The deck of the Bride was splitting up the middle.

After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker said, in Charity's normal voice: "Eva, you too, please. Acknowledge please. This is it unless everybody comes on duty at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour."

"Let it," Eva responded quietly.

There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner's, and the sound just might have been a chuckle.

Charity's circuit clicked Out.

The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in the little room.

After a while, the man and the woman went to the window, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.

CODA: Brookhaven National Laboratories (the piledump)

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite fully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward, have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more? do not even the publicans so?

"Evay END," Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, "is a new beginning. Perhaps in a thousand years my Earthmen will come home again. Or in two thousand, or four, if they still remember home then. They'll come back, yes; but I hope they won't stay. I pray they will not stay."

He looked at what he had written and thought of signing his name. While he debated that, he made the mark for the last day on his calendar, and the point on his stub of pencil struck stone under the calcimine and snapped, leaving nothing behind it but a little coronet of frayed, dirty blond wood. He could wear that away against the window ledge, at least enough to expose a little graphite, but instead he dropped the stub in the waste can.

There was writing enough in the stars that he could see, because he had written it there. There was a constellation* called Wagoner, and every star in the sky belonged to it. That was surely enough.

Later that day, a man named MacHinery said: "Bliss Wagoner is dead."

As usual, MacHinery was wrong.

Table of Contents

Contents

Five Cultural Portraits

BOOK ONE

PRELUDE: Washington

CHAPTER ONE New York

CHAPTER TWO: Jupiter V

CHAPTER THREE: New York

CHAPTER FOUR: Jupiter V

BOOK TWO

INTERMEZZO: Washington

CHAPTER FIVE: New York

CHAPTER SIX: Jupiter V

CHAPTER SEVEN: New York

CHAPTER EIGHT: Jupiter V

BOOK THREE

ENTRACTE: Washington

CHAPTER NINE: New York

CHAPTER TEN: Jupiter V

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Jupiter V