he trees, placing them to take advantage of what little
wind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soon
we had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer wood
of the trunks. It actually began to get uncomfortably hot, although
the temperature was now down around minus 90 deg. Fahrenheit.

Cesario was using the torch. After he got all the slashings on fire,
he started setting fire to the trees themselves, going all around them
and getting the soft outer wood burning. As soon as he had one tree
lit, he would run on to another.

"This guy's a real pyromaniac," Tom said to me, wiping his face on the
sleeve of his father's parka which he was wearing over his own.

"Sure I am," Cesario took time out to reply. "You know who I was about
fifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome." Theosophists never
hesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they see
it, a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "And
look at the job I did on Moscow, a little later."

"Sure; I remember that. I was Napoleon then. What I'd have done to you
if I'd caught you, too."

"Yes, and I know what he was in another reincarnation," Tom added.
"Mrs. O'Leary's cow!"

Whether or not Cesario really had had any past astral experience, he
made a good job of firebugging on this forest. We waited around for a
while, far enough back for the heat to be just comfortable and
pleasant, until we were sure that it was burning well on both sides of
the frozen stream. It even made the double moonlight dim, and it was
sending up huge clouds of fire-reddened smoke, and where the fire
didn't light the smoke, it was black in the moonlight. There wouldn't
be any excuse for anybody not seeing that. Finally, we started back to
camp.

As soon as we got within earshot, we could hear the excitement.
Everybody was jumping and yelling. "They see it! They see it!"

The boat was full of voices, too, from the radio:

"_Pequod_ to _Dirty Gertie_, we see it, too, just off our port bow...
Yes, _Bulldog_, we see your running lights; we're right behind you...
_Slasher_ to _Pequod_: we can't see you at all. Fire a flare,
please..."

I pushed in to the radio. "This is Walter Boyd, _Times_ representative
with the _Javelin_ castaways," I said. "Has anybody a portable
audiovisual pickup that I can use to get some pictures in to my paper
with?"

That started general laughter among the operators on the ships that