She was still breathing hard when she appeared at the door of the Game Room and signaled imperiously to Dick McCue. "You got to drive me into Hebertown," she ordered. "But Mrs. Goudeket!" He nodded back at the room, where a couple of sullen guests were doggedly putting golf balls into a tumbler. "I got a contest going. Dave said I had to help out; he said--" "This is more important," Mrs. Goudeket said firmly. "You think I like going myself? God knows what the guests will think, so don't tell them. Let them look." "All right, Mrs. Goudeket. I'll tell you what, I'll go get the car and meet you at the kitchen entrance. Just the two of us going?" Mrs. Goudeket smiled frostily. "Three," she said. "Miss Froman is leaving us." CHAPTER THREE The burgess of Hebertown wasn't having any luck with his call to the weather bureau. Because he was the burgess, he had got his own line to the central office back in service; but the central office was having a hell of a time getting through to any point outside. If he had got through, he wouldn't have had much luck either, because there were plenty of lines down, but practically all the ones that were left were trying to get onto the same three instruments in the bureau's outer office. The chief of bureau was talking into one of them, kept open with a direct line to the nearest Civil Defense filter center: "Charley? Here's the latest. No chance of the rain stopping for at least several hours, that's the big thing. Some places it's hitting an inch an hour. There's all that wet air that Diane pulled in from the Atlantic, and now the winds have pushed it up; when it gets cold the water has to come out. How much?" He blinked at the phone; he had been in that office for seventeen hours and, he suddenly remembered, he'd never got around to having lunch sent up. "Call it ten inches, average through the area affected. What?" He sat up straight. "Now listen, Charley! I've busted forecasts and I've admitted it; but you can't hang this one on me--" The station duty forecaster, on the phone next to him, was saying: "Sure, we're sticking by our forecast. Go ahead and print it. Flood damage? No, I can't give you anything; not our line. Please, won't you read the forecast? We said heavy rain. We said prospect of danger from flooding because the soil is saturated--no room for the rain to soak in, it has to run off somewhere. The only thing we didn't say was 'positively.'" He hung up, but didn't take his hand off the phone; it would ring again in seconds. It didn't much matter what they printed, of course; the newspaper that had been on the wire was in a town that had grown rich from the two rivers that joined in its heart, and the forecaster had his own feelings about what those two rivers might do.