INTROIT: KYRIE ELEISON

June 26, 1996

Arthur Gordon stood in the darkness by the bank of the Rogue River, having walked a dozen yards away from his house and family and guests, momentarily weary of company. He stood six feet two inches in height, losing no more than an inch to a slight stoop. His hair was a dusty brown color, his eyebrows a lighter shade of the same. He had a well-proportioned frame and a sufficient amount of muscle, but he lacked any trace of fat; his muscles showed clearly beneath the skin, giving him an appearance of thinness.

The same leanness added intensity and, falsely, a hint of villainy to his face. When he smiled, it seemed he might be thinking something unpleasant or planning mischief. But when he spoke or laughed, that impression was quickly dispelled. His voice was rich and even and calm. He was and always had been -- even in his year and a half in Washington, D.C. -- the gentlest of men.

The clothes Arthur Gordon owned tended to the professorial. His favorite outfit was an old brown pair of corduroy pants -- he wore them now -- a matching jacket, and a blue checked long-sleeved shirt. His shoes were few and sturdy, running shoes for wear around the house, and for work solid brown or black leather wing tips.

His only ostentation was a wide rectangular belt buckle showing a turquoise Saturn and silver stars set in rosewood above brass and maple mountains. He had done little actual astronomy for five years, but he kept that job description close to his heart and quick to his lips, still thinking it the noblest of professions.

Kneeling in the starshadow of ash and maple, he dug his fingers into the rich, black leaf-crusted cake of humus. Closing his eyes, he sniffed the water and the tealike tang of rotting leaves and the clean soapy scent of moist dirt. To be alone was to reappraise. To be alone and know that he could go back, could return at any moment to Francine and their son, Marty, was an ecstasy he could hardly encompass.

The wind hissed through the branches overhead. Looking up, peering between the black silhouettes of maple leaves, Arthur saw a thick spill of stars. He knew every constellation, knew how the stars were born (as much as anyone did) and how they grew old and how a few died. Still, the stars were seldom more than lights on deep blue velvet. Only once in a great while could he make them fill out and see them for what they were, far participants in an intricate play.

Voices carried over the woods. On the broad single-story cabin's porch, vaulting on sturdy concrete pillars above the fern- and tree-covered bluff, Francine talked about fishing with her sister Danielle and brother-in-law, Grant.

"Men love hobbies full of guts and grease," Danielle said, her voice high and sweet, with a touch of North Carolina that Francine had mostly abandoned.

"Nonsense," Grant countered cordially, pure Iowa. "The thrill lies in killing God's innocent creatures."

Below Arthur, the river flowed with a whispering rumble. Still squatting, he slid down the bank on the heels of his thoroughly muddy running shoes and dipped his long-fingered hands into the cold water.

_All things are connected to a contented man._ He looked up again at the sky. "God damn," he said in awe, his eyes moistening. "I love it all."

Something padded close to him in the dark, snuffling. Arthur tensed, then recognized the eager whine. Marty's three-month-old chocolate Labrador, Gauge, had followed him down to the river. Arthur felt the pup's cold nose against his outstretched palm and rumpled the dog's head and ears between his hands. "Why'd you come all the way down here? Young master fickle? Not paying attention?"

Gauge sat in the dirt, rump wriggling, tail swishing through the damp leaves. The pup's moist brown marble eyes reflected twin star-glints. "Call of the wild," Arthur said on the pup's behalf. "Out here in the savage wilderness." Gauge leaped away and pounced his forepaws into the water.

Arthur had owned three dogs in his life. He had inherited the first, a ragged old collie bitch, when he had been Marty's age, on the death of his father. The collie had been his father's dog heart and soul, and that relationship had passed on to him before he could fully appreciate the privilege. After a time, Arthur had wondered if somehow his father hadn't put a part of himself into the old animal, she had seemed so canny and protective. He hoped Marty would find that kind of closeness with Gauge.

Dogs could mellow a wild boy, or open up a shy one. Arthur had mellowed. Marty -- a bright, quiet boy of eight, spectrally thin -- was already opening up.

