Eight hundred yards from the road, we crossed the perimeter fence. Crushed by the dunes, long sections of the 20-foot‑high palisade had collapsed, the saw grass growing through the steel mesh. Below us, the boundary road passed a derelict guardhouse and divided into two paved tracks. As we waited at this rendezvous, the head lamps of the ward­ens' half‑tracks flared across the gantries near the beach.

Five minutes later, a small dark‑faced man climbed from the rear seat of a car buried in the sand 50 yards away. Head down, he scuttled over to us.

"Mr. arid Mrs. Groves?" After a pause to peer into our faces, he introduced himself tersely: "Quinton. Sam Quinton."

As he shook hands, his clawlike fingers examined the bones of my wrist and forearm. His sharp nose made circles in the air. He had the eyes of a nervous bird, forever searching the dunes and grass. An Army webbing belt hung around his patched black denims. He moved his hands restlessly in the air, as if conducting a chamber ensemble hid­den behind the sand hills, and I noticed his badly scarred palms. Huge weals formed pale stars in the darkness.

For a moment, he seemed disappoint­ed by us, almost reluctant to move on. Then he set off at a brisk pace across the dunes, now and then leaving us to blun­der about helplessly. Half an hour later, when we entered a shallow basin near a farm of alkali‑settling beds, Judith and I were exhausted, dragging the suitcases over the broken tires and barbed wire.

A group of cabins had been disman­tled from their original sites along the beach and re‑erected in the basin. Isolatecd rooms tilted on the sloping sand, man­telpieces and flowered paper decorating the outer walls.

The basin was full of salvaged space material: sections of capsules, heat shields, antennas and parachute canis­ters. Near the dented hull of a weather satellite, two sallow‑faced men in sheepskin jackets sat on a car seat. The older wore a frayed Air Force cap over his eyes. With his scarred hands, he was polishing the steel visor of a space helmet. The other, a young man with a faint beard hiding his mouth, watched us approach with the detached and neutral gaze of an undertaker.

We entered the largest of the cabins, two rooms taken off the rear of a beach­house. Quinton lit a paraffin lamp. He pointed around the dingy interior. "You'll be… comfortable," he said without conviction. As Judith stared at him with unconcealed distaste, he added pointedly: "We don't get many visitors."

I put the suitcases oil the metal bed. Judith walked into the kitchen and Quinton began to open the empty case.

"It's in here?"

I took the two packets of $100 bills from my jacket. When I had handed them to him, I said: "The suitcase is for the… remains. Is it big enough?"

Quinton peered at me through the ruby light, as if baffled by our presence there. "You could have spared yourself the trouble. They've been up there a long time, Mr. Groves. After the impact" – for some reason, he cast a lewd eye in Judith's direction – "there might be enough for a chess set."

When he had gone, I went into the kitchen. Judith stood by the stove, hands on a carton of canned food. She was staring through the window at the metal salvage, refuse of the sky that still car­ried Robert Hamilton in its rusty centri­fuge. For a moment, I had the feeling that the entire landscape of the earth was covered with rubbish and that here at Cape Kennedy, we had found its source.

I held her shoulders. "Judith, is there any point in this? Why don't we go back to Tampa? I could drive here in ten days' time when it's all over –"

She turned front me, her hands rub­bing the suede where I had marked it. "Philip, I want to be here – no matter how unpleasant. Can't you understand?"

At midnight, when I finished making a small meal for us, she was standing on the concrete wall of the settling tank. The three relic hunters sitting on their car seats watched her without moving, scarred hands like flames in the darkness.

At three o'clock that morning, as we lay awake on the narrow bed, Valentina Prokrovna came down from the sky. En­throned on a bier of burning aluminum 300 yards wide, she soared past on her final orbit. When I went out into the night air, the relic hunters had gone. From the rim of the settling tank, I watched them race away among the dunes, leaping like hares over the tires and wire.

I went back to the cabin. "Judith, she's coming down. Do you want to watch?"

Her blonde hair tied within a white towel, Judith lay on the bed, staring at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. Shortly after four o'clock, as I sat beside her, a phosphorescent light filled the hollow. There was the distant sound of explo­sions, muffled by the high wall of the dunes. Lights flared, followed by the noise Of engines and sirens.

At dawn the relic hunters returned, scarred hands wrapped in makeshift bandages, dragging their booty with them.

After this melancholy rehearsal, Ju­dith entered a period of sudden and unexpected activity. As if preparing the cabin for some visitor, she rehung the curtains and swept out the two rooms with meticulous care, even bringing her­self to ask Quinton for a bottle of clean­er. For hours she sat at the dressing table, brushing and shaping her hair, trying out first one style and then anoth­er. I watched her feel the hollows of her cheeks, searching for the contours of a face that had vanished 20 years ago. As she spoke about Robert Hamilton, she almost seemed worried that she would appear old to him. At other times, she referred to Robert as if he were a child, the son she and I had never been able to conceive since her miscarriage. These different roles followed one another like scenes in some private psychodrama. However, without knowing it, for years Judith and I had used Robert Hamilton for our own reasons. Waiting for him to land, and well aware that after this Ju­dith would have no one to turn to except myself, I said nothing.

Meanwhile, the relic hunters worked on the fragments of Valentina Prokrov­na's capsule: the blistered heat shield, the chassis of the radiotelemetry unit and several cans of film that recorded her collision and act of death (these, if still intact, would fetch the highest prices, films of horrific and dreamlike violence played in the underground cinemas of Los Angeles, London and Moscow). Pass­ing the next cabin, I saw a tattered silver space suit spread‑eagled on two automobile seats. Quinton and the relic hunters knelt beside it, their arms deep inside the legs and sleeves, gazing at me with the rapt and sensitive eyes of jewelers.

An hour before dawn, I was awakened by the sound of engines along the beach. In the darkness, the three relic hunters crouched by the settling tank, their pinched faces lit by the head lamps. A long convoy of trucks and half‑tracks was moving into the launching ground. Soldiers jumped down from the tail­boards, unloading tents and supplies.

"What are they doing?" I asked Quin­ton. "Are they looking for us?"

The old mail cupped a scarred hand over his eyes. "It's the Army," he said uncertainly. "Maneuvers, maybe. They haven't been here before like this."

"What about Hamilton?" I gripped his bony arm. "Are you sure –"

He pushed me away with a show of nervous temper. "We'll get him first. Don't worry, he'll be coming sooner than they think."

Two nights later, as Quinton proph­esied, Robert Hamilton began his final descent. From the dunes near the set­tling tanks, we watched him emerge from the stars on his last run. Reflected in the windows of the buried cars, a thousand images of the capsule flared in the saw grass around us. Behind the sat­ellite, a wide fan of silver spray opened in a phantom wake.

In the Army encampment by the gan­tries, there was a surge of activity. A blaze of head lamps crossed the concrete lanes. Since the arrival of these military units, it had become plain to me, if not to Quinton, that far from being on maneu­vers, they were preparing for the landing of Robert Hamilton's capsule. A dozen half‑tracks had been churning around the dunes, setting fire to the abandoned cabins and crushing the old car bodies. Platoons of soldiers were repairing the perimeter fence and replacing the sec­tions of metaled road that the relic hunters had dismantled.