My waiting-room and office were already dusty, I saw as I wandered through it, looking the place over; a fine film of dust over every glass and wood surface. My nurse, I knew, wouldn't have been near the place since I'd been here last, and now it smelled unused and closed-in, and was dark, every venetian blind closed tight. It was quiet and dead, and no longer friendly, as though I'd been away too long and it weren't really mine any more. The place looked untouched, and I didn't bother trying to see if anyone had been here, searching through it for some reason. Right now, I just couldn't care.

There's a long, wide davenport in the waiting-room, and I put Becky on it, her shoes off. I got a couple sheets, and the pillow from the examining-table, and tucked her in carefully. She lay watching me, not saying anything, and when our eyes met, she smiled wanly, in thanks. Crouching beside her, I took her face in my hands, and kissed her, but it was a gesture of comfort, like kissing a child, and there was no excitement or sex in it; she was worn out, at the end of her rope. I passed my hand slowly over her forehead, stroking it. "Sleep," I said. "Get some rest." I smiled and winked at her, looking, I hoped, calm and confident, as though I knew what I was doing, and was going to do.

My shoes off, so no one passing by in the hall outside could hear me, I untied the leather pad from my examining-table, took it out to the waiting-room to the row of windows overlooking Main Street, and laid it on the floor paralleling the windows. Then I unbuttoned my coat, loosened my tie, dropped cigarettes and matches to the floor beside the pad, and taking an ash tray from a magazine table, I sat down. My back against the side wall, I slowly tilted one slat of the Venetian blind just enough to peer down at Main Street, and now I felt better. Enclosed in these dark, silent rooms I'd felt blind and helpless, but now looking down on the street below, watching the activity on it, I felt more in control of things.

The scene I saw through that quarter-inch slit was ordinary enough at first glance; drive along the main street of any of a hundred thousand American small towns, and you'll be seeing what I did. There were parked cars on an asphalt street, sidewalks and parking meters, white-ruled parking spaces, and people walking in and out of J.C. Penney's, Lovelock's Pharmacy, the supermarket, and a dozen others. There was a little fog, no more than a mist, moving in from the Bay. Main Street jogs at the corner just past my windows, following the hills, and Hillyer Avenue, a wide through-street, curves into and joins Main at that corner. So the paved street area is more than usually wide there, and because of the jog in the street, the wide area of pavement is almost completely enclosed on three sides by stores; the nearest thing to a sort of town square we've got. They used to set up a band stand here, blocking off Hillyer Avenue, for street dances or carnivals.

I lay there smoking and watching, changing position now and then, occasionally lying on my side, propped on an elbow, my eyes just over the window sill; once I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I've long since learned that thinking is mostly an unconscious process; that it's usually best not to force it, particularly when the problem itself is vague in your mind, and you don't really know what sort of answer you're hunting for. So I rested – tired, but not sleepy – watching the street, waiting for something to happen inside my mind.

There's a real fascination about monotony in motion: the steady flicker of a fire, an endless series of waves slowly crashing on a beach, the unvarying movement of a piece of machinery. And I stared down at the street for minute after minute, watching the shifting patterns that over and over almost, but never quite, repeated themselves: women walking into the supermarket, and women coming out, arms around brown-paper sacks or cartons, clutching at purses or children, or both; cars backing out of the angled parking spaces, others slipping into the white-ruled slots; a mailman moving into and out of one store after another; an old man plodding along; three young boys horsing around.

It all looked so ordinary: there were red-and-white paper signs pasted on the windows of the supermarket: advertising Niblets, round steak at 96 cents a pound, bananas, and laundry soap. Vasey's hardware store, as always, had one window filled with kitchen equipment: pots, pans, electric mixers, irons; and in the other window, power tools. The dime-store windows were loaded to the ceiling with candy kisses, model airplanes, paper cut-out dolls, and staring at the red-and-gold front, I could almost smell that dime-store fragrance. Stretching across the street, near the Sequoia theatre, hung a rather faded banner, red with white letters; Santa Mira Bargain Jubilee, it read, an annual sale of the merchants. This year, though, it looked as though they hadn't bothered painting a new banner.

Off across the one-story roof of Elman's restaurant, I saw, two blocks away, on Vallejo Street, the Greyhound bus from Marin City pull in. Only three people got off – a man and a woman together, and a man with a brown paper parcel he carried by the string. There was no one waiting to get on the bus, and after a minute or so it pulled out of the blue-and-white-painted depot into Vallejo Street toward highway 101, and for some reason it suddenly occurred to me – I knew the bus schedules as did most everyone in town – that there wouldn't be another bus entering or leaving town for the next fifty-one minutes, and that things had changed on the street below me.

It isn't easy to say just how they had changed. The fog was heavier, touching the higher roof tops now, thick and grey, but that was normal, that wasn't the change. There were more people on the street, but… this was the change: they weren't quite acting like a normal Saturday afternoon-shoppers crowd. Some were still moving in and out of stores, but quite a few of them were just sitting in their cars; some with a door open, feet hooked on the side, talking to the people in the next car; others reading newspapers, or fiddling with car radios, just killing time. I recognized a great many of the faces: Len Pearlman, the optometrist, Jim Clark, and his wife, Shirley, and their kids, and so on.

At this moment, though, Main Street of Santa Mira, California, could still have seemed like an ordinary, though rather shabby shopping street on an ordinary Saturday – it's what a stranger would have thought, driving through town. But looking down at it now, I knew, or at least sensed, that there was more to it than that. There was an atmosphere of… something about to happen, a quiet waiting for something expected. It was – I tried to put it into words, sitting there watching through the slit in the blind – like people slowly gathering for a parade. But that wasn't quite it, either. Possibly it was more like a group of soldiers leisurely assembling for some routine formation; some of them talking, smiling, or laughing with others; some reading quietly; others just sitting or standing off by themselves, waiting. I guess the atmosphere down on that street was simply – expectation without any special excitement about it.

Then Bill Bittner, a local contractor, a stout middle-aged man in his fifties strolling along the sidewalk, glancing at store windows, casually pulled a button out of his pocket. It was a plastic or metal button, I could see, with printing on it. He pinned it to his coat lapel, and now I saw that it was about the size of a silver dollar, and I recognized the design and knew what the printing said. It said Santa Mira Bargain Jubilee; the local merchants all wore them each year, and passed them out to those customers who were willing to wear them. Only – all those I'd seen before had been red with white printing. Bill Bittner's button was yellow printed on navy blue.