He played with his cousin on the sward below and east of the patio. Becky, a pretty hellion with more apparent energy than sense -- excusable for her age -- had brought along a monkey hand puppet. To give it voice she made high-pitched chattering noises, more birdlike than monkeylike.

Marty's giggle, excited and girlish, flew out through the tops of the trees. He had a hopeless crush on Becky. Here, in isolation -- with nobody else to distract her -- she did not spurn him, but she often chided him, in a voice full of dignity, for his "boogy" ways. "Boogy" meant any number of things, none of them good. Marty accepted these comments in blinking silence, too young to understand how deeply they hurt him.

The Gordons had lived in the cabin for six months, since the end of Arthur's stint as science advisor to the President of the United States. He had used that time to catch up on his reading, consuming a whole month's worth of astronomical and scientific journals in a day, consulting on aerospace projects one or two days a week, flying north to Seattle or south to Sunnyvale or El Segundo once a month.

Francine had gladly returned from the capital social hurricane to her studies of ancient nomadic Steppes peoples, whom she knew and understood far more than he understood the stars. She had worked on this project since her days at Smith, slowly, steadily accumulating her evidence, pointing toward the (he thought, rather obvious) conclusion that the great ecological factory of the steppes of central Asia had spun forth or stimulated virtually every great movement in history. Eventually she would turn it all into a book; indeed, she already had well over two thousand pages of text on disk. In Arthur's eyes, part of his wife's charm was this dichotomy: resourceful mother without, bulldog scholar within.

The phone rang three times before Francine could travel from the patio to answer it. Her voice came through the open bedroom window facing the river. "I'll find him," she told the caller.

He sighed and stood, pushing on the corduroy covering his bony knees.

"Arthur!"

"Yeah?"

"Chris Riley from Cal Tech. Are you available?"

"Sure," he said, less reluctantly. Riley was not a close friend, merely an acquaintance, but over the years they had established a pact, that each would inform the other of interesting developments before most of the scientific community or the general media had heard of them. Arthur climbed the path up the bank in the dark, knowing each root and slippery patch of mud and leaves, whistling softly. Gauge bounded through the ferns.

Marty watched him owlishly from the edge of the lawn, under the wild plum tree, the monkey puppet hanging loose and grotesque on his hand. "Is Gauge with you?"

The dog followed, ears and eyes locked on the monkey, which he wanted passionately.

Becky lay on her back in the middle of the yard, luminous blond hair fanned over the grass, gazing solemnly at the sky. "When can we get the telescope out, Dad?" Marty asked. He grabbed Gauge's collar and bent down to hug him fiercely. The dog yelped and craned his neck to nip air as the monkey's plastic face poked him in the withers. "Becky wants to see."

"A little later. Tell Mom."

"She'll get it?" Marty was passing through a stage of doubting his mother's technical skills. This irritated Arthur.

"She's used it more than I have, buddy."

"All _right!_" Marty enthused, releasing the dog, dropping the puppet and running for the steps ahead of Arthur. Gauge immediately grabbed the monkey by the throat and shook it, growling. Arthur followed his son, turned left in the hallway past the freezer chest, and picked up his office extension.

"Christopher, what a surprise," he said affably.

"Art, I hope I'm the first. "Riley's voice was a higher tenor than usual.

"Try me."

"Have you heard about Europa?"

"Europe?"

"Europa. Jupiter's sixth moon."

"What about it?"

"It's gone."

"I beg your pardon?"

"There's been a search on at Mount Wilson and Mauna Kea. The _Galileo's_ still going strong out there, but it hasn't been aimed at Europa for weeks. JPL turned the cameras to where Europa should be, but there's nothing big enough to photograph. If it were there, it would come out of occultation again in about ten minutes. But nobody expects to see it. Calls from amateurs have been flooding JPL and Mount Palomar for sixteen hours."

Arthur couldn't shift gears fast enough to think how to react. "I'm sorry...?"

"It's not painted black, it's not hiding, it's just _gone._ Nobody saw it go, either."

