This Is the Way the World Ends

CHAPTER ONE

Until he saw the three children in white, George Paxton’s life had gone just about perfectly.

Born in the middle of the twentieth century to generous and loving parents, people of New England stock so pure it was found only in northeast Vermont, he came to manhood in the tepid bosom of the Unitarian Church. It was an unadorned, New England sort of faith. Unitarians rejected miracles, worshiped reason, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, and had serious doubts about the divinity of God. George grew up believing that this was the most plausible of all possible worlds.

By the time he was thirty-five he had been blessed with an adorable daughter, a wife who always looked as if she had just come from doing something dangerous and lewd, and a cozy cottage perched on stilts above a lake. He was in good health, and he knew how to prevent many life-threatening diseases through a diet predicated on trace metals. George took inordinate pleasure in ordinary things. Hot coffee gave him fits of rapture. If there was a good movie on television that night, he would spend the day whistling.

He had even outmaneuvered the philosophers. A seminal discovery of the twentieth century was that a man could live a life overflowing with advantages and still be obliquely unhappy. Despair, the philosophers called it. But the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides – no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets to George Paxton.

Now it must be allowed that not everyone in his situation would have shared his contentment. Not everyone would have found fulfillment in putting words on cemetery monuments. For George, however, inscribing monuments was a calling, not simply a job. He was in the tomb profession. He kept a scrapbook of the great ones: the sarcophagus of Alexander, the shrine to Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the Medici tomb at San Lorenzo, the pyramid of Cheops. Don’t you get depressed being around gravestones all day? people asked him. No, he replied. Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.

Occasionally his wife accused him of laziness. ‘I wish you would go out and get yourself some ambition,’ Justine would say. But George’s world satisfied him – the pace, the simplicity, the muscles he acquired from lifting granite.

And then they came, the three children in white, jumping out of the back of John Frostig’s panel truck and sprinting toward the sample stones that spread outward from the foundation of the Crippen Monument Works. The stones were closely spaced, as in a cemetery for dwarves. ‘Floor models,’ George’s boss liked to call them. ‘Want to take one out for a spin?’ the boss would quip.

Sitting near the smeared and sooty window of the front office, George watched as the white children leapfrogged over the stones. Their suits – trim, one-piece affairs cinched by utility belts and topped with globular helmets – afforded complete mobility. Each child wore a pistol. The leapfrogging boys looked ready for the bottom of the ocean, the inside of a volcano, a Martian sandstorm, a plague of bees, anything.

Briefcase in tow, John climbed out of the driver’s seat. A painting of a white suit decorated the side of the truck, accompanied by the words PERPETUAL SECURITY SCOPAS SUITS… JOHN FROSTIG, PRESIDENT… WILDGROVE, MASSACHUSETTS… 555–7043. The president of Perpetual Security Scopas Suits marched toward the office exuding the sort of nervous energy and insatiable ambition that made George feel there are worse things in life than being satisfied with what you have.

Entering, John imposed his rump on a stool, balanced the briefcase on his knees.

‘Has someone died?’ George asked.

‘Died? Nope, sorry, you won’t sell me anything today, buddy-buddy.’ John’s friendship with George had been primarily John’s idea. ‘No tombs today.’

George swiveled away from the window. A swivel chair, a rolltop desk, a naughty calendar, a patina of dust, the stool on which John sat – these formed the sum total of Arthur Crippen’s office. Arthur was not there. He never appeared before noon, rarely before 2 P.M. Just then it was 3:30. Arthur was doubtless at the Lizard Lounge, a bar administering to the broken hopes and failed ambitions of the town’s shopkeepers.

‘Look out the window, buddy-buddy. What do you see?’

George pivoted. The children had begun a science fiction game, laser-zapping each other with their pistols, using the monuments for cover. ‘White children,’ he reported.

‘Safe children. There’s a war coming, George, a bad one. It’s inevitable, what with both sides having so many land-based, first-strike ICBMs. Soon we’ll all be living in scopas suits. That’s S-C-O-P-A-S, as in Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival. Just five weeks I’ve had this franchise, and already I’ve sold two dozen units without once leaving the borders of our fair hamlet. The company tells us to operate under any name we like, so I’m Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. I thought that up myself – Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. Like it?’

‘I can’t see why the Russians would want to bomb Wildgrove,’ said George the Unitarian. He was what his church had made him, a naive skeptic.

‘You don’t know jackshit about strategic doctrine, do you? Ever hear of a counterforce strike? The enemy wants to wipe out America’s war-waging capability. Well, Wildgrove is part of that war-waging capability. We’ve got food, clothing, gasoline, trucks, people – many things of military value. All the apples we grow here could prove decisive during the intra-war period.’

‘Well, if they ever do drop their bombs, I imagine we’ll all die before we know what hit us.’

‘That’s pretty pessimistic of you, buddy-buddy, and furthermore it’s not true. Put on a scopas suit, and you won’t be able to avoid surviving.’

John opened his briefcase, took out a crisply printed form headed ESCHATOLOGICAL ENTERPRISES – WE DO CIVIL DEFENSE RIGHT. George knew about sales contracts; you could not acquire a stone from the Crippen Monument Works without signing one.

‘Eschatological – doesn’t sound very Japanese, does it?’ said John. ‘Don’t worry. Right now all the units might come from Osaka, but next month there’ll be a plant in Detroit and another in Palo Alto. Hell, talk about being in the right place with the right product at the right time. Greatest thing since the rubber. A smart bunch of bastards, those Eschatological people, a bunch of shrewd—’

‘This isn’t my kind of thing.’

‘The price wouldn’t shock you.’

‘Sorry, John—’

‘Begin simple – that’s what I tell everybody. One or two units, expand later. Do the kids first. The smaller the suit, the lower the cost. Your daughter—’

‘Holly is four.’

‘Wise decision, truly wise. I must tell you, it puts a lump right smack in the middle of my throat. Now, the way I figure it, the warheads won’t arrive for two years. Yeah, I know, the world’s going to hell in a slant-eyed Honda, but smart money still says two years. So you’ll need something that will fit Holly when she’s six, right? Normally we’d be talking over seven thousand pictures of George Washington, but for you, buddy-buddy, let’s make it sixty-five ninety-five plus tax.’

‘That’s more than I take home in… I don’t know, four months. Five. I’ll have to say no to this.’

The suit salesman hammered the contract with his extended index finger. ‘You think we’re talking cash on the barrelhead? We’re talking installments on the barrelhead, teeny tiny installments.’ The finger skated across a pocket calculator. ‘Figuring a five percent sales tax and an annual interest rate of eighteen percent or one-point-five per month, we can amortize the loan through a constant monthly payment of three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents, so in two years you’ll own little Holly’s unit free and clear. You probably spend that much on beer.’

George took the contract, attempted to read it, but the words refused to resolve into clear meanings. Holly liked to draw. She produced an average of four crayon sketches a day. Their refrigerator displayed one that looked exactly like George – exactly.

On the other hand, if a war occurred of the sort John was predicting, it wouldn’t matter how much art schools cost.

‘Do you happen to have the kind for a six-year-old with you? I mean… I’m just wondering what they look like.’

John’s nod was smug. ‘When you work for Perpetual Security, George, you’re prepared for anything.’

They left the office and wove through the tiny cemetery. Most of the stones embodied a macabre optimism; there was nothing inscribed on them. First came the Protestant district, then the Catholic section, finally the Jewish neighborhood. John opened the back of his truck and hoisted himself into the dark cavity, where several dozen scopas suits of varying sizes hung like commuters packed into a subway. George noticed one suit intended for a dog, another for a baby.

To the casual observer it might have suggested a nineteenth-century body-snatching scene, two men hauling a limp and pallid shape through a graveyard. First George – short, muscular, with rough-hewn features attempting to reclaim themselves from a scrub-brush beard and a jungle of hair. Then John – tall, clean-shaven, aggressively handsome, self-consciously suave. The white children followed them into the office. John and George arranged the little scopas suit on the swivel chair. George struggled to recall the names of the Frostig boys. The youngest was in the same nursery school as Holly and had once murdered the hamsters. Rickie – was that his name? Nathan?

‘Mr Paxton wants to see your units,’ John announced grandly, lining up his sons like army recruits. ‘Gary, show him your cranial gear.’

The fifteen-year-old removed his dinosaur-egg helmet. He had inherited his father’s disconcerting good looks. ‘Upon sensing the detonation,’ Gary recited, ‘the phones shut down – hence, no ruptured eardrums from blast overpressures. As for the fireball, the wraparound Lexan screen guards against flashblindness and retinal scorching.’

‘Excellent, Gary.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

John went to his second son. ‘Lance, Mr Paxton wants to know about the fabric.’

When Lance removed his helmet, George recognized the ten-year-old he had once caught spraying WALTERS BITES THE BIG ONE on a headstone Toby Walters had ordered for his dead mother. Lance looked middle-childy – casual, unassuming. He tugged on his front zipper, making a V-shaped part and revealing a sweat shirt emblazoned with the logo of a rock group called Sperm. ‘Alternating layers of Winco Synthefill VII, Celanese Fortrel Arcticguard Polyester, and activated charcoal,’ he chanted, folding back one flap to display the lining. ‘In terms of initial ionizing radiation and subsequent fallout, the protection factor is a big one thousand, shielding you from a cumulative dose of up to two hundred thousand rads. As for… as for…’ The boy twitched and turned red.

‘Thermal radiation, son.’

‘As for thermal radiation, a scopas suit can deflect over five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You can be one hundred yards from the hypocenter, and all you’ll get is a sunburn.’

Again John consulted his first son. ‘Gary, let’s hear about blast-wave effects on the human body.’

‘Because the material is interlayered with fibrosteel mesh,’ said Gary, ‘it can withstand dynamic pressures of up to sixty-five pounds per square inch, such as you might experience one mile from ground zero. Flying slivers of glass – a significant hazard in any thermonuclear exchange – cannot penetrate. Finally, even though the overpressures could catch you in a cyclonic wind and hurl you nearly three hundred feet, the padding in your nuke suit guarantees that you’ll walk away without a bruise.’

‘They aren’t “nuke suits,” lad,’ the salesman corrected cheerfully. ‘What are they?’

‘They’re Perpetual Security scopas suits, sir.’

‘You probably think the Eschatological people forgot about Mother Nature,’ said John, rapping on George’s shoulder with his index finger. ‘No way. Each unit gives you a built-in commode – the Leonardo Porta-Potty.’

Now it was the little one’s turn. ‘Nickie, show Mr Paxton your utilities.’

Nickie – ah, yes, that was his name – unbuckled his sashlike belt, removed his helmet. His hamster-killer’s face was swarthy and firm. ‘Let’s see… here I have an indiv— , indiv—’

‘Individual.’

‘Individual radiation… doze… er, doze-matter.’

‘Dosimeter, Nickie. Say dosimeter.’

‘Dosimeter. Then I’ve got a Swiss Army knife, a canteen, vitamins, and my’ – joy flooded through the child – ‘my Colt Mark IV forty-five caliber automatic pistol!’

‘Way to go, Nick!’

With a clumsy flourish the boy flipped the gun out of its holster. George pulled his hands in front of his face and said Jesus’ name.

‘Note your Pachmayr grips,’ said the suit salesman, ‘your King-Tappan fixed combat sights, your—’

‘Is that real?’ George asked.

‘She’s not loaded. Safety first.’

‘We have target practice in the basement,’ Nickie explained, waving the pistol around in a manner that made George say not loaded to himself several times. ‘We shoot paper Communists.’

John strutted behind the line of boys, patting them on their sleek, narrow backpacks. ‘Last but not least, you have your survival gear. The bottom compartment is an oxygen tank – those warheads could touch off a conflagration or two, and that means smoke and toxic gases. You also get a primus stove, a portable water purifier, and a vacuum-packed can of vegetable seeds, including soybeans, barley, and other species resistant to ultraviolet light. In the medical kit you’ll find penicillin-G tablets, tetanus toxoid, hydrocortisone, and a bottle of nitrous oxide for anesthesia. And, of course, each pack includes an item from your basic assortment of survival guns. Gary is carrying a disassembled Armalite AR-180 light assault rifle. She fires – tell the man, Gary.’

‘The standard US military five-point-five-six-millimeter round. Effective range – four hundred and fifty yards.’

‘Right you are. Now Lance here is toting all the parts for a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun. Most useful of all’ – John caressed Nickie’s pack – ‘is the Heckler and Koch HK 91 heavy assault rifle with collapsible stock. That’s the piece you’ll get with Holly’s suit. Effective range – one thousand yards.’

George had to admit that thermonuclear exchange worries crossed his mind occasionally, and that he did not know where to seek reassurance. It would be wonderful to lose this anxiety, which erupted at odd moments. Assuming they could squeeze another hundred dollars a month from Justine’s paycheck, there was every reason to put this thing under the Christmas tree.

‘If I give you the first installment today, can I take it home?’

An elaborate smile appeared on John’s face. ‘Sure, you can take it home. Hell, next you’ll order a suit for your pretty wife, then one for yourself, and then you’ll both sleep a lot better. Any more kids in the works?’

‘We’ve been talking about it. Yeah.’

‘Go for it.’

George took out his checkbook. John fondled the contract.

‘It’s like the fable of the grasshopper and the ant,’ said the suit salesman. ‘Mr Grasshopper wastes the whole summer singing and playing and having a ripsnorting time – sort of like that lushy boss of yours – while Mr Ant works his abdomen off saving up food. So when winter comes, Mr Grasshopper, he wants a piece of Mr Ant’s larder. Naturally Mr Ant tells Mr Grasshopper to piss off. Now, if you ask me, old Aesop was really writing about atomic wars. He got one thing wrong, though. Know what he should have called it?’

‘What?’

‘The Fable of the Grasshopper and the Cockroach.’

And so it was that George Paxton became the happy owner of a Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival suit.

CHAPTER TWO

As it turned out, George could not have picked a worse day for buying a scopas suit. That very morning, his wife was fired for breaking a tarantula.

