firing range less frequently; and, then, only when his father insisted.

"What's wrong?" Paris asked the boy.  "You used to love to shoot.  Now you only shoot when I make you.  Why?"

"When can I go with you on a mission?" the boy asked.  "I'm tired of shooting at targets.  I want to shoot at people.  I want to kill the enemy.  Why won't you let me go?  You say I'm an expert: no one's going to shoot me first, I can outshoot anyone but you."

"I forget sometimes you're still a boy," Paris explained.  "It's when you say something like that I'm reminded.  Our aim is not to kill people.  Each mission has an objective.  People are killed only if they get in the way of that objective.  We're here to disrupt an evil, totalitarian bureaucracy that has ignored the rights and freedoms the American people fought and died for.  As for out-shooting the enemy, that's not what it's about: that's only a small part of it.  Our job is to outsmart the enemy: that's how we stay alive.  You will almost never stand face to face with your enemy, as you and I are now standing.  His goal is to surprise you, yours to keep from being surprised.  If you think of him as a target, he'll get you first every time.  You must learn to think of him as an abstraction - a possibility - something that could appear at any moment, from any angle.  You must regard him as a phantom.  He doesn't exist until he suddenly appears from nowhere.  Then you have to instantly assess what he will do.  Only then can you ever think about shooting.  So long as he remains a phantom, your shots will stray from the mark, every time you fire.  Wait for that split second when he becomes a concrete reality.  Then fire."

Paris paused a moment.  "You know," he continued, "as I was explaining this to you, I thought of something useful.  I was trying to picture some training exercise, something you could watch on television.  I know I've spoken against that medium, and haven't allowed you to watch.  Now I want you to start watching.  You're right: you don't need to keep shooting at targets; once or twice a week should keep your skills sharp.  There's a series of programs - very, very old.  I watched them when I was a boy, and they were old then; I'd forgotten about them till just now, talking to you.  My father had given them to me to watch.  It occurred to me how much they taught me.  They're still around.  I'm going to get as many videos of as many episodes as I can find.  The series was called Star Trek.  I can't think of anything better to teach you this idea of something intangible suddenly becoming a reality so overwhelming you must deal with it immediately or perish.  These are life or death situations in which literally split-second decisions have to be made.  I don't want you to watch the shows for their entertainment value - ignore the costumes, the spaceships, the alien creatures, the ray-guns.  Focus only on the plot, and its resolution.  Look beyond the superficial paraphernalia to the essence of what is actually happening.  By this time next week I'll have those videos for you.  You have my word on that."

From the first moment of the first episode he watched, exactly one week from the day his father promised him the videos, the boy became totally engrossed in the events depicted, totally immersed in the world these events circumscribed.  Gradually, episode after episode, over and over, day in and day out, as he sat on a wooden chair in his small room, darkened by drawn curtains, watching the small screen a few feet in front of him, he came to understand what his father had tried to explain.  And when he went to the target range - every day he went now, no matter what the weather - he acted out the dynamic he was beginning to see as the essence of all human encounters.

"Father," he said one evening over supper as the two sat at a small wooden table in a small, bare room admitting the last light of the day through a yellowed, curtainless window, "the term you use: second nature: I'm beginning to understand it.  Not fully yet; but I know in time the things I'll need to do will be second nature to me.  Thank you, father, for those videos.  When I think of all you know, I'm proud to be your son, no matter what I might have to do when the time comes.  I love, father.  And I honor you."

"I love you, son," Paris, in turn, said.  "And I'm proud to be your father - whatever circumstances might require of me some day.

In reconstructing the compound at Recluse from the ashes of their old headquarters, the T-Men had endeavored to follow the original design as closely as possible; this was especially true of the room where the ruling Council met.  The new chamber, like the old, followed an A-frame, forty feet long, twenty feet wide, with a ten foot high wood beamed ceiling.  There were no windows, and only one door, heavy, dark and rustic.  The walls were stone, the floor wooden planks.  A table and ten chairs stood at the far end, opposite the door.  An American flag stretched against the wall overlooking the council table.

There was considerable discussion in the council chamber regarding the recent death of the Tung leader.  He and his organization were well known to the T-Men, who kept close tabs on the ruling bodies of all the major cities.

"He never owned a turtleneck in his life," Mount Everest mentioned.  "Yet he was buried in his 'favorite' one."

"He died 'after a brief illness,'" one of the other members observed.

"We're going to exhume his body," Paris Commune brought forth.

"Why?  Logic already says he was probably murdered!" a member declared.

"Or hung himself," another member added.

"It isn't to satisfy our curiosity," said Paris.  "It's to show the people what really happened."

"What makes you think they care what really happened?" several members agreed.

"It's to let them know they were lied to," Paris explained.

"Don't you think they already know how often they're lied to," Mount Everest posed a rhetorical question.  "They've long since abandoned any concern for truth they might have once had."

"What are you saying: we should give up?" Paris countered with another rhetorical question.

"No," Mount Everest recanted.  "Our course is worth whatever we need to do.  For my part, I've long since given up fighting for the sake of the people, that's all.  I've become a true revolutionary: all that matters is my cause.  All substance and no talk.  The truth is, freedom would be a hindrance to most people.  It would cost them, literally cost them, to be free.  They're already free enough, for their purposes.  When we come riding in our shining white horses to set them free from tyranny, they'll all be there cheering us.  And, all the while, cursing us under their breath for disrupting their comfortable existence just to set them free.  I have no more faith in the people than I do in their God.  And the only faith I have left in my cause is that I know, in an ideal world, it could help usher in the Millennium.  I'm willing to sacrifice that which is for the sake of that which can never be.  That makes me an absolute fool.  Yet when I look around at the options, weigh the alternatives, being a fool doesn't look half bad to me.  But digging up a corpse simply to rub people's noses in it: it makes no sense - even to an acknowledged fool."

"Nevertheless," said Paris, "it's what we're going to do.  Or, let me say: it's what I'm going to do.  Anyone is free to accompany me or not, as he sees fit.  For all I know, Kirkus is behind this.  If so, and if I can put a wedge between him and his operatives, I'll gladly dig up a thousand corpses and lay them at his feet!"

"So when are you going to rob Manseur's grave?" Mount Everest asked.

"I'll do that first," Paris answered.  "I want that behind me when I meet with the weatherman."

"Who?" several asked.

"That's all anyone knows him by: the weatherman.  He's formed his own militia - well, not exactly a militia; I'm just used to using that word.  He calls his group 'The Weathermen.'  All they do is report the weather - twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  The real weather.  Not this bogus crap you get in the papers and on television."

"Then he's the one who -" someone started to ask.

"He's the one!" Paris cut him short.  "A living legend.  And I want him on our team.  That'd be one huge feather in our cap, getting the man who single-handedly wiped out the ruling bodies of two separate gangs, even if they were two small, rather insignificant gangs.  I've arranged to meet with him next month.  Next week, I go dirty my hands in the Tungs' back yard before shaking his hand next month.  Anyone with me?"

The Council was not only a collective body, it was an amalgam of separate forces, each with its own leader who sat on the Council.  Had the other members not agreed to Paris' plan, he would have been limited to his own personal contingent and his own resources.  By voicing their agreement, as they did, the other nine members put the men and resources each represented at Paris' disposal.  He acknowledged their support, stipulating only that he wanted no new members this time.

"I want this to go without a hitch," he said.  "Only members whose loyalty has been proven need apply."

The little graveyard off South Kingshighway where the Tungs had been buried for three generations was surrounded by a ten foot high wrought iron fence, which the full moon twisted into an eerie shadow that stretched across the graves like the fingers of a skeleton trying to dig up corpses.  The nearest street light cast a garbled orange glare eaten up by the moon's light.  Five men dressed in black scaled the fence and jumped into the graveyard, each casting a long thin shadow that moved quickly to the center, where a new headstone had been installed over a freshly dug grave.  Within an hour the body of Joseph Manseur was inside a black plastic bag being carried across the fence to an awaiting van.

Inside the van, the body was removed from the bag and stripped, first of its silk jacket then its "favorite" turtleneck, revealing a jagged scar, reaching from ear to ear, carefully sown shut.  The body was returned to the bag; the van sped away.  It was approaching eleven o'clock.

"Do you know where your leader is?" Paris Commune quipped.

Ten minutes later the van stopped, in front of a local television station.  The five men in the van put on ski masks, gathered up the corpse, and made for the station, staying close to the shadows of shrubs along the front of the one story brownstone building.  They worked their way around to the side, coming to a metal door, which they pried open, and went in.  Through the darkness of deserted offices and storage spaces they slowly moved to a brightly lit area filled with cameras and other equipment all focused on a set in the center of the room.  Just ahead was the eleven o'clock news.  A woman and three men were strategically seated behind a long arch-shaped desk.

The five men and their cargo moved unseen and unheard to the back of the set.  At a signal from their leader they took out guns and burst all of a sudden through a backdrop of the Gateway Arch onto the set.  The woman screamed once; the three men arose as if to scatter but were convinced by guns pointed at their heads to return to their seats.

Two of the men wearing masks brought the black bag to the desk.  An empty chair to the left of the woman was placed in the center of the table.  The bag was seated in the empty chair.  The leader moved directly behind it.

"We have a present for the citizens of St. Louis," he said; and, as he spoke, pulled the black bag from around the corpse.  There were gasps around the desk and in the dark recess where the equipment was.  Suddenly all the red lights facing the set went out; the monitor went black.  The leader raised his gun and pulled the trigger.

"We're not alone," he said.  "This studio is completely surrounded.  The cameras go back on or the cameramen die.  The show must go on, gentlemen."  The red lights returned, the monitor once again displayed the newsroom.

A man who had been waiting in the wings came forward.  "You've taken my chair," he said.  Then, as he moved closer, five guns pointing at him, he addressed the leader directly.  "You may as well take your mask off," he told him; "I recognize your voice."

"We meet again, Mr. Carter," the leader said.  "I take it you were here to be interviewed.  I wouldn't wish to deprive your audience of their...other...special guest.  So please proceed.  With one change in the script: I'll be conducting the interview.  First question, sir: what is the secret project you're working on?"

"Next question," Bradley Jerome Carter prompted.  Paris raised his gun and pointed it.  "I repeat: next question," Carter said.

"Actually," said Paris, "we have to be going."  Then he drew very close to Carter and whispered in his ear.  "It's not too late to reclaim your son."

"The moment it happened it was too late," Carter replied back in a stage whisper.

Paris signaled to his men.  As quickly, as silently as they had arrived, they left the station, proceeded to their van, and sped away.  In less than an hour, they were headed west along Interstate 70 to Columbia, where they took a northern turn on US Route 63, which they followed to Ottumwa, Iowa, then headed west again, along US Route 34, into Nebraska, to the Bassway Strip.  There they disappeared underground.

A party of three men and two women paid an early evening visit to Bradley Jerome Carter's mansion in the Private Streets District of the West End.  A tall man dressed in a priest's black frock and white collar rang the doorbell.  He handed the servant who answered the door an embossed card. 

"Please announce us to Mr. Carter," he said.  "It's very urgent that we see him."

Presently the party was admitted to the formal sitting room just off the main foyer, the three gentlemen offered easy chairs, the ladies a divan.  Once they were seated, the man of the house entered.  The gentlemen arose; the ladies nodded.

"Please be seated," Carter said to the gentlemen after acknowledging the ladies.  "Father Rosten, you're always a welcome guest in my home," he addressed the one visitor he knew.  "Can I offer you something?" he asked.

"No," replied the priest gravely.  "This is, sadly, not a social call.  We bring very bad news, sir - and bad news is best offered swiftly, and with the greatest possible compassion.  I wish there were some other way to say this, but there isn't: something terrible has happened to your son.  We tried desperately to save him, but it was too late; there was nothing we could do.  We lost him, sir, despite all our efforts to save him."

"Lost him?" Carter repeated as if doubting which words he heard.  "What do you mean 'Lost him?'  Lost him how?"

"In times like this, our heavenly Father - and He alone - can give us the strength we need to get through our trials and tribulations.  We are prepared to offer a novena, and have petitioned the Bishop of St. Louis to include him in a special mass."

"That's all well and good," Carter impatiently interrupted, "but please just get to the point.  What happened to my son?"

"He was in school, in Bible class, when it happened."  The priest pointed to the man seated next to him and to the lady farthest from their host.  "Mr. Morne and Mrs. Leakin here were conducting a question and answer session -"

"Are you telling me something happened in school?"

"Yes, sir, I am.  But let me let Mr. Morne and Mrs. Leakin tell you in their own words," the Priest deferred to the man next to him first.

"I had just presented my students with the classic dilemma," Mr. Morne began relating the incident, his little mouth opening and closing like a fish sucking in water.  "'Can God make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it?'  I had gotten several attempts at answers - all quite off the mark, as you might imagine - when I perceived Master Bradley holding his hands palm up as if weighing some evidence, one part against another.  So I called upon him to share his thoughts with the class.  That was when it happened.  Mrs. Leakin," Morne deferred to the lady.

"At first Bradley said nothing," she resumed the story.  "Then he spoke up.  We were all so taken aback and horrified by what he said I asked him to please repeat himself.  'I no longer believe in God,' he said yet a second time.  'So I'm unable to address the matter of the stone you proposed.'  Mr. Morne and I stood there, transfixed, neither of us knowing what to do for the boy."

"That's when they called me," Father Rosten took over the narrative again, "knowing I was his parish priest.  I, of course, dropped everything and hurried right over.  Something told me I'd need all the help I could get, so I called Dr. Jurgens and Dr. Marsen on the parish car phone and asked them to meet me there.  They're both Christian child psychologists."

"That's correct," the second man down from Rosten said.  "Dr. Marsen and I deal every day with boys and girls in danger of losing their way.  Neither of us had ever encountered anything quite like this - do I speak correctly for you, Dr. Marsen?"

The other woman on the divan nodded her assent.  "The boy was quite recalcitrant," she added her assessment.  "We tried everything to get him to recant, but he steadfastly refused.  We asked him to join us in prayer, but he declined."

"He's suffering the symptoms of a classic unconversion syndrome," Dr. Jurgens explained.  "It's a very rare disorder, usually brought on by some traumatic event, such as the loss of a parent.  I've never seen so severe a case."

"Nor have I," Dr. Marsen assured her host.

"Unconversion?" Bradley Carter sought verification of what he had heard.

"It really goes back to very ancient folklore," Dr. Marsen pointed out.  "The story of the Prodigal Son.  In some ways the story of Cain also.  Even parts of the Lucifer allegory."

"It's a disorder most difficult to treat," Father Rosten again reclaimed the floor.

"What do you recommend?" Carter asked.

"First and foremost," Rosten offered, "he must be removed completely from exposure to any and all non-Christian influences or stimuli, no matter how innocuous they may seem.  There can be no pagan art, such as African statuettes depicting naked women; no erotic or suggestive poetry; no atheistic literature of any sort; absolutely no science-fiction; no music employing any strong percussion; no electronic or video games not sanctioned by the Church.  He may engage freely in all non-contact sports, but must not wear athletic attire which fits too tightly.  Needless to say, he must never be left alone with a member of the opposite sex - especially one who might assume the role of the temptress."

