e, a squat cubical structure, stood at the end of a
spruce-lined path beside the ruin that a thrill party had made of the
century-old farm house. The plastic screen squeaked when Stonecypher
opened it. He stood on the white floor of the robot kitchen and dug a
fifty dollar gold piece from the bag Oswell had given him. Glaring at
the head of the woman with Liberty inscribed on her crown, he muttered,
"Thirty pieces of gold."

Catriona called, "Oswell's lucky he couldn't stay foah dinnah! Ah had
the potassium cyanide all ready."

Stonecypher passed through the diner door into a room containing more
yellowed history books and agricultural pamphlets than eating utensils.
Catriona waited by the table. She held a large revolver in her right
hand.

INTERMEZZO

Stonecypher stood on Bay Knob, near the ruins of the old FM transmitter
station, looking down at the Tennessee Lakes. Catriona sat behind him
and held the revolver on her thigh. Stonecypher said, "I never see it
but I wonder how it looked before the water."

Before him, North Fork, an arm of Kings Lake, twisted across the
Virginia line four and one-half miles away, while to Stonecypher's
right, Boone Lake sparkled like a gigantic, badly drawn V. He did not
look toward Surgoinsville Dam securing Kings Lake far to the west.

The Tennessee Lakes were born in 1918 when Wilson Dam spanned the
Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama; but their growth was retarded
for fifteen years, until an Act of Congress injected them with vitamins.
Then the mile-long bastions of concrete crawled between the ridges.
Norris, Wheeler, Pickwick Landing, Guntersville, Watts Bar, Kentucky,
Cherokee, Fort Henry, Boone, Sevier, Surgoinsville--almost innumerable
dams blocked the rivers. The rivers stopped and overflowed. The creeks
swelled into rivers.

Congressional Committees investigated, the Supreme Court tested the dams
against the Constitution, ethnologists and archeologists hastily checked
for Indian relics; and the dams, infused with youthful vigor, matured.
Beginning with Norris, which backed up the Clinch and Powell Rivers to
inundate 25,000 acres and displace 3,000 families, the dams expanded
mighty aquatic muscles. The Tennessee, the Little Tennessee, the
Nolichucky, the Holston, the French Broad, the Watauga, the Hiwassee,
the Little Pigeon--all the rivers spread their waters into lengthy,
ragged lakes, changing the map of Tennessee more than any natural
cataclysm, su