Justine had never liked her situation at Raining Cats and Dogs, a franchised pet store located in the Wildgrove Mall. The job entailed most of the disadvantages of working for an orphanage and few of the rewards. It seemed to her that a given kitten or puppy never ended up with an appropriate owner; indeed, Justine mistrusted the motives of anyone who would patronize Raining Cats and Dogs when there were so many psychologically heal-thier, albeit less convenient, places from which to obtain a pet: a farm, a kennel, an alley. And, of course, there were those animals who did not find homes at all, every week growing older and conspicuously less adorable, their lives circumscribed by the glass-walled cages (which the chain’s owners called habitats), until the day came when Harry Sweetser would ship them back to head-quarters, where God knew what fate awaited. These unadoptable pets were a continual temptation to Justine, but George would have no more animals in a house where the nonhuman population already stood at six.

The fat boy wanted the tarantula, really wanted it, and his mother seemed far less repulsed by the idea than most mothers would have been. Justine sensed that here, for once, were customers with proper credentials. Normally she took a dim view of those parts of the inventory that had too few or too many legs – the pythons, indigo snakes, scorpions, crabs, and spiders – not because they frightened her (they did not), but because they were gimmicks, bought by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. To look at this boy, however, a loser by all odds – homely, awkward, and shy – was to realize how much he needed the tarantula, and how much the tarantula needed him.

And so Justine undertook a mission that she saw as, among other things, a test of her acting talent. More than anything else, George’s wife wanted to act. She was no dreamer, though; no visions of Hollywood danced in her head. Her sober and plausible ambition was to be the clown who gave out balloons at children’s parties, the radio voice that told you where to purchase a new sofa, or the pretty lady at the local cable television station who explained why you should patronize the Wildgrove Hardware Store or Sandy’s Sandwich Shop (or, for that matter, Raining Cats and Dogs).

‘What’s your name?’ she asked the boy, making your light up.

‘Andy.’

‘Well, Andy, this spider will make you the envy of your friends. You have my guarantee.’

‘I’ve heard that they can kill you,’ said his mother, winking humorfully. Without this particular mother, Justine decided, Andy would never survive.

‘Treat a tarantula badly and, oh yes, it’ll bite. Rather like a dog.’ Justine unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum and with a histrionic gesture placed it in her mouth. ‘The venom is unpleasant but never lethal. In fact, far from being savage beasts, tarantulas are quite delicate.’

‘Aren’t they kind of boring?’ asked the mother.

‘Not when they’re injecting you with venom, no,’ said Justine, and the mother laughed.

‘Can you play with it?’ Andy wanted to know.

‘Sure you can play with it.’ Justine removed the tarantula from its cage and set its fuzzy body on her shoulder. ‘See?’ As the animal strutted down her arm, Andy’s face gave off equal amounts of light and heat.

‘Wow!’ he concluded.

When a tarantula is dropped, the result is always the same. It blows up. Justine was never sure why the spider panicked and jumped from her forearm, although the disaster occurred simultaneously with, and might very well have been caused by, Harry Sweetser’s sudden, boisterous arrival. ‘Arrgh!’ he screamed as the forty-dollar spider exploded.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry, Harry.’ Pity and remorse swept through Justine. ‘Poor bugger.’

‘Women should never try to handle these things.’ Harry was a balding little fussbudget with a double paunch. ‘You’re too squeamish.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Justine, ‘it only fell because you came over.’

‘New rule,’ said Harry. ‘Anyone who can’t touch the arachnids without panicking has to leave them alone.’

‘Why don’t you go snort a toad, Harry?’ she snapped. She thought about the remark, felt astonishingly good, and flashed her teeth theatrically.

Harry ordered her to clean up the tarantula’s remains. ‘And then I want to see you in my office,’ he announced, giving each word an ominous spin.

The mother looked at the mess on the floor and said, ‘I guess we’re not all that interested in tarantulas today.’ She steered her bewildered son out of the store.

Entering Harry’s office, Justine noted with mild surprise that he was not at his desk. He stood in the middle of the rug, thumbs hooked in his belt. ‘So anyway, I think maybe Raining Cats and Dogs isn’t the place for you, right?’ he said. ‘I’ll mention one thing, though – you were always a pleasure to look at in the morning.’ Advancing, he groped toward her face. ‘You have an inspirational way of feeding the fish.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘In fact, Justine, everything about you is inspirational.’

She backed off. If I ever stoop to this, she thought, it will be in the name of landing a major role in a cable TV commercial. Harry’s countermove consisted of crossing to the door, closing it, and maneuvering her into a corner.

‘With a little encouragement I could be persuaded to give you your job back.’ He placed a practiced, unequivocal hand on her left buttock. ‘Why don’t we swing by the Lizard Lounge this afternoon for a drink?’

‘You know, Harry’ – she slipped out from under his palm and started for the door – ‘there’s something special about you that you may not be aware of.’

‘What?’

‘You’re an absolutely astounding scuzz-bucket.’

Harry then informed Justine that she was fired.

And so when George came home that evening proudly displaying the scopas suit, Justine’s reaction approximated that of the mother in Jack and the Beanstalk learning that Jack had bartered away the family cow for some magic seeds.

‘Six thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars?’ she gasped. ‘For what?’

‘For civil defense against thermonuclear attack. For Holly’s future. We pay three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents a month – that’s including the tax – and after two years it’s ours. It’s from Japan.’

Justine listened morosely as George jabbered about individual radiation dosimeters, primus stoves, Lexan screens, and Winco Synthefill. He placed the suit on the sofa and took off his work shirt, showering the floor with granite flakes and aluminum-oxide bits, the detritus of his trade; their cottage was highly tactile: granite, aluminum-oxide, sand, pet hair, pieces of mail too important to throw away yet too trivial to file, clothes that quit their hangers on their own initiative, all subsumed in the endless onrush of Holly’s toys. The Irish setter loped over and sniffed the suit. Lucius the cat jumped on it, curled into himself, and took a nap.

Justine’s horror of the scopas suit was nonverbal and intuitive, the horror of a mother hen seeing a hawk shadow glide across the barnyard. She could find no flaw in the garment’s design, no error in its execution, no fallacy in its purpose. And yet she knew that Holly must never own one.

‘I think Santa Claus should bring it,’ said George, eagerly caressing his purchase, which rested on the sofa like a boy king lying in state. ‘She’ll be more likely to wear it if she believes it came from him.’

‘George, I lost my job.’

‘You what?’

‘Harry Sweetser fired me. I blew up a tarantula.’

‘Nuts.’

‘I’m glad. Not about the tarantula – but I really couldn’t have faced another day at that place.’ She inserted a stick of spearmint gum between her lips like a cigarette, puffed on it. ‘Noah Webster College has a drama department, I hear.’

‘I thought we were talking about having another kid. This your way of changing your mind?’

‘I’ll take evening courses. By day I’ll be a mother, by night you’ll be a father. Life works out.’

‘Our plumbing is rotten, our car has cancer, we can’t afford life insurance, we’re trying to have a baby, and you want to join the circus!’

‘Not the circus, the drama department!’ The gum entered her mouth like a log entering a sawmill.

‘You have no sense of reality!’

‘You have no sense of anything else!’ Justine’s anger had thrown her hair across her face, and now she pushed it aside; curtains parted on large brown eyes, high cheeks, abundant lips, a sensual over-bite – to wit, a face that one might easily imagine on the talent side of a cable television camera, a face that was, by all but the most banal criteria, beautiful. ‘With training I can bring in twice what I was making at Cats and Dogs.’

‘Let’s be honest, Justine. Money isn’t something you and I will ever understand. If it grew on trees, we’d be raising chickens.’

‘You’re worried about money?’ She chomped violently on her spearmint stick. ‘Then stop going around spending seven thousand dollars like it belonged to somebody else.’

A fight followed. There was some screaming. Fists were pounded. Resentments emerged like bits of an ancient civilization tossed up by an earthquake. The fight encompassed George’s tendency to assume that the pets were solely Justine’s responsibility, and it included Justine’s tendency to treat her parents shabbily, always forgetting their birthdays. It touched on whether they could really cope with another child, money worries or not, and eventually it even embraced thermonuclear war and strategic doctrine. George believed that the bombs were normally dropped from airplanes. Justine was certain that they would arrive via guided missiles. Whenever the fight began to lull, George demonstrated some additional virtue of the suit.

‘What the hell good are those going to do anybody?’ Justine demanded after George showed her the vacuum-packed seeds. ‘Do you know how long it will take for those to grow?’

‘They’re resistant to ultraviolet light.’

‘Yeah? What does that mean?’

‘It’s like the grasshopper and the ant.’

‘It’s like what?’

‘A bad move that was, Justine, getting fired. Truly dumb. This suit will give us peace of mind. You’ll just have to ask Harry for your job back.’

‘There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, darling,’ said Justine with a tilted smile. ‘Today Harry grabbed my ass.’

The moment John Frostig saw George standing in the doorway with the little scopas suit under his arm, he knew that he had lost the sale. Taking the contract and the $345.71 check from his briefcase, he rolled them into a tube and thrust it toward George’s belly as if knifing him. He spoke in grim whispers.

‘I’m going to explicate a few things now, buddy-buddy,’ He curled his arm in a yoke around George’s neck and led him into the house. ‘Right now we’re friends, my dear grasshopper, but when the warheads reach their targets, I’m going to be looking out for me and mine and nobody else. That’s the way with us ants.’

Scopas suits cluttered John’s living room, sprawling on the floor, resting on the couches, relaxing on the chairs. One suit was watching a football game on television. Another played the piano. The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterres-trial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘In short,’ John continued softly, ‘anybody who hears that us ants have a few extra suits stored up… anybody who drops by our larders looking to borrow one of those suits… such a person – even if he’s an old buddy – such a person is asking to get his brains dredged out with a Remington 870.’

Alice Frostig glanced up from her sewing machine – she was repairing a scopas suit glove – and moved her bulbous and balding head with an amen sort of nod. Among other pitiable things, she was the female equivalent of a cuckold. More than once George had seen John approach a vulnerable housewife in the Lizard Lounge and convince her to accept his hospitality at the Wildgrove Motel.

‘Justine lost her job,’ said George. ‘She’s going to take acting lessons. We can’t afford the suit any more.’

‘Tell that to the Soviets,’ said the suit salesman.

‘There probably won’t even be a war,’ said George.

Throughout his entire life, George had never discovered a pleasure more complete than reading to his daughter. Food did not go beyond taste and satiation, sex lacked intellectual rewards, but Holly’s bed-time had everything. There was, first of all, the sheer physical enjoyment of swaddling oneself in blankets. Then, too, the process brought out Holly’s adorable side, suppressing the whiny beast that lived in four-year-olds and fed on parental exasperation. And frequently the books themselves were pithy and provocative, the sorts of things an advertising executive might have written in a fit of scruple.

Father and daughter were huddled together, orienting Holly’s selection for the evening – a bad selection as it happened, a vapidity called Carrie of Cape Cod. A kitten scampered amid the blanketed terrain. Holly’s menagerie of stuffed animals went about their soft habits. George began reading: Outside the cottage harsh winds whipped the lake, giving it whitecaps and a tide. Canadian geese splashed down, squonking loudly.

Carrie of Cape Cod slogged on. Near summer’s end, Carrie saw a seagull pick up a clam and drop it on a rock. The shell shattered, and the bird ate what was inside.

‘How did the seagull know the clam was dead?’ Holly asked.

I must get her a scopas suit, thought George. I’ll break into Frostig’s truck and steal one.

‘I know!’ said Holly. Freckles were sprinkled on her face. Her skin seemed lit from within. ‘If the clam is alive, he opens his eyes, and then the seagull knows not to eat him!’

‘Yes,’ said George. ‘That’s the answer.’

She pondered for a moment. ‘But then how does the clam get a new shell, Daddy?’

If George could have one wish, he would remake the world as Holly saw it. This Utopia would consist largely of cuddly ducks, happy ponies, and seagulls who spared live clams. ‘I don’t know how the clam gets a new shell,’ he said. Maybe he puts on a scopas suit instead, he thought.

At the climax Carrie walked the nocturnal beach, gazing toward heaven and identifying the constellations. One of them was the Big Dipper. ‘Why is it called that?’ Holly asked.

‘It looks like a dipper.’ George was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around Holly. ‘Do you know what a dipper is?’

‘What’s a dipper?’

Instantly George was off to the kitchen. He returned bearing a small saucepan that more or less resembled an ancient Greek dipper. He believed it was for melting butter.

‘I wish I could see the Big Dipper,’ Holly said.

‘One night soon we’ll go out and look for it.’

‘Daddy, I have something important to say. This is important. Could we go out and look for it now?’

‘You don’t have any shoes on.’

‘Could you carry me?’

He seriously considered doing so. ‘It’s pretty cloudy tonight. I don’t think we could find it.’

‘Let’s try. Please.’

‘No, honey, it’s late,’ he said, extricating himself from her little finger. ‘We’ll look for it some other night. I’ll tell you a story instead.’

‘Goody.’

He started out with the grasshopper and the ant, then suddenly realized he didn’t like the ending, and so he ad-libbed his way through the chronicle of a clumsy bunny who wanted, more than anything, to be able to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. The bunny tried and tried and kept falling off, covering his fragile body with little bunny bruises. (The wind could hurl you three hundred feet, young Gary Frostig had said.) Then one day the rabbit hutch caught on fire. The determined bunny leaped on his two-wheeler, raced to the fire department, and saved the day.

‘I wish I could ride a two-wheeler,’ said Holly.

‘You’ll learn,’ said George.

‘I know that,’ said Holly, slightly annoyed. She closed the book. ‘It’s going to be a long world.’

CHAPTER THREE

Halloween was coming, the pumpkins were off their diets, and the little cemetery where George worked had acquired a ghost.

When he first glimpsed the specter, she was contemplating him through the front window of the Crippen Monument Works. Inside the office, barrel-bellied Jake Swann perused a sales contract – a big order set in motion on Columbus Day when Jake’s uncle had come home and shot all of his immediate family dead – and as the customer reached for the pen to write his signature, George looked up.

