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Having recently brushed against death, she was more aware than usual of her mortality Life was finite In the business and the busyness of daily life, that truth was often forgotten

Now she was unable to escape thinking about it, and she wondered if she was playing too loose with life, wasting tooShe was a happy woman; it was damned hard for a Lockland to be unhappy, predisposed as they were to good hu what she truly wanted If she reet it

What she wanted was a fa That cao, where she had idolized her big sister, Janice, and had basked in the love of her mother and father The tremendous amount of happiness and security she’d known in her youth hat allowed her to deal with the misery, despair, and terror that she so on one of her more ambitious documentaries The first two decades of her life had been so full of joy, they balanced anything that followed

The elevator had arrived on the second floor, and noith a soft thuued that Moose, so accusto the elevator for and with his h the stairs would have been quicker Dogs, too, could be creatures of habit

They’d had dogs at hoolden retriever named Barney, then an Irish Setter named Mickey Finn…

Janice had o, when Tessa was eighteen, and thereafter entropy, the blind force of dissolution, had pulled apart that cozy life in San Diego Tessa’s dad died three years later, and soon after his funeral Tessa hit the road to make her industrials and docuh she had reular basis, that golden tione now And Marion wouldn’t live forever, not even if she actually gave up skydiving

More than anything, Tessa wanted to re-create that home life with a husband of her own and children She had been married, at twenty-three, to a man anted kids more than he wanted her, and when they had learned that she could never have children, he had left Adoption wasn’t enough for hiically his Fourteenday to divorce She had been badly hurt

Thereafter she had thrown herself into her ith a passion she’d not shown previously She was insightful enough to know that through her art she was trying to reach out to all the world as if it were one big extended fa down complex stories and issues to thirty, sixty, or ninetyto pull the world in, reduce it to essences, to the size of one family

But, lying awake in Harry Talbot’s spare bedroo to be fully satisfied if she didn’t radically shake up her life andshe so much wanted It was impossible to be a person of depth if you lacked a love for hueneralized love could swiftly becoless if you didn’t have a particular family close to you; for in your fas in specific people that justified, by extension, a broader love of fellow men and women She was a stickler for specificity in her art, but she lacked it in her e dust and the faint odor ofbeen lying as unused as that bedrooe froin to open herself to that part of life she had so purposefully sealed off? Just then she feltthat she would never have children of her own And at thea way to re where the Boogeymen came from and what they were

A brush with death could stir up peculiar thoughts

In a while her weariness overcaain Just as she dropped off, she realized that Moosein the house Perhaps he had been trying to alert her But surely he would have been er

Then she slept

2

From Peyser’s, Shaddack returned to his ultramodern house on the north point of the cove, but he didn’t stay long He made three ham sandwiches, wrapped them, and put them in a cooler with several cans of Coke He put the cooler in the van along with a couple of blankets and a pillow Froun cabinet in his study he fetched a Se seun, and plenty of ammunition for both Thus equipped, he set out in the stor areas, intending to keep on thethe situation by computer until the first phase of Moonhaas concluded at ht, in less than nineteen hours

Watkins’s threat unnerved hi ressed and, true to his proht, when the last conversions were performed, Shaddack would have consolidated his power Then he could deal with the cop

Watkins would be seized and shackled before he transformed Then Shaddack could strap hiy to find an explanation for this plague of regression

He did not accept Watkins’s explanation They weren’t regressing to escape life as New People To accept that theory, he would have to adated disaster, that the Change was not a boon to uided but cala

As odlike power He was unwilling to relinquish it

The rainswept, pre-dawn streets were deserted except for cars--some police cruisers, some not--in which pairs ofeither Booker, Tessa Lockland the Foster girl, or regressives on the prowl Though they could not see through his van’s heavily sed

Shaddack recognizedthe contingent of one hundred that he had put on loan to the police departo Beyond the rain-washed windshields, their pale faces floated like disembodied spheres in the dark interiors of their cars, so expressionless that theythe town on foot but were circu to the deeper shadows and alleyways He saw none of them

Shaddack also passed two conversion teams as they went quietly and briskly from one house to another Each time a conversion was completed, the team keyed in that data on one of their car VDTs so the central systeress

When he paused at an intersection and used his own VDT to call the current roster onto the screen, he saw that only five people reht to-six-o’clock batch of conversions They were slightly ahead of schedule

Hard rain slanted in frohts Trees shook as if in fear And Shaddack kept on the e bird of prey that preferred to hunt on stor, they had hunted and killed, bitten and torn, clawed and bitten, hunted and killed and eaten the prey, drunk blood, blood, war the fire in their flesh, cooling the fire with food Blood