"Yeah. I've kept up with the news and I've read books and I've worked with all sorts of people for sixty-odd years, and I've seen one kind of stupid, and another. We all bump into each other every day of our Uves, by guess and by golly, and we render our opinions whether we know anything or not, and if anybody catches us out we lie . . . Ah, shit on it." He shook his head. "I'm just feeling uncommonly sour today."

"Right." Sand brushed his sun-dried hair from his eyes.

"They've got us, you know that? We're down and we're weak and there's not a goddamn thing we can do now except go out and look . . ."—he raised his eyebrows and pursed his hps—"and say, 'yep, by golly, there it is. We're bleeding to death.' They knew exactly what to do. They used their decoys, and we fell for them. It's like they know stupidity from generations back, thousands of years back. Maybe they've found stupid hayseed worlds all across the galaxy. So now they have us confused and on our backs kicking and they've got the knife at our throats, like slaughtering a goddamned pig." He gripped the railing and rocked on his heels gently. "I have never in my life felt so useless."

Sand cocked his head to one side. "It still seems theoretical to me," he said. "I can't believe anything's really happening."

"It's been raining for two days in Montana, and they still can't put out the fires," Samshow said. "Now there's a grass fire in central Asia that's burned half a million acres. They can't control it, needless to say. And the fire in Tokyo. We're not only stupid, all our crazy folks are going to burn us out before the world goes kablooey. All our sins hang around our necks."

Fanning, barely twenty, a graduate student from the University of California at Berkeley, came onto the bridge and stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders in excitement. "I've just figured it out. Some of the Navy's coded messages," he said. "They're not working real hard to hide anything. They have a deep submersible somewhere out there." He removed a hand from one pocket and swept the horizon. "I think it's one of their biggies, a nuclear. With treads. They say it's crawling along the bottom."

"Anything else?" Sand asked facetiously. "Or is it a secret?"

Fanning shrugged. "Maybe we're going to do something," he said. "Maybe we're going to try again. Knock out something important, not just a rock. Up the President, man," he said, and lifted an expressive finger.

January 30