"Forgive my bluntness, Father," Carter observed, "but all your suggestions relate almost entirely to physical matters.  Isn't it his soul we're concerned with rather than his body?"

"The body is the vehicle of the soul," Rosten reminded his host.  "Set the body on the right path and the soul will follow."

Carter thanked his guests for their concerns as well as their suggestions.  He assured them he would do everything necessary to return his son to the fold.  He then bid them a good evening.  By the time they had descended the front steps and walked to Rosten's black sedan, Carter had formulated his plan.  When they were gone, he stepped outside and, looking up at the stars in the night sky, promised God he would deliver his son to Him or forfeit his own life trying.

At their next meeting, two days after the visit, Carter set down the terms of the rest of his son's boyhood.  They met in the formal study, which served as Carter's office away from his office.  The mahogany desk, the various mahogany side pieces, the green leather chair, the dark green rug and drapes, all flawlessly set beneath a flood of white light, conspired to wring all familiarity from the father-son dynamic, leaving only its most primitive manifestation: an open display of power.

The boy sat facing his father, who sat behind his desk in a chair larger and higher than the others.  At first Bradley Carter said nothing.  He just stared at his son, as if witnessing an imposter's charade.

"Perhaps you're wondering why I've called you here," he finally said when the tension had built sufficiently to make them both uncomfortable.  "Starting tomorrow you will no longer participate in scholastic sporting events.  I am taking that from you.  You will, however, attend every event that you would have otherwise participated in.  You will spend your leisure hours watching others do what you no longer can.  In case you wonder if this is punishment: it is.  You're being punished for turning away from God.  But it's not just punishment: it's an attempt to make you see the folly of your course.  Society has no more room for atheists than heaven does.  I intend to deprive you of everything that gives you joy, starting with the thing that gives you the greatest joy.  Once you see - really, truly see - what your life is like without the benefits society imparts to those who abide by its rules, you may - I hope, I pray you will - begin to understand what eternity would be like without the blessings heaven bestows on the faithful.  I have no other aim but teaching you; no other concern in this but your immortal soul.  I want you to be with me in heaven.  I can't imagine spending eternity without my son by my side.  I will do anything I have to to insure your salvation."

Young Bradley focused his deep black eyes on his father as he spoke.  "This is not a decision I chose to make," he said.  "I would never choose to give up my belief, it meant too much to me.  Yes, I love sports, father - more than anything; yes, I'll miss them, more than I can ever say.  But there's nothing you or anyone else can take from me that I'll miss half as much as I miss believing in God.  Every time I walk past the Cathedral - and I try to go that way every day - it's all I can do to keep from crying, I want so much to be a part of it again.  But I can't.  I saw it too clearly to deny it.  There is no God.  Nothing that's ever happened to me has ever been so clear.  I can't believe any longer, no matter what it costs me.  And I can't pretend to believe just to keep from losing the things I love: it's too important, I won't demean it by faking it.  You want me to believe again: I won't, father, not ever.  You want my soul to be saved: there is no salvation."

"There are no sports either," Bradley Carter reinforced his decision.

"Don't you miss playing?" Andrea Kirkus asked Brad at an inter-scholastic football tournament.  "You were so good.  A much better quarterback than the one we have now."

The statewide Junior High competition was being held at St. Joseph.  The best teams from each city had competed throughout the season, eventually narrowing down to two: St. Louis' Forest Park and St. Joseph's Corby Grove Middle School.  Forest Park was Bradley Carter's school.  He had been its team's quarterback throughout most of the season, helping his school win a trip to the final play-off.  This was the first game since his father's edict.

"Sure, I miss it," he replied to Andrea's question.  She had arranged to meet him in the stands at the Albrecht Art Gly Athletic Field, just below the Interstate 29 overpass, where the game was being played.  Ever since Brad's fall from grace, Professor Kirkus had discouraged his daughter from being seen in his company, so she met him on the sly.  "I would kill to be on that field," he added.  "The irony is, if I were poor I'd be there: my father's objections would carry no weight with the school board."

It was an unusually warm evening for late fall - particularly since the day had been cold.  Snow had fallen; by mid-afternoon the football field was covered.  Then suddenly it began warming up, the snow melted, the field became soggy.  The stands were packed, the spectators had tracked mud on their way to their seats.  Some carried blankets or heavy coats, in case it got cold again; most came only wearing the shirts or blouses on their backs.  The sun had just set when the game began: it had been scheduled earlier than normal to allow the St. Louis team and their fans time for the three hundred mile trip home.  Dark black clouds began spilling across the horizon, choking off the last remaining light.

Brad and Andrea had taken their seats on the front row, at the fifty-yard line, just in time for the kick-off.  The first quarter moved slowly; St. Joseph made a touchdown in the final seconds of the quarter.  By contrast, the second quarter moved swiftly.  St. Louis made a touchdown the very first play, followed by three field goals for St. Joseph, then a second touchdown for St. Louis and a touchdown for St. Joseph, putting the score at fourteen to twenty-three.  Half-time, the air began growing colder; the heavy black clouds sped out of Kansas toward the Missouri River like a runaway freight train.  Some of the spectators, watching the clouds, began singing a very old song, Ghost Riders In The Sky.

A howling wind accompanied the start of the third quarter.  Several attempted passes were foiled by it, the football blown not only over the head of the receiver but out of bounds entirely - twice ending up in the bleachers.  "It's starting to look like a baseball game!" one of the announcers for the station televising the game quipped.  Then, from nowhere, a blinding rain from the southeast swept across the field into the stands.  Blankets were hastily thrown over the few spectators who had brought them but were grabbed up by the wind as if they were fallen leaves and blown out of the stands and onto the bypass hundreds of feet to the northwest.  Nobody heard the cloud roll in.

It came as if on the twentieth century poet Carl Sandburg's "Little Cat's Paws."  It was nothing more than a passing cloud, very low to the ground, like a big thick fog that silently rolled in.  Had it not been a night game on a football field, no one would have known what was inside; the cloud would have done what it came to do unseen as well as unheard.  But the floodlights caught it.  Beaming from one end to the other, thousands of watts of luminescence burned an image in the night as surely as if a shutter had exposed an emulsion of silver nitrate.

Inside the cloud was a huge black swirl rolling with thunderous ferocity as the cloud slowly swept across the football field.  The boys on the field couldn't see it; only the spectators, from their illuminated vantage point, could, as well as the viewers watching at home on their televisions.  To the boys it still looked like fog as, one by one, it began sucking them in while they played out their final play of the game.

The spectators were screaming.  The boys still left on the field did not realize what was happening to their team mates, only that they were lost in a dense fog, which drew ever nearer.  Everyone watched in horror as the floodlights lit up bodies being torn apart inside a churning black vortex.

Bradley Carter jumped from his seat and ran, as fast as he could, onto the playing field, screaming at the top of his lungs to the boys still left "Get off the field!  Get off the field!"  None of them moved.  He kept screaming at them, running toward them.  They were in the middle of a scrimmage.  No one had ever told them they would one day have to abandon the configuration their coaches had put them in.  They wouldn't move.  The cloud kept rolling over them, one by one, drawing them up into the vortex.

Tears were streaming down Bradley Carter's face; he could barely see.  The cloud was almost on him.  He couldn't hear it, or see it; but he felt it drawing nearer.  As it reached out to him he made a running tackle, pushing himself and one other boy to the sidelines, just inches away from the cloud.  He had no idea who lay beneath him; he could feel a body struggling to free itself from his iron grip, that was all.

Then the cloud passed beyond the field and over Noyes Street, to the immediate west, carrying the disembodied boys toward the Missouri.  In its wake were two boys, lying just outside the ten yard line.  Slowly they got up and looked around.

"Where'd they go?" the boy Brad had tackled asked.  "Where are they?"  He began to panic as he sensed something terrible had happened.  He began running, away from Brad, to the other end of the field, calling then crying out then screaming the names of his team mates.  "Where are you guys?  Where are you?"

Brad walked across the field to the stands.  When he reached his seat, he touched Andrea's cheek with this palm.  "It might have turned," he said.  "I didn't think.  It might have turned and gotten you and I wouldn't have been there.  I'll never leave you like that again, I swear it."

Andrea looked into his eyes.  "You saved a boy's life," she said.  "If you had stayed behind to protect me he would have died with the others."  Brad put his arm around her and led her away.

"I never saw the ugly side of sports before," he said, tearfully.  "Where they do exactly as they're told, and stay their ground, no matter what, till someone in authority comes to relieve them.  Andrea, I loved those guys.  They were my buddies.  I loved them.  We were a team.  They died because they were a team, waiting for the leader to come save them.  Only there was no leader.  And now everyone will think they've gone to heaven and they'll see them again one day.  Except me.  And they think it's easy, not believing in God - just something a two-bit rich punk does for a lark!  I'd give anything if I could see those guys again.  It hurts so much knowing I never will.  I loved them so much.  But I love you more, Andrea.  So much more."

"I always knew you would, when you were ready to," Andrea said.    

"It's a new kind of tornado," Sanderson Spears explained the strange markings on his radar to Joey.  Hidden away in his cave in the side of Monitor Pass, he could only see and experience the strange weather around him through his network of electronic sensors, as if he were a paraplegic totally dependent on machines to make his way through life.  "Maybe some day I'll see one for real," he added, almost longingly.

"New in what way?" Joey asked.

The cabin was smaller than the weather station at Donner's Pass - barely half its size.  But the cave was big enough to accommodate a building the size of a football field; and, sheltered from all but the fiercest winter storms, it allowed for a multitude of possible living arrangements.  In the summer, on all but the coolest nights, Spears and his assistant slept in the open, behind the cabin, in a fenced in compound meant to keep the occasional bear, cougar or wolf from disturbing their sleep.  When the weather grew colder, they pitched tents inside a ring of fire.  Only on the very coldest nights, when blizzards crept up the mountainside, tree by tree, boulder by boulder, catching in the crevices and onto the ledges then all at once leaping inside the cave as if sucked into a vacuum, did they sleep in the cabin, and even then primarily to make sure the equipment kept working.

"This tornado never touches down," Spears explained.  "It never takes a vertical turn - it remains horizontal.  There are both updrafts and downdrafts in the cell; somehow they're held in perfect equilibrium.  The tornado never becomes a cloud.  It rolls, at the same speed as a regular tornado, inside this deceptively innocent looking cloud.  How much damage it does depends entirely on how low the cell is to the ground.  This one touched down just east of the Missouri River, probably right in the center of St. Joe.  Right near Route 29."

"How can you know that?" Joey asked.

"Because I'm the best there is," Spears replied.  "That's not saying much though, considering how few of us there are.  A hundred years ago you would have expected to see giants in the year 2060 - meteorologists who could almost create magic.  Then about thirty years ago, or thereabouts, it came to a screeching halt."

"Why?"

The marks on the screen conveyed by Spears' radar faded over the thin jagged line representing the Missouri.  What was left of Bradley Carter's team mates and their opponents fell from the sky into the cold dark waters and washed downstream.

"They realized what I've come to realize," Spears said.  "The world is coming to an end.  Not the world for good; but the world as we know it; the world human civilization was created in; the world people have managed to survive in.  It's coming to an end.  And the weather, as always, is the harbinger of what's to come.  Don't report it, it'll go away.  What we haven't named cannot exist.  What you don't know can't hurt you.  Oh, by the way: pack a bag, we're headed for Carson City tomorrow."

A strange look came over Joey's face, one of fear and at the same time relief.  Tears welled up in his eyes.  "It's for the best," he said, "turning yourself in.  I'll stand by you, no matter what.  And if they want to try me as an accessory, that's okay too."

Sanderson Spears looked at the boy and burst out laughing.  "That's why I love you, kid!" he exclaimed.  "You're a treasure!  That wonderful naiveté of yours is a never ending source of amusement!  Turn myself in?  For what?  For serving the cause of justice?  For righting a wrong?  For doing unto others as they did unto those I love?  No, kid, sorry to disappoint that two-bit morality of yours, but I won't be turning myself in.  Not tomorrow, not ever.  The only thing you'll be an accessory to is my meeting with the leader of the T-Men."

"Why Carson City?  Why there?" Joey asked.

"The scene of my triumph - one of the scenes, one of my triumphs.  That's why he wants to meet me.  In one afternoon I've done more to buck the system than he has in a lifetime - and surrounded by a small army to boot!  He wants to join forces.  Read: he wants the added prestige of having me in his back pocket.  That's okay with me, so long as I get what I want in exchange.  I'll be his poster boy - just as long as he provides me the resources I need to get my job done.  See, we're two of a kind, Paris Commune and me.  He doesn't trust me to meet him at his hideout; I don't trust him to meet me here.  So we agreed on a neutral ground."

The next morning, very early, Spears and Joey started out.  They headed north from Monitor Pass on California Route 89, skirting the western edge of Lake Tahoe.  Joey asked if US 395 wouldn't have been a more direct route.

"Sure would," Spears replied.  "Except we're taking a little detour through Donner's Pass.  I don't meet the T-Men till two o'clock.  That gives me plenty of time to set things up."

It was only when they pulled up in front of the old, abandoned weather station that Joey asked what things had to be set up - and why there.  "When we leave our meeting, this is where we're going," Spears explained.  "I want him to think this is my hideout, so I've got to give it that 'lived-in' look."

"Why?  I don't understand."

"Because as sure as the sun will set this evening that SOB'll have me followed," Spears explained.  "I do not - repeat: do not - intend letting him know my true location.  He's got to think this is the center of my operations.  Now, let's get to it.  We've got a lot to do."

For the first time, ever, Joey was not a hindrance.  Rather, he moved about and handled the equipment with the skill and agility of a trained acrobat.  Everything he did was letter perfect.  When the job was done and Spears was satisfied that the station looked the way it should, he commented on Joey's performance.

"What's wrong with you, kid?" he asked good naturedly.  "The one time I'm asking you to do something deceptive you're as smooth as silk.  You found your niche in life?"

Joey smiled, lighting up his whole face.  "It feels so good being here again," he said.  "The terrible thing that happened is gone; only the good memories are still here.  I loved it here."

"You'd have loved it more if I had treated you better," Spears noted.  "I'm sorry.  I'll never say that again, I'm sure you know, and I know I'll go right back to mistreating you.  But I truly am sorry.  You deserve so much more than the hand you were dealt."

"I wouldn't want more," Joey said.  "This is where God wants me.  And this is where I want to be."

"And you always will - I promise you that," Spears assured the boy; "as long as you want.  As long as I'm alive.  But I keep forgetting: you're not a kid anymore.  You're going to want to be starting your own life."

"This is my life.  I'm your assistant.  I could never be anything but an assistant - you've got to be smart for that, and I'm not smart.  I'd rather be your assistant than someone else's."

"We'd better get going," Spears said as he looked at his watch.  "Just remember: you don't say a word about Monitor Pass.  I have to ask you to lie for me."

"I won't be lying," Joey assured Spears.  "This weather station - this one, right here - is our home.  This is where we live and work; it still has the feel of those days.  This will always be our home, no matter what.  I won't be lying."

