This, clearly, was a joke. Someone who possessed a slightly malicious
sense of humor, some technician with a novel trick, had seen fit to
write above Lake Michigan a laconic comment: NUTS! People laughed and
went back to their activities--and their deliberate eschewals of all
activity. Other clouds appeared and offered no further entertainment.
A few cars on the Lake Shore Drive ground to a stop. Their operators
and passengers looked up to see what still intrigued the residual
gazers--chuckled--and drove on.
Perhaps only Calk, of all those myriads, had a real premonition of
evil. He referred it, not unnaturally, to the fact that this was the
occasion of his engagement. Looking at the long, shiny limbs of Miss
Lurp, the nodes on them, at her rather dangly breasts and her somewhat
overteased brown hair (that now smelled of a plastic bathing cap into
which had been "built" a perfume that did not quite eradicate the
cap's original odor of phenol) he could not help wondering if it was
auspicious to behold, upon their first venture as affianced persons, a
great NUTS! floating overhead. Following the word with his eye, as it
drifted toward the metropolis, he also observed, with distaste, that it
maintained its continuity better than any sky-writing he had ever seen.
Other citizens, not having witnessed the formation of the word, took it
for granted that some prankster had done the deed and, since Chicago
is a city where a burp will bring down the house, hugely enjoyed it.
The _Sun_ had a box about it. The _News_ had a cartoon about it--bad
municipal government shuddering as the word in the sky threatened. The
_Tribune_ carried a long editorial attributing the whole affair to
communists.
The next day was rainy.
The day after, however, was immaculately clear and from the azure
reaches above the lake there floated to and over Chicago a second giant
syllable: