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correlated it with Transcendentalism and the trek of the Latter Day Saints. Hmm, yes, it fitted. And the curve was pushing toward a crest.
    B illions in war bonds were now falling due; wartime marriages were reflected in the swollen peak of the Los Angeles school population. The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual. The Metropolitan Water District commissioners tried to stop it. It fell between the stools of the police powers of fifty “sovereign” cities. The taps remained open, trickling away the life blood of the desert paradise.
    The four regular party conventions—Dixiecrats, Regular Republicans, the Regular Regular Republicans, and the Democrats—attracted scant attention, because the Know-Nothings had not yet met. The fact that the “American Rally,” as the Know-Nothings preferred to be called, claimed not to be a party but an educational society did not detract from their strength. But what was their strength? Their beginnings had been so obscure that Breen had had to go back and dig into the December 1951 files, yet he had been approached twice this very week to join them, right inside his own office—once by his boss, once by the janitor.
    He hadn’t been able to chart the Know-Nothings. They gave him chills in his spine. He kept column-inches on them, found that their publicity was shrinking while their numbers were obviously zooming.
    Krakatoa blew up on July 18th. It provided the first important transPacific TV-cast. Its effect on sunsets, on solar constant, on mean temperature, and on rainfall would not be felt until later in the year.
    The San Andreas fault, its stresses unrelieved since the Long Beach disaster of 1933, continued to build up imbalance—an unhealed wound running the full length of the West Coast.
    Pelee and Etna erupted. Mauna Loa was still quiet.
    Flying Saucers seemed to be landing daily in every state. Nobody had exhibited one on the ground—or had the Department of Defense sat on them? Breen was unsatisfied with the off-the-record reports he had been able to get; the alcoholic content of some of them had been high. But the sea serpent on Ventura Beach was real; he had seen it. The troglodyte in Tennessee he was not in a position to verify.
    Thirty-one domestic air crashes the last week in July… was it sabotage, or was it a sagging curve on a chart? And that neopolio epidemic that skipped from Seattle to New York? Time for a big epidemic? Breen’s chart said it was. But how about bacteriological warfare? Could a chart
know
that a Slav biochemist would perfect an efficient virus-and-vector at the right time?
    Nonsense!
    But the curves, if they meant anything at all, included “free will”; they averaged in all the individual “wills” of a statistical universe—and came out as a smooth function. Every morning, three million “free wills” flowed toward the center of the New York megapolis; every evening, they flowed out again—all by “free will” and on a smooth and predictable curve.
    Ask a lemming! Ask
all
the lemmings, dead and alive. Let them take a vote on it!
    B reen tossed his notebook aside and phoned Meade. “Is this my favorite statistic?”
    “Potty! I was thinking about you.”
    “Naturally. This is your night off.”
    “Yes, but another reason, too. Potiphar, have you ever taken a look at the Great Pyramid?”
    “I haven’t even been to Niagara Falls. I’m looking for a rich woman, so I can travel.”
    “I’ll let you know when I get my first million, but—”
    “That’s the first time you’ve proposed to me this week.”
    “Shut up. Have you ever looked into the prophecies they found inside the pyramid?”
    “Look, Meade, that’s in the same class with astrology—strictly for the squirrels. Grow up.”
    “Yes, of course. But, Potty, I thought you were interested in anything odd. This is odd.”
    “Oh. Sorry. If