an do, they'll
have to believe him....

They put Walt in the car. They handled him as gently as they could.

"He's almost gone," the farmer said.

"Get in front with me. You need a hospital, too."

The farmer slipped in beside her.

Julia spun the car around and plunged down the road toward the
super-highway.

"Where's the nearest doctor?"

"Town eight miles down the road," the farmer said. He grimaced in pain.
He coughed, and blood flecked his lips. He wiped off the blood and
stared at it drying across the back of his hand. "I ... think I'm hurt
inside." There was barely controlled hysteria in his voice. He coughed
again and shuddered. "My wife, she wanted me ... to stay home this
morning...." He shut his eyes tightly. "I've got to patch the roof." He
opened his eyes and looked pleadingly at Julia. "_I've got to patch the
roof, don't you understand!_"

"I'm driving as fast as I can. Which way do I turn down there?"

"... turn right."

"We'll be to a doctor just as soon as I can get there."

She slowed down and turned onto the concrete slab of the super-highway.

Then she slammed the car to a full stop; she backed up out of the line
of traffic, back onto the cross road. She cut the motor.

* * * * *

Julia had felt the bridge in her mind snap shut. Instantly even the most
obscure brain compartment was open to her. Fatigue vanished. She was
alert; she was able to think with great clarity.

The lightning recovery of _herself_ forced a series of ever widening
implications to her attention; in a blinding flash of insight she was
(perhaps actually for the first time) aware of the degree to which she
could transform society.

Given time, she--she alone--like the magician Prospero in _The Tempest_
could create some paradise of cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces
and solemn temples and winding brooks and crisp channels and green lands
that need never (the Calibans being transmuted by power beyond the lust
for power) dissolve into air, thin air, leaving not a cloud behind.

If all the people were as she, the great globe of the world could become
an enchanted island: with wars and bloodshed and prejudice and
inhumanity forgotten.

Some such was her thought. It washed over her, the vision, and vanished
in the acute reality of the moment. Such a dream was athwart the
invasion plan of the aliens.

She was out of the car. She was opening the rear door. She stood at
Walt's h