At that point a beeper went off.

"Yours or mine?" Natasha asked.

It was a stale joke. There was just the one pager which they took turns minding. At the moment it hung from Boris' belt. He pulled it off and studied the readout. The message was in appearance a phone number, but in actuality a simple look-up code. Though at this point the general
III.EVERY ENDING

CLOSURE HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS THE COMPLETION OF SELF BY THE READER. IT IS, IN THIS SENSE, DESIGN DETERMINED.

sense of the message needed no decoding.

"Who's in trouble?" Natasha wondered.

Boris looked again, running through the numbers in his head. There was no mistake.

"Looks like we are," he told her.

All at once all through the neighborhood, each of the levitating TV sets comes on, as if someone had thrown a single switch. At first their screens light up crazily in random, jangling swirls. The glow from the screens plays across the lawns, gardens, and housefronts.

It touches insensibly the faces of astonished householders turned out in disbelief.

And now the agitating chaos on the many screens slows and settles. A pattern begins to emerge, clearer every second. It is a color wheel: red within blue, blue within green, green within white, white within red.

Gracefully and deliberately, the wheel begins to spin.