In the darkness he planned. All manner of inspirations came to him; he was not wasting his time, not being idle just because he had to be stationary. His head wildly rang with original notions; he could hardly wait, tlunkmg about them and how they would work when tried out. Most of them had to do with ways of survival. No one would be dependent on big society; it would all be small towns and individuality, like Ayn Rand talled about in her books. It would be the end of conformity and the mass mind and junk; no more factory-produced junk, like the cartons of color 3-D television sets which had fallen on all sides of him.

His heart pounded with excitement and impatience; he could hardly stand waiting—it was like a million years already. And still they hadn’t found him yet, even though they were busy looking. He knew that; he could feel them at work, getting nearer.

“Hurry!” he exclaimed aloud, lashing his manual extensors; the tips scratched against the TV cartons, making a dull sound. In his impatience he began to beat on the cartons. The drumming filled the darkness, as if there were many living things imprisoned, an entire nest of people, not just Hoppy Harrington alone.

In her hillside home in West Marin County, Bonny Keller realized that the classical music on the stereo set in the living room had gone off. She emerged from the bed.. room, wiping the water color paint from her hands and wondering if the same tube as before had—as George put it—cut out.

And then through the window she saw against the sky to the south a stout trunk of smoke, as dense and brown as a living stump. She gaped at it, and then the window burst; it pulverized and she crashed back and slid across the floor along with the powdery fragments of it. Every object in the house tumbled, fell and shattered and then skidded with her, as if the house had tilted on end.

The San Andreas Fault, she knew. Terrible earthquake, like back ago eighty years; all we’ve built… all ruined. Spinning, she banged into the far wall of the house, only now it was level and the floor had raised up; she saw lamps and tables and chairs raining down and smashing, and it was amazing to her how flimsy everything was. She could not understand how things she had owned for years could break so easily; only the wall itself, now beneath her, remained as something hard.

My house, she thought. Gone. Everything that’s mine, that means something to me. Oh, it isn’t fair.

Her head ached as she lay panting; she smoothed herself, saw her hands white and covered with fine powder and trembling—blood streaked her wrist, from some cut she could not make out. On my head, she thought. She rubbed her forehead, and bits of material fell from her hair. Now—she could not understand it—the floor was flat again, the wall was upright as it had always been. Back to normal. But the objects; they were all broken. That remained. The garbage house, she thought. It’ll take weeks, months. We’ll never build back. It’s the end of our life, our happiness.

Standing, she walked about; she kicked the pieces of a chair aside. She kicked through the trash, toward the door. The air swirled with particles and she inhaled them; she choked on them, hating them. Glass everywhere, all her lovely plateglass windows gone. Empty square holes with a few shards which still broke loose and dropped even as she watched. She found a door—it had been bent open. Shoving it, putting her weight against it, she made it move aside so that she could go unsteadily out of the house to stand a few yards away, surveying what had happened.

Her headache had become worse. Am I blinded? she wondered; it was hard to keep her eyes open. Did I see a light? She had a memory of one click of light, like a camera shutter opening so suddenly, so swiftly, that her optic nerves had not responded—she had not really seen it. And yet, her eyes were hurt; she felt the injury there. Her body, all of her, seemed damaged, and no wonder. But the ground. She did not see any fissure. And the house stood; only the windows and the household goods had been destroyed. The structure, the empty container, remained with nothing left in it.

Walking slowly along, she thought, I better go get help. I need medical help. And then, as she stumbled and half fell, she looked around her, up into the air, and saw once again the column of brown smoke from the south. Did San Francisco catch fire already? she asked herself.

It’s burning, she decided. It’s a calamity. The city got it, not just West Marin, here. Not just a few rural people up here, but all the city people; there must be thousands dead. They’ll have to declare a national emergency and get the Red Cross and Army; we’ll remember this to the day we die. Walking, she began to cry, holding her hands to her face, not seeing where she was going, not caring. She did not cry for herself or her ruined house, now; she cried for the city to the south. She cried for all the people and things in it and what had happened to them.

I’ll never see it again, she knew. There is no more San Francisco; it is over. The end had come about, today. Crying, she wandered on in the general direction of town; already she could hear people’s voices, rising up from the flatland below. Going by the sound she moved that way.

A car drew up beside her. The door opened; a man reached out for her. She did not know him; she did not even know if he lived around here or if he was passing through. Anyhow, she hugged him.

“All right,” the man said, squeezing her around the waist.

Sobbing, she struggled closer to him, pressing herself against the car seat and drawing him over her.

Later, she once more found herself walking, this time down a narrow road with oak trees, the gnarled old live oaks which she loved so much, on both sides of her. The sky overhead was bleak and gray, swept by heavy clouds which drifted in monotonous procession toward the north. This must be Bear Valley Ranch Road, she said to herself. Her feet hurt and when she stopped she discovered that she was barefoot; somewhere along the way she had lost her shoes.

She still wore the paint-splattered jeans which she had had on when the quake had happened, when the radio had gone off. Or had it really been a quake after all? The man in the car, frightened and babbling like a baby, had said something else, but it had been too garbled, too full of panic, for her to understand.

I want to go home, she said to herself. I want to be back in my own home and I want my shoes. I’ll bet that man took them; I’ll bet they’re back in his car. And I’ll never see them again.

She plodded on, wincing at the pain, wishing she could find somebody, wondering about the sky overhead and becoming more lonely with each passing moment.

Driving his Volkswagen bus away, Andrew Gill caught one last sight of the woman in the paint-spattered jeans and sweater whom he had just let off; he watched her as she trudged barefoot along the road and then he lost hen as his bus passed a bend. He did not know her name but it seemed to him that she was about the prettiest woman he had ever seen, with her red hair and small, delicatelyformed feet. And, the thought to himself in a daze, he and she had just now made love, in the back of his VW bus.

It was, to him, a pageant of figments, the woman and the great explosions from the south that had torn up the countryside and raised the sky of gray overhead. He knew that it was war of some sort or at least a bad event of some modern kind entirely new to the world and to his experience.

He had, that morning, driven from his shop in Petaluma to West Marin to deliver to the pharmacy at Point Reyes Station a load of imported English briar pipes. His business was fine liquors—especially wines—and tobaccos, everything for the serious smoker including little nickel-plated devices for cleaning pipes and tamping the tobacco down. Now as he drove he wondered how his shop was; had the event encompassed the Petaluma area?