Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L. Rev, or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young couple determined to repair to the beach. They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude. Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air." He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he looked at the vaporous structures overhead. Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder. But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana. Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe. These gossamer figures wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until, ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent. The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a deliberate thing--resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together again to make a real clean-cut N."