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Most people would no doubt balk at having to stand on the roof of an elevator as it drops slowly into a dark mine shaft sunk more than a mile into the ground. Not physicist Duncan Hepburn, 53, who shrugs off the task as just another part of his job. Some job.

A small horde of second- and third-graders swarms down onto the blood-red deck like so many giggling pirates. But the "blood" on the deck is really red-oxide paint. And the children - from Parkcrest Elementary School in Burnaby, B.C.

The world tour has been drawing huge crowds, there are souvenir T-shirts and a seemingly endless stream of articles in magazines and newspapers around the world. Everywhere there is an air of feverish anticipation.

Finally, the question. It is not long: only 41 words in French, 43 in English. Nor is it as clear as Jacques Parizeau always promised it would be. It is, in fact, cloaked in ambiguity, carefully crafted to obscure the full magnitude of the decision that awaits Quebec's 4.9 million voters.

On a day when Premier Jacques Parizeau and more than 1,000 of his closest sovereigntist friends were meeting for an occasion they deemed "historic," the man most of them consider Quebec's constitutional devil incarnate was less than 25 km away, doing his best to ignore them.

No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.

In Quebec, they call it referendum fever. And of all those who fell into its grip last week, perhaps no one was more surprised than René Lepage, director of the community health clinic in the lower St. Lawrence River town of Matane.

It was 11:30 on the morning after the New Brunswick Liberal party's third consecutive election landslide, but Frank McKenna was still celebrating - his way. Operating on just 4½ hours of sleep, he had followed his usual morning ritual: after waking at six a.m.

Vivian Godfree had just cleared the morning dishes at her Pugwash, N.S., home when her mother called from the British city of Bristol with surprising news - the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to an antiwar movement spawned in the tiny Nova Scotia village where she lives.

The fateful moment looms. And with only days remaining before Quebec voters' crucial encounter at the ballot box on Monday, Oct. 30, the signs were far from comforting for federalists.

It took 128 years to make Canada into the country that it is today - and 10 hours of voting and a margin of only 53,498 votes to almost break with that past and reshape both the map and the country's future. No, 50.6 per cent, total votes: 2,361,526. Yes, 49.4 per cent, 2,308,028 votes.

Hours before game time, in the dim light of an otherwise empty SkyDome, Carlos Rogers of the Toronto Raptors is alone on the basketball court.

At first in the House of Commons last week, it seemed that all the major players in the Quebec referendum had decided to go back to the future and behave as though one of the most divisive campaigns in Canada's history never happened.

With mounting concern, Dr. Joel Carter studied the situation in the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre emergency ward. In one resuscitation bed, an elderly heart patient lay dying, the family gathered around her.

Twenty-five-year-old Justine Allen's interest in winning is both professional and keenly personal. For eight months, as a master's student in sports psychology, the Wellington, N.Z.