flared hot in Burma by mid-1960. Indo-China was a Red
Fortress and with Tibet hopelessly behind the Iron Curtain, India
awoke to the fact that neutrality was an impossibility in the era of
pushbuttonry, lending her chaotic bulk to the West. Mao Tse Tung fell
before an assassin's bullet in Peking, but a shining new political
sewage system cleared the streets of celebration before it fairly got
under way. Inside of forty-eight hours, China had a new Red
boss--imported from Moscow.

For some reason, it took until 1960 for the first batch of
Hiroshima-Nagasaki mutants not to miscarry, and Sunday Supplement
editors had a field day with the pathetic little creatures, one of
which was born with two heads and actually survived for ten years. In
1960 the first manned spaceship reached Luna, but the public knew
nothing of this for another fourteen months. In the United States the
increase in taxes and prices was matched everywhere except in the
pocketbook of the white collar worker by an increase in wages.
Shortages in all branches of engineering forced the government to
subsidize engineering students and exempt them permanently from the
draft and the soon-to-be-started Nowhere Journey, while engineers'
salaries rose to match those of top business executives. Big news in
the world of sports was the inclusion in the baseball Major Leagues of
eight teams from the Pacific Coast, replacing the World Series with
what was to become a mathematician's nightmare, the Triangle Game.

But Christopher Temple had his own problems. He had his own life, too,
which had nothing to do with the life of the real Christopher Temple,
departed thirty-odd years later on the Nowhere Journey. Or rather,
this _was_ Christopher Temple, living his second E.C.R.... Temple who
had lost once, and who, if he lost again, would take the dreams and
hopes of the Western world down into the dust of defeat with him. But
as the fictional (although in a certain sense, real) Christopher
Temple of 1960, he knew nothing of this.

The world could go to pot. The world was going to pot, anyway. Temple
shuddered as he poured a fourth Canadian, downing it in a tasteless,
burning gulp. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with government
subsidized degrees from three universities including the fine new one
at Desert Rock. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with top-secret
government clearance. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with more
military secrets buzzing around in