Sedately the word moved toward the city area. People began to speculate about the product thus being advertised. Two or three of the quicker-thinking formed hat-pools for dimes and quarters--best guess to take all. At the same time, a considerable discussion arose over the fact that these letters were not being formed by a plane--a glinting speck at the head of a comet of smoke--but were the result of a composing of clouds which had thitherto appeared to be in the random distribution familiar to all. A vague alarm became observable in the voices and the postures of the beholders although it was suggested by the calm among them that the sky-writer had lost the first part of his message--a PEA, for example, or a GRAPE. At the same time, the discomforting fact remained that no performer, and no aerial equipment of any nature, could be descried. The growing strain--and strain came easily amongst persons who had lived through eight years of the Atomic Age--rather suddenly diminished. Clouds boiled, rotated and stretched out to make what people began to recognize (in the order of individual percipience) as a pluralizing S and an exclamation point. The great letters on the sky said: NUTS! This, clearly, was a joke. Someone who possessed a slightly malicious sense of humor, some technician with a novel trick, had seen fit to write above Lake Michigan a laconic comment: NUTS! People laughed and went back to their activities--and their deliberate eschewals of all activity. Other clouds appeared and offered no further entertainment. A few cars on the Lake Shore Drive ground to a stop. Their operators and passengers looked up to see what still intrigued the residual gazers--chuckled--and drove on. Perhaps only Calk, of all those myriads, had a real premonition of evil. He referred it, not unnaturally, to the fact that this was the occasion of his engagement. Looking at the long, shiny limbs of Miss Lurp, the nodes on them, at her rather dangly breasts and her somewhat overteased brown hair (that now smelled of a plastic bathing cap into which had been "built" a perfume that did not quite eradicate the cap's original odor of phenol) he could not help wondering if it was auspicious to behold, upon their first venture as affianced persons, a great NUTS! floating overhead. Following the word with his eye, as it drifted toward the metropolis, he also observed, with distaste, that it maintained its continuity better than any sky-writing he had ever seen. Other citizens, not having witnessed the formation of the word, took it for granted that some prankster had done the deed and, since Chicago is a city where a burp will bring down the house, hugely enjoyed it. The _Sun_ had a box about it. The _News_ had a cartoon about it--bad municipal government shuddering as the word in the sky threatened. The _Tribune_ carried a long editorial attributing the whole affair to communists. The next day was rainy.