For can they not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and Rameses change his gods? Manhattan! They look. Great Heaven, they never see! Directly below, on the sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the circular pools of street light. I could hear her heels crossing my life and every time she reached a new radiant circle I could see she had golden hair. The very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive dark. Her dress was green. I soon took my leave. 7 My double bed was a sea and I was its derelict. I read an article by a steelmaker that tish-pished those who are concerned over the possible exhaustion of America's iron ore. Run out in twenty years? this tycoon asked. Ridiculous! There is iron enough for a century and no corporation is anxious at all, where such extensive futures can be seen. I gave this oaf a hundred years to come to his senses in the third generation. It was an insufficient period. The iron ran out and he still foraged--a ghost rummaging in the raped premises of his great-great-grandchildren. Go rue the deserts man's already made! Paul didn't come. I read some poetry I could not understand in _Harper's_. I got out the medical book on cancer and looked at throats for a while. I took the Gideon Bible from the bureau drawer and read the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians. Then Psalms, awhile. Then Luke, awhile. I went into my bathroom and swallowed one of Tom's capsules. 8 It could have been morning; it could have been night; the light on the airfield was such as seeps across the northern pole in winter. Engines hiccupped and caught fire within themselves. Gouts of blue fire streamed from their steel nostrils and human figures warily aimed extinguishers as they crouched under the great wings. One B-29--a special craft--sucked up its ladder. "Good luck!" a thin voice called. The slam of a hatch replied. The plane snorted, bellowed, vibrated against its chocks, and lurched about. Like a house on casters--like a house-sized aluminum insect, it moved in the opalescent murk. There was a pause. At Flight Control, the ground officers of the Twentieth Air Force made a last check. It was not sergeant's work, or lieutenant's. Brass looked at the weather maps--high brass read the bulletins, squinted into the instruments, followed the meterological balloons, talked through telephones. Anxious brass at the hangar interrogated the mechs--studied the quadruple checks, the four-colored V's ranged after a list of thirteen hundred and eleven critical parts of a very heavy bomber. In the officers' mess, captains, young majors, young lieutenant colonels filled their trays, walked to the tables, sat, listened while the juke box sang-- My mammy done tole me--