The convention of the American Geophysical Society was in full swing. Kemp and Sand had gone ahead, and apparently big things had happened since their arrival Thursday. Now it was Saturday and he had a lot to catch up on.

As he checked in, two professorial young men passed by, engaged in earnest conversation. He caught only three words: "The Kemp object—"

The bellhop carted his luggage over thick carpet to the elevator. Samshow followed, unwinding his arms and stretching his fingers. Two other conventioneers—an older man and a young woman—stood near the elevators, discussing supersonic shock waves and how they might be transmitted through mantle and crust.

Reporters and camera crews from three local television stations and as many national news networks were in the lobby when Samshow returned from his room to check in at the convention desk. He avoided them deftly by walking around several pillars.

With his badge and bag of pamphlets and program guides came a note from Sand:

Kemp and I will meet you in Oz at 5:30. Drinks on Kemp.

D.S.

Oz, Samshow learned from a desk clerk, was the bar and disco at the top of the "new" tower of the St. Francis. He looked at his frayed sports coat and his worn-out running shoes, decided he was easily ten years behind the times and thousands of dollars short in refurbishing his wardrobe, and sighed as he entered the elevator.

The trip from Honolulu to La Jolla had been arranged by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He had paid for that by lecturing the night before at UCSD. It never ceased to dismay him, after twenty-five years, how popular he was. His huge, expensive book on oceanography had become a standard text, and hundreds of students were only too pleased to listen to, and shake hands with, the modern Sverdrup.

On his own tab, he had taken a flight out of Lindbergh Field to San Francisco. Not yet did he have a clear idea what they were all doing here; there was still much work to be done on the Glomar Discoverer, beginning with the collation of billions of bits of data from their passages over the Ramapo Deep.

He suspected much of that data would be pushed aside indefinitely now. Sand's gravimeter anomaly would be the key element. Somehow, that saddened him.

Braced against the ascent of the high-speed elevator, he realized he had been feeling his age for the past week. Psychologically, he had been caught up in the national malaise that had followed Crockerman's announcement. He felt no different from the young people carrying their blank signs just across the street. What was there to protest? Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process. Even now, the instrument of that destruction—or an instrument—might be lancing through the Earth's core.