Riley was a rotund, crew-cut, plaid sports-coated kind of scientist, shy in person but not on the phone, deeply conservative. He had always been critically deficient in the humor department. He had never pulled Arthur's leg on anything.

"What do they think happened?"

"Nobody knows," Riley said. "Nobody's even venturing a guess. There's going to be a press conference here in Pasadena tomorrow."

Arthur pinched his cheek speculatively. "Did it explode? Something hit it?"

"Can't say, can we?" He could almost hear Chris's smile in his voice. Riley did not smile unless he was faced with a truly bizarre problem. "No data. I've got about seventy other people to call now. Keep in touch, Arthur."

"Thanks, Chris." He hung up, still pinching his cheek. The smoothness of the moment by the river had passed. He stood by the phone for a moment, frowning, then walked into the master bedroom.

Francine reached high to rummage through the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Marty and Becky at her heels.

In their seventeen years together, his wife had moved over the line from voluptuous to _zoftig_ to plump. The physical contrast between Arthur and Francine, all curves and fulfilling grace, was obvious; equally obvious was the fact that what others saw in them, they did not see in each other. She tended to wear folk art print dresses, and much of her wardrobe was a stylish acquiescence to matronliness.

Yet in his thoughts, she was eternally as he had first seen her, walking up sunny white-sanded Newport Beach in southern California, wearing a brief one-piece black swimsuit, her long black hair loose in the breeze. She had been the sexiest woman he had ever known, and she still was.

She pulled down the bulbous canvas Astroscan bag. Bending over, she rummaged for the box of eyepieces under a pile of shoes. "What did Chris want?" she asked.

"Europa's disappeared," Arthur said.

"Europe?" Francine smiled over her shoulder and straightened, passing the bag to him.

"Europa. Sixth moon of Jupiter."

"Oh. How?"

Arthur made a face and shrugged. He took the telescope and its painted gray metal base and carried them outside, Gauge snorting at his heels.

"Uh-oh, kids. Dad's in robot mode," Francine called from the bedroom. "What did Chris really say?" She followed him down the stairs and onto the lawn, where he pressed the telescope base into the soft grass and soil.

"That's what he really said," Arthur replied, dropping the big red ball of the reflector gently into the three hollowed branches of the base.

Gray, dignified Grant and lithe blond Danielle stood by the railing on the east side of the rear deck, overlooking the yard and the plum tree. "It's a lovely night," Danielle said, holding Grant's arm. Arthur thought they most resembled models in upscale real estate ads. Still, they were good people. "Stargazing?"

"It's not secret or anything, is it?" Francine asked.

"I truly doubt such a thing can be kept secret," Arthur replied, peering into the eyepiece.

"One of Jupiter's moons has disappeared," Francine called up to them.

"Oh," her sister said. "Is that possible?"

"We have a friend. An acquaintance, really. He and Arthur keep each other up-to-date on certain things."

"So he's looking for it now?" her sister asked.

"Can you see Jupiter from here? I mean, tonight?" Grant asked.

"I think so," Francine replied. "Europa is one of the Galilean moons. One of the four Galileo saw. The kids were going to -- "

Arthur had Jupiter in view, a bright spot in the middle of the blue-gray field. Stars formed a resolving fog in the background. Two pointlike moons, one bright and one quite dim, were clearly visible on one side of the brighter planet. The dim one was either Io or Callisto, the bright probably Ganymede. The third was either in transit across the planet or in Jupiter's cone of shadow, eclipsed -- or behind the planet, occulted. He tried to remember Laplace's law regarding the first three Galilean moons: _The longitude of the first satellite, minus three times that of the second, plus twice that of the third, is always equal to half of the circumference_...He had memorized that in high school, but it did him a fat lot of good now. He murmured the consequences of the law to himself: "The first three Galileans -- that includes Europa -- can never be all eclipsed at once, nor can they all be in front of the disk at once. If Io and Europa are eclipsed or occulted simultaneously, or in transit simultaneously...Ah, hell." He couldn't remember the details. He would just have to sit and wait for the four to be visible all at once, or for only three to make an appearance.

"Can we see?" Marty asked.

