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incinerating whole districts of British streets and shops and homes. The boy had been sent back to Haslemere on a crowded morning train, and for the first twenty miles of the trip he had been able to see the storm cloud of black smoke behind him; the inconceivable bombing had been repeated every single night since then, and Andrew’s friend relied on daily telegrams now to know that his parents were still alive. By the time he had told all this to Andrew, the eight-page wartime newspapers were describing the rows of old trucks that were being set out on any English fields big enough for an enemy airplane to land in, and ditches freshly dug in Kent to stop invading tanks. Already butter and sugar were being rationed.
    Perhaps because he had grown up knowing that he had been born abroad in a perennially insecure region, this abrupt prospect of the invasion of his homeland galvanized Andrew Hale. He was eighteen now, and he was suddenly determined to enlist in the Royal Air Force at once, without waiting to finish school and the Officers’ Training Corps program. He wrote to Corliss in Cirencester, demanding his birth certificate, but when the lawyer finally wrote back it was to say that that document was in the hands of the uncle, who was some sort of secretary in Whitehall. Corliss was willing to give Andrew what little information he himself had: a Post Office box number, a telephone number, and a name—James Theodora.
    Andrew remembered the one-legged old colonel telling him to remember his dreams— One day Theodora will ask you about them —and though the prospect of recounting some of his dreams made him uncomfortable, he knew he was on the right track.
    The telephone number had been a challenge; Andrew had had to get permission to use the instrument in the Haslemere College warden’s office during a study hour, with the cost laboriously calculated and added onto his tuition balance. And the trunk line to London had been slow to connect numbers even before the bombing began, and now, though the service still worked, calls were frequently cut off, or interrupted with abrupt bursts of static, or even shifted somehow among startled parties, implicit testimony to the reported hundreds of high-explosive bombs that were hammering the City every night. After interrupting several calls, and even breaking in on what sounded like a military radio transmission, Andrew heard a woman answer, “Hullo?”
    “I need to speak with James Theodora,” Andrew had said, sweating under the warden’s by now impatient stare. “He’s my—my uncle—I met him at his office, and his Chief, who had a wooden—”
    “—Indian out in front of his tobacconist shop in Boston, I dare-say,” the woman interrupted breezily. “Nobody cares about any of that. If we’ve got a James Theodora at the firm here, I’ll have him call you. What’s the number there?”
    Andrew nervously asked the warden, and then gave her the office telephone number. “It’s about my—”
    “No use telling me, my good man. And what’s your first name? Don’t give me your last name.” Andrew told her. “Right, very well, Andrew. If we’ve got this fellow here, I’ll see he gets the message.” Abruptly Andrew was holding a dead telephone.
    He hung it up, humbly thanked the warden, and left the office; but an hour later the warden had him summoned back from class. The telephone earpiece sat waiting for him like an upside-down black teacup on the desktop, with the warden staring as if these City boys must all be W.1 district plutocrats. Andrew picked it up and said hello.
    “Andrew,” came a man’s impatient voice. “What’s the trouble?”
    “Uh, is this—who I called—”
    “Yes , this is who you called. The odor o’ sanctity should be detectable even over the line.”
    “Oh, heh, yes. Well—no trouble, sir, it’s just that I want to—” Peripherally he saw the warden still staring at him. “It occurred to me that I don’t have all my