As he stood overlooking the valley below with its green fields and little groves of trees, a realization came to him. The world wasn't so bad after all! Up to this moment, he'd almost hated the world with its wars, its threats of mass destruction, its warnings of atomic dusts and plagues that could wipe out humanity within an hour. He'd most certainly hated the cities with their blaring, rumbling automobile-monsters, with their mad rushing, their greedy, frantic, senseless, superficial living that was really not living at all. That was why he had chosen to live in the hill country, on the outskirts of the village, raising his few vegetables and making a trip every few days to the village store to purchase other necessities with his pension check from World War II. But now, he realized, it was good to be alive and to be a part of the green, growing things of Earth. Sandy barked again. "Okay, okay, Sandy. We'll go." But Sandy came sidling up to him now, tail between his legs. His barking faded to a low, shrill whimper. "Sandy! What's the matter? What's wrong?" Even the whimpering ceased, and there was silence. Martin stared at the dog, not understanding. To him came a _feeling_. Something _was_ wrong. A nameless fear rose within him, but the cause of that fear was intangible, locked just below the surface of consciousness. He took the fear, crushed it, pushed it back into the caverns of his mind that held only forgotten things. "Nothing's wrong," he declared boldly. "We're just tired and hungry, that's all." He strode down the quiet hillside toward the broad highway that stretched across the valley. He sang: "We're happy, so happy, Don't want to reach a star; We're happy, always happy, Just the way we are." Strange about that tune, he thought. He hated popular music, but in a regrettable moment of optimism he'd once purchased a second-hand battery video. After a three-day saturation with tooth paste and soap commercials he'd consigned the monstrosity to a remote corner of the woods, but that tune--of all the dubious products of civilization--had somehow stuck in his memory. Suddenly he stopped singing, as if some inexplicable pressure had seized his throat, stopping the flow of words. It was quiet--so incredibly, alarmingly, terrifyingly quiet. Just ahead of him was the highway, its gray smooth ribbon clearly visible through a thin wall of elms. But there was no swish-swish of speeding cars. And there were no bird twitterings and no insect hummings and no skitterings of squirrels at the bases of trees and no droning of gyro-planes. There was only silence. He broke out onto the highway which was dotted with cars, and the cars were motionless. Some of them were crushed, charred wrecks on the side of the road; some had collided in the center of the road to become ugly little mountains of twisted metal, and others were simply parked. But all were motionless. "Come on, Sandy. Something's happened!"