As a boy years ago in the hot summer nights of the bayou country, he would climb the faded grand stairway of the old Trois Belles, circle the pilot house, go up the ladders to the hurricane deck, and lie there on his back on dry, splintered planks of the steamboat hulk looking at the starry heavens. He would try to count the stars that glowed and glittered between his out-spread fingers. Today, what mostly moved up there were man-made silent orbiters that watched the enemy, scanning with infrared and heat sensors and high-resolution cameras that could pick out a wheelbarrow from one hundred miles up. Now the stars were being stolen.

1970.