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risk giving the old fellow a demonstration. He was compelled to stand silent, his thumbs hooked over his cartridge belt, while old Hickman strolled—or more accurately, floated —up the walk and disappeared around the corner.
    Except for two attempts by telephone, once to the Senator’s office and later to his home, the group made no further effort until that afternoon, when Hickman sent a telegram asking Senator Sunraider to phone him at a T Street hotel. A message which, thanks again to the secretary, the Senator did not see. Following this attempt there was silence.
    During the late afternoon the group of closed-mouthed old folk were seen praying quietly within the Lincoln Memorial. An amateur photographer, a high-school boy from the Bronx, was there at the time and it was his chance photograph of the group, standing facing the great sculpture with bowed heads beneath old Hickman’s outspread arms, that was flashed over the wires following the shooting. Asked why he had photographed that particular group, the boy replied that he had seen them as a “good composition.… I thought their faces would make a good scale of grays between the whiteness of the marble and the blackness of the shadows.” And for the rest of the day the group appears to have faded into those same peaceful shadows, to remain there until the next morning—when they materialized shortly before chaos erupted.

CHAPTER 2

     … Suddenly, through the sonorous lilt and tear of his projecting voice, the Senator was distracted. As he grasped the dimly lit lectern and concentrated on the faces of colleagues seated below him behind circular, history-stained desks, his eyes had been attracted by a turbulence centering around the rich emblazonry of the Great Seal. High across the chamber and affixed midpoint in the curving sweep of the distant visitors’ gallery, the national coat-of-arms had ripped from its moorings and was hurtling down toward him with the transparent insubstantiality of a cinematic image that had somehow gone out of control.
    Increasing alarmingly in size while maintaining the martial posture of tradition, the heraldic eagle with which the Great Seal was charged seemed to fly free of its base. Zooming forward, it flared luminously as it halted, oscillating a few arms’ lengths before the Senator’s confounded head. There, pulsating with hallucinatory vividness, the rampant eagle aroused swift olfactory memories ofdried blood and dusty feathers, and stirred within him fragmentary images of warfare tinged with heroism and betrayal.…
    Stepping instinctively backwards and fighting down an impulse to duck, the Senator managed by benefit of long practice to continue the smoothly resonant flow of his address, but before what appeared to be an insidious practical joke contrived to test his equanimity, he felt a cascading weakening of muscular control. For now, armed of beak and claw, the barred inescutcheon shielding its breast and the golden ribbon bearing the mystic motto of national purpose violently aflutter, the emblematic bird quivered above him on widely erected wings—while the symbolic constellation of thirteen cloud-encircled stars whirled furiously against a spot of intense blue which flashed like cold lightning above its snow-white head.
    Shutting his eyes in a desperate effort to exorcise the vision, the Senator projected his voice with increased vigor and was aware of distorting the shape of what he had conceived as a perfect rhetorical period. But when he looked again the eagle was not only still there, but become more alarming. For at first, clutching in its talons the ambiguous arms of olive branch and sheaf of arrows, the eagle’s exposed eye had looked in profile toward the traditional right, but now it shuddered with mysterious purpose, turning its head with sinister smoothness leftward—until with a barely perceptible flick of feathers two sphinxlike eyes bore in upon the Senator with piercing frontal gaze. For a