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skyscraper isn't high enough for you—"
    The roller coaster's my skyscraper tonight," she told him. That's enough, I said!"
    She twisted away from him and ran off, past an eight-foot-tall gray Saturn-man who reared out of a wall, gripping a yard-long raygun and peppering her with sizzling blue light.
     
    Asa Holcomb, puffing a bit, surmounted the top of the little mesa west of Arizona's Superstition Mountains. Just at that moment the wall of his aorta tore a little, and blood began to seep into his chest There was no pain, but he felt a weakness and sensed a strangeness, and he quietly lay down on the flat rock, which still had a little heat in it from the day of sun.
    He was neither particularly startled nor very afraid. Either the weakness would pass, or it would not. He'd known this little climb to a good spot to watch the eclipse was a dangerous thing. After all, his mother had warned him against climbing by himself in the rocks, seventy years ago. Doubly dangerous, with an aorta paper-thin. But it was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.
    His eyes had been resting, a little wistfully, on the lights of Mesa, but now he lifted them. This was about the fiftieth time he had seen Luna shrouded, but tonight she seemed more beautiful in her bronze phase than ever before, more like the pomegranate Proserpine plucked in the Garden of the Dead. His weakness wasn't passing.

Chapter Four
    The convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and her cat softly jounced along the rutted trail, raw cliff again to the right, beach sand to the left, both now only a yard or so off. Away from the big highway, the night pressed in. The three wayfarers shared more fully the lonely obscurity of the eclipsed moon climbing the starry sky.
    Even Miaow sat up to peer ahead.
    "Among other things, this road probably leads to the back door of Vandenberg Two," Paul ruminated. "The beach gate, they call it. Of course I'm supposed to use the main gate, but in a pinch…" Then after a bit: "It's really funny how these saucer maniacs are always holding their meetings next door to missile bases or atomic installations.
    Hoping a little glamor will leak their way, I guess. Did you know that at one time the Space Force was really suspicious about it?"
    The headlights picked up an earth-fall blocking more than half the road. It was as high as the hood of the car, and recent, judging by the damp look of the granulated dirt.
    Paul let the car stop.
    "End of saucer expedition," he announced cheerfully.
    "But the others have gone on," Margo said, standing up again. "You can see where they've gone around the fall."
    "Okay," Paul said mock-doomfully. "But if we get stuck in the sand, you're going to have to hunt drift boards to put under the tires."
    The wheels spun twice, but the convertible had no real trouble getting traction. A little beyond, they came to a shallow pocket in the cliff, where the road expanded to thrice its width. A dozen cars had used the extra space to park side by side, their rear bumpers snug to the cliff. The first comers included a red sedan, a microbus and a white, open-back pickup truck.
    Beyond the last car was another green lantern and an elegantly lettered sign: PARK
    HERE, THEN FOLLOW THE GREEN LIGHTS.
    "Just like the Times Square subway station," Margo exclaimed delightedly. "I'll bet there are New Yorkers in this crowd."
    "Newly arrived," Paul agreed, eyeing the cliff distrustfully as he parked beside the last car. "They haven't had time to find out about California slides."
    Margo jumped out carrying Miaow. Paul followed, handing her her jacket.
    "I don't need it," she told him. He folded it over his arm without comment.
    The third green lantern was out on the beach, by a stand of tall sea-grass. The beach was very level. They could at last hear the hiss of tiny breakers—little more than wavelets, from the sound. Miaow mewed anxiously. Margo talked to her softly.
    Just beyond