There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to follow. She went back toward the house, where only the light in Falin’s room was still lit and waiting. She shut the door she had left open. In Falin’s bedroom his quilt was thrown back, his shirt on a chair. She took the shirt in her hands and inhaled its odor; she crawled into the bed beneath the quilt. She drew her legs up and held his shirt to her cheek as she had for so long held her white lamb. Just please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him she prayed, to what powers she didn’t know. The wind diminished. She lay unmoving, and after a long time her heart ceased its banging and she knew, astonished, that she would sleep again.

10.

All that night a storm moved over the Gulf too, and toward morning Cuba was beneath it: rain and wind and the palms wild and the sea coming ashore to cover the roads and wash away the beaches. Cuban and Soviet officers in the northeastern mountain posts watched it through the knocking windows of their command posts, small shacks with corrugated roofs, and wondered how long their equipment would remain functioning. All the MRBMs on the island were now ready to be fired; they lacked only their nuclear warheads, which were stored away from the missile sites and heavily disguised by maskirovka, camouflage, the same word Soviet intelligence used for all misdirection, disinformation, false stories, entrapments. The twenty-four warheads for the R-14 IRBMs remained on the Aleksandrovsk, now rocking in the stirred waters of La Isabela harbor. At about ten o’clock the clouds parted; an antiaircraft unit in the mountains above Banes was alerted that a U-2 had been sighted near Guantanamo. It seemed certain that it was taking pictures in preparation for an attack the following day. The officers at the station had been forbidden to fire on U.S. aircraft without orders from the Soviet commander on the island, but they couldn’t reach him; the U-2 would be out of Cuban airspace in just minutes. The officers made their own decision: an SA-2 surface-to-air missile was fired up through the rainy air, found the U-2, and exploded near enough to it to bring it down. The pilot died in the crash.

American plans called for an immediate retaliatory strike on any SAM bases in Cuba that attacked an American aircraft. As soon as the report could be confirmed, the news went to the President. The assumption was that the Kremlin was deliberately intensifying the crisis by ordering an attack on an unarmed U-2.

Great feeble angels, long-winged and slow, all eyes. At almost the same moment, though so far from the sun it was still in the dark of the morning, a U-2 from a SAC base in Alaska strayed into Soviet airspace over the Chukotski Peninsula. Soviet MiGs rose to intercept it, and at the same time, in response to the U-2’s call for help, American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled and headed for the Bering Sea. With just a few minutes to go before contact, the U-2 managed to fly out of Soviet airspace: as unintentionally, it seems—as helplessly, as accidentally—as it had wandered in.

No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night: long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.

People were in motion too. Kit crossing the campus from the College Street gate felt them, small eddies or flocks, people coming in from Fraternity Row and from town in numbers, the way they did on class days, hurrying together toward their classes in different buildings; but this wasn’t a class day, and they seemed to be all going one way. She went that way too. She’d awakened in the dawn light in Falin’s bed, and had not dared or wanted to lift the phone from its cradle. She’d left the empty house and walked in the frost to town, so strangely weak she had to stop now and then to rest, until she came to the All Night Cafeteria. She sat there with a coffee, thinking of nothing, wondering at the pain in her throat. Was she really sick? Her head felt not light but heavy, made of mud or stone; when she rested it on the cold plastic tabletop and closed her eyes, the waitress shook her awake, and told her not unkindly that she couldn’t sleep there, which maybe people did a lot, and she got up and found a quarter to pay with and went up toward the University.

Many people were running, or hurrying as though not to miss something. They were becoming a crowd, rivulets flowing together into a stream and flowing faster. The earth rose up a little there, between the student center and the science building, beyond which lay the central axis of the campus, a broad way starting at the auditorium and lined with the newer buildings. That’s where the crowd was going, following the paths or pouring over the grass and through the leaves. Kit came to the top of the rise and saw what it was: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the other groups were marching, a little band with signs. Kit could just hear, like a plea repeated, the marchers’ voices, and the cries and shouts of the people around them, moving with them and pressing on them, a gauntlet they passed through. There were no more than twenty or thirty of them.

She went down that way, drawn along. There was Saul Greenleaf, in the front, and Rodger in a jacket and tie and his porkpie hat. Max was in back keeping the group together. Black-and-white cars of the University police were pulled up along the route, their lights revolving and their radios emitting staticky communications louder than the protesters’ chants. Up on top of the auditorium Kit could see watchers and the tall tripods of cameras with long lenses, men with binoculars. She thought of Milton Bluhdorn. Jackie had said it would do her no good to be here: did he know it would be like this? Photographers scooted along the march route too, and some of them looked like news photographers, and some of them didn’t.

She felt a tug at her sleeve, and pulled away, threatened. It was Fran.

“Unbelievable,” she said in cold scorn. “Can you believe this?”

It seemed that in a short time the furious crowd would fall on the demonstrators and beat them or worse. Kit and Fran went down the slope, hurrying as everyone hurried.

“You can think what you want,” Fran said. “You can say what you want. But this is ludicrous.”

A sign that read Hands Off Cuba was torn from someone’s hands and ripped to pieces to awful cheering.

“Who are these people?” Fran said. “College students? They’re rednecks.”

“Fran.”

“Well you hear what they’re saying? ‘Commies go back to Russia.’ I mean come on.” She tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it. “Dopes. Know-nothings.”

They pushed through the mass of hecklers and yellers that undulated along the march route until they were at the front of the crowd and keeping pace with the marchers. And without ever exactly choosing to, they became marchers, as though sorted from the crowd by a sorter that recognized only two kinds, if you weren’t one you were the other. Someone she didn’t know linked arms with her. Saul saw her and grinned, amazed, alight, unafraid she thought, or maybe not. A tall athletic guy was bent into his face, speaking curses meant just for him it seemed; on the guy’s crewcut head was a novelty straw hat decorated with church keys and a little sign that said Lets Raise Hell.