Page 28 (2/2)

The roo sheath fro Mr Hasseltine&039;s Jake Lesher had draped his fra for hirand piano, which was topped by flat wine glasses and two chane bottles

The room was lit by twenty-three candles - all Sally had been able to find - and two flashlights Dark drapes hid the s and even the stalled elevator, and especially the French doors to the patio

Silence was seeping in through the dark drapes, freezing the candle fla on their throats and hearts But then Jake&039;s fingers came down on the keyboard and drove the silence back with the rippling burst of an introduction Sally stood up, weaving a little, and sang loudly and quite clearly:

Oh, I a Our love&039;s not just big as the ocean free, As Mount Ararat or a beanstalk tree - You found

As Jake played the vamp with his left hand, he reached over and handed Sally a sheet of paper

"Try the second stanza," he said

She scanned it owlishly "Gee, it&039;s got so inkblots?"

"I found what you call crazy words in a fancy &039;list of outstanding celestial objects,&039; in one of your intellectual boy friend&039;s big books We got to keep up the astronoo with the new planet"

"Planet-shplanet If it weren&039;t for Hugo, you&039;d be in the drink I wonder where Hugo is now? Okay, Jake, play it" And she sang, with the sheet to her nose:

Oh, I a Our love is notas the sun, Orion or Messier-31 - You launched

Jake beaot us a hit, baby! A real blazer!"

"That&039;s very good," Sally told hilass, "Because the chances are we&039;ll be putting it on in a very damp theater"

Richard Hillary felt a weird exhilaration as he tra west a distance south of Islip Stranded on the rass within his view of the reen lobster feebly crawling across a long sodden twist of black cloth thatsouth, he could see souish the brown tide-mark halfway up them He held his breath, his hands moved upward, and his next step was alination he frantically swah the waters of the North or Irish Sea that had been here soo

He turned his leap back to a step with a snickering laugh,his exhilaration Sometimes, of course, the weirdness of the contrasts constantly presented by the stranded flotsaot a bit too much, especially when they involved sodden hus Here his rule, and apparently that of the people tra with him, was, "If they don&039;t stir, look away from them quickly" He&039;d had to invoke that rule several times in the past mile Thus far, none of the spraet forot a lift almost all the way froe of the Chiltern Hills He had set out at night, i the flooded east behind him, and had been picked up by a couple in a Bentley, cohts They&039;d been nervously intent on picking up their son at Oxford They hadn&039;t seen much of the flood and were inclined to iven hiood ot slow, and when they had finally driven slippingly down after dawn onto the sodden Oxford plain into the midst of a muddy traffic tie-up, Richard had thanked the one, and he couldn&039;t bear the stunned, hurt, planless expressions on their faces

Onequickly a a pack of fellow marchers, beside another double file of spattered cars slowly e hardly two feet above a foa flood He wondered how salt the water was, but didn&039;t stop to taste

He wondered, too, whether last night&039;s flooding here had come up from the Thames Estuary, or a hundredover the height of land between Daventry and Bicester, or even striking through gaps in the Cotswolds froe of thirty feet But such speculation wasn&039;t bringing hi hot on his back

There was a low, heavy dru, and the crowd around him pressed closer to the road as a s fifty yards away The pilot, a young wo out and ran to the one live figure that hadn&039;t run away fro in the ed her to her feet, and hurriedly led her to the &039;copter and put her aboard Then, an to come from the crowd, she quickly climbed aboard herself and took off

Richard shook his head self-angrily and strode on Watching such things ot hih, he had one forh tide, harbor upon the it, cross the Severn plain by way of Tewkesbury to the Malvern Hills during the next low, and finally -stone process to the Black Mountains of Wales, which should be proof against the highest tides thatexhilaration returned a bit

Of course it ht be wisest to return to the Chilterns or seek the hts just east of Islip, but he told hiht to leave roo west, so anywhere, even on a safe-see That was intolerable - oneAnd one feels loyalty toward a course of action one has just hammered out

He finally told his Cotswolds-Malvern Hills-Black Mountains plan to two older men beside whom he walked for a space The first said it was utterly is; the second said it would save half of England and should be communicated at once to responsible authorities (thishelicopter)

Richard becausted with both of the therily with each other Suddenly all his exhilaration was gone, and he felt that both his plan and his reasonings were the purest rationalizations for an urge to rush west that had no s across Scandinavia to the Atlantic and death Indeed, he asked hihtn&039;t shock and disorientation, in himself and all those around hiht-layers and laid bare some primeval brain-node that responded only to the sas hear?

He continued to hurry, however,for an e vehicles After all, le or no, his silly plan was all he had, and he had just reent objection to it ood twenty-fivetide flooded up the Bristol Channel, up the Severn, bringing wrecked ships and shredded hayricks, and buoys burst fro wires below, and torn houses, and the dead, flooding higher than last night, Dai Davies returned with it, past Gla like T S Eliot&039;s drowned Phoenician sailor, a fond Welshman poetic to the end, forty feet down