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three years old: Priest thought it was time he was weaned, but Aneth felt he should be allowed to suckle as long as he wanted to. “You can’t save the world with bombs.”
    Star stopped singing. “We’re not trying to save the world. I gave that up in 1969, after the world’s press turned the hippie movement into a joke. All I want now is to save
this
, what we have here, our life, so our children can grow up in peace and love.”
    Priest, who had already considered and rejected the idea of making a nuclear bomb, said: “It’s getting the plutonium that’s the hard part.”
    Aneth detached the child from her breast and patted his back. “Forget it,” she said. “I won’t have anything to do with that stuff. It’s deadly!”
    Star began to sing again. “Train, train, no-good train …”
    Oaktree persisted. “I could get a job in a nuclear power plant, figure out a way to beat their security system.”
    Priest said: “They would ask you for your résumé. And what would you say you had been doing for the last twenty-five years? Nuclear research at Berkeley?”
    “I’d say I been living with a bunch of freaks and now they need to blow up Sacramento, so I came here to get me some radio-friggin’-
activity
, man.”
    The others laughed. Oaktree sat back in his chair and began to harmonize with Star: “No, no, ain’t gonna ride that no-good train …”
    Priest frowned at the flippant air. He could not smile. His heart was full of rage. But he knew that inspired ideas sometimes came out of lighthearted discussions, so he let it run.
    Aneth kissed the top of her child’s head and said: “We could kidnap someone.”
    Priest said: “Who? The governor probably has six bodyguards.”
    “What about his right-hand man, that guy Albert Honeymoon?” There was a murmur of support: they all hated Honeymoon. “Or the president of Coastal Electric?”
    Priest nodded. This could work.
    He knew about stuff like that. It was a long time since he had been on the streets, but he remembered the rules of a rumble: Plan carefully, look cool, shock the mark so badly he can hardly think, act fast, and get the hell out. But something bothered him. “It’s too … like, low-profile,” he said. “Say some big shot gets kidnapped. So what? If you’re going to scare people, you can’t pussyfoot around, you have to scare them
shitless.”
    He restrained himself from saying more.
When you’ve got a guy on his knees, crying and pissing his pants and pleading with you, begging you not to hurt him anymore, that’s when you say what you want; and he’s so grateful, he loves you for telling him what he has to do to make the pain stop
. But that was the wrong kind of talk for someone like Aneth.
    At this point, Melanie spoke again.
    She was sitting on the floor with her back against Priest’s chair. Aneth offered her the big joint that was going around. Melanie wiped her tears, took a long pull on the joint, and passed it up to Priest, then blew out a cloud of smoke and said: “You know, there are ten or fifteen places in California where the faults in the earth’s crust are under such tremendous, like,
pressure
that it would only take a teeny little nudge, or something, to make the tectonic plates slip, and then,
boom!
It’s like a giant slipping on a pebble. It’s only a little pebble, but the giant is so big that his fall shakes the earth.”
    Oaktree stopped singing long enough to say: “Melanie, baby, what the fuck you talking about?”
    “I’m talking about an earthquake,” she said.
    Oaktree laughed. “Ride, ride that no-good train …”
    Priest did not laugh. Something told him this was important. He spoke with quiet intensity. “What are you saying, Melanie?”
    “Forget kidnapping, forget nuclear bombs,” she said. “Why don’t we threaten the governor with an earthquake?”
    “No one can cause an earthquake,” Priest said. “It would take such an enormous amount of energy to make the earth