Spears took Interstate 80 east to Truckee, then California Route 267 south to Lake Tahoe, where he picked up Route 28 around Tahoe's northeast rim and on into Carson City.  When Paris Commune, Mount Everest and four of their lieutenants arrived at the old State Capitol Building, Spears and Joey were waiting on the front steps to meet them.  Spears led them inside and down the same steely corridor to the same council chamber he had entered the time he had business here, except that there was no meeting in progress this time: the Silvers, what was left of them, never quite regained their prominence within the community.  Carson City was absorbed, along with Reno, into the Nevada State bureaucracy.  The old State Capitol Building became a museum.

Spears and his guests seated themselves at the same table the Silvers used to sit at.  Paris looked around the room, saying "I like your style" to Spears.  "I like boldness."

"I like irony," Spears responded.  "And I like anonymity."

"For a man who jams the airwaves seven days a week, that's quite a paradox," Paris observed.

"It's the weather - the real, true, honest to God weather, uncut, uncensored, unadulterated - I ram down their throats.  Not me or my personality or my ego.  My job is to give the weather, not to win popularity polls."

Incredibly, no one had thought to replace the carpet; traces of the stains Spears' vengeance had fixed to the floor still remained, six years later.  Mount Everest noticed the stains the moment he entered the room.  "A measure of their worth," he mused.

"How's that?" asked Paris.

"Once they fell from power," Mount Everest explained, "no one cared if their defeat became public property.  No one came to clean up after them.  There's a lesson there for all of us," he added pointedly.

Spears and Joey sat on one side of the table; Paris and his men on the other.  For a moment nothing further was said, as if everyone at the table had suddenly remembered that a thing called etiquette still existed; but no one remembered quite how it worked.  Spears, noticing Paris and, particularly Mount Everest, staring at Joey as if trying to place him, attempted an awkward introduction of his assistant - awkward because he knew precisely what his guests took their relationship to be, and didn't wish to dignify their conclusion by offering anything beyond the boy's name.  The introduction was acknowledged, followed by another pause, which Paris attempted to smooth over with small talk of a sort.

"Your friends were lucky," he told Spears.  "This is still the wild west, where executions are still done the old fashioned way: a bullet to the back of the head."

"Lucky?" Spears asked, as if he hadn't quite understood which term Paris had used.

"There are worse ways to die - believe me," Paris said.  "Execution has become a major art form - especially in the older, more 'civilized' cities.  In Pittsburgh - Pig Town - they cover you from head to toe with flame retardant then slowly lower you into a vat of molten steel.  Across the state, in Philly, they haul out Old Liberty; set you under it; surround it with electronic hammers; and keep pounding away till you're dead.  I'm told it sometimes takes days.  Or New Orleans: the City of Masks.  They've created delicate ceramic masks which they carefully slip over your head.  The mask covers your whole head, like a ski mask.  It has an opening at the top, into which they pour boiling hot Jambalaya.  Even death is the plaything of fortune: your friends died quickly, for no other reason than that they were where they happened to be.  But enough small talk: that's not why we're here, is it?"

"No, it isn't," Spears agreed.

The two men squared off; it was as if everyone else had vanished into the walls.  The entire time they spoke Mount Everest stared at Joey, as if still trying to place him.  It'll come to me some day, he said to himself.

Spears and Paris got down to business.  "Join us," said Paris.  "The T-Men can use a good weatherman.  We're a loose-knit organization: I suspect that's to your liking.  We don't tell you how to run your own organization: you're pretty much on your own.  There is one stipulation: we require each organization that joins forces with us to provide us a body - a living body, of course.  One of your members has to be given to us, to be trained by us and used in our operations.  It assures us adequate manpower.  I'll be perfectly frank with you: it's a form of tribute, it's your acknowledgment of our supremacy.  Are you uncomfortable with that concept?" Paris asked.

Spears focused for a second on the stains at his feet before answering.  "I'm uncomfortable," he said, "with anything that interferes with my job."

"Granted you're a small organization, but I'm sure you have someone you can spare."

"I have one assistant: Joey.  And I can't spare him."

"There must be others - you can't possibly run a network like yours alone," Paris speculated.

"Want to try me?" Spears retorted.  "I'm a one man show.  Oh, I've thought about joining forces with other weathermen; I know they're out there: real weathermen, who love the science more than the show.  But I've learned the hard way that having associates makes you too vulnerable.  I work alone.  With one assistant."

"I can give you one of my men in trade -"

"Forget it!  I don't trade assistants."

"We have a lot to offer you, Spears - I think you know that, or you wouldn't be here.  Our resources are considerable.  But we have to have something in exchange, or there can be no deal."

"I need my assistant," Spears said as he arose from the table.  "I'll have to pass on your offer."

Paris arose too.  "It may be possible to reach a compromise," he said.  "Give us your assistant half the year."

"There's weather year round," Spears pointed out.

"With our help you can redesign your network to where you won't need him all year long," Paris offered.

"Besides," Spears explained, drawing Paris aside, "I don't want this kid to become a killer.  I don't want him trained to shoot or stab or bludgeon or choke or smother another human being.  It would destroy him - assuming you could get him to go against his own conscience.  You must need cooks or janitors or something like that."

Paris shook his head.  "We all do those things."

"Then, I'm sorry.  No deal."  Spears turned to go.

"I could use a tutor for my son," Paris called after him.

"He's not that bright - he couldn't tutor anyone.  Besides, he hasn't even been in a schoolroom since he was twelve."

"He doesn't have to be a great tutor.  Half a year, to teach my son.  In  exchange for all we have to offer.  Is it a deal?"

"You promise he won't become part of some para-military operation?" Spears asked.

"I swear, on the boy I saved from the Mississippi, the boy I love as a son, that your assistant will not be sent on any dangerous assignment," Paris promised.

Spears looked around the chamber.  He looked over at Joey, who had been quietly sitting at the table.  Then he looked into Paris' eyes.  "Alright," he said.  "It's a deal."  The two men shook hands.

When they all left the old State Capitol, and as they were heading for their vehicles - Spears his car, the T-Men their van - Spears took Joey aside and told him of the arrangement.  "I want you to go with them," he said.  "In six months you'll return."  Joey nodded his acceptance of the arrangement and started to speak but was cut short by his mentor.

"I know, I know," said Spears.  "God must want you someplace else for the next six months.  You just keep telling yourself that.  I don't suppose there's the slightest chance you'd curse me for trading you for a piece of equipment, is there?" Spears asked.

Joey shook his head.  "No," he whispered.

"Remember this, kid, and remember it well: what I did here, and in Reno, pales in comparison to what I'll do to this bunch of goons if so much as a single hair on your head is damaged: you got that?  And you don't want my soul blackened more than it already is, because of you - now do you?  So don't go playing the martyr just because you think it's what God wants.  Because I'll kill them - every last one of them!  Boiling Jambalaya?  They think Jambalaya's a hard way to go?  They ain't seen nothing till they've seen my vengeance if they hurt you!  Six months from now I better see your ass right back where it belongs or they'll be hell to pay!  Holy mother fuckin' hell!  Now go."

Joey turned, walked to the van, and got in.  Spears got in his car and waited till the T-Men drove away before leaving.  He returned to the abandoned weather station and, just as he predicted, the T-Men followed, at a distance, leaving only when they were satisfied this was his hideout.            

As Unit 739 was being lowered into place, the thick steel cable supporting it from the two cranes straddling the trench snapped and it came crashing down, crushing the ten workers steering it with guy wires onto the concrete slab it was meant to rest on, and cracking open like a giant eggshell.  News of the accident was immediately relayed to Bradley Jerome Carter, who stormed out of his annual stockholders' meeting and summoned a helicopter to take him to the site.

Five hours later Carter was in the trench assessing the damage, one foot in Colorado, the other in Kansas, at the exact spot where a small stream running west to east across the border - the Ladder - had been filled in to accommodate the trench.

While in transit he called ahead to Denver, summoning his top metallurgists to meet him there.  They were already at the site, already inspecting the large, roughly dome-shaped object lying askance on the concrete slab, when he arrived.

"How did this happen?" he asked.  The foreman, also present, began speculating on the cable, the wear, the undue strain its having to be strung from one crane to the other might have caused.

"Forget the cable," Carter held up his hand signaling the foreman to be silent.  "I want to know why this cracked - that's all I care about," he addressed the four metallurgists gather around the object.  Unit 739 was approximately one hundred feet across, slightly less from front to back; thirty feet high at the center, tapering to twenty at the sides; a blend of circular and angular shapes, the former predominating; looking like a cross between an egg and a crown.  It was metallic, but without the silvery patina of ordinary metals, such as steel or aluminum; or the rusty sheen of copper alloys.  Vaguely, it hinted of violet, but with a preponderance of greenish undertones, as if several layers of almost translucent matter had been forged together.  The crack in it ran like a jagged lightening bolt the entire circumference.

Carter and his men walked several times around the Unit, at various points stepping over bloodied legs protruding from beneath it.  "We've got to get this raised," Carter ordered.  "The son of a bitch better be cracked all to hell on the bottom or I'm calling for a full scale investigation - and a halt to the project.  Because if it's not cracked down there, yet cracked up here, that means something's wrong in its construction or its design."

"Precisely," the team of experts agreed.

"And it makes all the others suspect," Carter added as he pointed north, to a row of these same dome-shaped objects, each sitting a couple hundred feet from the others, all lined up in the trench as far as the eye could see.  Each unit had been hauled over land by specially designed trucks, accompanied by a full military escort; each had been hoisted by the cranes over the trench; each had been lowered onto a concrete slab with the same six-inch wide cable.  Unit 739 was the first to suffer any damage.

An hour later a replacement cable had been strung from the cranes and re-attached to the Unit.  The weather that day had gone from cold, in the morning; to hot, by early afternoon; back to cold mid-afternoon; and now, late afternoon, to blistering heat, as one after another blast of air passed through, first from one direction then another - an almost daily occurrence on the plains.  There seemed to be no pattern or order, no regularity; everything was random, every front of equal strength, as if whatever forces once held the weather in equilibrium had disappeared from the earth.

The question on everyone's mind as the order to hoist the unit was given was "Will we get a tornado or won't we?"  No one knew what signs to look for anymore.  Each morning the workers struck a lottery amongst themselves: of the four categories - wind, earth, fire, water - which would come to claim a life before the day was out.

The cable began lifting the cracked structure, releasing the dead bodies to burst open and spew their contents over the broken slab; only the ten sets of relatively intact clothes identified the seeping objects as human.

Bradley Carter positioned himself directly beneath the ascending object.  He watched as it rose, carefully inspecting the bottom for signs of trauma.  There were none.  As he stood watching, the greenish sphere towering over him began to stir.  An enormous gust of wind took hold of it, initiating a forward thrust that, once the wind had passed, incited a backward thrust of equal force.  Unit 739 became a pendulum, swinging out of control over the Kansas-Colorado border, passing, with each swing, to within inches of the cranes on either side of the trench.  Though no one at the site was an expert in physics, everyone agreed there was no impetus inherent in the object to halt its motion.

"Just let it keep swinging till it stops," the metallurgists advised.

Carter disagreed.  "I want this to stop - and I want it to stop now," he insisted.  "There's too much to do to be kept waiting by a puff of wind.  I want guy wires all around.  You - you - and you!" he pointed to three of his foremen.  "Come with me!"  The four men grabbed a guy wire and ascended the cranes, two on each crane.  Once at the top, Carter motioned the others to follow his lead as he crawled along the crossbeam to a point just beyond where the cable was strung.  They each hung their guy wire, then let it drop the the ground.

"You, down there:" Carter called to his men, "grab hold and pull the wires as taut as you can.  Start at its arc and work your way toward the center.  It's now four twenty-eight.  I want this thing stopped by five o'clock!"

The men on the ground did as instructed.  Four men took hold of each guy wire and began trying to slow the sphere's momentum by first intercepting its path then gradually narrowing that path.  They strained as hard as they could to keep the guy wires tautly positioned against the circular mass swinging between the cranes. The first fifteen minutes of Carter's timetable was spent aligning the wires to the sphere.  When that was accomplished, the men concentrated on narrowing its arc, the two sets in Colorado moving closer by degrees to the two in Kansas, as the sphere bulged first against the wires on one side then against the wires on the other side.  Another ten minutes showed signs of its slowing.  The men speeded up the operation, the four sets moving more rapidly toward one another as the pendulum's force diminished.  Even so, they could not keep to the schedule.  Five o'clock came and went and the sphere still swung well over fifty feet east to west.  Fifteen minutes later its arc lessened to thirty feet; by five-thirty to less than twenty.  Another fifteen minutes would have done it.

But something that felt tight and scratchy on the men's exposed skin had descended all of a sudden from somewhere above the cranes.  A greenish violet arc the size of a small rainbow appeared directly overhead, barely visible against the waning horizon.  The men's watches stopped then began going backwards.  Suddenly the time said five o'clock all over again, then four twenty-eight, then four o'clock.  Their skin felt like a plaster cast filled with ants.  The men on the ground, the men on the crane all felt the same crawling tightness.  The coins in their pockets began clanking, hitting one another as if flung into a moving fan; the belt buckles of the four men on the cranes stuck fast to the crossbeams they were lying on.  A greenish violet glow played about the jagged crack that wound around the sphere, seeping in and out and in again with the scraping sound of sandpaper.  The sphere began to vibrate; the guy wires stuck to it; the cable it hung by began to twist and unravel as if pulled by equal force toward each crane.

The sphere started spinning, taking the men on the ground, who didn't realize what was happening in time to release the guy wires, around with it.  They flew so fast through the air they dared not let go.  All the while it spun, the sphere vibrated ever more fitfully, the greenish violet glow pulsating like an electric arc.  For five minutes this continued as, one by one, the men were flung loose, crashing against the cranes or being hurled to the ground.  The whole time, the crack in the base of the sphere widened, imparting a series of smaller cracks from the base to the top which, in turn, widened, emitting the same greenish violet glow.  Then, all of a sudden, as the last man was hurled against the thick reddish brown dirt forming the side of the trench, the sphere burst apart, sending a mangled spray of slivers and shards in all directions.  The sharp splintered metal covered the men on the ground like broken glass, some of the pieces just piercing their skin, some burrowing deep into their flesh.  Eyes, ears, noses, mouths, hands, necks, faces became a menagerie of slices, cuts, tears and stabs.  Blood seeped or poured from every inch of exposed body; larger pieces of metal protruded from the covered parts of their bodies as well as the exposed parts.  The sixteen men on the ground writhed where they lay or else, if they could get up, ran wildly trying to escape.  Above, the four men on the crossbeams had been spared the worst of the injuries; but had not entirely escaped the exploding sphere.

The crossbeams were not thick enough to shield their bodies completely; they, too, were covered in splinters; their hands especially, hugging the underside of the crossbeam, were torn and bleeding.  Shards protruded from their legs and sides.  Bradley Carter stood up on the crossbeam and walked to the other three men.  He helped each man up then led them to the body of the crane; still following his lead, they climbed down.  Carter summoned help on his phone.