Spider webs and arabesques were scribbled on the window in frost. A blood-red October leaf was pasted to one pane. George and the specter locked eyes. While he sincerely doubted that the old woman was in fact a ghost – Unitarians did not believe in ghosts – her every aspect suggested a netherworld address. She wore a mourning ensemble, loose-fitting as a shroud: black cloth, black gloves, and black veil – raised. Her complexion had the greenish pallor of mold. Her frame displayed the jagged profile of a dead tree. When she smiled at him, jack-o’-lantern teeth appeared, and one of her eyelids collapsed in a wink.

Ice formed in George’s gut. His throat tightened like a sphincter.

‘You got the sniffles?’ asked Jake Swarm, a phlegmatic man who had not been noticeably affected by the prodigal loss of kin.

George took the contract, knitting his brow in a manner he thought appropriate to a tomb professional. Furtively, he glanced out the window. The specter was gone.

But later, as George was leaving the office, she reappeared, kneeling amid the sample stones. Mud spattered her mourning dress; the veil was down. He ducked behind Design No. 3295. The old woman stared at a wordless headstone for several minutes, as if reading an epitaph written in a medium only ghosts could perceive, then reached forward with black velvet fingers and stroked the granite surface of Design No. 6247, the one with the praying Saint Catherine on top. George considered speaking, but the remarks that suggested themselves – ‘That one has real value,’ ‘We also offer it in Oklahoma pink,’ ‘For whom are you in mourning?’ – seemed inappropriate.

Evening pressed softly on the Crippen Monument Works. The woman uncrooked her back, hobbled forward. ‘I have a task for you,’ she said. A spry voice inhabited her antique body. ‘You’ll learn of it soon.’

‘Have we met?’ he asked.

‘I have always been with you,’ she said, smiling, ‘waiting to get in,’ and then she vanished into the dusk.

As the week progressed, George noticed her a dozen more times – peering through the window, bending over a sample memorial, standing outside the decaying picket fence that enclosed the little cemetery.

Waiting to get in…?

On Halloween afternoon she watched from the weedcorrupted field on the other side of Hawthorne Street. She sat on the ground, a basket of apples in her lap. Her dark dress was covered with leaves; she appeared to be stuffed with them. Her weak and decimated teeth had to fight their way into each apple. George wondered why she had selected such an ambitious lunch. Some early trick-or-treaters came past: a witch, a devil, a cat, a preschooler from Venus, a ghoul. When the woman offered the children an apple, they shrieked gleefully and ran off, laughing all the way down Hawthorne Street. At the corner they stopped laughing but kept going, faster now, panting, sweating, trembling with terror, to the far end of Blackberry Avenue and beyond.

Fade-in on a man seated at a desk. He wears a business suit and is flanked by American flags. During his speech the camera dollies forward and a subtitle tells us that this is Robert Wengernook, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

WENGERNOOK: As one of the officials charged with implementing America’s defense strategy, I know where our security lies. We must prove to the Soviets that they can never succeed in their ugly schemes for winning a nuclear war… The key to our security is deterrence. The key to our deterrence is civil defense. And the key to our civil defense is a technology developed by Eschatological Enterprises… If you’ve already bought that scopas suit – wear it. If you haven’t – well, don’t you think you owe it to yourself and to your country’s future? Remember, deterrence is only as good as the people it protects.

Fade-out.

In the screening room of Unlimited, Ltd., Phil Murcheson of Eschatological Enterprises blew cigarette smoke into Robert Wengernook’s projected face.

‘He looks nervous,’ said Murcheson as the tail leader of the thirty-second spot rolled out of the film gate and began flapping around on the take-up reel.

‘Intense, we thought.’ Dave Valentine, Creative Associate at Unlimited, Ltd., shut off the projector. ‘He looked intense to us.’

‘Nervous.’

‘He needed a cigarette,’ said Valentine.

‘You’ll notice a big difference when it’s transferred to tape,’ said Lou Marquand, Assistant Creative Associate. ‘Film is high resolution, right? It’s not his medium. Wengernook is definitely low-res iconography.’

‘Nervous as a cat,’ said Murcheson. ‘This is not a man I would want leading me into battle, and our customers won’t want him either.’

‘I hate to fail you like this, Phil,’ said Valentine. ‘I can’t tell you the pain I’m experiencing right now.’

Murcheson lit a fresh Pall Mall. ‘Look, what you did is okay for the six o’clock news, the Rise and Shine show, the Sunday morning evangelists. No problem. But this country has a Super Bowl coming up in a couple of months. This is not a Super Bowl presence you’re giving me here, Dave.’

Valentine began jumping up and down. ‘Hold on, Phil! Concept time! Hold on! Here comes the egg… now the sperm… direct hit! Insemination! You’ll love this. It has action, a medieval knight, and a sex-role reversal.’

‘I like the knight. Sex-role reversal?’

‘We’re on top of it. Eighty-five percent of male viewers enjoy sex-role reversals, as long as you keep the threat factor in harness.’

‘Okay. But life is short – need I remind you? The Super Bowl, Dave.’

‘Phil, you’ll have it in time for the goddamn Army-Navy game.’

Robert Wengernook proved a far more persuasive scopas suit salesman than anyone at Eschatological Enterprises had anticipated. Seven seconds after the commercial was aired for the first time, John Frostig’s phone rang. It was the chairman of the Wildgrove Board of Selectmen; he wanted two adult units and three child-size ones. No sooner had John replaced the receiver when the phone jangled again. The principal of Wildgrove High School required seven suits.

By Thanksgiving, John had supplemented his panel truck with a factory showroom, the Civil Defense Stop, open every night till nine.

America was becoming a safe, white country. From sea to shining sea, citizens began wearing their civil defenses as a matter of daily routine. Cheerfully they mastered the arts of eating, sleeping, working, and playing in perpetual preparedness for warheads. Not only did the suits promise survival in times of nuclear exchange, they also discouraged muggings and rapes.

Spin-off industries flourished. Rare was the entrepreneur who could not turn a profit from dry-cleaning scopas suits or adorning them with sashes, plumes, jewels, and decorative inlays. Little girls placing orders with Santa Claus commonly requested scaleddown scopas suits for their dolls. Patches bloomed everywhere, woven from fireproof thread: TRACY LIVES HERE… WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?… HAUTE PROTECTION CIVILE… DETERRENCE IN PROGRESS.

Fade-in on a village somewhere in medieval Europe. A gang of fat, bearded brigands is running amuck, setting the peasants’ huts on fire. Women and children flee in panic. Men are cut down by the brigands’ spears, axes, and swords.

NARRATOR (voice-over): The threat. It’s always been there. It always will be. Wherever you find freedom, you find forces seeking to destroy it.

A helmeted knight enters the village on a white charger. His armor catches the glow of the burning huts. He dismounts, draws his sword, and falls upon the brigands. Their weapons prove useless against breastplate and mail.

NARRATOR: But for every threat, there is a defense. In ancient times, body armor deflected swords. Today, scopas suits deflect blast, heat, and fallout.

As the victorious knight removes his helmet, his armor is magically transformed into a particularly svelte scopas suit. Surprise: the knight is a woman. She swirls her head, sending luscious blond hair in all directions. The background dissolves. A suburban living room emerges in its place. The woman’s husband rushes over, children trailing behind.

DAD: Marge, you did it! You saw our Eschatological representative!

MOM: Deterrence is only as good as the people it protects, Stan.

DAD: I’m so glad we had that talk.

Fade-out.

When Justine Paxton saw the thirty-second spot during the Army-Navy game, she concluded that she could have done a better Mom than the woman who played the part.

Her acting teacher agreed.

One bitter December morning, as George sat at his work table putting the final cuts in a stencil, he was enveloped by a sense of well-being. The feeling seemed to originate from outside his body. He turned.

The specter stood in the middle of the shop, veil up, smiling. A handbag dangled from her black-shrouded arm. She glanced longingly at Design No. 7034, rendered in South African granite. The granite was blacker than her eyes, the blackest of the black, as Arthur Crippen called it.

‘My name is Nadine Covington,’ she said. How smooth her voice, how young.

‘Why have you been spying on me?’

‘Not spying. Appreciating. You are a good man, George Paxton, a saint in a business swarming with ghouls.’ Although she had no trace of a foreign accent, she spoke as if English were an unfamiliar language. ‘I am honored to meet you.’

Sensations of peace and contentment continued to flow from the specter to George. ‘This is a service business,’ he said. ‘The product comes second. We must be as sensitive as any funeral parlor director – it’s amazing what people have on their minds when they come in here. The idea is to make the customer feel good about his choice, even if it’s the cheapest.’

‘You’re skillful at that.’ Nadine went to an electric heater and began massaging the winter out of her finger bones.

‘No memorial will take away grief, ma’am, but it can help.’ George had not drawn such pleasure from the sheer act of talking since he was three. ‘I’ll tell you what gets me upset, though. It’s when people buy, er, you know’ – what to call them? – ‘guilt stones.’ (That sounded right.) ‘I’m thinking of… well, I won’t say his name, but he treated that kid of his like junk. And then, after the boy drowns, what does this guy do? Has us order a four thousand dollar model of the Taj Mahal.’

‘I must give you your task,’ said Nadine. ‘An ordinary commission – not a guilt stone. I need an epitaph, and something to put it on.’

‘Is this a pre-need?’ he asked.

‘A what?’

‘Do you want the stone for yourself?’

‘No. Some people very close to me are dying… my parents.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Good God – how old were her parents?

‘The stone must endure,’ she said.

‘We carry the best bonded granites.’

‘I fancy this material.’ Nadine caressed the South African sample, which was polished to a mirror brilliance. ‘I can see my face in it.’

‘Our stones have extreme density – they can take the most detailed carving. Also low porosity – no moisture gets inside, ever. The guarantee is unconditional, valid to you, your heirs, and your assignees. If a crack appears, even a hairline, you get a new monument, free.’

‘I have no heirs or assignees. My real concern is the epitaph. I want… eloquence.’

‘Eloquence?’ said George lightly. ‘Really? But why, ma’am? I mean, it’s not like it’s going to be carved in stone or anything… That’s a little joke we have around here.’ He reached into the shelves above his work table and pulled out a plastic binder containing twenty sample epitaphs, typed, double spaced. It began with Number One, IN OUR HEARTS YOU LIVE FOREVER, followed by ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS, then I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE, all the way through Number Twenty, GOD IS LOVE. He handed the epitaphs to the old woman, who studied them with pursed lips.

‘No, no,’ she insisted, tapping the paper. ‘There’s no honesty here. I want you to write it.’

‘I don’t write epitaphs, ma’am, I inscribe them.’

‘Show me how,’ said Nadine, lifting the utility knife off the work table.

As George took the knife from her, her thumb strayed across the blade. At first he thought she was unharmed – but no, her ancient flesh had split. Violently he sucked in a mouthful of air, and then she expirated with equal vigor. For several seconds they continued to co-breathe in this manner, George neglecting to exhale, Nadine to inhale.

The old woman’s blood was black. Black as her eyes. Black as South African granite. It had a sulphurous smell.

‘Would you like a bandage?’ he asked.

‘Please.’ She sucked her thumb.

His nervous fingers returned to the shelves where the epitaphs were kept and procured a tin box. He punished himself by biting his inner cheeks. Way to go, George. Always be sure to draw blood – best way to firm up a sale.

Ripping the tabs from the bandage, Nadine wrapped it around her black, burning wound.

A rubber stencil spanned George’s work table. He sliced some final touches into the inscription. IN LOVING MEMORY OF GRACE LOQUATCH… THE HAMMER GROWS SILENT. Grace Loquatch’s birth and death dates followed. She had been a carpenter. The epitaph was her sister’s inspiration.

Black blood? What awful disease had Mrs Covington contracted?

He affixed the stencil to Grace Loquatch’s monument, Design No. 4306 on Vermont blue-gray. Using a hoist-and-chain he transported it across the shop, a job that if necessary he could have accomplished with his bare hands. Grace Loquatch’s immortality moved past three droning electric heaters, the mounted pencil drafts awaiting customer approval, and several shipping crates filled with uninscribed stones from the great quarries of Canada and Vermont.

‘Then we have your self-hatred stones,’ he said. (Self-hatred stones? Yes, that wasn’t a bad term for them.) ‘The customer uses them to take revenge on himself for never having gotten around to being alive, know what I’m saying? Yesterday we buried… a woman. She came here as soon as the doctor told her about the lung tumors. “For once I want to do something really nice for myself,” she said. So we worked up this special thing, all sorts of flowers and birds. Angels. Job took twice as long as usual, but I didn’t want to charge extra, she had enough problems. I brought the pencil draft into her hospital room. She said, “It’s beautiful.” Then she said, “I don’t deserve it.”’

George maneuvered the stone inside the chamber of the ABC Electric Automatic Sandblaster, closed the door, and turned on the motor. Sharp splinters of noise filled the air. Nadine watched in fascination as the jet of aluminum oxide gushed down the hose and spewed forth. The abrasive grains ricocheted off the rubber stencil; others slipped through the incisions, hitting the granite and biting deep. Corundum dust engulfed the stone like fog.

‘A person would not last long in there,’ Nadine observed after George shut the sandblaster down. ‘You’d be turned to bone.’

‘Unless you were wearing a scopas suit.’ He entered the chamber and peeled away the stencil. Now and forever the stone said, GRACE LOQUATCH… THE HAMMER GROWS SILENT. He ran his fingers along the excellent dry wounds.

‘You and I may be the only people in Wildgrove not wearing scopas suits, George.’

‘My wife and kid don’t have any either.’ He hauled the monument out of the chamber. ‘For some of us, seven thousand dollars is a lot of money. I sure wish Holly had a suit. She’s in nursery school.’

‘The Sunflower Nursery School,’ said Nadine. ‘I go over there sometimes. It’s my hobby, you might say – watching children play. Holly is very bright, isn’t she? And decent. Yesterday the class painted rocks. Holly helped the children who didn’t know how.’

