Word: rayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan called that goal a vision. His critics called it a mirage. Physicists have questioned whether Reagan's ray guns would ever work adequately; even a relatively small "leakage" through the defensive umbrella would rain down horrendous destruction. Military specialists have pointed out that there is a variety of ways the Soviets could slip weapons through even the most sophisticated, multilayered space-based defenses. Economists and politicians are aghast at the eventual total cost (some estimates range from $500 billion to a cool trillion...
...University of Idaho research station, Ray had dropped off his first passenger and picked up Jim Akenson, who had been studying cougars and elk but was now "coming out" to visit family. People along the Salmon River, the River of No Return the pioneers called it, speak of leaving or returning as "going out" and "coming in," or "leaving the river" and "coming to the river." Jim had known Newt and Sharon by radio for 30 months but had never met them. They live 65 miles apart. "You don't look the way I pictured you," said...
...Sharon to have. All along the route this day, he would be transferring gifts, books, food, goods and good wishes between these isolationists. It is a service not set down in his $20,000-a-year contract with the postal service. "Oh, I take it out in trade," Ray said. "The weather could ground me, and then I'd have to stay overnight with them, so I stay on their good side...
...next stop, a woman named Frances Wisner, a south Texas telephone operator who settled on the river in 1940, sat waiting with her German shepherd under a lean-to. She wore more layers than a high-society wedding cake. She gave Ray Arnold a meat-loaf sandwich, a cup of steaming coffee and a piece of her mind. She said it might help the federal deficit if they placed higher taxes on every soft drink but Coca-Cola, which she drinks, and every candy bar but Milky Way, which she favors. Around them, gathering dusk turned...
...Ray Arnold flew home with a full moon rising. He had covered 550 miles. The people he had seen are not hermits in the real sense, not even xenophobic (they chatter all day on their radios; they welcome strangers who accompany Ray), so much as they are shot through with oldtime ornery independence, misfits with a thing against clocks. To understand what drew them here, one need only remember those maps where population density is shown by clusters of black dots--each dot representing 100,000 people, say--on a white background...