She thanked Mentor, her science-fiction god, that the long-hoarded, thirty-inch nylon foot-gloves she was wearing below her black playsuit were black, too — one of the popular pastel shades would have shown up even without the flash. The bag dangling from her shoulder was a black one, of the Black Ball Jetline. She didn’t worry about her face and arms, they were dark enough to melt with the night — and get her mistaken for colored by day. Barbara was willing to do her bit for integration, but just the same she sometimes resented it that she tanned so dark so fast.

Another burden for Jews to bear bravely, her father might have told her, though her father wouldn’t have approved of stouthearted girls hunting millionaires in their home lair in Florida, which they shared with the alligators. Or of such girls carrying bikinis in their swiped shoulder bags, either.

The policeman’s flash was prodding the shrubs across the street now, so she continued across the lawn springy as foam rubber. She decided that this was certainly the house from beside which she’d seen a lens flashing while she’d sneaked her swim at sunset.

It got very dark around her as she advanced. As she rounded another palmetto, she heard the whisper of a tiny electric motor, and she almost overran a white suit that was seated at the eyepiece of a big white telescope supported on a white-legged tripod and directed at the western sky.

The suit got up with a kind of lurch that showed it was helped by a cane, and a voice quavered from atop it “Who’s that?”

“Good evening,” Barbara Katz responded in her warmest, politest voice. “I believe you know me — I’m the girl who was changing into the black-and-yellow striped bikini. May I watch the eclipse with you?”