"Maybe I'll go there. Live on my back salary. I've dreamed about it, you know. Those peculiar dreams where I go back and it's completely different, but still something special. I think to myself, after all those years of just dreaming about being there, I'm finally back. And then I wake up . . . and it's a dream."

Stella reached out to touch his arm. "If ... it works out, you can come back here after."

"Thank you," Edward said. "That would be nice. My teaching position will certainly be closed by that time. I can't expect them to wait forever."

"Let's strike a deal," Stella said. "Next summer, you come back here and help Mother and me. After you go to Yosemite, and after the world gets its act together."

"All right," Edward said, smiling. He reached out and touched her arm, and then leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. "It's a deal."

PERSPECTIVE

Compunews Network,

November 29, 1996,

Frederick Hart reporting:

Here in the winter desert, only a few miles from Death Valley proper, it gets bitterly cold at night, and thousands of campfires light up the grass and sand around the government-declared National Security Site. In the middle of the site, rising against the clouds of stars like a great black hump, is the so-called Bogey, the imitation extinct volcano that has burrowed into the national imagination as the Kemp objects have burrowed into the Earth ' s core, and into our nightmares. People have come here from around the world, kept back a mile from the site by barbed wire and razor-wire barricades. They seem to have come to worship, or to just sit quietly under the warm desert sun and stare. What does it mean to them, to us? Should they wish to storm the site, will the Army be able to keep them back?

Among their numbers are approximately ten thousand Forge of Godders, with their various prophets and religious guides. The American branch of this cult has arisen in just three weeks, sown in the fertile religious ground of the American South and West by the President's blunt, uncompromising words. I have spoken with these people, and they share the President's convictions. Most are fundamentalist Christians, seeing this as the Apocalypse predicted in the Bible. But many come from other faiths, other religions, around the world. They say they will stay here until the end. As one cultist told me, "This is the center. This is where it's at. Forget Australia. The End of the World begins right here, in Death Valley."

Chapter 38

38

December 1