"You three: take charge!" he ordered.  "Do what you can for the others till help arrives.  I have more important things to do."  With this, he made for his truck, which was parked just beyond the western perimeter of the trench.  He drove to Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, where his helicopter was waiting.

During the flight back to St. Louis, Carter took out the first aid kit and began tending his wounds, first pulling as many slivers of metal as he could from his hands and forearms then wiping the wounded areas with antiseptic.  He had already removed the larger pieces, which had pierced his sides and his thighs.  Once his hands were relatively free of debris he soaked bandages with antiseptic and, removing his shirt and pants, applied the bandages to the gaping wounds.  The pilot asked if he should stop at one of the cities along the way for medical help.  He was told no.

Five hours later Carter was back in St. Louis.  He called his doctor and told him to meet him at the Little Red Schoolhouse with a supply of antibiotics.

"You need more than antibiotics," his doctor took one look at his hands and said.  "What the hell happened?"

"That's what I'm here to find out," Carter replied.

"You belong in the hospital," his doctor insisted.  "Will you please go?"

"When I'm done here," Carter agreed.

"I'll wait."

Carter went in.  He went straight to the office of the Director of Educational Authenticity in the center of the building: as late as it was, the mere fact there were lights on meant Kirkus was still there.  Carter knocked once and entered.  Kirkus had a visitor: his son, Reginald, age fourteen.

"I need to speak to you," Carter addressed the Professor.  His tone emphasized the urgency of the matter.

"Wait in the other room, Kirkus told his son, who left by the rear door.

"The news of your exploit - as always - precedes you," Kirkus said. 

"Good," said Carter.  "Spares me the details.  I can get right to the point.  I thought I was building something meant to last indefinitely -"

"Indeed, you are," Kirkus assured him.

"Then why did it crack like an eggshell?" Carter asked.

"I'm told there was a magnetic storm."

"I don't know what the hell it was -"

"But I do," said Kirkus.  "It's one of the - shall we say - precipitating factors which led to the inception of the Project.  I quite assure you it was the storm - one of the phenomena we've been studying for some time now - that ripped the unit apart."

"Not good enough," Carter objected.  "I don't give a damn about any phenomena, nor how many people take it seriously.  It was no magnetic storm that caused that pod to crack - my men are calling them 'pods': I like the term; it was inferior material and workmanship that caused it to crack!  When it hit the concrete, the bottom of it, if anything, should have cracked - not around the middle.  I'm a builder, I know materials, I know how they behave; I've seen accidents before, I know what the result should be.  I've seen shoddy workmanship before, too.  That crack, in that location, without it being the direct result of the bottom breaking up, tells me there's a major structural defect.  That's the seven hundred thirty-ninth pod.  Your plan calls for two thousand.  What happened to that pod makes every single one suspect.  As far as I'm concerned, every pod we've already installed, every one waiting to be completed, has to be tested and, if found deficient, replaced.  I will not knowingly use substandard material."

Kirkus sat back in his chair and arched his fingers.  "I haven't as yet seen fit to inform you what these 'pods' are to be used for," he began.

"I don't care what they're made for," Carter interrupted.  "I care only what they're made of."

"You need to start caring what they're for," Kirkus pointed out, adding for emphasis "You need to care very much.  Because time - that one commodity man has always thought he had plenty, if not to say too much, of - is running out.  I presented you a timetable for completion of the Project.  This was not a whim on anyone's part - a mere bureaucratic pin blindly stuck in a calendar.  These weather phenomena you so cavalierly dismiss are about to spell the end of human civilization - at least, as we have seen it evolve over the course of human history.  Make no mistake: our way of life will end.  Our cities will become ghost towns, if the structures survive at all; the people will not.  In a very short while - a mere matter of years - this planet will become virtually uninhabitable.  Not because of anything man has done - and that's the great irony in this - but because the planet itself is evolving.  We avoided the long nuclear night; we stopped short of turning the earth into a greenhouse.  No comet came for us, no asteroid had our name on it.  No death plague was unwittingly unleashed.  We took great pains to preserve our natural environment - and it's still going to be our undoing.  Things are going to happen which will result in mass destruction on a scale unimaginable even to the doomsayers who helped usher in the new millennium.  You've seen signs of what's coming.  You've lost business associates and workers.  What you've seen is only a preview of coming attractions.  It will rain fire, ice, lightening, magnetism, electricity - on every continent, every island, every mountaintop, every seashore.  The earth will quake as it never has before.  Islands will sink into the ocean, tidal waves will sweep hundreds of miles inland.  All the fanciful stuff you've ever heard: our geologists, our meteorologists, our scientific experts have all confirmed they will happen, and happen within a decade."

Kirkus paused, as if to allow his predictions to maneuver his audience to a more strategic perspective.  Then he continued.

"These 'pods' - I, too, like the term, though I shall never use it outside this room - are all that will be left of thousands of years of human industry.  You're not satisfied they're up to par: get satisfied, and quickly; because these are our last and only hope.  They're made of space-age materials.  Their tensile strength may be less than ideal; but they were designed and tested to withstand a whole range of natural disasters.  By the end of the decade two thousand of them will be completed and set into place."

"I take it," Carter commented on Kirkus' scenario, "you don't intend to save the whole human race."

"Just a very small portion thereof," Kirkus admitted.  "Two thousand of the best families in the nation will be admitted.  There's one with your name on it."

"I trust it isn't Unit 739!" Carter observed.  "But what the hell - why not?  I have no intention of climbing into one of those things to live out my days anyway."

"I didn't think you would," Kirkus said.  "Believe me: I and my family will take up residence in one of those pods, to stay as long as necessary.  I have no intention of living out my days in substandard housing.  Quality control is absolutely paramount.  The material - a legacy of our defunct space program - will withstand temperatures as high as five thousand degrees Fahrenheit, as low as minus fifty; and pressures as great as 10 G's.  It's almost impervious to the elements; it will stand up to any kind of energy nature is capable of.  The crack you encountered in 739 was a freak occurrence.  I can assure you the unit, if it had been properly set in place and once it would have been readied for human habitation, would have met every specification.  Rest assured, the units are safe for human habitation."

"I'm not convinced," said Carter.  "I want my metallurgists given all the data the builders have.  I want to hear it from their mouths that the units are everything you say they are."

"And you shall," Kirkus agreed.  "I'll have all the data to you by noon tomorrow."

"I'll be waiting."

When Carter had gone, Reggie returned to his father's office.  "That guy's an idiot - just like his son!" he observed.

"He's good at what he does," Kirkus pointed out to his son.  "He cannot conceive of a situation he can do absolutely nothing about - an attitude that makes him a first rate worker and overseer.  I know of no one else as capable of completing the Project.  In time you'll learn that all men can be of use to you.  You just have to know which buttons to push - and which not to push - to get the maximum benefit from your association with them."

"He's arrogant, just like his son," Reggie insisted.  "They both need to be put in their place.  Work animals should be in a harness!"

"Oh, he is," the Director of Educational Authenticity assured his son.  "I've got him harnessed.  It'll be up to you to get his son harnessed.  You might try maneuvering your sister toward that end - I understand Andrea and young Brad are very much an 'item' these days."

"She's a fool," said Reggie.  "She'd never agree to work against him."

"The last thing in the world you want is anyone's agreement," Kirkus informed his son.  "For one thing, it's unreliable.  Today's agreement can easily become tomorrow's disagreement.  You want to let people do what they want - what they freely choose to do; then find a way to turn that choice to your advantage.  It's the most difficult task a ruler faces - which is precisely why most resort to brute force.  But if you can find a way to have everyone's choices serve your ambitions, you can rule the world.  Always study the consequences of what people choose to do - the things that come about unintended and unanticipated: the host of minor things everyone else ignores.  That's the key to gaining and holding power.  Someone enters a room: pay no attention; but observe and categorize everything that happens as a result of his entry.  Now run along home.  I'll be there shortly."

When his son had gone, Professor Kirkus picked up the phone and dialed.  "Mr. President," he spoke momentarily, "I hope I'm not getting you at a bad time."

"There is no bad time," the President elect replied.  "You wouldn't call unless you had something worth saying."

"And so it is now," Kirkus agreed.  "We may have to move up our timetable a bit."

"My God!" the President exclaimed.  "Some new weather phenomenon?"

"Oh no - not that part of the timetable," Kirkus assured him.  "We still have several more years - enough time to set everything up.  No, I'm thinking more in terms of our builder.  He's going to prove to be more of a problem than he's worth.  We may have to deal with him sooner than we anticipated.  We can't allow him to discover that the first thousand units are inferior to the second thousand."

"Just tell him straight out there wasn't enough material for all two thousand," the President suggested.  "It's not like they're plastic or paper."

"True, Mr. President.  They have a high enough concentration of the key elements to stand up to almost anything.  Unfortunately, I would never succeed in convincing him of that.  We've almost - not quite, but almost - reached a point where a lesser entity could complete the work.  I'm just afraid, Mr. President, he's almost outlived his usefulness.  The law of diminishing returns.  It's unfortunate: he's a decent, honorable man - the very kind the world's always clamoring for.  But a liability.  Better to be rid of him before the Project's complete rather than after."

"Well, whatever you think best," the President resolved.  "You know you have my complete support.  And I'm sure you'll handle it in a manner that casts no doubt this way."

"Absolutely, Mr. President."                                            

Crazy Alice stormed into the Carter mansion.  For weeks she had cased the place, waiting for just the right moment to break in, as her associates had cased the homes of the other families whose babies had disappeared fifteen years ago.  Her appearance said she didn't belong here, in the Private Streets District of the Central West End of St. Louis, just as the others' appearances betrayed them as aliens on the streets they were casing; yet no one stopped her or questioned her.  The reason was simple: no panhandlers were allowed in the city; if they were caught, they were used as subjects in the testing of new explosive devices the Tungs were developing.  Everyone who saw Alice knew she would be dealt with in time, so they left her alone.

No one was home when she jimmied a window on the first floor with her knife.  She gave herself five minutes to accomplish her mission.  The window she climbed through opened into the formal study.  From there she made her way upstairs, searching room by room till she found the right one.  She took a doll from a dirty sack she carried and laid it on a satin pillow at the head of a small cradle in the center of the room; then brought forth a placard and set it in the doll's tiny hand.  The moment her task was completed she left.  She was three blocks away when the police arrived.

The family was immediately notified of the burglary.  Carol Carter rushed home from the hospital, where her mother lay dying.  The police asked her to assess her jewelry and other valuables.

"I don't care about that," she told them.  "Was anyone home?  Was anyone hurt?"

"We didn't see anyone," the police informed her.  "You think one of the servants might have been involved?  Or even your son - sometimes it happens!" they hastened to add.

"No, I don't think that," she answered.  "I just want to make sure my son's alright."

A few minutes later young Bradley came home, just as the police were leaving.  "Don't leave town," they advised him.  "We may need to question you."

"I was planning to go to Mars tomorrow," he quipped, "but I can put it off."

The policemen shook their heads as they left.  One of them remarked that "That's what happens when you turn away from God."

"Is anything missing?" Brad asked his mother.

"No, it doesn't seem so," she replied.  "I guess they didn't have time to get anything."

"You don't think they're still here, hiding somewhere, do you?" Brad speculated.

"The police looked pretty thoroughly."

"I'll look around anyway," Brad decided.  A few minutes later he returned.  "Didn't see anything," he said.  "I closed the door to Bradley Junior's room.  I know you don't like it left open, even a little ways."

"The police weren't in there," said Carol.  "I asked them not to."

"Someone was."

Together they went upstairs and entered the nursery, which had been preserved exactly as it was.  They saw the doll.

"Where did that come from?" Carol wondered aloud.  "And what's that it's holding?"  She took the card and read it.  "'Compliments of the Society of the Infanticides.'"   She began to cry.  "Does someone think we killed our own son?" she asked.

"Ill find out who did this, mother," Brad promised.

"No, it's not worth it.  Besides, whoever could do something like this could be dangerous."

"I'll be careful - I promise."

"You don't have to do this, Brad."

"Yes, I do."

"I've got to find these people," Brad told Andrea the next day at school.

"They really upset your mother?" Andrea asked.

"Kind of - but that's not why.  They may know something about what happened to Bradley."

"I thought you said he was thrown in the river?"

"I did - because of something your brother said.  These people may know who did it.  I don't think they were accusing his parents of anything.  I intend to find them."

Brad's search took him, almost instinctively, to the less glamorous parts of St. Louis, where old frame buildings showed signs of decay and neglect and litter lay strewn in back alleys.  There were no slums, as such, since officially there were no poor, no unemployed, no social outcasts - no one who did not take an active role in keeping the community clean, safe and viable.  Nevertheless, there were areas of the city in desperate need of renovation, areas passed over in the never-ending race to keep the economy on track, areas whose contribution to an ever increasing productivity was too minor to justify sending any surplus wealth their way.

On a Saturday evening he was wandering through a sparsely populated area north of The Levee, between Laclede's Landing and the Mound City Docks.  Turning a corner, he caught sight of one of the massive spires of Eads Bridge still standing.  It was like a giant rising out of the Mississippi, silhouetted against the huge full moon just risen out of the lights of East St. Louis.  Brad stood there, transfixed by the sight.  For a split second the image of an old man appeared before him.  Then he felt a pressure at the back of his neck.

"Don't move!" a gruff voice ordered.  "There's a gun pointed at the back of your head, and my finger's on the trigger.  Try anything and I'll blow your head off!"

"What is it you want?" Brad calmly asked.

"Your money!" came the reply.  "Then me and my buddies are going to have some fun with you - and, if you're lucky, we may let you live."

Brad was about to turn around and try getting the weapon away when a second voice from behind stopped him.

"Drop the gun or I'll slit your throat like a pig!" a woman who had silently approached the assailant spoke softly into his ear as she held a butcher knife to his throat.  He began trembling, almost uncontrollably.  He dropped his gun.

"Please don't - please!" he begged.

"I'll leave it up to this young man," the woman said.

"Let him go," said Brad, who picked up the gun.  The woman released the assailant.  He ran into the darkness beyond.

"Thanks," said Brad.

"What are you doing in a place like this?" the woman asked.  It was Crazy Alice.

"I'm looking for someone, who can tell me what happened to my parent's real son."

"Perhaps I can tell you," Alice whispered.

"He was thrown into the river, wasn't he?" Brad asked.

"Why would you think that?"

"Because of something someone at school said."

"Who?"

"Reggie -" Brad started to say.

"Professor Kirkus' son?" Alice cut him off.

"You know him?"

"I worked for his father.  I helped kill those babies, without even realizing it."

"But you didn't throw them -"

"No.  Others were hired.  I prepared the wrong batch.  They were given what only a few were supposed to have.  Men were found willing to kidnap them.  They didn't know until it was too late what the babies were kidnapped for.  All of them were thrown into the Mississippi from just over there.  They all drowned.  The kidnappers and me formed a society here in the shadow of our evil."

"The Society of the Infanticides," Brad interjected.

Alice shook her head.  "We want people to know - but only if they want to know.  We've put out the word to every family that lost a child that night.  You're the only one who's come looking for us so far."