"Sure. I'm going to be out here all night, probably," Arthur said.

"Not Becky," Danielle said.

"Oh, Mooommm! Can't I see?"

"Go ahead," Arthur encouraged, leaning back. Marty squatted next to the telescope and showed his cousin how to look into the eyepiece. "Don't knock it," Arthur warned. "Francine, can you get me the field glasses?"

"Where are they?"

"In the hall cupboard, above the camping gear, in a black leather case."

"What would cause a moon to disappear? How big a moon is it?" Grant asked.

"It's quite large as moons go," Arthur said. "Rock and ice, probably with a liquid water layer under an ice shell."

"That's not like our moon, is it?" Danielle asked.

"Very different," Arthur said. Francine handed him the glasses and he trained them on the sky in the general vicinity of Jupiter. After a few moments of sweeping and focusing, he found the dot of light, but couldn't hold the glasses still enough to make out moons. Becky pulled away from the telescope, rubbing her eye and making a face. "That's hard," she said.

"All right. Let me use it again," Arthur said.

Marty asked his cousin if she had seen it.

"I don't know. It was hard to see anything."

Arthur applied his eye to the eyepiece and found a third moon visible, also comparatively dim. Callisto, Io, and bright Ganymede. No sign of a fourth.

The rest of the family soon tired of the vigil and went inside, where they played a noisy game of Scrabble.

After two hours of straining his eyes, Arthur stood up. He felt dizzy. His legs tingled painfully from the knees down. Francine returned to the backyard around ten o'clock and stood next to him, arms folded.

"You have to see for yourself?" she asked.

"You know me," Arthur said. "It should be visible, but it isn't."

"Pretty big thing to lose, a moon, isn't it?"

"Unheard of."

"Any idea what it means?"

Arthur looked up at her. "There's only three. I know I should have seen four by now."

"What does it mean, Arthur?"

"Damned if I know. Somebody's collecting moons, maybe?"

"It scares me," Francine said. "If it's true." She looked at him plaintively. He said nothing. "Then it's true?"

"I suppose it is."

"Doesn't it scare you?"

Arthur stretched to relieve cramped muscles and took his wife's hands in his. "I don't know what it means yet," he said.

Francine moved almost as easily and blissfully in the sciences as he, albeit on a more instinctive level. He valued her insights, and the thought of her fear sobered him further. "Why are you scared?"

"A moon is bigger than a mountain, and if a mountain, or the river, disappeared without a trace, wouldn't you be afraid?"

"I might," he conceded. He picked up the telescope and replaced its aperture cover. "That's enough for tonight."

Francine wrapped her arms around herself. "Bed?" she asked. "Grant and Danielle and the children are asleep. Gauge is with Marty."

Arthur's mind raced as he lay next to Francine. The wide bed's flannel winter sheets hadn't been changed to the regular percale spring and summer sheets. He was glad for their fuzzy comfort. His emotions had caught up with him.

Europa had been around for billions of years, silently orbiting Jupiter. Some scientists had thought there might be life there, but that had never been proved or disproved.

_If a mountain or the river disappears, that's much closer to home..._

Arthur dreamed of fishing with his best friend, Harry Feinman. They sat in a boat on the river, lines trailing in the current, wearing wide-brimmed hats against a sun that was not all that bright. In the dream, Arthur remembered Harry playing with Martin at the house, lifting the boy high in the air and making an airplane noise as he ran around the tree in the backyard. Harry's wife -- tall, stately Ithaca -- had watched in this dream memory, her smile carrying a slight edge; she was barren, and had never given Harry the child he wanted. Only occasionally did Harry seem to regret the missed opportunities. _I haven't seen Harry in over eight months,_ Arthur thought. _Yet here he is._

_How are you doing, fellah?_ Arthur asked Harry in the boat. _Any nibbles?_ It was curious to realize that the figure of Harry, sitting with hat slouched over his face, was part of a dream. Arthur wondered what the dream Harry would say. _You asleep?_

He reached over to lift the hat.

