thing in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was
given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long senior-
ity in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmenand somebody
stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those
years.
He had cocked his head as though listening for something,
but evidently nothing came. “I don’t know,” he said.
That’s me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains.
But what am I listening for?
The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the
airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There
was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along
the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night,
faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the
Neversink valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on
behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after
McDonough’s car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had
raised.
He swung the car to a stop beside the airport fence and
killed the lights; the other car followed. In the renewed black-
ness the faint traces of dawn on the hills were wiped out, as
though the whole universe had been set back an hour. Then
the yellow eye of a flashlight opened in the window of the
other car and stared into his face.
He opened the door. “Martinson?” he said tentatively.
“Right here,” the adjutant’s voice said. The flashlight’s
oval spoor swung to the ground. “Anybody else with you?”
“No. You?”
“No. Go ahead and get your equipment out. Ill open up
the shack.”
The oval spot of light bobbed across the parking area and