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on his way in. The newcomer was Arlo Field. He crushed himself against the doorjamb to let them go by.
    Sarah Bailey hugged him and dragged him inside. “Oh, Arlo, here you are. Saint George in person, come to save us from the dragon.”
    Mary and Homer Kelly followed the children out, while Sarah tucked one arm into Saint George’s and the other into Tom Cobb’s and hurried them into Sanders Theatre, trailed by Dr. Box.
    Morgan Bailey followed Dr. Box, asking himself, Who is the dragon? , answering grimly, I am. I am the dragon .

CHAPTER 6
    Here come I, St George, I’ve many hazards run ,
    And fought in every land that lies beneath the sun .
    I am a famous champion ,
    Likewise a worthy knight ,
    And from Britain did I spring
    And will uphold her might .
    Traditional British Mummers’ Play
    A rlo’s part of the rehearsal was over. He had put on the tunic of the Red Cross Knight, he had killed the comic dragon and been killed in turn by the swords of the Morris dancers. Then he had been brought back to life by the funny Doctor, and Sarah Bailey had hugged him again, and told him to come back tomorrow.
    He was released. Opening the north door of the memorial corridor, he stepped out into the cold night air, looked up to see what the universe was doing, and set off for his office in the Science Center. As an assistant professor in the astronomy department, Arlo had the use of the laboratory on the eighth floor. That was his professional address—Room 804, Science Center, Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. His home address was in Cambridge too—Apartment B, 329 Huron Avenue.
    It amused him sometimes to remember the way he had written his address as a twelve-year-old boy in Belmont, seventeen years ago—
    Arlo Thomas Field
    47 Orchard Street
    Town of Belmont
    County of Middlesex
    Commonwealth of Massachusetts
    New England
    Atlantic Seaboard
    United States of America
    Continent of North America
    Western Hemisphere
    The Earth
    The Solar System
    The Milky Way Galaxy
    The Universe
    Some of his friends, clever snotty little kids like himself, had written their addresses like that too. Later on, Arlo had run across the same thing in a play by Thornton Wilder, the cosmic address of one of the protagonists, beginning with Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, and ending with
    The Mind of God
    At twelve, Arlo had been a strict atheist, and he had left out the mind of God. Now, as an adult, he didn’t exactly believe in a Christian God, but he wasn’t an atheist either. How could an astronomer be an atheist? How could he look at his photographs of solar flares in the light of the alpha line of hydrogen—immense magnetic explosions one hundred thousand kilometers across—or see X-ray images of coronal holes blotching the face of the sun, how could he examine the faint spectra of star systems on the remote edges of the visible universe—and not be some kind of mystics?
    Most of the time Arlo didn’t bother to think about it. He lived and walked and breathed in a giant globe of stars and galaxies and dark matter and interstellar dust, he was penetrated by neutrinos from the sun’s core and cosmic rays from somewhere in deep space. It was the ground of his being.
    Now, as he crossed the mall over Cambridge Street under a sky emptied of stars by the glare of the city, Arlo’s upward gaze was rewarded by nothing but the starboard lights of a plane heading for Logan. The Science Center was a checkered pyramid of light. Beyond its glassy geometry the other buildings along Oxford Street were dark shapes, hard and crystalline, as if they might shatter in the cold. Arlo knew they housed a hundred branches of scientific study—in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, for example, there was an exhibit of blown-glass flowers and a spider collection and a stuffed pangolin with round glass eyes—but now the museum was only a chunk of frozen brick and stone.
    The night was