‘Really? I wish I’d been there. Do you ever baby-sit, Mrs Covington?’

‘I would be happy and grateful to baby-sit for your daughter. Are you certain you want her to have a scopas suit?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll strike a bargain with you. Do this task – write an epitaph for my parents – and I’ll see to it that Holly gets a scopas suit, free of charge.’

‘Free?’

‘Free.’

‘I don’t even know your parents.’

‘Pretend they are your parents, not mine.’

‘My parents are dead.’

‘What does it say on their headstones?’

‘Nothing. Names and dates. I’m a Unitarian.’

‘What should it say?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Let’s begin with your mother.’

‘Huh?’

‘Your mother. What was she like?’

‘You want me to tell you about my mother?’

‘Please.’

‘My mother,’ George began. ‘Well… certainly my mother should have been happier. She was always running herself down, always trumpeting her faults – kind of an inverse boaster, I guess. She had diabetes, but I think it was the high standards that killed her.’ Had he been storing up these ideas, waiting for Mrs Covington’s questions? ‘I loved her very much. She was better than she knew, and—’

‘“Better than she knew,”’ Nadine intoned. ‘There, you’ve done it – that fits my mother exactly! “She was better than she knew.” I love it.’

‘For an epitaph?’

‘Let’s discuss your father.’

‘A simpler person than my mother. Very likely he was the most unselfish man on earth.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘I think of him as always smiling. He smiled even when he was unhappy. They should have paid him a lot of money for being so nice. His job was pointless. He never found out what he was doing here. His car didn’t run right.’

‘“Never found out what he was doing here…’ My, my, that’s quite perfect – Dad is just like that. Your epitaph-writing talents are extraordinary, young man. You’ve earned that suit twice over. So, how much for the finished stone?’

‘Seven hundred and fifty dollars plus tax. We usually ask for half-payment down and the balance when your monument is ready.’

Nadine opened her handbag and drew out a roll of withered bills. ‘I don’t want change,’ she said, depositing nine hundred dollars in George’s palm. She squeezed his hand. Her skin was vital and warm, not at all the clammy membrane of a ghost. ‘And I don’t want a sales contract, either. We must trust each other.’

‘Come back on Monday and you can approve the pencil draft. We should select a lettering style now, though.’ I do trust her, George thought.

‘Any style you like will be fine. It’s the message that must be right. At the top, simply, “She was better than she knew.”’

‘No name?’

‘I’ll know who’s buried there. At the bottom, “He never found out—”’

‘“He never found out what he was doing here.”’

‘Precisely.’

‘What about dates?’

‘We needn’t trouble ourselves with dates.’

From her handbag Nadine produced a large, tattered map, unfolding it atop Grace Loquatch’s stone. George recognized the waterfront district of Boston – full color, fine detail, all the key buildings illustrated in overhead views. The paper was disintegrating along the creases. Entire warehouses had fallen into the holes.

‘This particular scopas suit store isn’t easy to find,’ she said. ‘And today your average cartographer doesn’t even bother with some of these little streets.’ She pointed to a vacant space on Moonburn Alley. ‘Here’s your destination – Theophilus Carter’s establishment, the Mad Tea Party he calls it. I’ll tell him to expect you this Saturday. Professor Carter is a tailor, a hatter, a furrier… an inventor. He makes extraordinary things for human bodies.’

She started to leave, paused, and scurried up to George, kissing him softly on the cheek. ‘I’m so pleased you’re the way you are,’ she whispered. ‘It was lovely talking with you.’

‘I enjoyed it too, ma’am, most assuredly.’

‘Fare thee well, George.’

‘Good-bye.’

On her way out of the shop, Nadine hesitated by the South African monument. ‘She was better than she knew,’ she mumbled, evidently projecting the words onto the granite. When the black gleam caught her eyes, George was certain he saw tears.

CHAPTER FOUR

Saturday. The big day. George the small-town artisan had little affection for Boston, with its self-importance and its arrogantly unlabeled streets, their plan evidently derived from a fallen wad of spaghetti. He trusted that Mrs Covington’s map would see him through the worst of it.

‘I’m going to the waterfront today,’ he told Justine. Husband and wife were snuggled together, basking in the afterglow. The chatter of cartoon squirrels and the giggles of animated elves blared into the bedroom. Working in cosmopolitan and distant Los Angeles, were the creators of these virginal diversions, George wondered, aware of the enormous quantity of screwing that their products brought about in the hinterlands of Massachusetts? ‘There’s a new memorial on Snape’s Hill. Arthur asked me to check it out. We might order one for the showroom.’

One-third truth, two-thirds lie. The Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds had indeed erected a remarkable memorial that month, a replica of a prehistoric megalith commissioned by an eccentric young man named Nathan Brown for his recently departed and allegedly Druid uncle. Arthur had not asked George to look at it, however, and the Crippen Monument Works would almost certainly not be ordering one.

He kissed her. They had not used contraception. If a girl: Aubrey. If a boy: Derek. They had been taking the necessary lack of precautions for the last ten weeks. Everything would work out. He wanted another girl, had instructed his sperm accordingly. Aubrey Paxton.

‘Is Arthur paying you to run around like this?’ asked Justine sneeringly. ‘Can’t he look at the damn rock?’

‘He’s busy today.’

‘Busy hauling Scotch bottles. Busy lifting shot glasses. It’s supposed to snow, you know.’

‘It won’t snow that much.’

But it did snow that much. Even before George had gotten their terminal-case Volkswagen van to the end of Pond Road, the first storm of December was under way. The heater fan groaned and squeaked as it shunted inadequate amounts of warmth toward his frigid toes. The wiper motors dragged frozen rubber across the windshield. Flakes came down everywhere, a billion soft collisions a second.

He turned left onto Main Street, steered the skittish vehicle past the post office, the Lizard Lounge, and the Wildgrove Mall, home of Raining Cats and Dogs. (Damn you, Harry Sweetser. I hope one of your tarantulas bites you on the ass.) A happier sight now, Sandy’s Sandwich Shop, where on Tuesday and Thursday nights, while Justine learned to act, he and Holly shared a pizza and something he was not embarrassed to call conversation; it was a tribute to children that whatever you discussed with them seemed important. A mechanical horse stood outside the shop. GIANT RIDE, the sign said. 25 CENTS, QUARTERS ONLY. INSERT COIN HERE. Holly always asked her daddy for an extra ride. The chances of her not getting one were equal to those of the sun not coming up the next day.

After the Arbor Road turn, the van rattled past John Frostig’s house. The Perpetual Security panel truck sat in the driveway, jam-packed with deterrence. George recalled his old fantasy of breaking into the truck and stealing a scopas suit for Holly. How wonderful it was not to be burdened with this temptation, to be bound instead for the Mad Tea Party and its free merchandise. Spying through the picture window, he saw little Nickie, clad in a scopas suit, watching TV. On the screen a mouse unleashed a bomb from a World War One fighter plane. As it detonated, a wave of well-being hit George.

Shoulders heaped with snow, a crooked figure was walking up the Frostig driveway. He recognized her handbag, shuddered to see her bent, defenseless frame. She should have a coat on, he thought, a sweater, a scopas suit, something besides that black dress.

Rosehaven Cemetery rushed by. Grace Loquatch’s stone – THE HAMMER GROWS SILENT – was now in place. White drifts engulfed black South African obelisks. Marble saints grinned stoically as the blizzard whipped their faces and stuck to their sides. Should I have offered Mrs Covington my down jacket? he wondered. Old ladies get cold… especially those with her kind of blood.

George switched on the car radio. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was deploying a hundred and fifty additional ground-launched Raven cruise missiles in Belgium to offset the Soviet deployment of three hundred intermediate-range SS-90 missiles in Poland. The snow slackened. George hummed along with Brahms’s String Quintet No. 2 in G Major. The van sailed into the white city.

He parked in a lot – five dollars, paid in advance, but who cares when you’re about to get a free scopas suit? – and, securing Nadine’s map under his arm, set off. The storm was over. Snow crunched beneath his boots. White sculpted mounds clung to everything, cars, fire hydrants, litter receptacles, subway entrances, all lying half-interred, vast pieces of quiet. Scopas-suited Christmas shoppers appeared on the frosted streets. George saw a Santa Claus, then an other, and another. Their scopas suits were blood red. Beards were glued to their helmets. The white strands vibrated in the wind. When the Santa Clauses rang their bells, the sound was lost in the fast bitter air.

George hurried on. He pitied the shoppers, sealed in their suits, unable to sense the magical white silence. Walking here was like being on a deep-sea dive into the heart of winter. He wore a wool cap, wool mittens, and a down jacket, but they were not enough – the wind still pinched his nose, stung his cheeks. Curling his fingers into self-warming fists, the epicure of everyday pleasures wished for hot coffee.

By the time he reached Snapes Hill, he had started doubting the wisdom of his trip. A free scopas suit? Just for making up a couple of silly epitaphs? More likely the black-blooded old woman was playing some senile joke. (‘I have always been with you…’ Nut talk.) He looked at the prehistoric megalith. Crude, humorless, and stern, it towered over stones of more conventional design. Here at the Snapes Hill Burial Grounds a canny observer could witness the entire evolution of a technology. In one section rose the limestone memorials, names, dates, and fond remembrances smeared away by decades of Boston weather. In an adjacent area leaned markers of slate, a sturdier proposition, inscriptions soft and worn but still readable. And finally, of course, the precincts of immortal granite, more permanent than anything a Pharaoh had ever demanded.

He left the graveyard, walked on, and suddenly it appeared, the coffee shop of his humble dream, the Holistic Donut. He went inside, treated himself to coffee with actual cream plus two donuts filled with a wondrous white goo. The waitress’s breasts flowed lushly against her scopas suit.

Had he and Justine conceived an Aubrey Paxton that morning? George began to whistle. Daddies could sense these things. Father’s intuition.

Still whistling, he stepped out of the Holistic Donut. He consulted Nadine’s map, charted his course. He turned left, went down an obscure street called Gooseberry Place, turned right, followed something called Pitchblende Lane, turned left, entered Moonburn Alley. It was a twisted, cobblestoned passageway pinched between rows of shops – cheese shop, rare coins shop, used books shop, clock repair shop – each snug and quaint, crescents of snow resting in their windows. Golden light spilled through the panes, marking the ground with shapes that George decided were elf shadows. Tonight, he thought, I’ll tell Holly a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.

The sign advertising Theophilus Carter’s establishment was a hearty slab of oak bearing a painted teapot captioned THE MAD TEA PARTY – REMARKABLE THINGS FOR HUMAN BODIES. Under that, PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS CARTER – TAILOR, HATTER, FURRIER, INVENTOR, PROPRIETOR. Across the front of the Mad Tea Party ran a bellied, multi-paned window displaying a definitive collection of hats: beaver, homburg, derby, tricorne, fedora, slouch, bowler, fez, stovepipe, even a king’s bejeweled crown.

A frail carillon from three tin bells announced George’s entrance. The Mad Tea Party was dark and musty. It was also, he surmised, extremely popular – customers jammed the shop to the walls – but then he realized that this impression owed entirely to the several dozen mannequins stationed about, their reflections inhabiting a multitude of full-length mirrors. Like the hats in the front window, the mannequins’ clothing was extraordinarily varied, with no fashion or era neglected. George moved through a tangled mass of gowns, togas, kimonos, doublets, jerkins, sarongs, crinolines, tunics, and shining armor. Could these all be scopas suits? he wondered. Had Theophilus Carter figured out how to combine deterrence with style?

‘So tell me, my good man, why is a raven like a writing desk?’ A British accent, precise, aristocratic.

George stumbled free of the congested clothing like a jungle explorer breaking into a clearing. ‘What?’

Behind the counter sat the most disturbingly comic person he had ever seen. The salesman was beetle-browed, sharp-nosed, rabbit-toothed, and small. Polka dots speckled his large four-in-hand tie. Wild red hair escaped from beneath his top hat.

‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ the salesman said again. He rushed forward, rubbing his hands together as if lathering a bar of soap. He was on the downward side of middle age, yet his voice and movements had a robust, rat-a-tat quality. ‘A vulture then.’ He issued a chuckle that might have come from a jack-in-the-box. ‘Why is a vulture like a writing desk?’

‘I’m not here for riddles.’

‘I can tell you why a vulture is like a raven, but the answer is distasteful, involving carrion and bad table manners.’ The squeal of automobile brakes suddenly penetrated the shop from Moonburn Alley, conjuring up images of narrowly averted death. ‘The human body is an egg. “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall: Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and—” Now why in the world would anybody expect horses to be able to put an egg back together? People were naive in those days.’

‘I’m looking for Professor Carter.’

The salesman pulled off his top hat, and his hair spilled out like released champagne. ‘Also known as the Tailor of Thermonuclear Terror. Also known as the Sartor of the Second Strike. Also known as the MAD Hatter.’

Now we’re getting somewhere, George told himself, although he sensed that this situation would not endure.

‘But if I am the Mutual Assured Destruction Hatter,’ Theophilus trilled, ‘then where is the Mutual Assured Destruction Tea Party? In Geneva, of course. Entry number three in the Strategic, Tactical, and Anti-Ballistic Limitation and Equalization talks – STABLE III to you. The Soviets and the Americans sit down at the STABLE table, and the Soviets say, “We don’t like that MAD Hatter you’ve got sitting over there. Nobody mutually assures Mother Russia’s destruction.” And the Americans reply, “Then meet the MARCH Hare, named for our new war-fighting strategy, Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities. MARCH puts the fun back in nuclear war – you can actually do MARCH.”’

‘I really don’t want to hear about this, Professor Carter.’

‘Quiet, sir! So the MARCH Hare comes bounding in, and Alice says, “Now that Russia’s forces are the same as America’s, both sides will make reductions.” And the Hare says, “Russia’s forces are not the same as America’s, they are equivalent, which means you’ll get reductions when Frosty the Snowman conquers hell.”’

‘Professor Carter, I am losing patience,’ George snapped.

