billboards, fading motels, battered, rusting cars, long, immobile freight trains—the scrap from a million dreams. Once they saw a big yellow tomcat prowling the edge of the highway like a lion; he snarled at them as they passed.

"It's awful," said the Earth Mother. "Nothing but birds and cats and trees."

"On the contrary, I think it fitting and just. Give the animals a chance, I say. Man had his chance and he botched it. In ten years the trees will obliterate this man-made ugliness and the land will be clean again."

"So who cares, if there's nobody to see it?"

"Somebody will see it. We and our children. The new race of man, guardians of Phoenix."

"Ain't this new race going to have lights, and towns, and movies, and dancing?"

"Not the kind of music and movies you keep talking about. We'll have no clods sponging up drivel from television sets."

"Yeah? Well, it sounds pretty square to me. I don't know if I want to be the mother of a bunch of squares like that."

Markel groaned, slapping his forehead with his left hand. "Gad! Why do I endure your stupidity day after day? Listen, the world you knew is dead, irrevocably dead. The new world is going to be completely, utterly different from it. Can't you grasp that?"

"You think that's going to be great, don't you? So what'll be so great and different about this new race you keep yakking about?"

"For one thing, they will not drop bombs on each other."

"Anybody that square won't know how to make bombs, or nothing else," she answered, turning on the radio.

That, Markel decided, was the most annoying of her habits, even more so than her constant preening in her hand mirror, or her nasal, off-key singing of popular songs, or her ungrammatical speech. He spent a lot of time trying to correct her grammar but it was a frustrating job. He was able to resign himself to her only by concentrating on his dream. In that he was constant.

They were in the foothills of mountains when the first autumn rain fell. Parking at the side of the road, Markel put up the convertible's top and they sat watching the rain. "It's kind of romantic, ain't it?" the Earth Mother said. "I always liked the rain." The thin rain 

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