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paint box and cloth-covered painting, pressing them hard against the railing to keep from falling. He
rubbed his eyes viciously with the fingers of his good hand and for a painful moment blinked through
watery tears at blurred surroundings. But when his gaze cleared again, the redness of sun and land was
unchanged, and the fear began to grow into unreasoning anger, like a bubble of fire expanding under his
breastbone.
His doctor at the university hospital had told him last month that he was working too hard. His landlady
and even Marie Bourtel, who loved him and understood him better than anyone else, had pleaded with
him to slow down. So, to be sensible, he had forced himself to get at least six hours' sleep a night these
last two weeks andstill this false and untrustworthy body had failed him, after all.
With brutal fingers he rubbed his eyes once more. But the color of light and sun would not change.
Furiously, helplessly, he looked around the walkway for a phone booth.
Probably, he thought, he should stop using his eyes immediately, so that they would not get any worse.
He would phone his doctor. . . .
But the walkway bookstore, holding the only phone in the long passageway, was locked up behind glass
doors because it was Sunday. Maybe he could get somebody to help him. . . .
Because it was Sunday, the walkway was all but deserted. But looking now, Miles saw three other
figures near its far end. The nearest of them was a tall, thin, black-haired girl hugging an armful of books
to her nearly breastless front. Beyond the girl were a squarely built, blue-suited older man who looked
like one of the academic staff and a stocky, sweatered young man with the brown leather scabbard of a
slide rule hanging at his belt. Miles started toward them, lugging his paints and canvas.
But then, suddenly, hope leaped faintly within him. For the other three were also staring around
themselves with a dazed air. As he watched, they moved toward each other, like people under a huddling
instinct in a time of danger. By the time he reached them they were close together and already talking.
"But it has to be something!" the girl was saying shakily, hugging her books to her as if they were a life
belt and she afloat on a storm-tossed sea.
"I tell you, it's the end!" said the older man. He was stiff and gray in the face, and he spoke with barely
moving, gray lips, holding himself unnaturally erect. The reddened sunlight painted rough highlights on his
bloodless face. "The end of the world. The sun's dying. . . ."
"Dying? Are you crazy?" shouted the sweatered young man with the slide rule. "It's dust in the
atmosphere. A dust storm south and west of us maybe. Didn't you ever see a sunset "
"If it's dust, why aren't things darker?" asked the girl. "Everything's clear as before, even the shadows.
Only it's red, all red "
"Dust! Dust, I tell you!" shouted the young man. "It's going to clear up any minute. Wait and see. . . ."
Miles said nothing. But the first leap of hope was expanding into a sense of relief that left him weak at the
knees. It was not him then. The suddenly bloody color of the world was not just a subjective illusion
caused by his own failing eyesight or exhausted mind, but the result of some natural accident of
atmosphere or weather. With the sense of relief, his now-habitual distaste for wasting precious time in
social talk woke in him once more. Quietly he turned away and left the other three still talking.
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"I tell you," he heard the sweatered young man insisting as he moved off, "it'll have to clear up in a
minute. It can't last. . . ."
But it did not clear up, as Miles continued on across the east campus toward his rooming house in the
city beyond. On the way he passed other little knots of people glancing from time to time up at the red
sun and talking tensely together. Now that his own first reaction to the sun change was over, he found a
weary annoyance growing in him at the way they all were reacting.
To a painter, a change in the color values of the daylight could be important. But what was it to them,
these muttering, staring people? In any case, as the sweatered young man had said, it would be clearing
up shortly.
Pushing the whole business out of his mind, Miles slogged on homeward, feeling the tiredness creeping
up in him as the working excitement drained out of him, and his one good arm, for all its unusual
development of muscle, began to weary with the labor of lugging canvas and paint box the half mile to his
rooming house.
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