Six months quickly turned into a year, and no one came for him.  There were lines of communication; and a continual supply of electronic equipment, delivered as instructed to the weather station at Donner's Pass.  But Joey remained with the T-Men at their compound in Recluse, unable to return to the Sierras.

"The agreement was, he comes for you," Paris Commune told Joey.  "We made the overtures, we went to him, we supplied him with everything he asked for, now it's his turn to take the initiative.  We don't want you to be our prisoner, Joey, but you will not leave here until he personally comes to get you."

"He will, when he's ready," Joey confidently stated.  "I can imagine how busy he's been, setting up all that equipment.  Don't worry: he'll be here, soon enough."

Joey was given a small room near the center of the compound, not far from Paris' son's room.  In it was a cot, a chair and an old bookcase filled with the books Paris wanted used in his son's tutoring.  From the very first day, Joey diligently studied the books, hoping to acquire enough of an understanding of their contents to convey the ideas to the boy.  Most of their sessions ended up reversing the student-teacher roles, however, with the boy explaining to Joey the significance of the ideas he brought into the makeshift classroom set up in a vacant storeroom next to the Council Chamber.

"You're a grown man," the boy said one day; "I don't understand why you remained with the weatherman so long, instead of starting your own life.  Is he like a father to you?"

"No," Joey answered.  "I never thought of him that way."

"Did he molest you when you were a boy, and that's why you stay?"

"No, he never did anything like that.  I thought he would," Joey admitted, "because I misunderstood something my father said about him.  But he didn't."

"Then what is it?" the boy asked.

"I work for him," Joey explained.  "He's spent all these years trying to teach me what he knows.  It's hard for me to understand things.  He gets mad at me; but then he always goes back to trying to teach me.  I'd never be able to keep a job half that good anywhere else."

When Joey asked Paris Commune why his son had no name, he was told that the boy was a foundling.  "I wouldn't give him my name anyway," Paris explained.  "Nor is it that I don't know his real name, because I do: I know who his father is, but I haven't told him, and won't.  He's the son of Bradley Jerome Carter - I presume he's a 'Junior.'  But that's irrelevant.  He must choose his own name."

"Shouldn't you contact his real father?" Joey asked.

"He knows about the boy," Paris replied.  "He's chosen to ignore that knowledge."

"But to go through life not knowing who he is," Joey attempted to point out.

"He knows who he is - he doesn't need a name for that.  He knows very well who he is - same as you or I."

A strange look came over Joey's face.  Tears welled up in his eyes.  "I just realized," he said, more to himself than to Paris: "I've almost forgotten my last name.  I shouldn't have.  I was almost thirteen when my father died.  But I barely remember my name."

At all their meetings, Paris attempted to gain as much information about Sanderson Spears from Joey as he could - no matter what the conversation, he would always work around to that one subject.  Then, a year and a half into Joey's stay, Paris finally discovered what was inevitable: that the weather station at Donner's Pass was a ruse.  One too many times his men returned with the message that Spears had not been at the cabin to accept their delivery.  Paris sent two men to spy on the station, twenty-four hours a day.  During their vigil three separate deliveries were made; each time, someone other than Spears came and picked up the equipment and supplies.

"Where is your home?" Paris demanded of Joey.

"Here," Joey replied.

"I mean, your real home - the one you shared with the weatherman?"

"At Donner's Pass."

"You're lying!" Paris insisted.

"No," Joey said, "I'm telling the truth.  Our home was, and is, and always will be the weather station at Donner's Pass.  I swear on everything I believe in and hold dear that that's our home."

When Joey had left the Council Chamber, Mount Everest entered.  He walked to the center of the room, deliberately letting his nearly seven feet height tower over the lesser figure of his leader.

"I know that look," he said in a voice almost threatening.  "From this day on you'll be looking for any excuse to kill Joey.  The first time one of our missions goes sour you'll accuse him of being a traitor."

"If he betrays us, he'll die - you know the rule!" Paris answered back.

"You know, I know - everyone in this Council, everyone in this compound knows: Joey could no more betray us than he could burrow his way to the Mississippi," Mount Everest offered in evidence.

"It's just a matter of time till he does," Paris countered.  "And when he does, he'll be returned to his boss in a pine box.  He's one traitor who won't be buried in the tunnels.  I want the weatherman to know what's happened to him."

"Power is all that matters to you anymore, isn't it?" Mount Everest asked rhetorically.  "My God.  That all your dreams and hopes and plans and all your suffering and bravery should come to this.  What a waste of a life.  Mark my words: if you kill that boy, you will set in motion something that will destroy us all and everything we believe in."

"Are you going to warn him?" Paris asked.

Mount Everest shook his head.  "No - God help me - I can't," he said; and, as he said it, though he hadn't moved, or stooped down, he no longer towered over this man ten inches beneath him.  But I know I know him, Mount Everest told himself.  Soon it'll come to me.  And when it does -  He let his thought trail off, because it ended there; it had no corresponding action.

Paris' son learned of his father's intention.  More exactly, once he learned from Joey the ambiguity concerning the weatherman's whereabouts, and knowing how his father operated, he set about confirming his suspicion.  On a Thursday evening, after class, and after making certain no one was within earshot, the boy issued his teacher a warning.

"You must leave," he told Joey.

"Your father wants me to go?" Joey asked.

"My father is planning to kill you."

"What?  He thinks I've hurt you in some way?  My God, what have I done to make him think I could ever hurt you?  If he thinks that of me, then I deserve to die!"

"Joey: it has nothing to do with me," the boy assured him.

"Then what?"

"Just trust me -"

'You know I trust you - I'd trust you with my life!" Joey said.

"Then trust me enough to leave this place now, and never come back."

"No," Joey told him.  "I can't come between you and your father."

"Listen to me," the boy said as if issuing a command: "when I become leader, I'll need someone I can trust absolutely.  That's you.  You would never betray me, would you?"

"I swear, in the name of God, I would never betray you," Joey solemnly pronounced.

"Then I must save your life, even if that sets me against my own father - do you understand?"

Joey seemed confused.  He was unable to answer.

"Joey," the boy said, "my whole life is dedicated to the day when I assume leadership.  Everything I do is toward that end.  God said to render unto Caesar that which is his.  Your loyalty is the greatest asset I have.  Without it, my leadership will always be in jeopardy.  Do you think father would remain leader a single day without the absolute loyalty of Mount Everest?  You are no good to me dead, Joey.  It's time to stop thinking of me as my father's son.  I'm going to tell you something no one else knows - and no one else will know, until the time is right.  You've always wished I had a name you could call me by.  I do have a name.  I chose it long ago.  My name is Kirk.  If you die, that name will die with you, because I will never share it with another.  Leave, Joey.  Leave, now.  You must survive, for my sake if not your own."

"Alright," Joey finally agreed, "I will.  I'll do as you say."

Kirk led the way to a special storeroom, making sure no one was around.  He grabbed a parcel from a long row of shelves, where dozens of similar parcels were lined up, then led Joey to another room, where he handed him the parcel.

"This is a week's supply of food and water, and a flashlight," Kirk explained.  "The men take them whenever they go on a mission, in case they get stranded."

"Will I need it?" Joey asked.

"Yes, you will.  Because the way you'll be going - the only way you can go without being spotted - you risk getting lost, without access to anyone or anything."

Kirk sat down at a small wooden table and drew a map, which he then explained as he handed it to Joey.  "This is where we are, just north of Recluse.  Ten miles due east is Route 59.  A mile beyond that is the Little Powder - follow it downstream another mile, then cross it, where you see a high bluff on the other side.  A few hundred feet around the bluff, to the southeast, you'll come to a small opening.  That leads to a series of tunnels: that's where you'll need the supplies.  You should be able to make it to the tunnels before anyone discovers you're gone - I'll show you a secret way out of here.  Once you're in the tunnels, you're on your own.  I've only been there once, and only through a small part of them, so I can't map it for you.  No one could: no one here has ever seen all the tunnels, and no one's ever made a map, for fear our enemies might get hold of it.  You'll have to find your own way out, otherwise you could wander down there till you die.  My father says these tunnels extend hundreds of miles under the Plains from Montana to the Mississippi; no one even knows if they're all interconnected.  It's your only hope of getting away, but it could be a deathtrap.  Joey, I don't want you to end your life all alone down there.  But in order to save your life you have to take that chance."

"I will," Joey resolved.  "If God wants me to survive, I'll survive.  But if I don't, I promise you, Kirk: I will not curse your name for sending me there - any more than I would curse God's name for not saving him."

Kirk then led Joey to a secret passage below the main wing of the compound, which opened, a hundred yards beyond the compound wall, at the base of the bluff where the compound set, to a small forest of spruce trees.  Before they parted, Kirk removed a small locket on a silver chain from around his neck.  Under a clear dome was a tiny splinter of wood.

"This is from a sacred tree," Kirk said as he handed Joey the locket.  "It's not a lucky charm or anything like that," he added, "but its something I relish.  And I want you to have it, to keep till the next time we meet."

Joey thanked him as he accepted the offering, putting it around his neck and tucking the locket under his shirt.  They shook hands and Joey turned toward the east.  Unbeknownst to either of them, Mount Everest had watched the escape, nodding his head as Joey disappeared into the twilight.  Now I know, he whispered as he turned back toward the compound.            

Joey moved quickly, covering the first ten miles in less than three hours.  Route 59 was little more than a country road, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass one another.  He encountered no traffic; there were no signs of human habitation along this stretch of road.  Having no reason to linger, he made for the Little Powder, followed it downstream to the bluff Kirk had mentioned, then crossed over, located the opening, and entered the tunnel.

Soon after he entered, before he had gotten far enough to be insulated from the outside, he heard what sounded like thunder, followed by a splash.  He felt a spray against his face.  He returned to the entrance to witness a smoldering bolder sinking into the little stream.  Everything around the stream was as wet as if it had just rained.

"Can't be a meteor," he mused.  "A stone that big would have done more damage."

Then he turned again and began his journey through the tunnel.  He used his flashlight sparingly, so as to preserve the batteries, pointing it straight ahead long enough to get a fix on the next hundred or so yards before using it again.  In some places the tunnel narrowed to where he nearly touched the sides as he passed; in other places tree roots covered with moss protruded from the walls into the tunnel; or else rocks littered the ground, making it treacherous to continue walking.

When he grew tired, he left his flashlight on long enough to find a place suitable for sitting down and leaning against the wall.  When he became too tired to simply rest awhile, he sought out as clean and dry a spot as he could to lie down and sleep.

He encountered no animals, though occasionally he heard the gnawing and scurrying characteristic of a rat; but he never saw anything when he turned his flashlight toward the sounds.  Once in a while he would feel something like an insect crawling on him; he would try to locate and remove it.

"It's like camping," he reminded himself.  "Just without the stars overhead."

He used his supplies sparingly: a week's worth of food and water lasted two weeks.  He had no way of telling how far he had traveled in that time, only that he had been on the move most of the day, stopping only to rest, to eat, to accommodate bodily needs, and to sleep.  He pursued countless passages; some led to other passages, some proved dead ends which he had to retrace.  Dozens - for all he knew, maybe hundreds - of times he saw what he took for light in the distance, only to have it dissipate in the interminable darkness surrounding him.

He could feel himself growing weaker as he neared the end of his supplies and tried to stretch them still farther.  He had begun talking out loud to himself, almost incessantly, his every thought a spoken word; then his mouth would become dry, almost raw, and he had to take a sip of water, which made him resolve not to waste another ounce of energy or a drop of water on the sound of his own voice.  He would continue in silence awhile; then, without realizing it, begin talking all over again.

"I'm here now," he might say.  "Was I here before?  It feels familiar.  How could it not feel familiar, it's all the same?  Maybe I haven't moved a step yet!  A journey of a thousand miles beings with one step: have I taken that step?  I've gone a thousand miles, but taken no step.  Where am I?  Am I under Donner's Pass?  Is he so busy with his monitors he doesn't see me down here?  Why doesn't he have a relay down here to pick up my movements?  Aren't they almost as important as those of a wind?  Maybe if I holler."

Then he would try to holler, but his voice could barely rise above a whisper.  "Why don't I show up on his radar?" he would ask.  "If only I were a storm, or a cloud, or a sunbeam: he'd come save me.  Maybe I wanted him to molest me - maybe that's why I'm being punished.  Maybe I wanted him to see me...doing boy stuff.  Maybe I wanted to see him...doing man stuff.  Maybe I wanted to teach Kirk...from my body and not from my books.  If only I could see something, maybe I would know.  My flashlight!"

He would push the switch but no light came on.  "Did I drop it and break it?  Huh?  You stupid little punk did you break this too - the only light you have?  Oh God.  Why must I be so stupid?  Is that why God abandoned me?  Because even He couldn't tolerate my stupidity any longer?  Instead of glorifying Him with beautiful prayers I disgust Him by breaking everything that's given to me.  This light was Kirk's.  I love Kirk, and broke his light.  No wonder God washed His hands of me.  No wonder."

His food and water had run out three days earlier.  He was tired, so tired he only wanted to lie down and sleep.  Had the way out been ten feet in front of him, he would not have moved to it, he was too tired.

He closed his eyes and began dreaming.  He was bathing in a frozen stream.  A shadow appeared on the shoreline.  He looked up, thinking it was God.  It wasn't.  It was the weatherman, standing there with the sun at his back watching him bathe.  "This God of yours," the weatherman said: "He deceives you.  That's why you always get lost in the woods.  You follow your instincts - and always end up going the wrong way.  Whatever way you want to go, go the opposite way.  God can't help you.  Only disobeying the directions He gives you can help you find your way."

Joey awoke in a cold sweat.  He quickly got up, as if he wanted to run away and hide.  He looked all around him, as if somehow it were possible to see anything. 

"I can't disobey God!" he cried.  "I can't - not even to save myself!  I won't!  God is telling me to go to my right up ahead: I can almost hear Him!  I won't go the opposite way - I can't!  I'll stay here and die.  I will not go against God's word!  I will die first!  If it's His will, then let it be."

As he stood there, resolved not to take another step, something lightly brushed against his chest.  "Let it stay," he said.  "Soon enough I'll be food for the worms anyway."  Then he remembered something: a boy placing something in his hand.  It wasn't an insect he felt on his chest but the locket Kirk had given him.  "He relishes this and gave it to me!  I owe him!  I can't die: I owe it to him to live!  Oh God!  Oh my God!  I don't want to disobey you, but I have to return this to him - I have to!  Help me, someone: please: help me!"

He fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands; the muffled sounds of his weeping seeped like tears through his clenched fingers.  He wept for a long time.  When he stopped, he got up and slowly groped his way to the point, a dozen yards ahead, where a passage intersected the one he was in.  He knew it would be there - he had come to understand the tunnels well enough to sense the slight shift in the air flow such a juncture always produced.  When he reached the intersection, he felt the same wish to go one way that had guided his every step.

"For you, Kirk, and for this piece of wood you relish, I will condemn my soul to hell.  I will go against what God is telling me."

Joey turned to the left and began following the passage, coming to another, where he also took the opposite direction from the way he wanted to go; then to another, then another, till, finally, he saw a light up ahead which, as he approached, instead of dissipating into the darkness, grew larger and brighter.

