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with a tentative frown. "Oh, Kidd ."
    If Tak had an expression you couldn't see it.
    He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.
    She reared her shoulders back, blinking. "How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?" To Tak: "Isn't it amazing how we're always turning up people like that? You think you've met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who's been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out—"
    "That's how we met Tak," John said. To Tak: "Isn't it, Tak?"
    Tak said: "He's new."
    "Oh. Well," John said, "we've got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?"
    "Well, we figure—" Mildred's shoulders came, officially, forward. "We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can't be at each other's throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this—" He was sure her gesture, at 'this', included nothing beyond the firelight—"to degenerate into something… well, awful! So we've set up I guess you'd call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that's getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don't take in everybody. But when we do, we're very accepting." There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn't sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. "You are new? We're always glad when we get somebody new."
    He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?
    Tak said: "Show him around, Milly."
    John said: "Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something," tapping his newspaper again. "Oh, here. Maybe you want to take a look at this?"
    "What? Oh…" You couldn't worry so much about things like that! Often, though, he had to remind himself. "Thanks." He took the folded paper.
    "All right, Tak." John, with Tak, turned away. "Now when are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you—"
    "Look, John." Tak put his hand on John's shoulder as they wandered off. "All you need is the plans, and you can—"
    Then they were out of earshot.
    "Are you hungry?"
    "No." She was pretty.
    "Well, if you are—come, let's go over here—we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That's not too far off."
    "You been up all night?" he asked.
    "No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early."
    "I have."
    "We do a lot of work here—" she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs—"during the day. We don't just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It's pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all." She smiled.
    "I've been up; but I'm not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything." He looked down at her legs.
    As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. "Oh, we wouldn't mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don't want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand."
    "Yeah, I understand that." He'd been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.
    "Why do you go around wearing an orchid?" she asked. "Of course, with the city in the state it's in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But…"
    "Some people gave it to me." He turned the rolled newspaper around.
    SERIOUS WATER
    He let the tabloid fall loose.
    SHORTAGE THREATENS
    The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. "What the hell is that?"
    She looked concerned. "Well, there's not very many people around who know how to keep things running. And we've all been expecting the water to become a real problem any day. You have no idea how much they used when they were trying to put out the fires."
    "I mean the 1995?"
    "Oh. That's just