Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down.

Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won't make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad. A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present.

Giving me a a new idea is like handing a cretin a gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang bang.

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.