Although it was twilight, the sky hurt his eyes so much he had to close them.  He sat down and leaned against the rocky surface of the opening until the sky almost turned to night, then he opened his eyes again.  Even the stars hurt for a few moments, till his eyes gradually re-accustomed to the light.

As he looked up at the stars, his whole face brightened.  The terrible pain that had almost visibly disfigured him disappeared.  He sought out the brightest star in the sky and held it in his sight.

"You sent him to me," he said.  "Not to test me, or to make me disobey you, but to tell me I was wrong.  You let him show me the way out.  And you've shown me something more even than that: you've shown me you haven't abandoned him.  There's still hope for his soul.  If it took my suffering for me to see that, then I'm glad for having suffered.  Sandy's not lost.  Thank you, God, for showing me that."

He had no idea where he was, only that he had not ended up where he started.  There was a bluff where the tunnel opened, just as there had been outside of Recluse; and a stream beside it.  But a different bluff, beside a different stream.  He walked to the stream, bent down with the cup he had carried for three weeks, and drank the clear, cold water, cup after cup until he could hold no more.  Then after looking around to see if there were any lights, and finding none, he returned to the tunnel, but just inside, just enough to keep warm for the night.

In the morning, after letting his eyes slowly adjust to the pale blue spreading upward from the eastern horizon, he set out to find food.  He had camped enough to know how to find it.  He observed where animals had been.  Berries, roots, wild varieties of garden plants: very quickly he found enough to satisfy what little hunger he felt.  Several days passed before his appetite returned completely.

He needed to find shelter beyond what the mouth of the tunnel offered; so he needed to find work.  No one was going to feed, clothe and shelter him any longer; he had survived beneath the world, now for the first time in his life he had to figure out how to survive in it.

"I've got to leave the security of this tunnel behind," he resolved as he set out to find other people.  "I know it's wilderness, but there has to be someone nearby.  If only I knew where I was."

He decided to follow the stream - it was called the Cheyenne, though he had no way of knowing that - to follow it southward - at least, it seemed to have a north-south flow.  In less than a day he came to a road, South Dakota State Road 40, which he followed to a small hamlet called Red Shirt, on the western fringe of the Badlands National Monument.  He was within a few hundred yards of a series of buildings scattered about what seemed to be a town square when he turned back.

"Not yet," he said as he headed north again to the tunnel.  He wasn't afraid to go among people, but he wasn't ready.  First he had to wash his clothes.

Although it was late spring, this was far enough north to still be too cold for clothes to dry in the sun.  He had bathed, where the sun hit a part of the stream shallow enough to be warmed by mid-afternoon; then dried himself with bits of moss and dead grass.  But he had not been able to wash his clothes; and dared not go among people seeking work until he had: to present himself as a drifter was risky enough, but a dirty, ill smelling drifter would have reduced his chances of finding work to zero.

Another two weeks went by till a day warm enough to do his laundry came.  Mid-morning he undressed and washed everything but his shoes, laying each piece on a rock in the sun to dry.  As he bent over the water to wash his clothes, he noticed his reflection.  It hadn't occurred to him till then that he was starting to grow a beard, or even that he could.  He reached up and stroked it, running his hand back and forth over the still prickly growth.

"I like it," he pronounced.  Then an image came to him which shamed him so much he resolved to shave it as soon as he could and never grow it again: a picture of Jesus he had seen - actually, every picture of Jesus he had ever seen.  Jesus was always depicted as a soft-looking young man with gentle brown eyes and a flowing beard.  Joey was a soft-looking young man with gentle brown eyes; and he despaired that people might think he was trying to look like Jesus if he let his beard grow.

"The sooner I get work and can shave, the better!" he decided then and there.  The moment his clothes were dry he got dressed and headed south again, realizing before he traveled five miles that his timing was bad: his preoccupation with what people would think of him had cloaked his judgment; it would be the middle of the night when he arrived.

"Wait till morning," he resolved - but kept going just the same.  Something was driving him onward - something other than the image of Jesus.  He had no idea what it was, but he kept glancing up at the sky, as if the answer lay overhead, in the thick dark clouds spreading in from the southeast.  His pace quickened the nearer he got to the little town; his strength, during the two weeks since he had been here, had nearly returned to what it had been before his ordeal in the tunnels.  What took him almost a full day two weeks ago had taken him little more than half a day this time.

He stopped dead in his tracks; his eye caught a gleam of red in the midst of the tightly compressing fold of clouds settling above the arc of buildings whose lights he could see through a sudden clearing.  He began running toward the lights.  He was a mile away.  The clouds folded and folded one over the other.  Then he was half a mile away.  The reddish glow piercing the clouds like a blood soaked eye grew wider, brighter.  Then he was where he had turned back two weeks ago.  The glow was breaking up into a thousand burning embers.

A hand reached up as if from a grave and grabbed Joey's foot.  He fell to the ground, crying "Let go of me!  Let go of me!  I've got to warn them!  Let go!"

He struggled, but he was pinned to the ground and a thick, musty smelling blanket was thrown over him.  "I've got to warn them!" he still attempted to say, nearly gagging on every word.  Then he felt a searing heat surrounding him, nearly choking him as he gasped for air.  For what seemed like hours but was really only minutes he lay there, unable to move, imagining himself burned beyond recognition.

"Won't matter now if I do grow a beard," he muttered aloud, as barely a whisper.  The smell from the blanket finally caused him to vomit.

Slowly the blanket was removed and he was helped to his feet.  On either side of him stood a tall, burly man, one his age, the other almost fifty.

"What the hell were you doing?" the older man asked.  "You damn fool, you nearly got my son and me killed trying to save you!"

Joey looked from one to the other.  "I'm sorry," he said.  "But I had to try and warn those people.  I've seen that before."

"Then you know better!" the younger man said.

"I don't mean I've really seen it, like this time," Joey tried to explain.  "I've only seen it on radar, and monitors.  But I knew what it was."

The two men were looking at him like he was from outer space - or, worse, like he had just escaped from an asylum.

"I studied weather," Joey said.  "You have to warn people - no matter what happens!" he added.  "Even if," he faltered, "even if you die trying."

The men's features softened.  They shook their heads, but smiled; each one slapped Joey on the shoulder.  "You're a strange one," the father said.  "But as fearless as anyone I've seen.  How'd you come to be here?  You studying the weather in these parts?"

"No," Joey answered.  "I'm looking for work though.  Anything - even working with this stuff," he pointed to the blanket, the top of which was singed but otherwise undamaged.  "It made me sick, but I'll get used to it if it's all you've got for me to do.  What is it, anyway?"

"It's just a regular old Army blanket," the father said.  "It's what's on it that's special.  It's why our houses aren't all burned up - and why you didn't need to risk your life warning us.  But you didn't know that.  Thank God it came up fast as it did or me and my son wouldn't have been caught out in it - and you'd be a pile of cinders right now.  We've learned not to go far from our homes without having a tarp like this with us.  The T-Men gave us this.  It stinks, like it sat in an old cellar a hundred years, it makes you wish you was dead - but it keeps you alive when the fire balls start falling."

"The T-Men?" Joey asked, his voice cracking.

"I know - I know," the man said, "you've heard terrible things about 'em.  And they've done some terrible things - but, on the whole, a hell of a lot more good than bad!"

"I know," Joey agreed.  "It's just...it isn't right I should be saved by something they made."

"Are you crazy?  Why not?" the younger man asked.

Tears filled Joey's eyes.  "They think I betrayed them," he explained.

"No they don't," the father retorted.

"No, honest: they did think that - and they were going to -"

"I know!" the man cut Joey short.  "They were going to kill you - the new recruit; and - God bless you, son! - you got away!  I told you they did some terrible things.  See, they've got this...I guess you'd call it ritual: the militia, or whatever group, sends someone to work with them - in this case you.  The militia does something that angers the Council; they come up with some trumped-up charge and kill the poor dumb slob the militia sent."

"I'm not from any militia - or any group at all!" Joey protested.  "It's just me and the man I work for - that's it: just us two!"

"Of course!  Of course!  The weather: I should have known!" the man slapped Joey on the back.  "You're with that fella who mowed down two whole gangs in one afternoon!"

"He didn't know what he was doing!" Joey insisted.

"Way I hear, he planned it for months!" the young man said.

"But he didn't know what he was doing!  He's not a cold-blooded murderer!  He could have killed me: I came to arrest him because I thought he killed my dad, but he didn't.  He's not a murderer!"

"Son," the older man said, "there are plenty of us see him as a hero.  You don't have to make excuses for someone killing these gangs.  Not to folks like us you don't.  We've all seen what these gangs that run every town in the country do.  Your boss ain't no murderer.  Not in our eyes!"

"He's not a hero either," Joey said.  "He's my friend, and I love him, but he's not a hero for what he did."

The older man looked at Joey and smiled.  "You're a religious man, aren't you?" he observed.

"Why do you say that?"

"I can tell.  You've got the look of a man that gives his whole heart and soul to the Lord - and I respect you for that.  That's probably why you were so quick to risk your life for us.  But don't let it blind you to the truth we have to live in down here every day of our lives.  Not everything's either good or bad.  Some things just ought to happen - and there's no more to it than that."

Joey remained in Red Shirt for six months, working at odd jobs, staying with whomever had a spare bed for the night.  The people of the town came to accept him as if he had lived there all his life.  He attended church with them every Sunday - something he hadn't done since his boyhood.  They wanted him to settle in their town; they offered to help him build a place of his own.

"What do you say?" the pastor asked him on behalf of the townspeople.

"I love this town," Joey answered.  "You're all special to me - and I'd gladly give my life for you."

"We're not asking you to give your life for us," the pastor said, "but to live your life with us."

"The whole time I've been here," Joey explained, "I've had a thought in the back of my mind: the tunnels, that brought me to you.  They run for hundreds of miles under the plains.  I want to map them."

"Why?" the pastor asked.  "What possible reason could there be?"

"The way I first came into your town, Bill Evans and his son saved me by throwing a tarp over me," Joey tried to make it clear why the tunnels were so important.  "You've got other things the T-Men helped make too to protect you from the weather.  But there are things out there nothing you can spray on or paint on or throw over you can protect you from.  When they come - and they will, just like the fireballs did or the icicles or the electricity - the only safe place will be underground.  For these people here - my friends - and for all the people of all the towns on the plains, I have to do whatever I can to help you find the shelter you'll need when the time comes.  I've got to map the tunnels: where they are, what towns they're under, where they lead, how to find your way back out once you're inside."

"How are you going to do that?  You'll get lost - and even if you don't, it'll take the rest of your life!"

"I won't get lost," Joey said.  "I remembered something from reading some old books when I was tutoring Paris' son: I'll use string, just like Theseus did.  I figure if it's thin enough I can haul around maybe a couple miles of it in a cart small enough I can pull behind me.  But I can't let it take the rest of my life: there won't be that much time till the other things - the silent tornadoes and things like that - start hitting everywhere, all the time.  That's why I have to start as soon as I finish making my cart and getting the string I need."

Two weeks later Joey said "Good-bye" to the people of Red Shirt and, dragging a small wooden cart filled with supplies and a preposterous mound of string behind him, set off for the Cheyenne, to follow the stream northward to the tunnel he had emerged from six months earlier.  He put off entering the tunnel for another day and a half as he tried to come up with some strategy for realizing his ambition; but he was unsuccessful: every plan he devised depended on his already knowing his way around - and he didn't.  So there was nothing but his giant ball of string to help him find his way.

At first, his task seemed almost overwhelming, as he painstakingly unfurled the string, step by slow step, his entire roll running out in just a couple hours, requiring him to retrace his steps five or ten times and mark his path till he finally came to another tunnel entrance, which he then pinpointed in reference to the surrounding terrain - towns, streams, roads, any territorial markings he could map.  At the end of a month he had mapped his way from the Badlands to the Black Hills - a grand total of some fifty miles, out of hundreds or even thousands of miles of tunneling.

He came close to abandoning his project several times during and after that first month, cursing himself for imagining he was capable of undertaking such a monumental task.  But he kept at it until, a few more weeks into his venture, he made an astounding discovery which convinced him to keep going.  He discovered a pattern to the lay-out of the tunnels.

Every tunnel entrance he had located so far was on the southern side of a bluff beside a stream.  But even more significant was his realization that the entrance was always on the eastern bank of the stream, and that, just prior to the point of entry, the tunnel always ran beneath the stream.  These were shallow streams; the tunnels did not have to burrow very far beneath them.  Nevertheless, there was a noticeable incline in the tunneling at the point where it crossed below the stream; and a dampness not evident elsewhere along the walls and floor of the tunnel.

Again and again, Joey tested the pattern; and, every time, it held true.  Three months after he began, he abandoned his ball of string in one of the tunnels.  Six months after he began, he had mapped almost five hundred miles of tunneling snaking its way beneath six states.  After nine months, he had added a second five hundred miles, stretching from the Little Bighorn in Montana to the Bear in southeastern Idaho; from the Willow in eastern Utah to the Rattlesnake in central Kansas.  When his first year was up, nearly two thousand miles of tunnel had been mapped, extending as far south as Texas, as far east as Missouri, as far west as Idaho, as far north as North Dakota.

He had only run into dead ends six times, and had to retrace his steps.  As he sat one day on a high bluff near Black Mesa, Oklahoma, beneath the hot summer sun, looking over his series of maps, which he had superimposed over maps of the United States and the individual states of the great Plains, he noticed a pattern even to the dead ends.  They were all situated along an imaginary line that ran from central Colorado to the Texas Panhandle.  He decided to investigate the terrain where he had encountered these dead ends, to see if there were something above ground affecting them all or if each was entirely separate from the others.                                    

Toward evening, when it cooled down, he set out for Colorado, where three of the dead ends had been mapped.  He treated himself to a luxury he almost never availed himself of during his year on the Plains: he hitched a ride along US 287/385 to Lamar, Colorado, the closest town to where the first dead end was located.

It was late when he was let out on the outskirts of Lamar.  He walked in an east-south-easterly direction until he came to the spot where his map indicated the tunnel beneath the ground had abruptly ended.  He looked around, but saw nothing unusual about the landscape.

"I'll look tomorrow," he decided.  "Maybe in the light I'll see something I've missed."  He kept going in the direction he was headed; under the half-moon, he could see it was more wooded, and higher in elevation: a better place to camp for the night.  The sky began to cloud over.  The clouds gave off a pinkish hue up ahead.  Joey found himself wondering what it was; it was unlike anything he had ever seen.  What strange weather phenomenon was he about to encounter this time? he wondered.  He made his way to the summit of the bluff where he had decided to set up camp.  He looked up into a sky full of pink clouds.  A fleeting image appeared in his mind then quickly disappeared; but he knew what it was, this image: it was the night sky over St. Louis filled with low clouds that glowed with a pink luminescence from the city's reflection.  But there was no city here.  This was the middle of nowhere.

Joey came to a clearing.  His mouth flew open, as if he were gasping for air; and his eyes grew big, as if the whites were swallowing up the irises.  He stood up as straight as he could.  A shiver ran down his spine, as if someone had caressed him.  He couldn't speak at first, then finally released an almost soundless "My God!"

