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you can, but no later than the last week of the month.”
    “The election is next year.”
    “What a quick mind! But some states hold off-year gubernatorial elections.”
    “Oh.”
    “And the bigger our man wins, the better he looks next year.”
    “I gather I don’t get to learn his name.”
    “Not today. But don’t shoot any governors except for Guthrie. Just to be on the safe side.”
    “I don’t know if I can do all these.”
    “It’s what you do, Miles, and you do it as well as anyone I have ever known.”
    “I have been known to miss.”
    “Not often.”
    “And these are not six nonentities. There’s not only security in front but the certainly of a stench afterward. The Vice-President, for Christ’s sake.”
    “No one’s safe if you want him. No one on earth. Who knows this better than you?”
    He acknowledged this with silence, then looked thoughtfully at Heidigger. His voice softened. “Why should I do this, Eric? You expect me to do it. You and I both sit here expecting that I will do it. Why is this so?”
    “You’ll act for the good of the country. To preserve the American Way of Life. Bathrooms and Holiday Inns.”
    “The question was serious.”
    “So was the answer. Do you know what happens if we don’t act? Do you know? Chaos. Literally, chaos. The trends continue. Polarization increases. The left retains certain strengths. The right is too splintered to lake control. The economy goes completely to hell. The center evaporates like piss on a hot iron. The cities erupt. Pointless bloodbaths. Utter disorder. That is the alternative, Miles Dorn. The mistake everyone makes is to believe that the alternative to change is preservation of the status quo. And this is so rarely true. The alternative to change is another sort of change. You know this.”
    “No, I don’t know it. Perhaps it is true—”
    “It is.”
    “—But I do not know it. I have no politics, Eric. You know that. I do not act out of principles.”
    “Who does, in our line?”
    “You do. You have standards, you have a set political frame of reference. I do not.”
    “Then perhaps that is why you can do this sort of thing so much better than I. I can point. You can act. Perhaps that is why.”
    “But why do I do it? Why, Eric?”
    “Because it is how you are defined, how you define yourself. You do it because it is what you do.”
    “Like robins.”
    “I don’t hear you.”
    “Nothing,” he said. “A private thought.”
    “Enjoy your private thoughts. It’s a free country.”
    Back on the bus, head flung back, half in and half out of sleep, he played with private thoughts while the bus coursed northward through a free country.
    A governor, a senator, a labor leader, two mayors. A vice-president. Worms to feed my baby robins. Men to nourish worms.
    If you are not part of the solution, then you must be part of the problem.

FOUR
    Monday noon she rang his bell. He was not surprised to see her. He had been expecting her ever since he read the morning paper. “Oh, God,” she said.
    She was ashen-faced, trembling. He took her arm. “You know about it.”
    “I read about it, yes.”
    “I wasn’t supposed to come until tomorrow. If you’re busy—”
    “I have a completely free afternoon. Come in.”
    “I have the five dollars.”
    “You’re being hysterical. Come inside. Now sit down. Would you like anything? Tea? A glass of wine?”
    “No,” she said. She took hold of her upper arms, hugged herself, shuddered. She sighed heavily. Then she said, “I’m all right now.”
    “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some wine?”
    “No.” Her eyes found his face. In German she said, “Your intuition saved my life.”
    “Oh, now.”
    “Fourteen of them. Dead. Fourteen kids dead. It was never fourteen before. But when it was four at Kent State, everybody said, ‘God, it was never four before.’” She had returned to English. “And thirty-five wounded. One of them was from here. You know that, you saw the