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village of Wainwright, a hundred and twenty-two miles to the east, where the Alaskan badlands petered out by the sea.
    It was a revolutionary idea. And it -was working. For three months now, the station had been cooking like a greased skillet. Lots of little headaches, of course, these were to be expected. But nothing major. Now the Thoreau was operating with a skeleton crew of 102 men and 4 women, a hundred people fewer than normal, all of them volunteers who had passed up their Christmas furlough to work the station during the holidays.
    Slick Williams, the electronics genius who ran the computer room, was sitting at the main console, his feet on the desk, sipping coffee and watching the lights flashing. He looked up as Lansdale came in. ‘Hi, Chief,’ he said. ‘Slumming?’
    Lansdale laughed. ‘In this sixty-million-dollar toy?’ Around him was possibly the most sophisticated computerized operation ever built. ‘Keep an eye on the stabilizers, it’s getting rough out there.’
    ‘Check,’ Williams said. ‘Tell Sparks to let me know if it gets too bad.’
    ‘Shit,’ Lansdale said, ‘I sat Out a hurricane on the first offshore rig ever built. A goddamn wooden platform fifteen years old. You could fit the son of a bitch in this room. Only lost one man. Silly bastard got hit in the head with a lunchbox flying about ninety miles an hour. Broke his neck. Otherwise, all we got was wet.’
    Williams nodded. He had heard the stories before.
    ‘I’ll either be in the bar having a nightcap or in my apartment,’ the Chief said and left, walking down the hall to the weather room. Radar maps covered one wall, their azimuth bars sweeping in circles, covering a four-hundred-mile radius. The weatherman was just a kid, twenty-six, skinny, acned, long-haired, with glasses as thick as the bottom of a Johnnie Walker bottle. But he was good. Everybody aboard was good or they wouldn’t be there.
    Below them, the heavy seas thundered mutely against the pillars.
    ‘We got a bitch comin’ up, Chief,’ said the youthful weatherman, who, for reasons of his own, had nicknamed himself Sparks, after the old-time radio operators.
    ‘What’s it look like?’
    ‘Hundred-mile winds, sleet, snow and big, I mean big, seas. And it’s already running four degrees below freezing. Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight, they got about five minutes in that water.’
    ‘Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight’ll be in Nome before we get a line to ‘em,’ Lansdale said.
    ‘These storms gimme the creeps.’
    ‘We been through worse, kid. Why don’t you knock off and catch a movie. They got that Clint Eastwood picture showing, the one with the ape.’ The theatres operated twenty-four hours a day.
    ‘I’m staying here. There’s no windows and you can’t hear much. I’ll sleep on that cot if I fade out. Besides, I got Cagney keeping me company.’ He pointed to one of more than a dozen monitor screens near the radar maps. The sound was turned down, but there was Jimmy Cagney, running through an oil refinery, shooting up everybody in sight.
    ‘There was a man,’ Lansdale said. ‘He makes those macho assholes today look like a bunch of Ziegfeld broads.’
    Now Cagney was on top of one of the huge refinery globes and the FBI was trying to pick him off.
    ‘Watch this,’ the kid said. ‘This has got to be the biggest ending ever.’
    Cagney was surrounded by flames, riddled with bullets and still fighting back. ‘Made it, Ma!’ he yelled. ‘Top of the world!’ And blooie !—there goes Jimmy and the refinery and half of Southern California.
    ‘Neat,’ said the Chief.
    ‘Neat,’ echoed the kid.
    ‘What are you pickin’ up?’
    ‘WTBS in Atlanta, Georgia. They show movies all the time. There’s a Japanese station that’s pretty good, too, but all the flicks are dubbed. It’s weird seeing Steve McQueen talking chinguchka.’
    ‘Okay, kid. Ride it out in here. I like devotion to duty.’
    ‘Shit,’ Sparks said, ‘if