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day."
    "Meaning?"
    "Subversives."
    "Subversives! Less than two per cent of the work force are non-Canadians."
    "There's been a royal decree abolishing Canadian criminals? When you hire, you investigate backgrounds?"
    "Well, not intensive questioning, third degree, lie detector tests or any of that rubbish. Try that and you'd never hire anyone. We check on previous experience, qualifications, recommendations and, most important, criminal records."
    "That's the least important. Really clever criminals never have criminal records." Dermott looked like a man who had been about to sigh, explode, curse or quit, but had changed his mind. "Well -- it's late. Tomorrow, Mr. Mackenzie and I would like to talk to your Terry Brinckman and look over the plant."
    "If we have a car here at ten o'clock -- "
    "How about seven o'clock? Yes, seven will be fine."
    Dermott and Mackenzie watched the two men go, looked at each other, emptied their glasses, signalled the barman, then looked out through the windows of the Peter Pond Hotel, named after the first white man ever to see the tar sands.
    Pond went down the Athabasca River by canoe almost exactly two hundred years before. He did not take too much interest in the sand, it appears, but ten years later the much more famous explorer Alexander Mackenzie was intrigued by the sticky substance oozing from outcrops high above the river, and wrote: "The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the Indians' canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal."
    Oddly, the significance of the words "sea-coal" wasn't appreciated for more than a hundred years; nobody realized that the two eighteenth-century explorers had stumbled across one of the world's largest reservoirs of fossil fuels. But had they not so stumbled, there would have been no Peter Pond Hotel where it is today nor, indeed, the township beyond its windows.
    Even in the mid-nineteen-sixties Fort McMurray was little more than a rough, primitive frontier outpost, with a population of only thirteen hundred, and streets covered with dust, mud or slush according to season. By now, though still a frontier town, it had become a frontier town with a difference. Treasuring its past, but with an eye to the future, it was the epitome of a boomtown and, in terms of burgeoning population, the fastest expanding township in Canada. Where there were thirteen hundred citizens fourteen years earlier, there were now thirteen thousand. Schools, "hotels, banks, hospitals, churches, supermarkets and, above all, hundreds of new houses stood and more were being built. And, wonder of wonders, the streets were paved. This seeming miracle stemmed from one factor and one factor only: Fort McMurray sits squarely in the heart of the Athabasca tar sands, the biggest such known deposits in the world.
    It had been snowing heavily earlier in the evening and had still not completely stopped. Everything -- houses, streets, car tops, trees -- was under a smooth cover of white. Hundreds of lights shone hospitably through the gently falling flakes. The scene would have gladdened the eye and heart of a Christmas postcard artist. Some such thought had occurred to Mackenzie.
    "Santa Claus should be here tonight."
    "Indeed." Dermott sounded morose. "Especially if he brought along some of that peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Whatever happened to peace on earth? We're running low on goodwill toward men. Shortage of everything. What did you make of that telephone message to Sanmobil?"
    "Same thing you did. Practically identical to the letter Finlayson received up in Prudhoe Bay. ' Obviously the work of the same man or group of men."
    "And what do you make of the fact that Alaskan oil people got a threatening message from Alberta, while the Albertan oil interests received the same threat from Alaska?"
    "Nothing -- except that both threats had the same origin. That call from