planet Earth. The final examination and departure will be held ten years from this date."

I stood at the window, my arm around Jane. We couldn't say anything for perhaps ten minutes.

"Well," I said to her finally. "Well, well."

"Well," she said. We were silent for a few more minutes. Then she said, "Well," again.

There was nothing else to say.

I looked out the window. Below me the city was sparkling with lights; the sun was coming up, and everything was deadly quiet. The only sound I could hear was the buzzing of an electric sign. It sounded like a broken alarm clock, or like a time bomb, perhaps.

"You'll have to go back to work," Jane said. She started to cry. "Although I suppose ten years is only a second in eternity. Only a second to Her."

"Less," I said. "A fraction of a second. Less."

"But not to us," Jane said.

It certainly should have ended there. Judgment day should have come, bringing with it whatever it brought. We were ready. All the worldly goods were disposed of, in New York and I suppose, in the rest of the world. But ten years was too long, too much a strain on goodness.

We should have been able to carry on. There was no reason why not. We could have gone back to our jobs. The farmers were still on the farms, the grocers and clerks were still around.

We could have done such a bang-up job of it. We could have pointed to that ten years with pride, and said, "You see! Our recorded history of thousands of years of avarice, cruelty and hate isn't the whole story. For ten years were good and clean and noble. For ten years we were brothers!"

Unfortunately, it wasn't that way.

The farmers didn't want to go back to their farms, and the grocers didn't want to return to their groceries. Oh, some did. Many did, for a while. But not for long. Everyone talked about high ideals, but it was just talk, just like before.

For six months Jane and I struggled along, not getting much to eat, frightened by the mobs that surged around New York. Finally, we decided to move out. We joined 

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