The Earth's moon lay under Harry's hat, bright and full. Harry's face was in the craters and seas of its surface. _Wow,_ Arthur said. _That's really beautiful._

But he worried for the merest instant that he was not dreaming, and awoke with a start.

QUID SUM, MISER! TUNC DICTUROS?

PERSPECTIVE

_AP/Home Info Service, September 2, 1996:_ WASHINGTON, D. C. -Scientists are convening at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference to listen to speakers presenting papers on subjects ranging from "Lack of Proof for Supermassive Intergalactic Gravitational Lenses" to "Distribution of Wild Rodent Plague Through Ground Squirrel Fleas (_Diamanus Montanus_) in Southern California." Yesterday, one of the most hotly debated papers was presented by Dr. Frank Drinkwater of Balliol College, Oxford University. Dr. Drinkwater maintains that there are no intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. "If there were, we would certainly have seen their effects by now." Dr. Drinkwater maintains that one civilization, creating self-reproducing planet-visiting spacecraft, would permeate the galaxy in less than a million years.

No conclusion was reached by conference scientists regarding the recent disappearance of Jupiter's sixth moon, Europa. Professor Eugenie Cook of the University of Washington, Seattle, maintains that the moon has been displaced from its orbit by collision with a massive and heretofore unknown asteroid. Famed astronomer Fred Accord maintains that such a collision would have "shattered the moon, and we would still be able to see the orbiting fragments." No such sightings have been reported. Many scientists remarked on public apathy over such an unprecedented event. After a month, the story of Europa has almost vanished from the media. Accord commented, "Obviously, more provincial difficulties, like the U. S. presidential election, loom larger. ".

September 28-29

Camped beside the mountain that should not have been there, wrapped in cold desert darkness, Edward Shaw could not sleep. He heard steady breathing from the still forms of his two companions, and marveled at their ease.

He had written in his notebook:

The mound is approximately five hundred meters long and half as wide, perhaps a hundred meters high, (apparently) the basaltic cinder cone of a dead volcano, covered with boulder- and cobble-sized chunks of dark black scoria and surrounded by fine white quartz sand. It is not on our maps nor in the 1991 Geosat directory. The flanks of the cone are steeper than the angle of repose, as much as fifty and sixty degrees. The weathering is haphazard at best -- some parts open to the sun and rain are jet black, shiny, and other areas are only mildly rusty. There are no insects on the mound -- specifically, lift any rock and you will _not_ find a scorpion or millipede. There are no beer cans.

Edward, Brad Minelli, and Victor Reslaw had journeyed from Austin, Texas, to combine a little geology with a lot of camping and hiking across the early autumn desert. Edward was the eldest, thirty-three; he was also the shortest and in a close race with Reslaw to lose his hair the fastest. He stood five feet nine inches in his hiking boots, and his slender frame and boyish, inquisitive features made him seem a lot younger, despite the thinning hair. To see objects closer than two feet from his round nose, he wore gold wire-framed round-lensed glasses, a style he had adopted as an adolescent in the late seventies.

Edward lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head and stared up at the clear steady immensity of the sky. Three days before, dark and gravid clouds had conspired in the flaming sunset to drop a true gully-washer into Death Valley. Their camp had been on high ground, but they had seen basketball-sized boulders slide and roll down freshly gouged channels.

The desert seemed once again innocent of water and change. All around the camp hung a silence more precious than any amount of gold. Not even the wind spoke.

He felt very large in the solitude, as if he might spread his fingers over half the land from horizon to horizon, and gather a mica coat of stars on his fingers. Conversely, in his largeness, he was also a little frightened. This inflated magnitude of self could easily be pricked and shrink to nothing, an illusion of comfort and warmth and high intellectual fever.

Not once in his six-year career as a professor of geology had he found a major error in the U.S. Geological Survey Death Valley charts. The Mojave Desert and Death Valley were the Mecca and Al Medina of western U.S. geologists; they had tramped over the regions for well over a century, drawn by the nakedness and shameless variety of the Earth. From its depths miners had hauled borax and talc and gypsum and other useful, unglamorous minerals. In some places, niter-lined caves wedged several hundred feet into the Earth. A spelunker need descend only twenty or thirty feet to feel the heat; creation still lay close under Death Valley.

