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road, assuring himself with a smug satisfaction that it was his ability to be casual and at ease with what he did, his characteristic of being visible but at the same time so ordinary as to be virtually unseen, that had made him so successful in the activities for which the unjust system really wanted to bring him in.
    Thinking of these now as he trotted along, the sounds of Pomeroy Station at first faint then louder as he approached the plant again, he congratulated himself that he had never once failed to achieve his objective in the permanent war that he and a small handful of companions still waged against their country.
    He had disappeared occasionally, without explanation to Janet or anyone. During the course of his absences four banks were robbed, seventeen people died in an airport bombing in Illinois, twenty-five more in the sinking of a ferry near Seattle, sixteen in a children’s parade in California. Travel was no problem, easy targets in a still-innocent, open society, were everywhere. He had by now become a very skillful expert in demolition. Along with buildings and people, he was still hoping to demolish the society. He was part of the growing mood of fear and uncertainty that fastened increasingly upon his countrymen, and proud of it.
    The only thing that annoyed him considerably, he reflected as he swung down again past Pomeroy Station, gave its workers and guards a parting wave and jogged on by, was the fact that his type of protest now was not unique: much of its calculated impact was lost in the general tide of wanton crime. Violence was satisfying to those who felt they were doing it in some great social cause whose rationale only they were privileged to understand; but when robberies, rapes, molestations and wanton casual killings in public streets and private neighborhoods were becoming so prevalent, the statement seemed to be disregarded—quite disrespectfully, he felt—in the general public fear and agitation.
    Everybody was getting into the act nowadays: killing for killing’s sake was becoming an American habit. He wondered wryly sometimes whether it was worth making a personal effort to bring the society down. It was being consumed quite adequately, many of his countrymen felt and he sometimes agreed, from within.
    Yet there must still be room for someone to make the point he wished to make—whatever it was. His alienation from society had been so conventional in terms of the Sixties and early Seventies, so predictable in all its stages from the student protests to the breaking with his family, to his disappearance, to the underground conspiracies, to the robberies and bombings, all in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number, that he had to continue to play out the charade now and never yield to uncertainty. Otherwise his whole life’s meaning would be destroyed. He could not have endured this. He just had to go on, destructive and essentially mindless for all his intelligence and cleverness, repeating the past because there was no way for him, now, to find the future.
    Of course he could not admit this. He was the future. He had a purpose, he had a goal— he destroyed society in order to save it— he knew the secret. He felt a complete contempt for the animalistic committers of animalistic murders who now befouled the land, the primitives who roamed the streets and slaughtered on a second’s sick impulse. He was infinitely better than they. He was Earle Holgren, guardian of a Cause. And after he had defended it at Pomeroy Station, there would no longer be doubt of it.
    The target he had chosen this time was an obvious one, given his lifelong familiarity with the area and the fact that even now, after years of agitation, security at the nation’s atomic energy plants was still as lax and casual as ever.
    He jogged on down the mountainside for another three miles until he came to the outskirts of the little village of Pomeroy Station, turned off the paved road onto a dirt