wubba.'" Meade's striptease, along with the commonplace public transvestism, the new churches with their ceremonial nudity and all the other pieces of minor insanity are simply symptoms of the inexorable trends. As Breen puts it, while any one person may seem to be rational, in the bulk people behave statistically, whether they like it or not. "Meade," he says, "I think we're lemmings." Meade and "Potty" grow close, and as the weeks pass and the craziness increases, both abandon their jobs and prepare for when it will be "time to jump." Breen has transport, supplies and a firearm or two. He plans to head for the Mojave Desert. Then the record drought breaks, and the skies open. They decide to leave. On the way, there is an earthquake. A hitch-hiker attempts to steal the car at gunpoint. Meade surprises Breen (and herself) by shooting the thief with Breen's pistol. Far from the city, they are horrified when a nuclear explosion apparently destroys Los Angeles. Living at an isolated cabin, they wait for things to stabilize. There has been a full-scale nuclear exchange, but the weather was so bad that few bombs reached their targets. Breen himself has had to shoot a group of marauding Russian soldiers. But now the world is at peace, and Breen can catch up on his reading, in journals of astrophysics. He comes across an article where the author calculates the exact conditions required to make the Sun explode in a nova, and even offers predictions about when in the life of the Sun this might occur. Meade comes out of the cabin to join Potiphar and watch the sunset. There is a rather large sunspot on the Sun's face. Suddenly Breen realizes that this has not just been a bad year. Looking again at the article, he knows it is the final year. "Something funny is happening to the sunset," says Meade. "No," replies Potiphar, "to the Sun." Reception Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction described "The Year of the Jackpot" as a "frightening classic". See also Kondratiev wave References External links "The Year of the Jackpot" at the Internet Archive Short stories by Robert A. Heinlein 1952 short stories