Fair question, after the fighting she had just done. “No. If I had been an instructor, Thatch would never have gotten a hand on me. I’m a meteorologist. I happened to take a course in self-defense. Just in case.”

“Meteorology!” he exclaimed. She thought he was going to make the old joke about studying meteors, but he passed that up. “Then you know about this rain!”

Trouble again! “What do you mean?”

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? Study the weather? So you know.”

“I study the weather, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I know more than you do about this particular rain. Obviously I didn’t know enough to come in out of it!”

Gus let out a hearty laugh. Then he shook his head wisely. “Uh-uh! This is a special rain! It started with that band in the sky—you saw that, didn’t you?”

“No.” Literally true. But the man was on an uncomfortably accurate track—by what coincidence, she hoped to learn.

“This one that looked like a contrail, then got larger and larger until it filled the whole sky? They said it was just a freak cloud formation that would go away in a few days, but the experts always lie about things like that How could you miss it?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Zena, the whole world could see it! The news was censored out of the papers, which is how I knew it was significant, but I have a little shortwave radio and I picked up the hams discussing it. That band went all around the earth from pole to pole, like a Russian satellite. But the Russians didn’t know anything about it either. Not the ones who were talking, anyway. You would have had to be blind or in jail to miss it!”

No help for it: She was not a facile evader, and she refused to lie directly. “I wasn’t on the world.”

Gus chuckled. “Oh, yeah! You came from the Cape. You were up in orbit, right?”

“That’s right.”