He shut down the computer, got undressed, shook the little remaining water off his rain suit, got in the shower, cranked the heat until he couldn't stand it anymore, then turned it up one more notch. He got out, scalded half to death, crawled into bed, and thought about Bill Judd roasting like a bratwurst in the embers of his own home, and a truck speeding away in the night. That would be an interesting murder.

THEN HE THOUGHT about God for a while, as he did most nights.

The son of a Presbyterian minister and a professor of engineering, who saw in God the Great Engineer and believed as devoutly as her husband, Virgil had gotten down on his knees every night of his life, to pray before bed, until the first night he'd spent in the dorm at the University of Minnesota. That night, embarrassed, he hadn't gotten down on his knees, and he'd shivered and shaken in fear that the world would end because he hadn't said his prayers.

By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.

He'd never gotten back to religion, but he had gotten back some faith. It came all at once, in a bull session in an Army bachelor-officers' quarters, when one of the guys professed to being an atheist. Another one, and one who wasn't too bright, in Virgil's estimation, had said, urgently, "Oh, but you're wrong: look at all the wonders of the world. There are too many wonders."

Virgil, having grown up in the countryside, where there were wonders, and having studied ecology, where he found even more, had been stricken by the correctness of that statement from the not-too-bright believer: there were too many wonders. Atheists, he came to believe, generally worked in man-made cubes, with blackboards and computers and fast food. They didn't believe in wonders because they never saw any.