"Johnny, what are you doing up here all alone in the dark? We've been looking everywhere for you! You didn't touch your supper. What's the matter, darling? What's wrong?"

"I wasn't hungry!" he said.

"And last night you didn't sleep! You tossed and twisted—Oh, Johnny!"

The woman fell to her knees beside her son and drew him into her arms. She ran her fingers through his hair.

"You're not well, Johnny!"

"Go away!"

Johnny wriggled out of his mother's embrace and ran to the window. He stood looking up at the pale stars, his lips quivering.

"Why don't they come?" he said in choked tones. Tears welled in his eyes, ran down his cheeks. "I can't stand living here any longer! They must come! They must!"

Downstairs in the library Johnny's father knocked the dottle from his pipe and walked to the window. It was a clear, star speckled night, and the dew-drenched grass seemed to breathe an air of freshness into the room.

Stephen Ambler's mind went back across the years.

He saw again the terrible, mushrooming shape of flame, so bright that, when he shut his eyes, it stabbed through his eyelids into his brain.

Shutting his eyes high above Bikini Atoll, hearing only the drone of his own plane, he had truly believed that the little primitive minds of men had wrought a miracle.

But no miracle could compare with the one that he had wrought one year later—the bright, incredible miracle of Johnny!

His memory grew sharper. In his mind's gaze he was walking with Johnny along a shining beach, the curving pink shells of the sea at his feet.

Johnny was staring at the white surf curving back. Johnny was in the autumn of his sixth year, his clear, childish eyes bright with excitement. Johnny stood staring at the surf and the wheeling gulls, and a horse-shoe crab half buried in the sand. Johnny kept tugging and pointing.

"The waves are tired, Daddy! The waves are falling back and dying! They don't want to come in!"

"Johnny, whatever gave you such an idea? The sea is restless and 

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