But Orville Peabody's mind was not operating correctly. It was drinking in each millisecond of "Ways of Our Days" with a thirst unequalled in the annals of telecommunications. It was absorbing information with an intensity that left Peabody breathless and expectant. It was extracting from the beating light in front of him a message so clear that it stood out like a shining nugget, hard and inviolate, against the vague flapping images on the television screen.

It was telling him his destiny.

And so Orville Peabody, in his glorious moment of revelation, did not wonder why he was sitting in a darkened room on a tropical island, his skin brown from unremembered days in the sun, huddled beside two strangers who might have been sitting, unmoving, beside him for hours or days or weeks for all he knew. Nothing mattered now. He had a mission. It had come to him through the television, and it was not to be questioned. Orville Peabody was at peace.

Smiling like a prophet who has viewed the future of man and found it good, he rose from his contoured chair and turned off the set. The two other men in the room never glanced his way. Without a thought for the stiff muscles brought on by the hours of sitting, he walked over to the small closet in the room and put on his suit jacket. Everything was in place: his wallet, containing the forty-two dollars he had left West Mahomset with; three credit cards; a passport; photographs of his wife and kids; and a Swiss Army knife. His father had given him the knife for his tenth birthday, and Orville carried it wherever he went. "Just in case one of those muggers comes to West Mahomset with any fancy ideas," he would tell his kids with a wink.

Outside, the sun was shining, fairly pelting cheer onto the narrow dirt roads of the primitive island where the land gave way to the rocks and the rocks to the wild sea. It would be a wonderful day for traveling. He walked the two miles to the small island airport and bought a ticket for Newfoundland, Canada.