There were hundreds of dead volcanoes, black or sullen red on the tan and gray and pink desert, between the resort at Furnace Creek and the small town of Shoshone, yet each one had been charted and was likely featured in some graduate research paper or another.

This mountain was an anomaly.

That was impossible.

Reslaw and Minelli had shrugged it off as an interesting if unique error on the maps; a misplacement, like the discovery of some new island in an archipelago, known to the natives but lost in a shuffle of navigators' charts; a kind of Pitcairn of volcanic mounds.

But the cinder cone was too close to routes traveled at least once or twice a year. Edward knew that it had not been misplaced. He could not deceive himself as his friends did.

Neither could he posit any other explanation.

They walked once again around the base of the mound at midmorning. The sun was already high in the flat, still blue sky. It was going to be a hot day. Red-haired, stocky Reslaw sipped coffee from a green-enameled Thermos bottle, a serviceable antique purchased in a rock-and-junk shop in Shoshone; Edward chewed on a granola bar and sketched details in a small black cloth-bound notebook. Minelli trailed them, idly chipping at boulders with a rock pick, his loose, lanky form, unkempt black hair, and pale skin giving him the appearance of a misplaced urban scrounger.

He stopped ten yards behind Edward. "Hey," he called out. "Did you see this?"

"What?"

"A hole."

Edward turned back. Reslaw glanced back at them, shrugged, and continued around the mound to the north.

The hole was about a meter wide and slanted upward into the mass of the mound. Edward had not seen it because it began in deep shadow, under a ledge illuminated by the warm rays of the sun. "It's not a flow tube. Look how smooth," Minelli said. "No collapse, no patterns."

"Bad geology," Edward commented. _If the mound is a fake, then this is the first mistake._

"Hm?"

"It's not natural. Looks like some prospector got here before us."

"Why dig a hole in a cinder cone?"

"Maybe it's an Indian cave," Edward offered lamely. The hole disturbed him.

"Indians with diamond drills? Not likely," Minelli said with a faint edge of scorn. Edward ignored his tone and stepped on a lava boulder to get a better look up into the darkness. He pulled a flashlight from his belt and squeezed it to shine a beam into the depths. Smooth-bored matte-finish lava walls absorbed the light beyond eight or ten meters; to that point, the tunnel was straight and featureless, inclining upward at about thirty degrees.

''Do you smell something?" Minelli asked.

Edward sniffed. "Yeah. What is it?"

"I'm not sure..."

The odor was faint and smooth and sweet, slightly acrid. It did not encourage further investigation. "Like a lab smell," Minelli said.

"That's it," Edward agreed. "Iodine. Crystalline iodine."

"Right."

Minelli's forehead wrinkled in a mock fit of manic speculation. "Got it," he said. "This is a junkie rock. A sanitary junkie cinder cone."

Edward ignored him again. Minelli was infamous for a sense of humor so strange it hardly ever produced anything funny. "Needle mark," Minelli explained in an undertone, realizing his failure. "You still think this isn't a map mistake?"

"If you found a street in New York City, not on any map, wouldn't you be suspicious?"

"I'd call up the mapmakers."

"Yeah, well, this place is as crowded as New York City, as far as geologists are concerned."

"All right," Minelli conceded. "So it's _new._ Just popped up out of nowhere."

"That sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?" Edward said. "Your idea, not mine."

Edward backed away from the hole and suppressed a shiver. _A new mole and it won't go away; a blemish that shouldn't be here._

"What's Reslaw doing?" Minelli asked. "Let's find him."

"This-a-way," Edward said, pointing north. "We can still catch up."

They heard Reslaw call out.

He had not gone far. At the northernmost point of the mound's base, they found him squatting on top of a beetle-shaped lava boulder.

"Tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing," he said, pointing to the shade below the rock. Minelli made a face and hurried ahead of Edward.

In the sand, two meters from the boulder, lay something that at first glance resembled a prehistoric flying creature, a pteranodon perhaps, wings folded, canted over to one side.