‘Hold your tongue, sir! “And don’t forget,” says the Hare, “they are equivalent because the Soviets began matching the American buildup necessitated by the early sixties missile gap that did not exist.”’

‘I am George Paxton,’ the tomb inscriber stated calmly, deliberately, ‘and I would appreciate it if you would let me speak. Nadine Covington said you have a scopas suit for my daughter. If she was mistaken, then—’

‘Mistaken? No, I’m the one who’s mistaken. It’s the mercury we use to cure our felt. Makes me mistaken. Crazy as well. The doctors say there’s no cure, because I’ve used it on the felt, but I feel cured, I really do, never cured more felt or felt more cured. Mrs Covington, did you say? Oh, yes, a sterling woman, sterling. You could serve tea off her. The old girl and I have a lot in common. One nose. Two eyes. Black blood. We have always been with you, waiting to get in. Of course I have a suit for you, George. Let me dig it out. Meanwhile, have some wine.’

‘I don’t see any wine.’

‘There isn’t any.’

The MAD Hatter vanished behind velvet drapes, returning almost instantaneously with a child-size scopas suit, one unlike any George had ever seen.

The material was golden, silky, and phosphorescent, bathing the shop in a bright, boiling-butter glow. The boots and gloves suggested vulcanized jade. George pulled off his mitten and touched a sleeve. Warm milk.

‘This is the only one I shall ever make,’ said the Hatter. ‘I raised the caterpillars myself – fed them on vitriol and metal shavings so they’d put out tough silk. It takes a hefty fabric to get through a thermonuclear exchange, George. They were marvelous caterpillars. They smoked hookahs and sat on mushroom clouds.’

When Theophilus flopped the luminous invention on the counter, George thought he saw golden sparks.

‘Is it as good as an Eschatological?’ he asked warily.

‘Better. It actually works.’

‘Then why don’t you make more?’

‘That will be obvious once you read the contract.’

‘I thought it was free!’

‘If you want the suit, you must sign the sales contract.’ The Hatter reached behind the counter, drawing out a crisp, rattly sheaf of printed paper and a fountain pen. ‘Here,’ he said, sliding the paper toward George. ‘Put your John Hancock, or the founding father of your choice, on the line.’

‘I don’t understand this,’ said George.

‘Just sign it.’

‘“Complicity.” That means…?’

‘Partnership in wrongdoing.’

‘Sounds like I could go to jail.’

‘Well, you might go to jail anyway. I mean, suppose you woke up tomorrow morning and murdered somebody. They’d surely put you in jail.’

‘STABLE agreements. You said they were the Strategic, Tactical, and… Anti-something.’

‘Anti-Ballistic Limitation and Equalization. Hey, George, if you don’t want the suit, I’ll give it to somebody who does.’

‘MARCH Plan. Moderate Attacks—’

‘Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities. Just another war-winning strategy. Old wine in new bottles. Don’t worry about it. Sign.’

‘“No-first-use,” it says.’

‘As opposed to no-second-use, no-third-use, no-seventeenth-use… Have you forgotten how to write your name?’

George picked up the pen. When Holly was born, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I don’t ever want anything bad to happen to her.’ He signed. The minors recorded his deed. The mannequins fixed him with their plasticine stares, whispering among themselves.

He took the warm, soft suit in his arms. He felt as if he were hugging Holly. Her incandescence poured through him.

‘This is her Christmas present,’ he said.

The Hatter picked up the sales contract with a carefulness he might have accorded a china figurine. Taking off his top hat, he stuffed the paper inside.

‘I hope that your daughter enjoys many years of not using her Christmas present,’ he said, complementing his rabbit teeth with a smile that George did not find entirely benign.

‘Thank you.’

George shoved the precious garment under his arm, plowed through the crowded shop, and yanked the door open. He waited for the bells to settle down.

‘Holly is safe now,’ he asserted quietly to the mannequins, and he was off.

CHAPTER FIVE

Complicity. Partnership in wrongdoing. Am I a wrongdoer? wondered George as his van chugged away from the snow-muffled city. He glanced at the fabulous suit, which he had carefully strapped into the infant car seat. It fit perfectly. The golden helmet seemed to smile. You did it, Paxton. You brought it off. Merry Christmas, Holly.

But then his palms grew damp, and his bowels tightened. All the way up Route 2A, he studied his rear-view mirror for police cruisers. The traffic lights became eyes on the lookout for signers of scopas suit sales contracts. At each red light, he half-expected some jackbooted commandant to open the van door and arrest him.

He turned on the radio. Things were terrible in Indonesia. Malaysia was doomed. George glanced in the rear-view mirror. In Costa Rica terror was the norm. In Libya people’s tongues were being removed without their permission. George checked the mirror. Assistant Defense Secretary Wengernook, of scopas suit commercial fame, gave an interview taped earlier that day. He was asked whether, because the new Soviet ICBM deployments could reach the American heartland in eighteen and a half minutes, the Strategic Air Command was now putting its own longrange missiles on a so-called hair trigger. Security and flexibility go hand in hand, Wengernook replied.

Bundled in snow, pine trees and stone fences coasted by, George clutched his seatbelt strap, checked the mirror. Holly was going to get a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. She would find it standing under the tree, right next to her civil defenses. George had bought the Mary Merlin in October – on the very day Holly had seen the magazine advertisement and asked whether the doll was something to which Santa Claus had access. Bitter experience had taught George not to leave doll purchases to the last minute. Between the Mary Merlin in his closet and the scopas suit riding next to him, he felt astonishingly secure.

He looked at the road – the solid, reliable open road with its recently plowed surface and shoulders of spangly snow. Not far ahead, an old wooden bridge reached across the Wiskatonic River. A sign sailed past: WILDGROVE CENTER – THREE MILES. Next to the sign, a talented and macabre-minded sculptor had fashioned a snowman whose head was a skull. The van rumbled over the Wildgrove Bridge, which for an antique seemed to George remarkably sturdy.

Mary Merlin dolls were modeled to suggest precocious female babies. They came in three races. Mary Merlin could be made to perform a repertoire of magic tricks, such as pulling scarves from a cardboard tube and causing a coin to disappear from—

Something extraordinary happened… Something far more astonishing than a scarf materializing in a cardboard tube… Something that the United States and the Soviet Union had been spending large amounts of diligence and money to bring about. What happened was that the winter, which would be officially recognized by the calendar in a mere three days, and which only that morning had smothered southern New England with snow, went away.

It went away in a brilliant burst. The light hit George from the direction of his hometown, the brightest experience a human being could have in those days, a searing supernatural blaze, dazzling, hot, as if a vast array of flashbulbs were being fired at some cosmic wedding celebration. The sky hissed. The snowman perished, vaporized. Static leaped from the radio. The van motor expired with a whine. George thought the sun had crashed to earth.

Jesus Lord God!

The light bleached his retinas, making his vision a luminous void. His face became an unbroken first-degree burn, the pain reminiscent of a severe sunburn. The blind, dead van glided forward. Staring into the horrible, endless, sunny hole, George applied the brakes and bailed out through the passenger door. Had he lingered – instant death, for among the many quick, loud, and evil events that follow the detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead is a wave of pressurized air that transforms automobile windshields into barrages of glass bullets.

Jesus Lord God in Heaven!

The blast built to a crescendo, pummeling the van and lifting him off the ground. Briefly he flew. He hit the Wiskatonic, skimming across its surface like a tossed pebble. The water soothed his face, but he did not notice. Relief was agony, north was south, odd was even, fair was foul. Afloat on his back, he became driftwood. Blind. Eyeless, The wind hated him, meting out this ill-proportioned punishment for his signature, and the sky hated him, and the trees, and the moon, and the MAD Hatter, and Harry Sweetser, and John Frostig. The river hated him, and so it sent him smashing into a log, crack, everything knocked from his head, no, God, please—

He awoke on a mattress of silt – an hour lost? a day? – silt everywhere, silt to eat, to breathe. He flipped over, realized that his stunned retinas were recovering. A dead leaf lay several inches from his nose. An ant crawled on it. Ant… grasshopper… Aesop… roach. Eyes back, thank you, God. He looked up. No birds, no sun, millions of black specks awhirl like insects, smoke weaving through the sky, what sky, no sky, the sky had fallen, Chicken Little lay boiling in a forgotten pot. He stood up, knee deep in the river, spitting wads of silt from his mouth. His face ached. Dust clogged the air, each mote acrid and black. The trees had become roaring masses of flame. Whatever had happened, he was certain that it was important enough to be on the evening news that night; people would be talking about this for a long time. He looked toward where the fireball had been. A vast ring of pink smoke attacked the clouds, frothing atop a ten-mile-high column of gas and windblown dirt. In the late twentieth century such shapes had come to symbolize madness, but the effect on George of this particular celestial mushroom was to yank him fully into sanity. ICBM deployments. Counterforce strike. The Russians wanted Wildgrove’s apples. I am not to blame.

His terror was glue, he could not budge. The Wiskatonic seeped into his boots and through his socks. From somewhere far away a voice cried, over and over, ‘Find Justine! Find Holly!’ For nearly thirty minutes George could focus on nothing but those cries, which he did not realize came from himself.

Pieces of Wildgrove protruded from the silt – chairs, tables, lamps, bureaus, television sets. A smoke detector lay buzzing on a rock. George was fairly certain he saw Emily McCarthy’s birdbath and Clarence Weatherbee’s ceramic Negro. He would have to tell his neighbors where these belongings were.

A logjam of corpses spanned the Wiskatonic. Their scopas suits were in a dreadful state. The material was mutilated, Winco Synthefill VII leaking through split seams. Most of the helmets were shattered, so that the corpses wore jagged fiberglass clown-collars.

Townspeople marched down to the river – fractured helmets, mangled fabric, torn backpacks – walking stiffly, arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes. Synthefill bits were fused to their skin. A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes. Driven as lemmings, graceless as zombies, the marchers tumbled over the banks and splashed into the water, rising to the surface as buoyant, lifeless hunks of local citizenry. All about, the upheaved earth was settling – dust, dirt, ashes by the ton – a radioactive rain on the final parade: the drum majors were skeletons; the baton twirlers tossed human bones. Vomitus and diarrhea gushed from most of the marchers. George, who not long ago had felt hated, now felt hatred instead. He hated these survivors with their worthless suits, their unsanitary behavior, their junk strewn across creation, their agony. They really made him mad.

The van sat under the bridge. A lunatic had gone after it with a large can opener. Mud slopped out of the shaggy metallic wounds. Thrown from the infant car seat, the golden suit lay loose-limbed against the front bumper like a marionette awaiting animation.

The Hatter’s masterwork! Holly’s Christmas present! The one suit in the world that would work! George’s paralysis ended. Hobbling forward, he recalled some points from John Frostig’s sales pitch: fire, poison fumes, fallout… If I get the suit home, he thought, she’ll be able to leave this mess by any route she wants, walking through flames if need be, crossing fields of deadly vapor, free as a bird.

Golden suit draped across his arms, George started for town. The terrain was like some enormous gas stove, its countless burners turned up high. In the soot-soaked heavens, the mushroom cloud had become a wide gray canopy.

A mass of shocked and rubble-pounded refugees wove among the fires, improvising roads. George moved against the tide. Was Justine in this retreat? Holly? Find my family, God! (There are no Unitarians in thermonuclear holocausts.) Please, God! Justine! Holly! No. Nobody but ambulatory cadavers ruined by unbelievable burns and implausible wounds. This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot… He saw torsos more cratered than the surface of the moon. Skin fell away like leaves of decayed wet lettuce, spirals of flesh dangled like black tinsel. He got angrier and angrier, he really couldn’t forgive these people for having ended up so badly. What had they been doing, fooling around with his sandblaster? Fragments of the refugees’ possessions – metal, wood, glass – had been driven into them like nails. One woman lacked a lower jaw. An old man held his left eyeball in his cupped hands. Damn them – how dare they come out in public like this? Tearful parents carried dead children. The sound of mass weeping engulfed him like a horrible odor. And still another variety of suffering – thirst. Acute, cruel, infinite, radiation-induced thirst. Cries for water rose above the sobbing and the shrieks and the bellowing fires. Damn them all to hell.

The roads belonged to the walking wounded. The rest of Wild-grove belonged to the immobiles. Keep going. Don’t stop for anything.

A six-year-old girl lay in a ditch, clutching a teddy bear and whimpering, ‘I’ll be good.’

A fat man sat on an overturned federal mail deposit box, gripping a stack of Christmas cards. He kept trying to pull back the lid, but it was melted shut.

A seeing-eye dog, its scopas suit and fur seared away, licked the face of its dead master. ‘Somebody put the fur back on that dog!’ George shouted.

A middle-aged plumber held his wrench toward the sky and made twisting motions, as if trying to stop the dust leaks.

At the base of a charred, blasted tree, a boy of about two snuggled against his dead father and pressed a candy cane to the corpse’s lips. ‘Daddy, food?’ he asked.

Several children gathered around a man whose tattered scopas suit was in the Santa Claus style. The man sang snatches of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ One little girl was telling Santa Claus to find her parents. Another was saying she wanted a sled. A boy with a mangled hand was asking Santa Claus for a thumb.

Why wasn’t anybody helping these people? Somebody should be doing something!

A horse blocked George’s path. Once it had sat outside Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. GIANT RIDE. 25 CENTS. QUARTERS ONLY. INSERT COIN HERE. The chances of Holly not getting an extra ride were equal to those of the sun not… Previously the horse had lacked an ear. Now it lacked both ears, its left front leg, and its hindquarters. The horse’s name, according to Holly, was Buttercup.

The third-degree burn victims lay on their sides, backs, and stomachs, quivering piles of excruciation, daring not to move, naked beyond flesh. A cyclone made of screams moved across the land. As the mobile survivors passed by, the third-degree burn victims begged to be shot to death with scopas suit pistols, their own hands (weeping, pulpy rubble) being useless to the task. ‘Somebody please kill me,’ the third-degree burn victims gasped with curious politeness.

God, make this stop. Help them, God.

