But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.

He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others—all who knew and believed—were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.

This, of course, was vaster and more final than the Holocaust. Nondiscriminatory. Thinking such thoughts pressed him up against a wall of ignorance; he had never been particularly imaginative, and he could not conceive the means or motives behind what he nevertheless knew was coming.

He stood on the concrete seawall and watched them board the fishing boat. The boat, covered with people, sailed out to the north.

Then he sat on the concrete and rock, buttoning his coat and slipping on a cap to keep away the chill of the breezes off the bay.

Grant had no clear plans, or clear idea what he was doing. If he waited, perhaps an answer would come. Hours passed. He doubled his legs up on the rock and pressed his knees against his chest, chin on the new denim of his pants. The afternoon passed very slowly, but he stuck with his vigil.

The ground trembled slightly and the water level of the bay rose a foot against the seawall, and then fell until the rocks at the base of the wall were exposed—a drop of perhaps four or five feet. He expected—almost welcomed the possibility—that the water would rise again drastically and drown him.

It did not rise again.

Like a robot, he stood and walked through the unlocked gate to the end of the pier, where he leaned his elbows against the wood rail, staring north. He could barely see Alcatraz beyond the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The water just south of Alcatraz appeared rougher than usual, almost white.

A dark gray shape sat in the middle of the whiteness. For a moment, Grant thought a ship had overturned in the bay and was floating hull-up. But the gray bulk was rising higher in the water, not sinking. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the shape.

With a jerk of surprise, he saw that it was already out of the water, and that it had a flat bottom. He had an impression of something shaped like a flatiron, or like the body of a horseshoe crab, four or five hundred feet in length. It rose above the span of the bridge, lifting on a brilliant cone of blinding green. Across the bay came a teeth-aching high-pitched hissing, roaring sound. The object accelerated rapidly upward and dwindled against the late morning sky. In a few seconds, it was gone. How many others had seen it? he wondered.