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less than any youth to chase the nymphs. Over hill and dale. Now you see them; now you don’t. The world a paradise, a paradise! Father, Father, why have you come back?
    There was the noise of something falling in the next room. The knowledge that this was a squirrel, as it was, would not have brought Coverly to his senses. He was too far gone. He grabbed his clothing, flew down the stairs and left the front door standing open. He stopped on the sidewalk long enough to draw on his underpants. Then he ran to the corner. Here he put on his trousers and shirt but he ran the rest of the way to Honora’s barefoot. He scribbled a farewell note, left it on her hall table and caught the milk train north, a little after dawn, past the Markhams’, past the Wilton Trace, past the Lowells’, who had changed the sign on their barn from BE KIND TO ANIMALS to GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS , past the house where old Mr. Sturgis used to live and repair watches.

CHAPTER IV

    Going back to Talifer where he lived with Betsey, Coverly had the choice of concluding that he was demented or that he had seen his father’s ghost. He chose the latter, of course, and yet he could not say so to his wife; he could not explain to his brother Moses why the house on River Street was empty. The specter of his father seemed to sit beside him in the plane that took him west. Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back! What, he wondered, would Leander have made of Talifer?
    The site for Missile Research and Development had a population of twenty thousand, divided, like any society, whatever its aspirations, into first class, second class, third class and steerage. The large aristocracy was composed of physicists and engineers. Tradesmen made up the middle class, and there was a vast proletariat of mechanics, ground crewmen and gantry hands. Most of the aristocracy had been given underground shelters and while this fact had never been publicized it was well known that in the case of a cataclysm the proletariat would be left to scald. This made for some hard feeling. The vitals of the place were the twenty-nine gantries at the edge of the desert, the mosque-shaped atomic reactor, the underground laboratories and hangars and the two-square-mile computation and administration center. The concerns of the site were entirely extraterrestrial, and while common sense would scotch any sentimental and transparent ironies about the vastness of scientific research undertaken at Talifer and the capacity for irrational forlornness, loneliness and ecstasy among the scientists, it was a way of life that presented some strenuous intellectual contrasts.
    Security was always a problem. Talifer was never mentioned in the newspapers. It had no public existence. This concern with security seemed to inhibit life at every level. One Saturday afternoon Betsey was watching television. Coverly had taken Binxey for a trip to the shopping center. Out of her window she saw that Mr. Hansen, who lived across the street, was taking down his storm windows and putting up his screens. He had a stepladder, which he planted carefully in his flowerbeds, then he raised and unhooked his windows and carried them into the garage. His wife and children seemed to be off. There were no other signs of life around the place. When he had removed the windows from the first floor he started on the upstairs bedrooms. His ladder didn’t reach these and he had to work by leaning out of the open windows, unhooking the frames and drawing them on their rectilinear bias into the house. The hardware for one of the windows seemed warped or rusted. It would not come loose. He straddled the windowsill and yanked at the frame. He fell out of the window and landed with a thud onto a little terrace that he had paved with cement block a few weeks earlier. Betsey looked out of the window long enough to see that his body was inert. Then she returned to her television set. Twenty minutes later she heard a siren and an ambulance came