George began to run, desperate to reach a place, any place, where indecent death was not. He dodged fires, circumvented walls of smoke, leaped over corpses. Large sections of Wildgrove had become beaches of broken glass; it would take a thousand years to put the town together again. He went past burning houses, pulverized automobiles, stray toilets, lost sinks, fallen traffic lights, smashed STOP signs, wayward CHILDREN – DRIVE CAREFULLY signs, severed water mains, uprooted fire hydrants, and telephone wires lying on the ground like dead pythons.

The stones of Rosehaven Cemetery had survived the disaster splendidly. Most had been torn from the earth, but George could find no gouges or fissures. A familiar place. A place to get one’s bearings. Granite is truly forever, he thought.

Dead Wildgrovians were sprawled on the grave sites as if seeking admittance. To George’s left lay old Mrs Mulligan’s stone, Design No. 2115 in Oklahoma pink. He remembered inscribing ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS on it. To his right was a memorial to the Prescotts, Louis and Barbara. ERECTED IN LOVING MEMORY BY THEIR CHILDREN, the stone said. (In truth, only their daughter Kathy had erected the stone; their deplorable son Kevin, who had wanted little to do with his parents while they were alive, wanted even less to do with them dead.) The blast had opened a ravine from one end of Rosehaven Cemetery to the other. Several previously interred Wildgrovians had fallen into it; they were mainly bones. Such was the extent of observable resurrection.

George faced north, the direction of the post office, but the intervening smoke and dust were opaque. He saw the post office anyway, saw it in his thoughts, and beyond the post office he saw the lake, and on the shore he saw his cottage, and inside his cottage he saw Justine and Holly packing their suitcases, feeding the pets, waiting for Daddy. He merely had to go there. Giving the golden suit a quick little hug, he started off.

The most convenient route home took George across acres of black dirt and directly into a crater. Cautiously he clambered down the pulpy walls, from which cut cables and broken pipes protruded like diced earthworms in a newly dug grave. Poisoned by radioisotopes, drained by their wounds, hundreds of dis-oriented refugees had died crossing the pit. He picked his way through a mottle of white corpses.

The center. Ashes, stench, dead refugees, another survivor. The man was naked but for his utility belt, a few hunks of scopas suit, and a cracked, Humpty-Dumpty helmet. He negotiated the rubble methodically. Now and then he would kneel down, unzip a corpse’s suit, and study with scientific intensity the dead flesh beneath. Approaching, George recognized the survivor, who was examining the corpse of a child.

‘Tsk, tsk,’ the survivor muttered. ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk.’

The attack had wrecked John Frostig’s good looks. Much of his nose was gone, and all of one ear. His brow was a swamp of blood and perspiration.

‘John?’

‘Afternoon, buddy-buddy.’ The blaze in John’s eyes, the cackle in his voice, would have made Theophilus Carter seem by comparison as rational as a grammarian. ‘Looks like we’ve got a failure-to-meet-specifications problem here, eh? Of course, with the fallout still trickling down, it’s too early to say how they’ll handle the cumulative doses, but obviously we should beef up thermal shielding and overpressure protection by at least twenty percent, at least twenty percent, wouldn’t you say? All these holes in the fabric – shoddy workmanship, plain and simple. Those jackasses in quality control are going to hear from me, you’d better believe it, they’re going to hear from John Frostig. They’re going to hear from Alice and Lance and Gary – shit, George, have you ever seen so many dead people? Gives me the berries, I don’t mind telling you. They’re going to hear from Gary, too. And Lance and Gary and… and—’ The scopas suit salesman, who had probably not wept since the doctor swatted his rump to prime his lungs, was weeping now, torrents of stored tears.

George said, ‘Your showroom used to be around here, didn’t it?’

‘Fucking Cossacks!’

‘It’s amazing you aren’t dead.’

‘I was at the Lizard… a quick drink, that’s all, and a minute of talk with… a lady, nothing wrong with that, two minutes of talk, because my boy… Nickie – you just asked about him, didn’t you? – well, he’s off sledding at the Barlows with this nice old person we use for a baby-sitter, the Covington lady, though I can’t even find the Barlows, which is where my boy is, with Mrs Covington, who’s a good baby-sitter, we can definitely recommend her, so I’m sure he’s alive, I mean, the units can’t all have been defective, just the Palo Alto line, probably – the Osaka ones must be okay, especially Nickie’s, who was sledding at the Barlows – right? – broken suit or no.’ The salesman groaned, and a viscous mix of water and pink solids poured from his mouth. ‘The point is, I’m not having my company associated with a cheapjack product, people will lose faith. The customer is always right – you probably learned that at the tomb works, eh, buddy-buddy? If we don’t get a better performance out of these units next time, why, the whole industry will go down the toilet. What’s that gold thing?’

‘Scopas suit.’

‘Never saw a gold one before.’

‘It’s special. Custom-made.’

‘Kind of small.’

‘It’s for Holly – her Christmas present. She’s going to get this and a Mary Merlin doll.’

‘You’re mistaken,’ said John, who had drawn the Colt .45 from his utility belt and was now aiming it at George. ‘It’s for Nickie. He’s sledding with Mrs Covington. Damn good baby-sitter.’

George vomited. ‘Forget it, John,’ he said, wiping his mouth.

The pistol was ugly. It did not waver. Is this where the bomb had come from? No, too small. An airplane had brought it, or a missile. Was there any hope? Yes, there was, lying in the holster of Holly’s suit…

‘I’ll bet it doesn’t even work,’ said the salesman. ‘It’s not an Eschatological.’

George made a swift, calculated grab toward the utility belt. He heard a sound like a firecracker exploding.

The bullet rammed through the left glove of Holly’s suit and entered his stomach, throwing him to the ground. The suit embraced him. He felt nauseated, terrified. A burning poker had spitted him, drilling his bowels. It hurt more than anything possibly could, and yet it did not hurt enough, did not punish him sufficiently for failing to bring her salvation home.

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry, George. I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t even want that stupid suit. You shouldn’t have moved. I hope I haven’t killed you. Nickie’s off sledding. Jesus, what a horrible day this has been. Have I killed you? I told you not to move!’

John slid the Colt .45 muzzle between his lips. He moved it back and forth as if operating a bicycle pump, licked the metal, pushed it tight against the roof of his mouth. Odd behavior, George thought, for a man who has just survived a thermonuclear war. There was a pop. Something coral-colored and soggy flew out of the back of John’s head, and he fell.

George looked heavenward. A bloated, bellied shape wheeled across the scorched sky. It had a scraggy neck and a beak like the jaws of a steam shovel. Its eyes were yellow, glowing, crosshatched by veins. The beating of its wings, loud and violent as a stampede, raised a wind that stirred the ashes in the pit and heaped them on George’s body.

He named the creature. Vulture. The mightiest vulture in the world, big as a pterodactyl. It had come to pick his bones.

CHAPTER SIX

Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre, who could see beyond the horizon, stood in the periscope room of his strategic submarine, watching the Commonwealth of Massachusetts burn down.

‘God help them,’ he mumbled, pressing his good eye against Periscope Number One. Each town’s flames had a distinctive tint. Stockbridge burned orange, Worcester violet, Wellesley gold, Newton vermillion.

The periscope was a wondrous blend of mysticism and know-how. Its lenses were made of beryl, the very substance from which Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century wizard, had fashioned a looking glass that enabled him to observe events occurring a hundred miles away. When Sugar Brook National Laboratory, working under a cost-plus contract from the United States Department of Defense, had aligned these fabulous glass disks according to doodles found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and then linked them to an array of geostationary satellites, the result was a periscope of infinite range. The US Congress had recently bought the American people forty-two such devices, one for every Philadelphia-class fleet ballistic missile submarine in the Navy. The people were for the most part surprised and delighted by these gifts, and pleased to learn that the people of the Soviet Union did not have any yet.

Sverre narrowed the focal length, bringing the glowing mass of Boston into view. Confused sea gulls soared through the skies above the harbor. They were on fire. He closed his right eye and opened his left, which was made of gutta-percha. There, that was better, no burning gulls. Each evening Sverre would remove his rubber eye, soak it in gin, and replace it, whereupon the alcohol would seep into his brain, giving him a unique and copacetic high. In these troubled times, it was the only way he could get to sleep.

Although Sverre could monitor places as remote as India and Argentina, he could not see what was happening on his own ship. For this he relied on his executive officer. ‘Mister Grass,’ he growled into the intercom, ‘bring me a status report.’

It would take Lieutenant Grass several minutes to reach the periscope room. Time for a drink. Time for two. Sverre yanked a bottle from his claw-hammer coat, poured gin into a Styrofoam cup. Black fur thrived on the sides of his stovepipe hat. Dark, silky hairs sprouted along his cheeks, rushing down his jaw and coming together in great torrents of beard.

A stanza of poetry jumped spontaneously into his mind. Grabbing a booklet called The MK-49 Torpedo: Repairs and Servicing, he turned it over and scribbled:

Lieutenant Grass came in, brass buttons sparkling, white uniform croaking softly with starch. His freckles looked newly polished. He loved the Navy.

Sverre crossed out the stanza. ‘Can we leave this ghastly place?’

‘They pulled the man free an hour ago,’ said the exec. ‘He’s in surgery.’

‘Surgery? Hell. I’m not delivering any corpses, that’s not how my orders read. Prognosis?’

‘Fair. The bullet probably would have finished him, but it went through some kid’s scopas suit first. He’s a strong fellow – carved tombstones for a living.’

‘Tombstones?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What do they want with him?’

‘Beats me, Captain.’

‘Contaminated?’

‘Over two hundred and fifty rads, the needle said.’

‘Got any more bad news, as long as you’re here? Tell me the ward can’t handle another case.’

‘Well, they’re still treating Wengernook and Tarmac, but even after Paxton’s admitted they won’t be near capacity. This is a fine boat they gave you, sir.’

Sverre contacted the control room and ordered the diving officer to bring them around. ‘Take her down, Mister Sparks. Two hundred feet.’

‘I’m curious, sir,’ said Lieutenant Grass. ‘When they picked up Paxton, he was at ground zero – right in the crater. A crazy place to be, wouldn’t you say? What do you suppose he was doing there?’

Turning his good eye to the periscope, the captain watched the red, boiling waters of Boston Harbor splash across the deck. ‘He was doing what we’re doing,’ said Sverre. ‘Trying to get home.’

‘Facts,’ a woman said. ‘You need facts, Mr Paxton. Facts will steady your mind.’

George became conscious of several varieties of pain. He concluded, with mixed emotions, that he was still alive. Despite the bullet from John Frostig, the thermonuclear bomb, and his keen desire to be dead, he had evidently not yet left the world – unless, of course, the blurry creature standing near him was an angel.

‘Facts. You are in the radiation ward aboard US Navy submarine SSBN 713 City of New York, out of McMurdo Station. Displacement – thirty-four thousand tons submerged. Draft – sixty-five feet. Delivery system – thirty-six tubes loaded with Multiprong missiles. Warheads – W-76 reentry vehicles, eight per bus, five hundred kilotons each.’

Fever coursed through George’s body. His brow oozed sweat. His bowels ached. His stomach churned sour milk. Barbed wire flossed his brain.

‘There is a document,’ she said. ‘The McMurdo Sound Agreement. Six names appear in it. You are all being evacuated to the Ross Ice Shelf.’

George suddenly realized why the angel was so fuzzy. He was inside a plastic tent. She was outside.

‘Aurhgh,’ George responded. Two marbles seemed to be lodged in his throat. As if to diagnose the problem, he inserted his fingers. The back of his hand was covered with purple spots. His gums were bleeding.

‘Your benefactor is Operation Erebus. When they rescued you, there was a bullet in your stomach and a scopas suit in your arms. The bullet came out last week. The suit is now in the cabin you will occupy if and when your convalescence begins.’

Why is my head so cold? George wondered. Your head is cold because you are hairless, his fingertips revealed. You are as bald as a slab of South African granite.

‘Final fact. For the last six days you have been unconscious, during which interval you passed from the prodromal phase of radiation sickness through the latency phase and into the life-or-death phase. And that’s your situation. I’m sorry it’s not better.’

Beyond his physical pains lay additional anguish, emotions that rested on him like the stones with which his New England ancestors had pressed witches to death. There was a stone for loss, a stone for fear, a stone for Holly, a stone for—

‘I have a wife,’ he said. Four words, four swallows of acid. A coughing fit possessed him, and he expectorated onto the pillow case. Dots of blood were suspended in the sputum. ‘And a daughter,’ he rasped. ‘I’m supposed to tell her a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.’ He struggled to sit up, collapsed in a heap of pain and fatigue. ‘Ice shelf? Submarine? You mean – under the water? Why are there purple spots on my hands? What’s in my throat?’

‘The spots indicate intradermal bleeding. The things in your throat are infected tonsils. My name is Morning Valcourt. I’m a psychotherapist, and I intend to help you.’

George coughed, less severely than before. He vibrated with fever. His lungs felt as bloated as unmilked udders.

After strapping a surgical mask over her face, Dr Valcourt pushed back a corner of the tent and entered.

One glance was enough to disprove George’s angel theory. A silk kimono enveloped a body that was decidedly secular. The woman’s eyes were a saturated blue-green, her hair thick and red like the coils in the electric heaters back at the Crippen Monument Works. Six days unconscious, is that what she said? Then he had missed his Monday appointment with Mrs Covington.

‘What you must realize… just after you were evacuated, another warhead found its target. Direct hit.’ She came closer, her mask pulsing with her breaths. ‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Do you understand?’

His dislike of Dr Valcourt was not far from disgust. How did she know whether anybody got out? What right had she to speak of such things?

She pulled away and stepped backward, so that the plastic veil parted and then dropped, walling them off from each other once again.

‘Please kill me,’ he said, quoting the Wildgrove burn victims as calmly as if asking for a glass of water.

Dr Valcourt paced behind the milky tent. She seemed to emanate from an unfocused movie projector. ‘My job is not to kill you, but to cure you.’

‘Of radiation sickness?’

