CASS: Right.

SALAZAR:…Everybody’s in the raft.

CASS: Yep. (Pause.) And as usual, where is she? She’s off on a personal hike and somebody’s got to track her down. One of those people. This wasn’t a hiking trip. We were utilizing the waterways. So I got after her. Now. Here’s one for you. She was half a mile up a trail, way up on a ledge all alone with her shorts down and her butt out over the air, peeing. It was spattering down on the rocks, going down like pebbles and making a clatter must have been eighty feet below. Then she started to switch her footing and just went over backward. I saw her go down, but I didn’t see her land. She didn’t give any indication. Not the smallest yip till when she hit, and then she said, Hu-uhhhh. Just the air going out through her voice. (Pause.) I had to radio back and get us choppered out. Later on I just told people we wrecked, like my sister, I told her…Which we did, but it wasn’t that big a deal. We hauled out and dried off and put back in, it wasn’t nothin’.

SALAZAR: These things happen, in a fallen world.

CASS: My sister is all right. There’s a lot of twisted people on the surface of the earth, plenty of fakes, and snakes, and harlot queens and one-eyed jacks. Almost all of us, let’s face it. But not her. Not my sister. She’s fine. Her name is Marigold.

SALAZAR: I’m sure Marigold is fine.

Pause.

CASS: Here’s one for you, chief. The thing of it is I think that woman that time—I think she saw me watching her. I think the surprise of it made her fall.

SALAZAR: Our hearts and souls are sought continually by the Devil.

CASS: That ain’t news.

SALAZAR: We could help you. Join us!

CASS: Bite me! (Staring hard at the phone:) It’s between me and my fate.

Pause. CASS staring at the phone—

SALAZAR: What are you up to?

CASS: I’m praying for that phone to ring.

SALAZAR’s gaze is drawn to the TV.

SALAZAR: Hey—(Looks back and forth between TV and phone.) Turn this up—that phone ain’t gonna ring. Turn it—(He turns up the TV.)

NEWS VOICE:—in an underground shopping mall in Engle-town, New Jersey, will convene a panel to sift through the results of the massive investigation. Survivors of the terrible blaze—

SALAZAR (turning TV down): God told Job some things that were just flat-out nasty. Like: Can you make a forest full of trees a hundred years old and then fill that forest with snow? Can you make an elephant, can you manufacture a whale? Who do you think whomped up this whole shebang? Can you at least admit something’s going on here bigger than you, something majestic? “Hast thou walked in the search of the depth, hast thou entered the springs of the sea?” (He turns TV up.)

NEWS VOICE:—huge fireballs propelled through stores by eerie winds created by abrupt temperature changes in the four-level mile-and-a-half-square area beneath this sleepy suburb. Witnesses to the holocaust—