Logan ignored the insistent beeping of his wrist-pager. Whoever was calling, they’d have to wait till his hands stopped shaking. Besides, it was easy to dismiss one tiny sound in this cacophony of disaster. Sirens blared as emergency vehicles braved the dark, solitary road leading down to where catastrophe had struck only a short while ago. Behind Logan, the pilot of his commandeered helicopter kept its blades spinning as he argued by radio with the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Department, urging the SWAT team commander to be less trigger happy and a little more cooperative with a federal investigating team.

“… Look! Don’t give me all that dumpit load about state and local jurisdictions having priority. That don’t hold canned shit in a gor-sucked case like this! You see any sign of any burring terrorists? Do we look like a bunch of fucking greeners?”

Logan ignored the racket. He stared at the panorama below, lit by the searchlights of sheriff ’copters already on the scene.

What was left of the Flaming Gorge Dam gleamed like jumbled, broken white teeth below the darker sheen of native canyon rock. Part of the glitter came from roaring water, still spilling over the remains. Most of the great reservoir had already departed downstream toward the Green River Valley. Breathless net reporters told of a swath of devastation, stretching from Wyoming through a corner of Utah, into northwestern Colorado and finally back to Utah again.

But then, Flaming Gorge lay near the intersection of three states, so that was a bit misleading. In fact, the only town evacuated was Jensen, several score miles downstream. And by then, most of the flood’s force had been spent ravaging the unpopulated canyons of Dinosaur National Monument.

Unpopulated… if you don’t count scores of missing or panicked campers. Nor a hapless paleontologist or two.

Logan refused to think about the hurt done those exquisite, fossil-yard badlands. One disaster at a time. He stared at the ruined dam, wondering how such total demolition was accomplished.

It could have been done more economically. Why blow a dam into smithereens when a good crack would serve as well?

Besides, why would any eco-guerrilla want to smash the Flaming Gorge Dam? No one left alive remembered the arroyo that had been drowned under the man-made lake. Anyway, even Neo-Gaian radicals recalled the debacle when someone had wrecked the huge Glen Canyon Dam. The resulting mess had been a caution to all sides and restored the world’s beauty not one iota.

This didn’t feel like a Greener action, anyway. Within an hour’s drive there were scores of more likely targets… places where Logan’s colleagues were busy altering the land for better or worse. Projects hotly debated in the pub-crit media, not a boring, stolid structure like this stodgy old dam.

No, this has to be our demon again.

Footsteps scuffed the loose gravel to Logan’s right. It was Joe Redpath, the assistant assigned him only hours ago for this mission. The tall Amerindian wore twin braids… a fashion statement recently adopted on many university campuses as chic and declarative… though here Logan figured both hairstyle and attitude were genuine.

“Found some eyewitnesses, Eng,” Redpath announced tersely. “Be here in a minute.”

“Good. Any word when we’ll get satellite scans of the explosion itself?”

The other man nodded. “Half an hour, they say.”

“That long?” Logan felt a surge of resentment.

Redpath shrugged. “Spivey has lots of teams. You didn’t think you and me were his top boys, did you? Hell, we’re backups for the backups, man.”

Logan looked squarely at the part-time federal agent. A number of retorts crossed his mind — including telling Redpath where Spivey could take his priorities.

But no. Something was happening in the world. And if Logan wasn’t privy to secret knowledge at the top, at least his investigator’s warrant took him where events were breaking… where he might help solve the puzzle and do some good.

“What do you think of that?” he said, pointing toward the shattered dam.

Redpath watched Logan for another second before turning to survey the scene. “Don’t see how they did it.” He shrugged. “Shape’s all wrong.”

“What shape?”

Redpath gestured with his hands. “Shape of the explosion. Dams don’t break that way. No matter where you plant the charges.”

Logan wondered how Redpath knew. By investigating other cases? Or, perhaps, from practical experience on the other side? To some among society’s brightest, cooperation with authority was strictly a conditional matter, in each instance judged by sharply individualized standards. He could well imagine Redpath swinging one way on one occasion and quite another when it suited him.

“I agree. There’s a big piece missing.”

The local agent inhaled deeply, his eyes roving the tumbled remains. He exhaled and shrugged indifferently. “Carried downstream. We’ll find the chunks in the morning.”

Logan admired the man’s veil. His shield of inscrutability. In this situation, however, it didn’t work at all. He knows damn well the missing chunks aren’t downstream! He just doesn’t want to admit he’s as appalled as I am.

Their pilot finally gave up arguing with the sheriffs and shut down his whining engine, a sudden, welcome lessening of the din. Far better to wait for clearances from Washington, anyway, than be shot down by trigger-happy provincials.

More footsteps approached. A woman in a National Parks uniform, whom Redpath had deputized only an hour ago, entered the light with a middle-aged man in tow. Two teenagers rushed ahead to point at the blasted dam, making awed sounds.

“We… were farther up the reservoir,” the father explained when asked. He was dressed in fishing gear. Hand-tied flies dangled from his vest, along with a photo-ID camping permit.

“We’d come ashore and were setting up to cook… That’s when it all happened.” He covered his eyes. “Those poor night fishermen. They were caught in the flood.”

This fellow wasn’t going to be much use. Shock, Logan diagnosed, and wondered why the ranger had even brought him here. “What was the first thing you saw?” he asked, trying to be gentle.

The man blinked. “We lost the boat. You don’t think they’ll charge us, do you? I mean, we ought to get a refund for the whole trip…”

A tug at Logan’s elbow made him turn. “It started with a noise, mister.”

One of the teenagers, his hair cut short, Ra Boy style, gestured toward the muddy lake bed below. “It was this low hum. Y’know? Like the water sort of sang¹.”

His sister nodded. A little younger but nearly as tall, she wore a Church of Gaia gown at complete odds with her sibling’s sun-worshipper attire. Logan could only imagine the ideological climate in their household.

“It was beautiful but awfully sad,” she said. “I thought at first maybe it was the fish in the lake, you know, moaning?. Because certain people were killing and eating them?”

The boy groaned, sending her a disgusted look. “The fish were put there so people could come and—”

“How long did the sound last?” Logan interrupted.

Both youths shrugged, nearly identically. The boy said, “How could we know? After what happened next, our subjective memory’s sure to be screwed up.”

The things they’re teaching kids, these days, Logan thought. For all the schools’ emphasis on practical psychology, kids still seemed to pick and choose what they wanted to absorb, in this case, apparently, a convenient and plausible excuse for imprecision.

“What did happen next?”

The boy started to speak, but his sister jabbed his ribs. “Things got all blurry for a second or two,” she said hurriedly. “With funny colors—”

“Like we were going down this laser suspensor tunnel ride, see?” the boy blurted out. “You know, like at—”