So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar. It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star--a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too--a nova." People--including those summoned--began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star--reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed--burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens--and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti--the Italian-Czech--whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be--?" Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an +-----------------------------+ | * * * * * * * * * * * * * * | | * +-------------------------+ | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * +-----------------+ | * * * * * * * * * * | | * +-----------------+ | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | | * | +---+ 13 The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound, ripping open my peaceful bivouac--bayoneting dreams and my poor respite. I grabbed in the dark. "Yeahhhh?" "Can I come up?" "For God's sakes, Paul, what time is it?" "She's gone!" "Okay, okay. Where--?" "Downstairs!" I found the light. Four-fifteen. Went to the door and propped it open with a chair. Turned on the shower and stepped into it--letting the multiple streams rattle against my sleepy skull and sweep away the salty acids on my body. The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!" "For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky. Or would you rather have coffee?" "Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face--which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic. "You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out.