Hook thanked her for her time and walked on to the last of the three houses, where he found no one at home except two snarling German shepherds that would have eaten him alive except for the chain-link fence that enclosed them and against which they kept leaping in their frenzy to get at him. Hook walked back to his car then, which he had parked on the shoulder of the narrow blacktop lane that led in from Cliff Drive. Altogether the lane and the three houses made a very handsome cul-de-sac, neatly hidden from the road by a thick growth of live oaks.

Before getting back in his car, Hook debated whether to stay there a while longer. He did not know what more he could do, but then neither did he know what he could accomplish back in town. He had been on the coast almost two days now and he was afraid he was still running around with all the purpose and direction of a freshly decapitated chicken. He felt a first faint touch of despair and knew he had to fight it, had to stay in control. More precisely, he had to slow down, think, plan. And part of that slowing down, he decided, was to stay right where he was and poke around a little more, give things a chance to come to him instead of his rushing blindly in what he hoped was their direction. If nothing else, he could walk along the beach and think. So, leaving his car now, he headed back down the row of eucalyptus to the cliff and wandered along it to a point where the live oaks and Cliff Drive itself came almost to the cliff edge, pushed there by a steeper cliff behind. Under one of the trees he sat back against a boulder and lit a cigarette. The day was not only bright but so clear that the channel islands looked just a few miles out instead of the thirty or forty he knew them to be. To his right, on a headland jutting into the Pacific, a stand of high-rise buildings identified the Isla Vista campus; and to his left, down the coast, a half-dozen oil-drilling platforms looked like tiny transistors set in the sun-dazzled sweep of the sea. So in effect he found himself positioned neatly between the Scylla and Charybdis of the new American crisis—on the one side the hard rock of the bank-burners, a generation in violent revolt against everything symbolized by the whirlpool that had formed on his other side three years before, the black filth that had come gushing up out of the sea like the blood of a rectal carcinoma, a system in terminal disease. And the irony of it was that Hook’s physical position, midway between the two, was a fair approximation of his philosophic position as well. He had long feared and hated the power of big business in America, yet he himself as a small businessman, an entrepreneur, feared even more the prospect of a society regimented by social activists dedicated to the proposition that all men should be free to do everything their way. So Hook sat on the fence, and squirmed.