‘Of shame. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. To live through a disaster like this, where so many died – it’s a terrible burden on your psyche.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Home.’

‘Wildgrove?’

‘Antarctica.’

‘Please leave me alone.’

‘Here’s a straight opinion for you, Mr Paxton. That’s something you won’t often get from a psychotherapist – especially from a survivor’s guilt specialist – so listen carefully. I think you have a duty to learn why your name is in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. After you have found out – do what you will. Eat, drink, and be merry – or curse God, and die. I don’t especially care which.’

There were footsteps, and the distasteful psychotherapist melted away…

Curse God, and die. In the Book of Job, the Lord’s most pious follower is subjected to a kind of wager between God and Satan. With God’s sponsorship, Satan inflicts on Job everything short of a thermonuclear warhead. Job loses his oxen, sheep, camels, sheasses, servants, sons, and health.

‘Curse God, and die,’ his wife advises. Job is sitting on ashes at the time.

‘My bowels boil, and rest not,’ complains Job, who does not have the proverbial patience of Job. ‘I am a brother to jackals, and a companion to ostriches. My skin is black, and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with the heat. Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, and my pipe into the voice of them that weep.’

Curse God, and die. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.

If one had to say something good about acute radiation sickness, it would be this: either it kills you or it doesn’t. Knowing that success was a distinct possibility, the medical staff of the City of New York got busy. They cultured George’s mucus, blood, and stool, then loaded him up with appropriate antibiotics. They stuck a tube in his arm and gave him a new set of white blood cells. They bathed him in antiseptic solutions every twelve hours, shampooed him with chlorhexidine gluconate every twenty-four hours, and trimmed his fingernails and toenails every other day.

To the end of his life, George would be haunted by the notion that the onslaught of gamma rays had planted the seeds of God-knew-what diseases, but the United States Navy was still within its rights when they pronounced him well. His fever broke, his hair grew back, his purple spots vanished, his tonsils shrank, his lungs drained, his gums stopped bleeding, his platelet and white cell counts became exemplary. The paramedics assured him that he had inhaled very little fallout and that, thanks to his precipitous departure from ground zero via Operation Erebus, his cumulative dose had been well under three hundred rads.

‘More like two hundred and eighty rads, if you want my opinion,’ said the medical officer, a lieutenant senior-grade named Brust. ‘You’re in great shape, believe me. There’s only one thing we couldn’t fix.’

‘Oh?’ said George.

‘Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’ Dr Brust was a small, tubby man with a face so incongruously gaunt it seemed to be on its own separate diet. ‘Blame the radiation.’

‘What are you talking about?’ George asked.

‘You’re sterile,’ said Dr Brust evenly.

‘Sterile?’

‘Sterile as a mule.’ Black stains covered Brust’s surgical gown. ‘I can’t imagine that it would make much difference to you at this point.’

‘My wife and I were planning…’ George closed his eyes.

‘Didn’t they tell you about your wife?’

‘Yes.’ When he opened his eyes, he saw only his tears.

‘I wouldn’t worry about my gonads if I were you,’ said Dr Brust. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

They moved George out of the radiation unit into an ordinary sick bay.

‘You in the McMurdo Sound Agreement?’ asked the patient in the next bed, a long, nervous, weasel-bodied man with an expression so intense George could not look at it without squinting.

‘Yes. George Paxton. You in it too?’

‘At the top of the list. Love to lean over and shake your hand, friend, but I’ve got this tube up my silo.’

‘Me too.’

‘Ever hear of Robert Wengernook?’

‘Haven’t I seen you on television?’

‘Ah, another one of those,’ said Wengernook with mock distress. ‘Here I am in the goddamn D-O-D, and everybody thinks of me as the guy who does the scopas suit commercials. For my hobby, I’m the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.’

‘My wife always wanted to be in a scopas suit commercial. The one with the lady knight.’

‘Really? Your wife was in that? Small world.’

‘No, she wanted to be. She would have been right for it too, because Justine was very pretty, everybody thought so. They say a warhead got her.’

‘You’ve got to believe me, George, I really thought the suits were good.’ Wengernook’s twitchy fingers knitted themselves into elaborate sculptures. His tongue, which was remarkably long, darted in and out like a chameleon’s. ‘I guess it’s Japan’s way of getting back at us.’

‘For Hiroshima?’

‘I was thinking more of import quotas.’ He lit a cigarette, puffed. ‘God, this is all so awful. You might suppose that on a submarine there wouldn’t be much to remind a man of his family, but that’s not true. I’ll see some fire extinguisher, and that gets me picturing the one I gave Janet last Christmas. You wouldn’t think a fire extinguisher would have such emotionalism attached to it.’

‘I’d like to talk about something else.’

‘Same here.’

But the tomb inscriber and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had nothing more to say to each other.

At the end of the week they transferred George to a cabin more suggestive of a civilian ocean liner than of a military vessel. The luxury suffocated him. He wanted Justine to be there, making fun of the kitschy floral wallpaper and reveling in the cornucopia that was the City of New York’s galley – eggs Benedict breakfasts, steamer clam lunches, lobster dinners – all served up by cheerful, redfaced enlisted men who seemed to be auditioning for jobs in some unimaginably swank hotel. He wanted Holly to be there, delighting in the tank of live sea horses and giving them her favorite names, the ones she had already bestowed on dozens of dolls and stuffed animals. These names, for some reason, were Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret.

And so, despite posh surroundings and great food, George still felt himself a brother to jackals. His pipe was still turned into the voice of them that weep. Sometimes he smashed things until his knuckles bled. The Navy sent a seaman third-class around to clean up the mess. At other times he contemplated his closet, where Holly’s golden scopas suit and its shattered glove hung as if on a gibbet. He stared at the suit for hours at a time.

It would have saved her life, he told himself, although he suspected this was not true.

‘I should have tried harder,’ he moaned aloud at odd moments.

A small bubble of consolation occasionally drifted into his thoughts. If death were as final and anesthetic as he had been taught, then his family had at least been granted the salvation of nothingness. Justine could not now be mourning the death of her daughter. Holly could not now be wondering whether all this chaos somehow precluded her getting a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. Thank God for oblivion, ran his Unitarian prayer.

The knock on George’s door had the brisk, impatient cadence of a person accustomed to getting his way.

‘It’s open.’ George sat on a plush divan reading the Book of Job for the third time that week. Once again he was finding the drama cruel and absurd.

A military man entered. His uniform, curiously, was of the United States Air Force. His presence on a Navy submarine entailed the incongruity of a rabbi in a cathedral.

‘You’re evacuee Paxton, aren’t you?’

George closed the Bible and said yes. The Air Force refugee approached, arm poised for a mandatory handshake. He was constructed of massive shoulders, a rough rock-like head, a formidable trunk, and limbs of simian length. A flurry of decorations and service ribbons hung from his breast opposite a nameplate that read TARMAC.

‘Major General Roger “Brat” Tarmac,’ the refugee said in a large, wholesome voice. Shaking hands with Brat Tarmac was a workout. ‘Deputy Chief of Staff for Retargeting, Strategic Air Command. I was in downtown Omaha when the Cossacks came. Had to do my Christmas shopping some time, right? So there I am, buying my sister’s kid this clown, when quick-as-shit a warhead goes off behind me, and the next thing I know I’m in the Navy. It’s all so crazy. The clown needed batteries – that was going to be my next stop. I keep telling myself, “Brat, face facts. You’ll never see those people again – your sister’s a casualty.” I say that, and I don’t believe it. She was a pilot. Like me. Flew strategic interceptors. Jesus. Incredible.’

George had never taken so immediate a liking to anyone before. Brat Tarmac was the sort of handsome, athletic soldier ten-year-old boys wanted for fathers, a fantasy to which George, at age thirty-five, was not entirely immune.

‘Coffee?’ George offered.

‘Affirmative,’ said the general.

Obtaining coffee aboard the City of New York was a simple matter of walking up to your cabin’s vending machine and pushing some buttons. ‘Cream and sugar?’

‘Black. In a dirty mug, eh? No frills for us bomber jockeys.’

A Styrofoam cup caught the stream. George’s hand made a spider over the rim, and he carried the coffee to his guest.

‘So far I’ve managed to locate all the Erebus personnel but that evangelist, Sparrow.’ Brat sucked coffee across his leathery lips. ‘We’ll be working with a pretty broad spectrum of talent. Wengernook is—’

‘I met him in the sick bay.’

‘Impressive guy, huh?’

‘Nervous.’

‘Intense. He should quit smoking. Then we’ve got Brian Overwhite of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you’ll never guess who they stuck in the cabin next to yours.’

‘Who?’

‘William Randstable. Remember when he beat that Cossack at chess? He was only seven or something.’

‘I don’t follow chess.’

‘It was a big propaganda thing for us. The kid worked at one of those think tanks for a while, then they put him on missile accuracy over at Sugar Brook or someplace. All in all it’s a pretty classy act our President’s putting together down in Antarctica. In a few days they’ll be calling the whole team together – after they run us through this survivor’s guilt crap – so we can chart out our options. God, I hope they’ve got a crisis relocation effort going. I can’t bear to think of this turning into a high civilian-casualty thing.’

‘Why Antarctica?’

‘A big chunk of real estate, right? Hence, a high warhead-exhaustion factor. Excellent place for a command-and-control center. Looks like the Joint Chiefs thought of everything – I’m a good man with an ICBM, Wengernook knows what we should commit to the European theater, Randstable can probably maintain a decent R and D effort throughout, and Reverend Sparrow will do wonders for our morale. All right, all right, I’ll admit it. We should all just admit it, right? We’re scared. We’ve never done this before. The cheerleader and the quarterback. You must be dousing your drawers, what with your MARCH Plan on the line and everything. I’m a big supporter of MARCH, you know. Over at SAC they called me the MARCH Hare.’

‘My plan? I don’t have anything to do with the MARCH Plan, General Tarmac. I’d never heard of it until Professor Carter—’

‘Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities – that’s not your baby?’

‘No.’

‘The SPASM, then. You’re one of the geniuses behind the SPASM.’

‘The SPASM?’

‘Single Plan for Aligning the Services of the Mili… er, what exactly are you doing on this team, Paxton?’

‘Wish I knew. Two weeks ago I signed a really strange scopas suit contract.’

‘Scopas suits? Hell, they don’t work. We ran tests.’

‘I have one that works. In my closet. It didn’t get… where it was supposed to go.’

‘You aren’t in the defense community? You aren’t at Sugar Brook or Lumen or anything?’

‘I inscribe tombstones.’

‘Tombstones?’

‘Lately I’ve been writing the epitaphs.’

‘Epitaphs? I hate to say this, Paxton, but they sure made a mistake evacuating you.’

‘I don’t want to be on the team. I just want to be dead.’

The MARCH Hare could think of no adequate response to this. ‘Dead?’ he said. He rubbed his hand across his hair, each strand of which was as straight and rigid as a sewing needle.

‘Dead?’ he said again. His waist was encircled by a utility belt from which hung an object that looked like a skyrocket. ‘Nice cabin you got here. Mine’s not bad, either. But then, the Navy always did have a sweet tooth, eh? I understand this boat hauls thirty-six E4 Multiprongs, all gassed up and loaded for Russian bear.’

George looked at the sea horse tank, studied the antics of Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret. The previous day some babies had appeared. He could imagine Holly discovering them. The hallucinated sound of her oooooh’s and ahhhhh’s was like a jagged bronze bell implanted in his skull.

Brat got himself a second cup of coffee, drained it instantly, went for a third. ‘Epitaphs, you said? Hmmm, maybe they expect this fight to last so long we’ll all be needing a few well-chosen words over our heads. In any event, welcome to the show. We’ve got some tough decisions to make. Started your therapy?’

‘No. You?’

‘I suppose so. Mostly we just sit in Dr Valcourt’s cabin and palaver, for which the Navy evidently pays her the going rate. I tell her the main guilt I’ve got comes from not being at SAC when we retaliated.’ He grinned, forced a laugh. ‘Don’t let anybody kid you – our air-launched Javelin missiles are the finest a federal deficit can buy.’ His grin suddenly degenerated. He grabbed his mouth as if to forestall vomit. ‘Hell, I’m scared, Paxton.’

‘I don’t like Dr Valcourt.’

Brat took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, I know, kind of an ice cube, but I do enjoy our sessions. Maybe I’ll end up on the fun side of her pants some day.’ He crushed his Styrofoam cup. Coffee erupted over his fist. ‘Shit, wouldn’t you think they’d give us a few scenarios to mull over? You can be sure the Cossack generals aren’t sitting around in some goddamn submarine.’

Jeremiah Sea Horse and Margaret Sea Horse were kissing. ‘Have you ever noticed that when a four-year-old draws a human face, it’s always smiling?’ George asked. ‘At least, my four-year-old’s faces were always smiling. Her name was Holly.’

‘I’m sorry. War is hell, huh?’ Brat removed the skyrocket from its holster. ‘Jesus Christ – it’s really happening! Just about the most tragical thing a person can conceive of, and it’s… happening! The point is, after you get into one of these failed-deterrence situations, you can’t let the enemy call the shots. In quite a few scenarios – more than you’d think – the victor is the guy who gets off the last strike.’ Brat waved his weapon. ‘It’s small, but it packs a wallop. David and Goliath.’

‘A hand grenade?’

‘Nah, come on, we’re in the age of microtech, Paxton. The Navy may get to piss in gold cups, but turn to your Air Force for the state of the art. This is a one-kiloton man-portable thermonuclear device complete with delivery system. Looks just like—’

‘A toy,’ said George, edging toward the back of his cabin. Indeed, the missile was so toylike that, had Holly been there, she would have used it to send a teddy bear to the moon. ‘I would like you to leave now,’ he said. ‘I feel an attack of survivor’s guilt coming on.’

George spent the next four days in his canopied bed, under silk sheets, wishing for death. He cursed God, but he did not die. His mind wanted no dealings with whatever remained of the world, but his body declined to cooperate. His heart, unmindful of Justine’s fate, kept beating. His kidneys, indifferent to Holly’s absence, continued to filter. His mouth got dry, and he drank. His stomach growled, and was fed. George Paxton cursed God, and he cursed the false adage that time heals all wounds.

