his mind sluggishly. "Why? What's happened?"

"The bank's gone. Just--just gone!"

He blinked and shook his head again. "I--I don't think I heard you
right, Mrs. Schermerhorn."

"There's a jungle where the bank used to be. With tigers in it." She
laughed wildly for a moment, but the laughter dissolved into tears and
she reached for the bottle of smelling salts in the pocket of her robe.
"Most of them have been shot by this time, I think. The tigers. Think of
it, Mr. Elvin--tigers in San Benedicto!" She began to laugh again.

When Elvin joined Pop Schermerhorn and the twins in the station wagon,
Mrs. Schermerhorn followed him out of the house with a thermos of hot
coffee. As she put it in the car, she saw the rifles they were taking
with them. She began to weep again, clinging desperately to the side of
the car. Suddenly the twins knelt beside her, and threw their arms
around her neck.

"We're sorry, Mom," David whispered. "Terribly sorry."

"You've nothing to be sorry about," she replied. "It's not your fault."

"Better get back inside," Pop Schermerhorn told her. "Mind, keep the
doors locked. Things ain't safe no more around here."

As they drove into San Benedicto, Elvin was considerably puzzled by the
attitude of the twins. Normally talkative to the point of nausea, they
were now strangely quiet. And this was exactly the sort of thing that
should have inspired their most adolescent repartee.

The sun was rising as they stopped the station wagon among the clutter
of cars filling Main Street. Elvin stared in disbelief at the neat
square of tropical jungle rising cleanly in the heart of San Benedicto.
Not only the bank but a whole block of business houses was gone. This
could be written off neither as insanity nor hypnotism; it was a madness
existing in actual fact. Elvin gave up trying to discover any logic in
what was happening. Both reason and natural law seemed to have
abdicated.

The periphery of jungle was surrounded by armed men. At intervals they
shot at shadows lurking among the trees and, as the sun brightened, the
accuracy of their aim increased. They were not worrying about causes,
either; they were responding with excellent self-discipline to the
emergency of tigers roaming the streets of San Benedicto. Afterwards, at
their leisure, they could speculate on how the jungle had come to be
there.

There was only one fatality. A tiger sprang out of the jungle and mauled
a man who had pressed too clo