He stared for a time, trying to sort out the implications. The memory of Chernobyl came again. Obviously, there had been an accident at the Two Rivers plant. He had no way of knowing what kind of accident. What he had seen had not looked like a nuclear explosion but might have been something just as catastrophic, a meltdown, say. He watched the smoke make a lazy spindle in the cool air. The breeze was brisk and from the west; if there was fallout it wouldn’t travel into town—at least not today.

But what happened last night had been more than an explosion. Something had rendered him unconscious for most of six or seven hours. And he wasn’t the only one. Look at Beacon Road, empty except for a scatter of starlings. The docks and boat ramps were naked in the sunlight. No boaters or dawn fishermen had taken to Lake Merced.

He turned to the bed, suddenly frightened. “Evelyn? Ev, are you awake?”

To his enormous relief, she stirred and sighed. Her eyes opened and she winced at the light.

“Dex,” she said. “Oh-um.” She yawned. “Pull the drapes.”

“Time to get up, Evie.”

“Um?” She raised herself on an elbow and squinted at the alarm clock. “Oh my God! Breakfast!” She stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, and pulled on a housecoat. “I know I set that alarm! People must be starving!”

The alarm was an ancient windup model. Maybe she had set it, Dex thought. Maybe it went off smack at seven, and maybe it rang until it ran down.

He thought: We might already be dying of radiation poisoning. How would we know? Do we start to vomit? But he felt all right. He felt like he’d slept on the floor, not like he’d been poisoned.

Evelyn hurried into the en suite bathroom and came back looking puzzled. “The light’s out in there.”

He tried the wall switch. The bedroom light didn’t work, either.

“House fuse,” she pondered, “or it might be a power failure… Dex, why do you look so funny?” Her frown deepened. “You were at the window last night, weren’t you? I remember now. You let Roadblock in…”