"Hello," she said. "Operator, hello?" The line wasn't stone-cold dead, but it wasn't buzzing with the reassuring familiarity of the dial tone. A delusive droning kept encouraging her to try; mechanically she switched off and on again, asked for the operator, tried dialing various service numbers. As she went through the motions she thought abstractedly that something had to work; the horse-book concession was absolutely vital. She'd always known she should have an auxiliary generator, paid for God knows how, so the teletype could be kept going--but what good was a teletype with power and no line in? It was dawning on her that the place was cut off from the outside world, that the wires were down and would stay down for hours. Radios? The radio must be saying something. There was a little station in Hebertown that played nothing but records and news a couple of times a day from the _Weekly Times_ office. Junk like who's in the hospital, the borough council meeting, "want ads of the air," traffic things. _They'd_ know what this rain was doing, they'd have an estimate from the power and phone companies of the damage to the lines and when they'd be back in service. The radio would tell her everything she needed to know; then a calm announcement to the guests and everybody would go to bed cheerfully, rather enjoying the excitement.... But little Mrs. Fiedler came up and she had her portable radio in her hand, weighing her down like a suitcase; it wasn't one of those little pocket jobs but a substantial long-range outfit. Little Mrs. Fiedler made something of a nuisance of herself when she played it beside the swimming pool--highbrow music from New York City stations. "Could you get me an outside line, Mrs. Goudeket?" she said. "I want to call my mother in New York so she won't worry." "Worry? About somebody at Goudeket's Green Acres?" the old woman kidded. "She should have such worries. But I'm sorry, the phone's out again. I don't know for how long. But why should she worry?" "There was a news broadcast from New York, there's a flood up in Richardstown. Of course that's a hundred miles away, but to my mother, the mountains are the mountains." "Ah. Richardstown. Mrs. Fiedler, did you try the local station? Let's go into my office and see what they have to say." But even the big, powerful portable failed to pick up the local station. Mrs. Goudeket refused to think of what _that_ might mean.