For Judy? Yes, without a second thought. If you don't know what really matters to you, why bother living?

Tony Sudakis was up on the roof of his office. He saw Michael and me, waved, and disappeared. A minute later, he came pounding down the path toward us. He had a hard hat on his head, his cravat was loosened and his collar open. He was a foreman again, not an administrator, and looked as if he loved it.

"Glad you got here," he said. "Dave, on the phone you sounded like you know more about this shit than maybe anybody. You want to brief Yolanda there?" He pointed up ahead to one of the hazmat team people.

Up till then, I hadn't noticed the boss of the team was a woman. She was black, slim, maybe my age - not half bad, though she looked both too smart and too tough to be model pretty.

I told her what I knew about the Chumash Powers, and what I'd heard from Professor Blank not an hour earlier.

When I was through, she crossed herself. "What are we supposed to do, then?" she said. This is worse than we're really set up to face. Maybe a military team would be a better bet to resist" I doubt that," Michael put in. "Military teams are configured against specific security threats - Persian, Aztecian, Ukrainian. But the Chumash, till this moment, have never posed a danger to the Confederation. Warrior priests and the like will not be able to help us."

Yolanda scowled; you could tell she was the kind of person who wanted to get right in there and do things, then worry about consequences later. "What do the two of you recommend, then?" she demanded.

Do as weU as you can, was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. If the Chumash Powers remanifested themselves with the burst of thaumaturgic energy Professor Blank had feared, there was nothing else to do, and even that wouldn't help. But you always have to play the game as if you think you're going to win - which, when you get down to it, is also part of dying well.

So I said, "Delay. Every second we keep that Nothing encysted buys us time to evacuate the neighborhood. It may not help, but then again, it may. Tony, I presume you have procedures in place for an emergency evacuation?"

"Sure," he said.

"You'd better implement them, then. EPA orders, if you like."

"You got it, boss." He went back to his office on the dead run. If his procedures were like most people's, he'd have a bunch of spells completed but for the last word or pass or whatever, so he could but them into effect one after another, bang,bang, bang.

Sure enough, maybe thirty seconds later we heard a dreadful cacophony from the cacodemons mounted at each comer of the containment fence. It reminded me, fittingly enough, of the air raid warnings that would help mark the start of the Third Sorcerous War.

After they'd screeched for a while, the cacodemons started yelling, "Evacuate the area. Evacuate the area. Contamination may escape from the Devonshire containment site. Evacuate the area." Then they shouted what I think was the same thing, only in Spainish.

They were loud enough to be heard for miles. That was why they were there, but they made talk inside the containment area just about impossible for anybody who wasn't an accomplished lip-reader. I was sure my ears would ring for the next couple of days - assuming I was still around in a couple of days.

Michael stuck his head next to mine, bawled in my ear,

"Delay is all very well, but to the end futile. Sooner or later - probably sooner - the Chumash Powers will succeed in breaking free of their encystment and returning to This Side, with the accompanying energy release you have described."

He turned his head so I could y

ell into his ear. It was my turn, after all. Yell I did: "I know, but we'll get some people away, so when the Great Eagle and the Lizard and rest get out, they won't do the damage they want to."

I turned my head. Michael shouted. "Possibly not. The damage they do inflict, however, will be more than adequate to satisfy anyone not-" I'm sure he kept talking after that, but I stopped hearing him. I was running for Tony Sudalds' office as fast as my legs would cany me.

He was coming out as I dashed in. He might as well have been Phyuis Kaminsky - I almost bowled him over. "Phone,"

I said, panting. Inside the blockhouse, the noise from the cacodemons was just too loud, not deafening.

"Sure, go ahead." He followed me back up the hall. I made my call, talked for maybe a minute and a half, hung up. When I was done, Tony stared at me, big-eyed. "You drink that'll work?" he asked, unwontecally quiet.

"Let me put it this way," I answered. "If it doesn't, do you think these concrete blocks are going to save us?" He shook his head. I went on, "I don't, either. The hazmat mages out there will delay all they can, but how long is that. Sooner or later, probably sooner"-I realized I was echoing Michael - "the Chumash Powers wttl break out. And when they do-"

"Bend over and loss your bum goodbye. Yeah," Sudakis said. "How much time do you drink they need to buy?"

"I just don't know," I answered. "Burbank isn't far, but I don't know how much prep they have to do first. All we can do now is wait and hope."

We walked back out into the unbelievable din together. I bawled into Michael's ear; Tony yelled into Yolanda's (no question he got the better half of that deal). Michael shouted back at me, "Not the best chance, but I see none better."

Then he walked over to scream, presumably, the same dring at Tony.

"I wish I had your connections," Yolanda shouted at me.

"I wish I didn't have them," I answered, "because that would mean dris miserable case never happened."

She nodded grimly. We all stared toward the east, like the Kings of Orient with somebody extra thrown in for luck.

Trouble was, all the luck in this case had been bad.

I tfiought about poor little Jesus Cordero. Seeing if the Slow Jinn Fizz jinnetic engineering techniques could make him a soul hadn't seemed urgent. He was just a baby, after all; years and years would go by before he had to worry about forever vanishing from the scheme of things. That's what I'd thought. But if the Chumash Powers burst forth, he'd be gone for good. Not even limbo. Just gone.

Out in the dump, one of the hazmat mages crumpled like soggy parchment I couldn't tell whether the toxic spell residues had overcome him or whether he'd just broken under the burden of delaying the burst. Yolanda leaped off the warded path and dragged him back toward its very tenuous safety.

One he was back on the path, he pulled himself into fetal position and lay there shivering: sorcerous shock of some kind, sure enough. He was breathing, and he nodded his head when Yolanda shouted at him, so he wasn't critical.

Since he wasn't, the rest of us kept looking eastward. Either we'd be saved, in which case we could treat the hazmat mage later, or we wouldn't, in which case nothing we did for him now would matter anyway.

I preferred the first choice, but wouldn't have bet anything big on getting it.

Suddenly, Tony Sudakis' finger stabbed out. "Isn't that-?" He didn't go on, maybe for fear his words would induce it not to be.

"I don't think it is," I yelled - hard to sound bitter when you're yelling, but I managed. "More likely to be a big cargo carpet on me landing approach toward Burbank airport"

We all watched for another couple of seconds. Tony shook his head. "A carpet heading into Burbank would be getting smaller. This is getting bigger."

"So it is," Michael said. He forgot to yell, but I read his lips. When Michael forgets to do something he should, you know he's under strain. We all were. I didn't want to think he was right, just because that would have made getting my hopes dashed all the crueler.

But after another few seconds, there could be no doubt. The speck in the air we were watching swelled out of speckdom far faster than any carpet could have, and it didn't have a carpet's shape, either. I saw great wings beat majestically.