Below him was a city.  As far as his eye could see, going north; as far south as he could see.  A city.  Unlike any he had ever seen.  A narrow band, less than a quarter mile wide, filling an open trench some ten feet below the ground, reaching deep into the dark oblivion of a sunless horizon, lights stretching until light could no longer be seen.  Strange round houses surrounded by arc lights and connected by walkways to one another.  Hundreds of houses; thousands of lights.  And a pink glow thrown up to the sky overhead.

Slowly, as his eyes flitted back and forth between the sky and the city it reflected, other, less fabulous objects began filtering through the unearthly scene to capture some small part of his attention.  There were people standing about, like guards stationed at the turrets of a medieval castle; they all held objects which, though too small from the perspective of the bluff to identify for certain, looked to be guns.  It was impossible to tell how many men there were: like the houses and lights, they trailed off into the darkness.  There could have been dozens, there could have been hundreds.  Joey focused on two.

A shadow moving along the ledge overlooking the city caught his attention.  Then another shadow crept to where the first had momentarily paused.  Then both descended into the trench and vanished beneath the glaring lights.  In place of the shadows now were two boys - two teenagers - stealing along the floor of the trench.  It was only then that Joey noticed the big signs, posted every few feet along the ledge, that read "No Trespassing."

"You boys'll spend the night in jail for sure," he mused as he shook his head.  "There: those two guards see you guys.  I wish I could warn you, but it's too late.  Your parents are going to be getting a call from the police before the night's over!"

"Halt!" sounded from below.  But the boys kept going.  Two shots rang out.  The boys fell.  Joey leaped up, unable to believe the guards had actually fired to hit them.  The guards came over to where the boys were squirming on the ground, trying to get away.  Both guards lowered their guns.  They were grinning.  The two boys were begging the guards not to shoot.  The guards set the barrels of their guns flat against the screaming mouths and shot the boys point blank in the face.  Blood splattered everywhere.  The two young bodies convulsed a moment then became as rigid as stone.  Joey cried out "No!  No!"  The guards turned, pointed to him, and took off running toward the bluff.  Joey also began running, down the bluff and through a wooded area toward a tiny, almost dried up stream.  He knew exactly where he was and where he was headed.

The guards never lost sight of him.  They saw him disappear into the side of a small bluff.  They began laughing as they followed him into the tunnel with their flashlights.

"We got him now!" one said.

"He don't know it dead ends up ahead.  Get your gun ready!" said the other.

They reached the dead end.  But he wasn't there.  "Where'd he go?" they asked one another, frantically retracing their steps to where they entered.  Only then did they see there was another passage, going the opposite way from the one that abruptly ended.

"We can't let him get away!" they both resolved as they followed the other passage.  Joey was already out of the tunnel, above ground, seated on a tree stump, still trembling from what he had witnessed.  He stayed in that area another few weeks.  He knew the guards would get lost.  He planned on somehow showing them the way out, even though it occurred to him that they deserved to stay down there till they died; but it wasn't his place to extract retribution, only God's.

Three weeks, to the day, after the guards killed the two boys and chased Joey into the tunnel, two shots were fired.  Joey heard them, pinpointed them, took a flashlight and entered the tunnel.  An hour later he came upon two headless corpses sprawled on the tunnel floor.  The guards, out of desperation, had pointed their guns at their own heads and pulled the triggers.  Joey went to look for a shovel; when he found one, he returned the bury the guards in the tunnel.  Then, returning from the tunnel, he collected his backpack, filled with maps and his meager store of clothes, and set out for St. Louis.

It was the same thing all over again.  Except that, instead of happening along the Kansas-Colorado border, south of US Route 40 where a stream called the Ladder had been filled in to accommodate the trench as it neared the halfway mark, it happened on the Texas-Oklahoma border, north of Interstate 40, where a stream called the Kiowa had been filled in to accommodate the trench as it neared its end in King County, Texas, five miles east of the junction of US Routes 82 and 83 at the town of Guthrie.  The Project was eighty percent complete; it was on schedule.  The five hundred mile long trench which, when complete, would hold the two thousand pods that constituted the Project, intersected so many major highways and lay beneath so many airline corridors that maintaining its secrecy became itself a monumental undertaking.  Highways were re-routed, re-designed, or else fitted with fifteen feet high barriers to keep motorists from looking down.  Air traffic was either re-routed north of the Wyoming-Colorado-Nebraska border and south of the Texas panhandle or else ordered to fly above twenty thousand feet.

It was not so much to oversee the on-going placement of the pods onto their concrete slabs as it was to monitor the "Veil," as the process of obscuring the Project from travelers came to be known, that Bradley Jerome Carter happened to be at the precise place and time when Unit 1739 was being lowered by two giant cranes straddling either side of the trench.  With him were his son, Brad, and Andrea Kirkus.

Carter had asked his son to accompany him; Brad had insisted that Andrea be invited along.  "Make sure you get her father's permission," Carter told his son; "I won't have her along without it."

"If he objects," Brad countered, "then I'm sorry, I'll have to decline too."

"You can't be away from her that long?" Carter asked.

"I don't want to," Brad answered.

"Yes," Professor Kirkus readily agreed, "Andrea is free to go with you."

"Thank you, sir," said Brad.

"Just make sure the two of you are careful," Kirkus cautioned.  "Your father has quite a knack for getting in the middle of uncomfortable situations."

Brad promised they would be careful.  When he had gone, Kirkus' son Reggie came in from the next room, where he had overheard the conversation.  "Why'd you agree?" Reggie asked.

"There've been no weather disturbances, or earthquakes, or the like in that area," Kirkus explained.  "If anything, it's safer there than it is here."

"But the impropriety," Reggie insisted.  "They're still teenagers - still in high school.  They shouldn't be going off together.  Suppose they engage in too intimate behavior?  I wouldn't exactly recommend Brad's father as a chaperone!"

"They won't," Professor Kirkus assured his son.

"How can you be so sure?" Reggie asked.

"I know Andrea," the Professor replied.  "We don't give annual physicals just to weed out unhealthy workers.  There's a whole range of things we're checking for: substance abuse, illicit sexual behavior - just to name two.  Andrea knows Brad would be charged with sexual misconduct if she allows too much.  She would never allow that."

"I still think it's a mistake," Reggie maintained.  "Someone like Brad is a dangerous influence.  Too many people look up to him.  It's not healthy for society."

"As long as they're in your debt - and make damn sure they are - it doesn't matter in the least who people look up to.  When push comes to shove, they'll follow the one they need before the one they respect."

"I still don't trust him."

"Then you need to work harder to turn the others against him," Kirkus advised his son.

"Oh, I will," Reggie promised.  "Rest assured of that.  There can only be one person in charge - and that's me.  I'm the one who'll fill the void when you're gone - not Brad."

"Don't bury me just yet, son," Kirkus said good naturedly.  "Besides, your rival will not be a resident of our new city when it's completed.  He will not be among the survivors when the world ends."

"Good."

Carter, his son Brad and Andrea Kirkus were flown by helicopter from St. Louis to Perryton, near the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle.  From there they proceeded in a rented car to the border separating Texas from the Oklahoma Panhandle.

"We won't spend much time in the field," Carter said as he sped along State Road 15 to the town of Darrouzett, five miles southeast of the worksite.  "We've got a major Interstate and five heavily traveled US Routes to deal with before we finish."

"Why spend so much energy trying to keep the Project hidden when everyone seems to already know about it anyway?" Andrea asked.

"What everyone 'knows' is hearsay," Carter pointed out.  "No doubt some people have actually seen it, despite our tight security.  Most have just heard rumors though: rumors aren't a problem.  It isn't that the government doesn't want anyone to know about it: they don't want anyone to know exactly what it is.  So long as everyone thinks it's just another secret government project, there's no harm.  The people who conceived it have this absurd notion the world's coming to an end - so they're all going to move in: you, too, Andrea.  And since they actually believe their own nonsense about the end of the world, they're afraid the masses would panic - maybe even destroy the whole country - if they found out their leaders were building a haven for themselves for when the world 'ends.'  It's kind of like the Gorgon: if the masses look directly upon it they'll turn - no, let's say their hearts will turn - to stone.  But, enough nonsense: there's work to be done.  Pod City awaits!"

The same workers who had dubbed the spherical structures being lower into place along the trench "pods" had dubbed the whole five hundred miles of trench "Pod City."  Some workers had even erected signs saying "Pod City" when the security guards were not watching.  The signs never remained up longer than a day or two till the guards discovered and removed them.  There was no official name for this enterprise; none had been deemed suitable.  Many were considered - Utopia, Shangri-La, El Dorado, Atlantis - but all were dismissed as too idealistic.  It was decided not to name the city at all, or to even think of it in terms that had evolved from normal human activity.  Pod City was not a city, it was simply a place on a map.

The site where the two panhandles touched was virtually identical to every other point of the Project.  The particular route had been chosen precisely for the consistency of the terrain: a broad, flat plain allowing for an even placement of houses, lights and walkways above ground, conduits for wires, fuel and plumbing as well as common areas, banquet halls and ballrooms below ground.  Seen in the daylight, up close, Pod City, while still an unusual sight, appeared quite ordinary, its endless symmetry a monotonous, prosaic repetition of a single theme.

Brad and Andrea both hated it.  As they walked from the car, Brad resolved not to let Andrea be brought here.  "If we have to, we'll run away - just the two of us!" he proposed.

"They'll find us," Andrea countered.

"No, they wouldn't.  We could disappear - like the T-Men."

"The T-Men?  Brad: don't you realize my father's people know where the T-Men are every minute of every day?" Andrea asked.

"Then why do they always get away?" Brad, in turn, asked.

"Because they're allowed to get away.  Trust me, Brad: there's no alternative to it.  I must come here when the time comes.  Then, when nothing happens, and the people here realize how foolish they were, they'll come up out of their pods and return to the real world.  We can stand to be apart that long."

"Andrea: I don't want us to be apart - not even one minute, let alone till your father and the others come to their senses.  You forget: my father's a very influential man in his own right."

"Don't depend on that," Andrea warned.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing.  Just things I've overheard.  And things Reggie's told me."

"Who listens to Reggie?" Brad observed.

"You'd do well to, Brad.  He doesn't make things up - he's not that original.  He only reports what he hears father say.  Just be careful.  He's a lot more dangerous than you realize."

The two of them walked along the embankment overlooking the trench as they talked; then climbed down the bank to the floor of the trench.  "Brad, are you going to mention to your father about that couple you saw on TV?" Andrea asked.

"I want to," Brad answered.  "I know father well enough to know what his response will be.  He won't understand why I would waste my time -"

"But if they really are your parents?"

"He still wouldn't understand.  But I want to ask him.  I don't want to go see them without his knowing it."

A week earlier, one of the local television stations had aired a public forum on the state of American society; various people - some dignitaries, some local celebrities, some ordinary citizens - were encouraged to offer their opinions.  A middle-aged couple, after stating they were from the north St. Louis suburb of Normandy, somewhat reluctantly expressed the view that "No one really cares what happens to people."

Asked to expand on that view, the two took turns elaborating what they meant by it, each seeking confirmation from the other as they spoke, and, at the same time, encouraging the other to add to what was just said.  So perfectly did their narrative mesh that, by the time their story was told, it was nearly impossible to remember who had said what.

"Life is comfortable, and secure, and peaceful - and we're grateful for that.  Everything rolls along smoothly.  But if anything happens to you, everything just keeps right on moving as if nothing happened.  The energy our society generates seems to have a life of its own; it's indifferent to those whose collective energies went into making it.  We lost our son, many years ago.  He was a baby.  He was scheduled to come into St. Louis and receive the enzyme - or whatever it is - they give to help our kids be good.  It doesn't harm the children: we've seen our neighbors' kids growing up to be respectful, well-behaved boys and girls.  But the boy's grandfather took it into his head his grandson would be harmed somehow; so he took our son one night while we were sleeping and set out for God only knows where.  He ended up on Eads Bridge the night the T-Men blew it up.  His body washed up onto the shore; so did the horse's body: he was riding in a horse drawn wagon.  Even the wagon was retrieved.  But no one ever found our son - or even looked.  No one made any effort to find him.  We begged and begged the authorities; but they refused to help us.  They said the probability of finding a baby's body was too small to warrant the time and expense.  They reminded us of those babies who were kidnapped around the same time and their bodies were never found either.  What could we say?  So many others had lost their sons - and they were rich and powerful.  Who were we to insist that our son be brought to us so we could lay him to rest?  It's not that we're bitter, but we haven't gotten over losing him.  When we read about tragedies that happened in our nation's past, what stands out is how much effort went into recovering the bodies.  Almost literally, no stone was left unturned.  Now, everyone's just too busy to take the time.  It makes you sad to think that the people who used to live in the towns we now live in would probably still be looking for our son.  It's almost as if, to everyone around us, he wasn't ours anyway - just some foundling we were asked to take care of.  So why should we care if he's found or not?"

Tears welled up in Brad's eyes as he sat watching the couple working together so intimately to relate their story - not because of the poignancy of the tale, not even because their son's disappearance mirrored so closely his own emergence into Bradley Jerome Carter's life; but because, as the camera panned back and forth from the husband to the wife, Brad saw so much of himself in their gestures and expressions and especially in their eyes as they spoke.  And because their story dredged up from his deepest memories the image of a huge grayish animal that snorted and made a shrill laughing sound and smelled like a warm oven full of overcooked bread.  And, alongside that creature, the image of an old man who smelled of tobacco and musty brown clothes and damp shoe leather.  And a brown basket smelling of wool and talcum and seaweed.

Unit 1739 was poised twenty feet above the concrete slab that lay on the floor of the trench.  The same steel cables that had lowered every sphere into place held it taut between two huge cranes straddling the unit.  The motors of the cranes began generating the power needed to lower the unit.  Slowly the process began.

The unit descended the first five feet with the same smooth precision that had set all but one of its predecessors into place.  Then the wind picked up.  The sphere began to stir, but the guy wires, skillfully maneuvered from below, quickly restored proper balance.  The wind died down and the cranes resumed lowering the sphere.  Suddenly the stillness was shattered by a fierce, howling wind that blew up, from nowhere, in an instant.  The sphere was sent hurtling back and forth.  One of the workers was thrown off balance by the wind and fell to the ground, releasing his guy wire.

Brad and Andrea had been watching the unit being lowered from a few yards away.  When Brad saw the guy wire snap out of the fallen worker's hands he ran to it and grabbed hold, immediately assuming the rhythm and thrust needed to synchronize his efforts with those of the other nine workers.

At almost the same instant that Brad joined the work crew, his father, who had been consulting with the engineers, became aware of what was happening and ran to where the workers were struggling to hold the sphere in place.  A second worker - right next to where Brad had taken over from the first - lost his footing and was thrown to the ground by the momentum the sphere sent beating down the guy wires.  Carter immediately cornered the flapping wire and assumed the worker's place beside his son.

