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time Peter hooked the mail—a catalogue and a letter (or a bill—yes, with the end of the month coming, it was more likely a bill)—out of the box with the first swipe of his paw. It fluttered to the road, and as Peter picked it up, Anderson dropped her eyes back to her sketch, telling herself to stop banging the goddam funeral bell for Peter every two minutes. The dog actually looked half-alive tonight; there had been nights recently when he’d had to totter up on his hind legs three or four times before he was able to get his mail—which usually came to no more than a free sample from Procter & Gamble or an advertising circular from K-Mart.
    Anderson stared at her sketch closely, absently shading in the trunk of the big pine-tree with the split top. It wasn’t a hundred-percent accurate . . . but it was pretty close. She’d gotten the angle of the thing right, anyway.
    She drew a box around it, then turned the box into a cube . . . as if to isolate the thing. The curve was obvious enough in her sketch, but had it really been there?
    Yes. And what she was calling a metal plate—it was really a hull, wasn’t it? A glassy-smooth, rivetless hull.
    You’re losing your mind, Bobbi  . . . you know that, don’t you?
    Peter scratched on the screen to be let in. Anderson went to the door, still looking at her sketch. Peter came in and dropped the mail on a chair in the hallway. Then he walked slowly down to the kitchen, presumably to see if there was anything he had overlooked on Anderson’s plate.
    Anderson picked up the two pieces of mail and wiped them on the leg of her jeans with a little grimace of disgust. It was a good trick, granted, but dog-spit on the mail was never going to be one of her favorite things. The catalogue was from Radio Shack—they wanted to sell her a word processor. The bill was from Central Maine Power. That made her think briefly of Jim Gardener again. She tossed both on the table in the hall, went back to her chair, sat down again, flipped to a fresh page, and quickly copied her original sketch.
    She frowned at the mild arc, which was probably a bit of extrapolation—as if she had dug down maybe twelve or fourteen feet instead of just four. Well, so what? A little extrapolation didn’t bother her; hell, that was partof a fiction writer’s business, and people who thought it belonged solely to science fiction or fantasy writers had never looked through the other end of the telescope, had never been faced with the problem of filling in white spaces that no history could provide—things like what had happened to the people who had colonized Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, and then simply disappeared, for example, leaving no mark but the inexplicable word CROATOAN carved on a tree, or the Easter Island monoliths, or why the citizens of a little town in Utah called Blessing had all suddenly gone crazy—or so it seemed—on the same day in the summer of 1884. If you didn’t know for sure, it was okay to imagine—until and unless you found out different.
    There was a formula by which circumference could be determined from an arc, she was quite sure of it. She had forgotten what the damned thing was, that was the only problem. But she could maybe get a rough idea—always assuming her impression of just how much the thing’s edge curved was accurate—by estimating the thing’s center point . . .
    Bobbi went back to the hall table and opened its middle drawer, which was a sort of catchall. She rooted past untidy bundles of canceled checks, dead C, D, and nine-volt batteries (for some reason she had never been able to shitcan old batteries—what you did with old batteries was throw them in a drawer, God knew why, it was just the Battery Graveyard instead of the one the elephants were supposed to have), bunches of rubber bands and wide red canning-rubbers, unanswered