"Still out of my league," Sand said. He wanted to get back to the satellite data. Kemp passed on a few more items of information and then hung up. Sand reexamined the photographs on the slate as Samshow scrolled through them again.

"Why oxygen?" he asked. "Volcanic activity?"

"I don't think so," Samshow said. "Not in my experience. Something is definitely dissociating seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. But only the oxygen is showing up . . .

"Something?" Sand asked softly. "What, machines? Where?"

"There don't appear to be bubbles above the ocean plains. Only in the trenches, and here and here, in known fracture zones." He scrolled back. "Wherever there are deep cracks in the crust, something is storing up hydrogen and releasing oxygen."

Sand made a clench-jawed tsk-tsk. "Kemp says oxygen is up by another percentage point in the Pacific region, and half a percent in central Eurasia."

"Approaching dangerous concentrations," Samshow said. "We're going to see conflagrations . . .forests, cities."

"I've already given up smoking, thank God," Sand said.

Chapter 44

44

Edward Shaw sat in a comfortable antique chair in the bar of the Stephen Austin Hotel—alone, with a whiskey sour in one hand and a fistful of Smokehouse almonds in the other. He had returned to Austin to straighten out his affairs, as might a man condemned to death by lingering illness. He found himself unable to cope with ordinary life any longer.

Austin and environs had been his final effort to get in touch with the past and attempt at least a symbolic reconciliation. His last girlfriend—almost a fiancee—had married a bank vice-president and wanted nothing to do with him. The university had taken his departure philosophically.

He had even broken free of Reslaw and Minelli in Arizona, though Minelli had promised to meet him in Yosemite in late March, weather allowing. He did not want his malaise to burden them. Reslaw, lightly bearded, hair cut to a thin shag, told them he was going to Maine to live with his half brother.

Edward had come back to his hometown to discover that his two-bedroom apartment had been emptied and rented to another tenant the month before—having been forgotten by the government agents looking after his affairs during his quarantine. That seemed a rather major oversight. At least the landlady had been kind enough to store his belongings in the event of his return. He had sold the furniture, but—to his own amusement—learned he still had a few things he couldn't bear to part with. These he had stored in a rental shed at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars a month, paid in advance for five months.

These things done, Edward became what he wanted to be, footloose and fancy free.