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my specialty. But it’s never prudent to rush into a deal.” He screwed his face up into a frown. Damned if he could figure this out. “I don’t think you stand to lose much by waiting. And, depending on what it turns out to be, you might have a lot to gain.”
    Ginny put on her jacket and walked outside with Max, where they stood on the porch with five or six tourists. The rain wasn’t much more than a light drizzle, but it was cold . “Ginny,” he said, “do you have any pictures? Of the yacht?”
    “Sure.”
    “May I have a few? And one other thing: I’d like to make off with a piece of sail. Okay?”
    She looked at him uncertainly. “Okay,” she said. “Why?”
    “I’d like to find out what it’s made from.”
    “It feels like linen,” she said.
    “That’s what I thought.”
    She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.” A curtain of hard rain was approaching from the west. “I better put it away.” She jumped downoff the porch, climbed into the tractor, and started the engine. Most of the visitors, seeing the sky, decided to get out while they could and ran to their cars.
    She had to back the boat into the barn. It was about halfway in, and she was turned around in the operator’s seat, trying to ease between stalls, when she stopped and stared. “Max.” She waved him forward. “Look at this.”
    “It’s raining out there,” he protested.
    But she waited for him. He sighed, jammed his hands into his pockets, and walked across the squishy lawn. “What?” he said. The rain got heavier. It drove against him, drilled him, took his breath away.
    She was pointing at the prow, paying no attention to the downpour. “Look.”
    He looked. “I don’t see anything.”
    “I don’t think,” she whispered, “it’s getting very wet.”
    A haze had risen around the boat, much the way it will on a city street during a downpour. Max shrugged. “What’s your point?”
    “Look at the tractor.”
    No mist.
    Well, maybe a little. The tractor had been recently polished. It shimmered, and large waxy drops ran down its fenders.
    But the boat: The rain fountained off the hull and was shot through with rainbow colors. It was almost as if the water was being repelled .
     
    An hour later the P—38J rolled down the runway at Fort Moxie International Airport and lifted into a gray, wet sky. Max watched the airstrip fall away. The wind sock atop the lone hangar was around to the southeast at about twenty knots. North of the airport, frame houses and picket fences and unpaved streets mingled with stands of trees and broad lawns. The water tower,emblazoned with the town’s name and motto, A Good Place to Live , rose proudly above the rooftops. The Red River looked cold.
    He followed Route 11 west, into the rain, flying over wide fields of wilted sunflowers waiting to be plowed under. Only a farm truck, and a flock of late geese headed south, moved in all that vast landscape. He cruised over Tom’s place. The driveway was almost empty now, and the barn was shut against the elements. He turned south.
    The rain beat on his canopy; the sky was gray and soupy. He looked over at his starboard tail boom, prosaic and solid. The power plant consisted of two 1,425-horsepower liquid-cooled Allison engines. White Lightning had been manufactured sixty years ago by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Seattle. It was magic, too, like the boat. But this was real ; it was magic held aloft by physics. There was no room in the same world for a P—38J and a buried yacht with working lights.
    None at all.
    He climbed to seventeen thousand feet, his assigned altitude, and set course for Fargo.
     
    Max dropped the fragment of sail off at Colson Laboratories, asking that they determine the composition of the material and, if possible, where it might have been manufactured. They promised to get the results back to him within a week.
    Stell Weatherspoon was his executive assistant. She was an overweight,