It was like a dream after that. In the Caddy oil the way to the spaceport, Wagoner said nothing. As for Anne, she seemed to be in a state of slight shock. From what little Paige thought he had learned about her and it was very little he deduced that she had expected this as little as he had. Her face as he had entered Gunn's office had been guarded, eager, and slightly smug all at once, as though she had thought she'd known what Wagoner would say. But when Wagoner had mentioned Jupiter, she'd turned to look at him as though he'd been turned from a senator into a boxing kangaroo, in the plain sight of the Pfitzner Pounders. Something was wrong. After the long catalog of things already visibly wrong, the statement didn't mean very much. But something had clearly gone wrong.

There were fireworks in the sky to the south, visible from the right side of the Caddy where Paige sat as the car turned east on to the parkway. They were nigh aim spectacular, and seemed to be going up from the heart of Manhattan. Paige was puzzled until he remembered, like a fact recalled from the heart of an absurd dream, that this was the last night of the Believer Revival, being held in the stadium on Randalls Island. The fireworks celebrated the Second Coming, which the Believers were confident could not now be long delayed.

Gewiss, gewiss, es naht noch heut und kann nicht lang mehr sliumen

Paige could remember having heard his father, an ardent Wagnerian, singing that; it was from Tristan. But he thought instead of those frightening medieval paintings of the Second Coming, in which Christ stands ignored in a corner of the canvas while the people flock reverently to the feet of the Anti-Christ, whose face, in the dim composite of Paige's memory, was a curious mixture of Francis X. MacHinery and Bliss Wagoner.

Words began to bloom along the black sky at the hearts of starshells:

Million now will die!

No doubt, Paige thought bleakly. The Believers also believed that the Earth was flat; but Paige was on his way to Jupiter not exactly a round planet, but rounder than the Believers' Earth. In quest, if you please, of immortality, in which he too had believed. Tasting bile, he thought, ft takes all kinds.

A final starshell, so brilliant even at this distance that the word inside it was almost dazzled out, burst soundlessly into blue white fire above the city. It said:

% , 'q.I_/ TOMORROW , 1