It was not mineral, Edward decided immediately; it certainly didn't resemble any animal he had seen. That it might be a distorted plant, a peculiar variety of succulent or cactus, seemed the most likely explanation.

Minelli edged around the find, cautiously giving it a berth of several yards. Whatever it was, it was about the size of a man, bilaterally symmetric and motionless, dusty gray-green with touches of pastel flesh-pink. Minelli stopped his circling and simply gaped.

"I don't think it's alive," Reslaw said.

"Did you touch it?" Minelli asked.

"Hell no."

Edward kneeled before it. There was a definite logic to the thing; a kind of head two feet long and shaped rather like a bishop's miter, or a flattened artillery shell, point down in the sand; a knobby pair of shoulder blades behind the fan-crest of the miter; short thin trunk and twisted legs in squat position behind that. Stubby six-digit feet or hands on the ends of the limbs.

_Not a plant._

"Is it a corpse, maybe?" Minelli asked. "Wearing something, like a dog, you know, covered with clothes -- "

"No," Edward said. He couldn't take his eyes away from the thing. He reached out to touch it, then reconsidered and slowly withdrew his fingers.

Reslaw climbed down from the boulder. "Scared me so bad I jumped," he explained.

"Jesus Christ," Minelli said. "What do we do?"

The snout of the miter lifted from the sand and three glassy eyes the color of fine old sherry emerged. The shock was so great that none of the three moved. Edward finally took a step back, almost reluctantly. The eyes in the miter-head followed him, then sank away again, and the head nodded back into the sand. A sound issued from the thing, muffled and indistinct.

"I think we should go," Reslaw said.

"It's sick," Minelli said.

Edward looked for footprints, hidden strings, signs of a prank. He was already convinced this was no prank, but it was best to be sure before committing oneself to a ridiculous hypothesis.

Another muffled noise.

"It's saying something," Reslaw said.

"Or trying to," Edward added.

"It isn't really ugly, is it?" Minelli asked. "It's kind of pretty."

Edward hunkered down and approached the thing again, edging forward one booted foot at a time.

The thing lifted its head and said very clearly,"I am sorry, but there is bad news."

"What?" Edward jerked, his voice cracking.

"God almighty," Reslaw cried.

"I am sorry, but there is bad news."

"Are you sick?" Edward asked.

"There is bad news," it repeated.

"Can we help you?"

"Night. Bring night." The voice had the whispering quality of wind-blown leaves, not unpleasant by itself, but chilling in context. A waft of iodine smell made Edward recoil, lips curled back.

"It's morning," Edward said. "Won't be night for -- "

"Shade," Minelli said, his face expressing intense concern. "It wants to be in shade."

"I'll get the tent," Reslaw said. He jumped down from the boulder and ran back to the camp. Minelli and Edward stared at each other, then at the thing canted over in the sand.

"We should get the hell out of here," Minelli said.

"We'll stay," Edward said.

"Right." Minelli's expression changed from concern to puzzled curiosity. He might have been staring at a museum specimen in a bottle. "This is really, wonderfully ridiculous."

"Bring night," the thing pleaded.

Shoshone seemed little more than a truck stop on the highway, a caf6 and the rock shop, a post office and grocery store. Off the highway, however, a gravel road curved past a number of tree-shaded bungalows and a sprawling modern one-story house, then ran arrow-straight between venerable tamarisk trees and by a four-acre swamp to a hot-spring-fed pool and trailer court. The small town was home to some three hundred permanent residents, and at the peak of the tourist season -- late September through early May -- hosted an additional three hundred snowbirds and backpackers and the occasional team of geologists. Shoshone called itself the gateway to Death Valley, between Baker to the south and Furnace Creek to the north. To the east, across the Mojave, the Resting Spring, Nopah and Spring ranges, and the Nevada state line, was Las Vegas, the closest major city.

Reslaw, Minelli, and Edward brought the miter-headed creature into Shoshone after joining California state highway 127 some fifteen miles north of the town. It lay under moistened towels in the back...

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