The wind finally weakened and the sphere began slowing down.  From the ground, still holding his guy wire, Carter signaled the crane operator to resume lowering the sphere.  Suddenly one of the cables snapped, throwing the sphere off balance.  The crew on the ground readied themselves for another sudden jolt of their wires; they pulled them as taut, and held them as fast, as they could.  Instead of hurtling away from the broken cable, as everyone expected, the sphere began spinning in place, enough of its earlier momentum remaining to offset that caused by the breaking of the cable.

As it spun, it carried the men on the ground with it, like a merry-go-round; they had to keep moving faster and faster around it in order not to be thrown free.

Suddenly the second cable snapped.  In the split second before it broke completely Brad realized what was happening and reacted.  Releasing his guy wire, he reached over and grabbed his father's arm; in almost the same motion, he leaped back, taking his father with him, just as the sphere crashed onto the concrete slab where they were standing a second earlier.  Four of the men were crushed to death instantly; four others had their legs pinned beneath the sphere, and lay there, trapped, screaming for help.  Only Brad and his father were unharmed.  They immediately got up.

Carter summoned help for his injured workers then went to the sphere to inspect it.  He walked all the way around it, stepping over the injured men as he felt the sides for signs of damage.  Then he proceeded to where he had left his engineers, ordering them to have a complete inspection of the structure in his hands with twenty-four hours.

Andrea had gone to Brad the instant he and his father hit the ground.  She waited till they both got up and Carter walked away before speaking.  "Does it bother you your father didn't thank you for saving his life?" she asked.

Brad shook his head.  "I didn't do it for that reason," he answered.  "If it had been someone else instead, I would have done the same."

"But still -"

"No: please don't think that way where he's concerned," Brad cut short any further discussion.  "If it had been him who saved me, he wouldn't have expected an acknowledgment.  It's just his way.  You do what you have to do - for no other reason than that.  I wonder what he's looking for," he mused as he watched his father feeling the sides of the sphere.

"For any damage?" Andrea speculated.

"That's what he has his engineers for," Brad pointed out.  "It's more than just damage.  It's almost like something personal.  It doesn't feel right.  It's weird, Andrea, but I'm more scared watching him inspect that pod than I was when it fell.  Something's not right."

No mention was made of the incident during the flight back to St. Louis, nor of the fact that the trip had been cut short because of it.  Carter was uncharacteristically idle, as if something internal had been allowed precedence over the external events around him, as reflected in the papers spread before him, which he reviewed in the most perfunctory manner.  Brad took this opportunity to breach the subjects of his real parents, telling Carter about the couple he had seen on TV.

"They lost their son in the Eads Bridge incident," Brad said.  "His body was never found.  It was the very next morning you found me.  Maybe these are my real parents."

Carter looked at him as if from a great distance.  "So what if they are?" he asked.  "That was eighteen years ago.  I lost my son the same year, just weeks before I found you: do you think I gave it another thought?  There's too much to be done to let yourself be distracted by things you can't do anything about.  I don't understand how you can be so short-sighted as to let your focus be shifted every time the wind blows."

"It matters who my parents are!" Brad insisted.

"The only thing that matters is your objective," Carter, in turn, insisted.  "God put us here to fulfill a certain purpose.  If He chooses to separate us from our families in order to better fulfill His purpose, it's not our place to second-guess Him, or to neglect our duty while we go searching the earth over for what He's taken from us."

"Would you prefer I didn't see them?" Brad asked.

"What I would prefer, Brad, is that you didn't find it necessary to want to see them.  But if you feel you must, I have no right to stop you.  Do what you must.  But if God wills otherwise, then you won't get to see them, no matter how much you may want to."

The following morning Brad set out for Normandy.  This time Andrea was not with him: he wanted to meet the couple alone.  He drove a red sports car his father had gotten him for his sixteenth birthday.

"I thought you didn't like that car?" Carol Carter said to him.

"I don't," Brad replied.  "It seems pretentious - but I want them to see me in it."

"Why?"

"I want them to know I'm rich, so they won't think I'm just out to get what they have, pretending to be their son."

"And if you really are their son - what then?" Carol asked.

"I don't know," Brad admitted.  "I guess I'll play it by ear."

Brad knew their name, from the documentary; he looked up their address in a phone book at a convenience store on the outskirts of Normandy, then proceeded to their house.  When he arrived, he found their block cordoned off by police tape, and three squad cars parked at the end of their street.  He parked in the next block, got out, and walked to the squad car, asking what had happened.

"House fire," one of the policeman told him.  "Number five fourteen: burned to the ground, early this morning."

Brad turned pale as a ghost.  "Five fourteen?" he muttered.  "Was anyone hurt?"

"No one could have escaped that inferno," a second policeman said.

"Nice folks too," a third one added.  "Such a shame."

"They were in there?"  Brad faintly asked.  "They were killed?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Have they been...identified?"

"There's not much left to identify, son.  Firemen who got here said they'd never seen a blaze so hot.  The neighbors say the whole house went up in smoke, all at once.  Just: poof.  Sad.  Real sad."

"So they're dead," Brad stated as if it finally sunk in.  "I waited too long.  I should have come the next day."

"Next day?  What does that mean?" the first policeman asked, suddenly curious.

"They were on TV a couple weeks ago," Brad explained.  "They were talking about their son, who they lost when Eads Bridge blew up.  My father found me the next day, downstream.  I just wanted to see if maybe I was their son.  I should have come sooner."

"If you had, son, the coroner might be sifting through your ashes along with theirs right now, looking for teeth to identify you by: look at it that way.  Maybe it's a blessing you didn't come sooner."

"Is it okay if I hang around awhile?" Brad asked.  "I promise I won't go anyplace you say not to.  I'd just like to maybe get a chance to talk to their neighbors, find out a little about them.  Can I?"

"Sure.  But don't go beyond that second line of tape up there.  The fire marshal still has to look it over before we close the books on it.  And don't bother anyone who might not want to talk to you."

Brad agreed to their terms and was let past the first line of tape.  He walked as close to the smoldering remains as he could.  Even now, hours after the blaze, and a couple hundred feet away, the heat was as intense as an oven; Brad began sweating.

Presently some children and their parents came along, the children stopping almost beside Brad while their parents caught up.  "Wow!  That's hot!" one ten year old boy exclaimed.  Then he turned to his playmate.  "When it cools down we'll go see if those pellets are still there."

"I bet they got burned," the other boy speculated.

"No - no - I bet they didn't!  They were neat!"

The children started to move on when Brad, on a sudden impulse, began questioning them.  "Pellets?" he asked.  "What kind of pellets?"

"Just pellets," the ten year old answered.  "Some guys were putting them all around the home last night, sticking them everywhere they could.   And stringing wires from them.  I saw them with my binoculars -"

"No you didn't!" the boy's father, who had caught up to him and overheard the conversation, emphatically stated.  "You didn't see anything!"

"But dad: I did!"

The man grabbed the boy by the collar.  "You didn't see anything - not anything!" the man shouted at his son.

"But what about the pellets?" Brad interrupted.

"There were no pellets!  Do you see any pellets on the ground?  These are kids - they make things up!  Now leave us alone!"

With this, the entire group hastily moved on.  The policemen noticed the incident; two officers came over to Brad.  "What was that all about?" one asked.

"I guess I inadvertently upset that man, so I'll move on," Brad said.

"Upset him?  How?" the other officer asked.

"His kid was telling some crazy story about pellets or something.  I guess I sort of encouraged him: his tall tale took my mind off what happened here.  But, I can understand: his father didn't want him making things up.  So he was a little upset.  I'll go now."

"Yeah, I think it's best if you do," the first officer agreed.  "We wouldn't want no tall tales to get started around here.  We're a peaceful community; we aim to keep it that way."

Brad walked calmly to his car.  Nothing in his movements gave away the rage building up inside him.  When he drove off, that too was deceptively calm.  He waited till he was outside the town limits, on Interstate 70, to rev up the engine of his red sports car.  Within seconds, he went from forty to eighty miles per hour.  He turned off 70 onto Interstate 270 at Bridgeton; then off 270 onto Interstate 44 at Osage Hill, heading west southwest until he came to Stanton, where he left the Interstate.  A few minutes later he was entering Merrimac Caverns.  He wandered the caverns for hours, working his way eventually to the room filled with stalactites, where he lost his faith in God.  He moved away the broken blades of ice, as if searching for some trace of someone or something; he shook his head resignedly as he turned and left the room.  He walked through the caverns a while longer then emerged at dusk to return to St. Louis.

He didn't go home, however: he went to the same run-down area north of the Levee where he had earlier sought some kind of answer - the place he had found Crazy Alice.  It was dark already, but it was overcast, so the sky had a pinkish glow where the clouds drew nearest the city.  There was no moon to silhouette the spires of Eads Bridge.  There was no reverie on Brad's part, no gun at the back of his head.  But there was a tall, unkempt woman approaching from the shadows of an open alleyway.

"You came back to our domain," Crazy Alice greeted the boy.

"All day I've been trying to decide what to do," Brad explained.

"And what have you decided?" Alice asked.

"To leave.  To just go, and never come back," Brad replied.  "If I stay, I'll kill them - some of them, maybe all of them, I don't know.  But if I get caught, they'll kill my family, I know they will.  I'm going to ask her to go with me - Kirkus' daughter.  She says they can find us anywhere - but I don't believe that: they're not that powerful."

"They are that powerful," Alice corrected him.  "The only reason they haven't found me is because they think I'm dead.  Even so, if I had something they wanted back, they'd upturn every gravestone till they found me.  If you take his daughter, they'll find you."

"I just wish I could kill the Tungs!" Brad cried out, fighting back a sudden rush of tears.  "They killed the couple I believe were my real parents.  They blew their house up.  All they did not complain that no one looked for their son's body after Eads Bridge blew up."

"That was more than enough to get them killed," Alice concluded.  "You go on, get your young lady, go as far away from here as you can.  Leave the Tungs to us."

"No!" Brad protested.  "I didn't come here to get you to do my dirty work!  I swear I didn't!  It's something I have to do - but I can't!  I can't jeopardize my family!  In a way it's because of me my real parents died.  I don't want to be the cause of my adopted parents' death too!"

"Please understand," said Alice, "the Tungs are our enemies too.  They didn't just try and kill me.  It was some of their men who killed all those babies we delivered to them.  We will take care of them, one by one.  We won't be doing your dirty work, or anyone else's.  Only our own."

Brad said nothing to his father, but he did tell his mother what he had decided, and why.

"You can't think your father had anything to do with this?" Carol Carter demanded to know.

"No, I know he didn't," Brad assured her.  "He would sooner die than do something like that.  And I don't hold him to blame just because he associates with the Tungs.  I'm not leaving to get away from him, or you: I love you both, and always will.  But I can't stay.  I know he won't understand my leaving: he'll think it's cowardly.  I regret that, but I can't let his opinion of me stand in my way.  This is the right thing to do."

"Then tell him: you owe him that much," Carol told her son.

"What I owe him, mother, is to leave rather than jeopardize his life," said Brad.  "That takes precedence over everything.  Besides, he'd think it's foolish of me to waste my time avenging their deaths.  Good-bye mother.  I don't know if I'll ever see you again."

"You will," said Carol.  "I know that as surely as if it already happened."

Brad passed through his father's study before leaving.  "I'll miss you," he said, picturing his father seated behind his desk.  "May your God bless and keep you."  Then he left.

It surprised him how easily he convinced Andrea to go with him.  "You expected me to refuse," she observed his reaction.  "You're not a fugitive, Brad.  You're not wanted for anything; you haven't done anything.  I'm not afraid for you, like I would be if I went with you when it was time for us to move to Pod City.  They'll find us, Brad: this is my chance to prove that to you without risking your life.  All they'll do is bring us back.  That's all."

It was after midnight when they left.  "I know it's foolish to take this, the way it stands out," Brad explained as they were getting into his red sports car.  "We can sell it along the way maybe."

"There's no reason to," Andrea offered.  "If they want to find us, it won't matter what we're in."

The car turned onto Kingshighway Boulevard, heading south.  It sped past the junction with US Route 40, past the junction with Interstate 44, proceeding due south until it came to Interstate 55.  There it left St. Louis to proceed south-southeast.

"I thought you'd head west," Andrea observed.  "Maybe work your way to Wyoming - to Recluse - to join the T-Men."

"No," Brad replied.  "I believe you when you say your father knows where they're holed up.  Anyway, I don't believe in what they stand for.  Although, if they hadn't blown up Eads Bridge, you and I might never have met."

"Where are you headed, then?" Andrea asked.

"The other place you mentioned.  Remember?  Where they were holed up before returning to Wyoming?"

"You mean Tennessee?"

"Uh-huh.  Tennessee.  Clingman's Dome.  I figure whatever encampment they had is still standing.  We'll stay there."

"How long?"

"I don't know," Brad admitted.  "Until I can decide what I need to do.  Father says nothing is more important than your objective.  I can't accept that - not with you sitting beside me.  Andrea: I'm not running away from life.  I'm not going to Tennessee to hide.  Just to think."

They drove through the night, till Brad was too tired to drive any farther.  They had just crossed the Arkansas border when he announced he would have to stop and rest.  A couple miles more brought them to the town of Blytheville, a moderately sized town along the Interstate 55 corridor.  They stopped at a small rest area; it was nearly sun-up.  They both quickly fell asleep, missing both the first rays of the sun and the tremor which shook the car for a few seconds before subsiding.

By mid-morning they were awake and, after getting gas for the car and breakfast for themselves, on their way south again.  An hour later they had crossed the Mississippi into Memphis, Tennessee, where they picked up Interstate 40 heading east-northeast to Nashville then due east to Knoxville.  From there, they took US 441 southeast almost to the North Carolina border.

A day and a half after they left the Private Streets section of St. Louis they arrived at Clingman's Dome.  They searched the area until, at the southeastern corner, halfway to the summit, they found the deserted compound, intact but overgrown with vines, shrubs and saplings.  They moved in.

The spring passed into early summer; and, though both knew they had to be going soon, neither wanted to leave.  The reality of the place had not yet stripped away its idyllic mask; Clingman's Dome in late May was paradise.  There was plenty to eat, plenty to do to get and keep their new home livable; there was a never-ending kaleidoscope of natural beauty spread all around them; there were days warm enough to stroll about naked, nights cool enough to huddle beneath a blanket.  They had no reason to set foot of the mountain.  Their only contact with the outside world was the radio in Brad's car, which he tuned in each morning to hear what was happening elsewhere.  He wanted to know if Crazy Alice had set about doing what he dared not: he half hoped she had, half hoped she hadn't.  In the back of his mind was the thought: leave some for me.

"They'll know - won't they?" he asked Andrea one night when he felt as if his whole body would burst open if he could not do the one thing he was not allowed to do.

"They'll accuse you of raping me," she said.

"Then let them!" he vowed.

In a morning mist that seemed to transport the mountains of southeastern Tennessee to the ancient-most recesses of the Appalachians, as the light of an early summer sun began filtering through this blue-gray cocoon wound like wet beads of time around Clingman's Dome, a cry rang out so deep, so anguished it penetrated the muffling clouds and caught on overhanging branches of the highest trees along the eastern slopes, echoing out across the valley below to the border of North Carolina.  A solitary figur