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crumbs of moss and composted pine needles onto it. The smell of the soil was rich and strong. Dex picked up a handful. It was moist and compacted easily in his fist. It had been here a long, long time.
    An earthworm crawled across the white divider by his knee, sublimely indifferent.
    The truck driver ground a cigarette under the heel of his boot and said, “It’s real, all right. Nobody’s driving south today.”
    Beyond this line of demarcation there was no road and had never been any road. That much was obvious. The forest was deep and trackless. Not so much as a deer trail passed through here, Dex thought.
    “It doesn’t seem possible,” said the woman from the Pinto. She was hugging herself and kept glancing at the forest, furtively, as if it might disappear between peeks. The toddler pressed at her thigh.
    “It isn’t possible,” said the man in the business suit. “I mean, there it is. But it’s not, I mean, possible . I don’t think possible has anything to do with it.”
    Still cataloging details, Dex went to the side of the road where a string of telephone poles followed the right-of-way. The phone lines had been sliced as neatly as the road. The wires dangled limply from the poles.
    “That’s not all,” the truck driver said. “Even the trees don’t match. This side’s been burned off a couple of times, I think. Over there it’s all old growth. Go a little ways in that direction, there’s an old pine sliced right up the middle. All the heartwood exposed and the sap leakin’ out. The bugs aren’t at it yet, so it must have happened just recently. Like last night.”
    Dex said, “You come from out of town?”
    “Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”
    “They?”
    “Whoever did this. Or what ever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”
    The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.
    He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.
    Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.
    It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night—Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.
    Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.
    Stern had come to the house in Queens, bald and extravagantly bearded, infinitely patient with family gossip, courteous at the dinner table and modest about his career. Howard had learned to cultivate his own patience. Sooner or later, he knew, he would be left alone with his uncle; and the conversation would begin as it always began, Stern smiling his strange conspirator’s smile and asking, “So what have you learned about the world?”
    They sat on the back porch watching fireflies, a Saturday night