The house nestled among elms and post oaks one loop of the road down from the crest of the mountain. A paved driveway curved through a gap in the trees to his right. Through the gap he could see virtually the whole of the city from northeast to due south. There was the squared-off peak of the university bell tower, there were the capitol dome and high-rise buildings placed like playing pieces in some titan's board game among the patterns formed by rows of houses and cumuloid masses of trees. The amber glass face of one of the downtown structures looked molten, a blob of fire amid the earth colors. To the south was the unreal-looking blue-gray band of Town Lake. But no Jane.

He turned and peered into the shadows gathering among the trees on the left. Bracketing his mouth with his hands, he called, not loudly, "Jane?" There was no answer. He moved to the edge of the trees, where the ground sloped to the next terrace down, and caught a glimpse of something, someone, below. Jane. Damn it, Jane. He started to call her name again, then, for no reason that he could say, let his hands gall to his sides and sighed and entered the gloom.

The earth beneath the mat of ash-brittle leaves was soft and treacherous. As the grade steepened sharply, he found that he was not so much walking as propelling himself from bole to bole, stiff-arming each tree as he came to it, pausing at the end of each sliding, skidding advance to survey the prospects and carefully select his next stopping point. Halfway down the slope, he squatted to catch his breath and thought, Girl could break her fool neck, why would anybody want to come down this way?

Three fireflies turned in lazily intersecting half-orbits above his head. They tagged along, idly, incuriously, as he pushed off and away and on down, heels gouging up dark plugs of humus. Through the interstices of branches before and below him, he saw shifting jigsaw bits of a high plank fence, a house, a street lamp beyond the house. The trees thinned out as the grade began to level off, well short of the fence, discouraged, apparently, from growing right up to the barrier by a broad grass strip. He halted at the edge of the strip and looked down over the top of the fence into the house. The picture window of the living room was a pulsating rectangle of bluish light. Within, eerily illuminated, were several unmoving human shapes.

Jane sat on the grass some distance to his left. Her hands lay palms-up in her lap. Her lips moved slowly, and he heard, or thought that he heard, her muttering to herself. Oh Jesus.

It was easy, most of the time, to pretend that Jane was okay, easy to lose sight of her when quickly running down the list, yeah, well, a good job, fine home, Beth's a great little wife, and the twins, you ought to see Deb and Sheryl, eleven years old now, those two are gonna be knockouts in another couple of years. Life's satisfactions.

But Jane.

Every now and then, you had to take stock, and that meant being honest with yourself, and that meant accepting the painful truth along with the pleasant facts. And the painful truth was: Jane was ... well, not strange, but, yes, strange. Disturbing. Different. Probably not--

He shied away from the idea even as it occurred to him, then chided himself in annoyance. You had to be perfectly honest. She's probably not very popular with other kids her age. Never talks about what she's doing, how she's getting along. Not many dates. Never with the same boy. Not right. Not right at all. She's pretty, for Heaven's sake, maybe not a sensation like that girl on the television just now, but I haven't raised any dogs. She's smart, too, A's and B's straight down the line. Haven't raised any dummies, either. But. She stays by herself too much. Always has her nose in a book or something. Too quiet. Too withdrawn. Thinks too much for a seventeen-year-old girl.

Talks to herself.

He moved toward her, and when he was close, he said, "Hi, hon."

She started and half-turned. Her throat crimsoned. Beadlets of perspiration glittered on her upper lip. He noticed a thick paperbound book lying closed and cover-down in her lap.

"Whoops, sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to scare you."

She gave him a quick, nervous smile. "I just didn't hear you coming, Dad."

"I'm surprised. I really wasn't trying to sneak up on you." He gestured at the wooden slope. "The fact of the matter is, there were a couple of times when I thought I was going to come crashing down right on top of you."

She patted the ground at her side. He sat down. Through the fabric of his trousers, the grass felt hard and prickly. Summer had burned it to something like the color of bone.

"So," he said, "how are things out here in the wilderness?"

"I was just waiting for the sun to go down. Any thinking."

"About what?" A second too late, he added, "If it's any of my business."

"Oh. Nothing." She shrugged, struggled to repress a frown, moved her hands in a gesture of embarrassed surrender. "Abaddon." She glanced at him, then away. His blank expression must have registered, though, for she said, almost too quietly for him to hear, "The comet."

"What about it?"

She shrugged again. "Just a lot of stuff about it." She saw that that was not going to satisfy him and went on. "I was thinking how different the world must seem to it this time around. It only comes once every thousands of years. I was wondering if it'll even recognize the Earth any more. What if it decided it'd made a wrong turn back at Alpha Centauri or somewhere and this wasn't Earth at all. What if it didn't like what it found here, what it would do." She shrugged a third time. "Stuff like that."

He stared at her in bewilderment. All he could think of to say at first was, "Well," and then, after a long silence, "You going to camp out here for the night?"

"No, I just want to see the comet. This's the first night you're supposed to be able to see it with the naked eye."