Page 62 in different directions ever since the Convention, but here our paths had crossed, for Ethel's last day in San Francisco and our first. I don't know how much later it was that we started. It was one of the nice things about Berkeley fandom, and one of the things that made it like Ireland, that time didn't seen to matter. There were a number of pleasant things that could be done if we felt like it, but there was not hurry. The day was open- ended. But it must have been about noon when we all piled into Jerry's Volkswagen convertible and he whisked us off to the Golden Gate. Whisked was the word. We started off with the top down, but the wind soon blew that idea out of our heads. We stopped and Jerry put the top up while the girls had still some hair style left. It was as well we did because the day got misty and cool as we drove further into the Pacific. By the time we got out to the Golden Gate it was quite chilly and the bridge, one of the few contemporary structures to figure in a science fiction story, could only be extrapolated. How- ever we were the people to do it, and besides I bought a very nice picture post- card of it when we stopped for a cup of coffee at the far end. After all, as I pointed out philosophically to Madeleine, we had been on the bridge and we had seen what it was like. What more could we ask? Then we went to the museum, where there was some Rodin sculpture. We visited the Chinese room too, our appetite for sculpture being still as it were unjaded, and then on the Miriams' favorite modern ruin. This was a wonderful fairylike castle made out of canvas and plaster for some exhibition and now rapidly disintegrating, but of such charm that not only had it been left undemolished, but a fund had been started to reconstruct it of permanent mate- rials. As we admired it across its moat, moving from time to time to dodge the wind-borne fallout from a massive stone fountain - these Americans have some fancy lawn sprinklers, I murmured - the highly original thought struck me that San Francisco was a very different city from Los Angeles. There they specialised in lath and plaster reconstructions of masonry; here they made masonry recon- structions of lath and plaster. I had been coming to like San Francisco anyway, having seen enough despite the mist at the Golden Gate to know it was probably the most beautiful city in the Northern Hemisphere (sorry, Berkeley fandom, but I have this notion about Rio de Janeiro) and now this crazy idea made me suspect I was going to love it. In most places it's hard enough to get people to pay for the preservation of ruins of great historic interest. Of course it's probably accounted for by the well known breeding habits of familiarity. The Egyptians, for instance, seem quite content to make reservoirs round their antiquities and blame the consequences. Only the foreigners worry. And in Ireland only a few years ago Killymoon Castle was sold for 100 pounds to a farmer who put pigs in it. But in Sand Francisco, Miriam told me, there was great indignation when it was found that a new five million dollar elevated motorway obstructed the view of the Ferry Building, which although of no particular architectural interest had been a historic San Francisco landmark of all of two generations. So it was decided to pull it down and rebuild it somewhere else. No, not the Ferry Building, silly. The motorway. We continued further into downtown San Francisco, looking for that contem- porary chimera, parking space. It sometimes seems to me that half the popula- tion of the world is at present devoting its life to getting a motor car and the other half to getting rid of it. San Francisco has this latter problem in a par- ticularly acute form, being a European-style city with an American-style traf- fic problem. In his search for a distantly glimpsed multi-storey carpark Jerry was entrapped in a relentless spiral of one-way streets, borne steadily further and further from his objective as by some sort of infernal whirlpool, until it