The only exercise he got that week came from walking in his sleep.

‘Well, well, who have we here?’

He was being shaken so vigorously that all his bones seemed about to disconnect. He opened his eyes. Six ensigns filled his field of vision. They became four. The vibrations stopped. Two ensigns – moon-faced, pudgy, not notably distinguishable from each other.

‘To begin with, you should salute us,’ said the first ensign.

‘Quite so,’ said the second.

‘Salute who?’

‘Ensign Cobb,’ said the first.

‘And his cousin, Ensign Peach,’ said the second.

‘Mister Peach, I do believe we are in the presence of George Paxton,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Do tell, Mister Cobb. Are you referring to George Paxton of the McMurdo Sound Agreement?’ said Ensign Peach.

‘One and the same,’ said Ensign Cobb.

Ensign Peach lifted a stray thread from the Navy insignia on George’s silk pajamas. ‘Some say we should build slow, inaccurate, invulnerable missiles,’ he said with a sly grin.

‘Thereby allaying Soviet fears that we intend to strike first,’ continued Ensign Cobb.

‘Whereas others say that a force of fast and accurate missiles—’

‘Is a more credible deterrent,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Because it does not imply mutual suicide,’ said Ensign Peach.

‘Contrariwise, some say the enemy command-and-control structure must be spared.’

‘So that the war can be brought to a negotiated end.’

‘Whereas others say you must hit command-and-control right away—’

‘So that the enemy will be decapitated and unable to retaliate.’

‘Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be.’

‘And if it were so, it would be.’

‘But as it isn’t, it ain’t.’

‘That’s strategic doctrine.’

‘Salute us, Mister Paxton.’

George fired off an uncertain salute.

‘Sorry,’ said Ensign Peach. ‘Not good enough.’

George saluted again.

‘Still not right,’ said Ensign Cobb. ‘Looks like we’ll have to put you in a torpedo tube after all.’

‘In what?’ asked George.

‘Don’t worry. You won’t be there for long,’ said Ensign Peach.

‘A minute at most,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘And then – zowee, powee – off you go into the wild blue Atlantic!’

‘That’s the one with all the salt in it.’

‘Can you swim?’

‘Can you breathe water?’

Two facts entered George’s disorganized brain. He was afraid of these cousins. And they were dragging him down a corridor. He struggled. His muscles pulled in contradictory directions. Steam ducts and neon lights bounced by. He tried telling his captors they had no right to treat an Erebus evacuee this way, whereupon he discovered that Ensign Cobb’s sweaty hand was sealing his mouth.

The torpedo room was green and pocked with rivets. Muzak oozed through the air, countless strings performing ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ The ensigns hauled him up to Tube One, opened the little door. The chamber beyond, which reeked of brine and motor oil, suggested a womb in which man-portable thermonuclear devices were gestated.

Ensign Cobb held a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement before George’s uncoordinated eyes. It was a document of several hundred pages, bound with a spiral of barbed wire. He opened it and thrust Appendix C toward George. Appendix C was headed Scopas Suit Sales Contract.

‘That’s your signature, isn’t it?’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Yes, but—’

‘Look, Mister Peach, he signed it!’

‘And with his own name, too!’

‘I’m a friend of General Tarmac’s,’ asserted George.

‘The MARCH Hare?’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Right.’

‘Any friend of General Tarmac’s is an enemy of mine,’ said Ensign Peach.

‘Don’t forget to close your mouth,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Don’t forget to hold your nose.’

‘Don’t forget to write.’

‘We have always been with you—’

‘Waiting to get in.’

George swung at Cobb’s jaw. The connection was firm and noisy. Peach retaliated, planting a fist in the tomb inscriber’s stomach, thus awakening the dormant agony of his bullet wound.

I can take this, George said to himself after they had shoved him into Tube One and closed the door. I will not scream, Oblivion is what I wanted all along, and now here it is, oblivion, my good Unitarian friend.

The chill seeped into his flesh. His breaths echoed off the cylindrical walls. He decided that this was how his customers felt, snug in their caskets. Were they soothed knowing that a seven hundred and fifty dollar chunk of bonded granite sat overhead? He screamed. The reverberations knifed his eardrums.

He thought of the damage he had just inflicted on Peach. Had he seen correctly? Could it be? When he split the ensign’s lip, had black blood rushed out?

George wet his pajamas. The warmth was at once terrible and comforting. They had said this would take only a minute. Black blood. Just like Mrs Covington. An effect of the radiation? No, her visit to the Crippen Monument Works was before the war, wasn’t it? His wet pajamas grew cold.

Movies had always been fun, especially with Justine. Postmarital dates were the best kind. You could relax, and if there was no butter for the popcorn the world did not end. You sat there, bathed in conditioned air, waiting for the movie to start – any movie, it didn’t matter – like an astronaut in zero gravity, nothing pulling at you, no obligations…

The tube door opened. Someone grabbed his ankles and yanked him backward. The torpedo room smelled like burning hair, something he had not noticed before. The syrupy strings were now playing ‘Over There.’ George flexed his knees and stood up. Pain screwed through his shoulder bones.

A thirtyish man, handsome and stocky, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit, grinned at him with what seemed like a surplus of teeth. His hair was auburn and abundant, like a well-nourished orangutan’s coat.

‘What happened to those ensigns?’ George asked. He stepped forward, scissoring his legs so as to hide his soggy crotch.

‘They had to go off watch, George,’ said his rescuer amiably. ‘I believe they just wanted to scare you.’

‘Whatever made them think that threatening to launch me into the ocean would scare me?’ The tomb inscriber laughed. His rescuer did not. George had never before met such a clean-shaven individual. It was as if all the man’s whisker follicles had been cauterized.

‘My grandfather was in the Navy,’ said the rescuer. His voice was like gourmet coffee, silky, layered. ‘Evidently it’s changed a lot since those days. These sailors have not received the Holy Spirit.’

George looked at his knuckles. They were speckled with a substance resembling tar. ‘Their blood is black.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said the rescuer.

‘You in the Navy, too?’

‘Ever watch Christian television?’

‘Not a great deal.’

‘Last year Countdown to God’s Wrath – you’ve never caught it? – we had a consistently better rating than Gospel Sing-Along. We get two and a half tons of mail a week. The Lord is doing so many wonderful things.’

‘My wife always wanted to be on television.’

The evangelist extended a soft, pliant hand. ‘Reverend Peter Sparrow,’ he said. Taking Sparrow’s hand, George felt sustenance and comfort radiate from each finger. This was a very fine evacuee indeed.

‘Television is becoming God’s chosen medium these days, just the way Gutenberg’s press used to be,’ said the evangelist. ‘We’ve been running a lot of old movies on Countdown lately, to build up our audience, follow what I’m saying? You’ve got to start where people are at. Sure, maybe Ben-Hur isn’t such a great picture – I mean, leprosy doesn’t really look like that, it’s quite a bit worse – but then you can move them toward the better stuff, The Robe and Quo Vadis and so on.’

George coughed. The torpedo tube had probably contained several infectious diseases. ‘So we’re all going to Antarctica.’

‘Isn’t it wonderful how nuclear exchanges cannot touch Christians?’ said Sparrow. ‘I knew the Perfect Exile would be a time of joy, but I hadn’t realized how rapturous the joy would be. I’m about to see my family.’

‘They’re in Antarctica?’

‘They’re in the sky with Jesus.’

George glanced up.

‘May I ask you something?’ The evangelist touched George’s spotted knuckles. ‘Are you saved?’

‘Yes, you just saved me. I’m most grateful to you. If your program was still on, I’d watch it.’

‘I’m talking about your relationship with—’

‘My family died when the Russians blew up Wildgrove. Or so I’m told.’

Reverend Sparrow frowned. ‘The Hebrew prophets – Ezekiel, Jeremiah – they’re all batting a thousand, understand? The Perfect Exile, the Terrible Trial, the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem – they saw everything, right? You’re saved, George, or you wouldn’t be on this trip.’

‘I’m a Unitarian.’

‘I’m going to pray for you,’ said Reverend Sparrow firmly.

‘I appreciate it,’ said George, and he did.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the days that followed, George’s grief took on a New England quality, becoming not so much an emotion as a job to do.

He tried to remember all those times when fatherhood had seemed a crushing burden. Moments when Holly’s screeching or stubbornness had brought him to the brink of child beating, moments when he felt as if his life had been stolen and replaced by a talkative iron ball chained to his ankle. But only cloying memories came. Holly putting her dollies to bed. Trying to feed the sick cat before it died. Singing to herself. Struggling to grasp the point of a knock-knock joke. She had never understood that proper knock-knock jokes are puns. Knock-knock, she would say. Who’s there? a four-year-old friend would ask. Jennifer (or Suzy or Jeremiah or Alfred or Margaret), Holly would reply.

Jennifer who?

Jennifer Poopie Diapers Stupid Dumb Face!

And then she and her friend would dissolve in giggles, overwhelmed by preschool social satire.

Knock-knock.

‘Who’s there?’ George didn’t really need to ask. The knock was as characteristic as a fingerprint. ‘It’s open, Brat.’

The MARCH Hare pushed boisterously into the cabin – a one-man infantry charge. Accompanying him was a fiftyish man with a dark razoring stare and a marionette’s gangly frame.

‘Meet Dr William Randstable,’ said Brat. ‘The whiz kid of Sugar Brook Lab and, it is rumored, a certifiable genius.’ The general had lost some weight, and the bags under his eyes looked like change purses. ‘William, this is George Paxton – the poet laureate of Wildgrove, Massachusetts.’

‘I’m not really a whiz kid any more,’ said Randstable. His suit was several sizes too large. ‘More of a whiz middle-aged man.’

‘I hear you once beat the Russian chess champion,’ said George.

‘I made the next-to-the-last mistake,’ said Randstable modestly.

Brat patted his man-portable thermonuclear device. ‘Well, men, looks as if some more fat is about to enter the fire.’ His words fought past a trembling throat and clenched teeth. ‘They’re planning to knock over the remaining enemy missile fields at fourteen hundred hours. If we hurry to the launch control room, we can catch thirty-six Multiprongs go galloping off like Grant took Richmond.’

‘Sugar Brook did the technical support for Multiprong guidance and control,’ said Randstable with a quick chuckle. He removed his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and began chewing on the ear piece. ‘I always wondered how I’d feel on the day they actually left the nest.’

‘Pretty upset, I guess,’ said George. An understatement, he concluded from what came out of Randstable’s chest, a conglomeration of sighs and uncontrolled wheezing.

After moving down a narrow passageway crowded with pipes, ducts, ladders, and stopcocks, the three evacuees came upon a hatch labeled RECREATION AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Brat decided they were authorized personnel. Crossing over, they entered a throbbing undersea metropolis, each facility scaled to the constraints of submarine space. They started along a corridor named Entertainment Lane. George noted a compact skating rink, a slightly abbreviated bowling alley, a miniature golf course where every hazard entailed placing the ball in one orifice or other of a plaster mermaid, and a pair of succinct indoor swimming pools. The enlisted men’s pool was eight feet deep, the officers’ ten. A waking nightmare seized George – Peach and Cobb wrapping his body in chains and throwing him into the officers’ pool. Or perhaps they would favor the bowling alley. They would tie him up and leave him behind the pins.

A movie marquee blazed outside a small theater. SERGEI BONDARCHUK’S ‘WAR AND PEACE,’ the marquee shouted. Several blue-suited sailors were lined up at the box office; Peach and Cobb were not among them. Opposite the theater, the little Silver Dollar Casino dazzled George with its hurlyburly of lights and its promises of instant fortune. Through the swinging doors he noticed a seaman second-class dealing blackjack. The clacks and gongs of slot machines ricocheted into the corridor.

Passing through a bulkhead labeled DETERRENCE AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, the evacuees found themselves before an open doorway to the missile compartment. Enlisted men streamed back and forth. Brat accosted the first officer he could find, a freckle-faced lieutenant named Grass.

‘Mister Grass, I thought you were due to launch at fourteen hundred hours.’

The young officer neglected to return Brat’s salute. ‘The reentry vehicles aren’t ready,’ he said.

‘Not ready? What kind of operation are you running here, Mister? Sverre will have your pips on a plate.’

Now Grass did salute. He used the wrong hand. Marching up to George, he presented a conspiratorial wink. ‘Aren’t you the one they tried to blow into the water last week? Pretty funny.’

They followed Grass into the cavernous, echo-laden room.

‘I nearly suffocated,’ said George.

‘I believe that was the point,’ said Grass.

Overbearing in their size, dazzling in their metallic sheen, the thirty-six launch tubes rose toward the ceiling like rows of ancient Egyptian pillars. Indeed, the missile compartment suggested nothing so much as a technological incarnation of the Temple of Karnak. George advanced at a stoop, cowed by the overbearing majesty of national security. There were worshipers in the temple. Perched on scaffolding, sailors swarmed up and down the tubes, unbolting the access plates and lowering them to the deck via steel cables.

‘Why are they opening the tubes, Mister?’ Brat demanded.

‘To get at the nosecone shrouds,’ Grass replied.

‘Why get at the shrouds?’

‘To reach the bombs.’

‘Why?’

‘To uncover the arming systems.’

‘Why?’

‘To smash them to pieces.’

Brat stuck a finger in his ear and swizzled it around. ‘Excuse me, Mister, but the EMP from that Omaha explosion must have shorted out my hearing. Sounds like you’re defusing the warheads.’

‘Those things are dangerous, General. If one detonates during launch, somebody could get hurt.’

A cluster of bomb-carrying reentry vehicles was visible at the top of the nearest tube. Each vehicle looked like a witch’s hat: black, conical, smeared with strange oils.

‘You’re shooting off unarmed missiles?’ said Randstable, eyebrows arching with curiosity. ‘Some part of your strategy is eluding me, Lieutenant.’

‘As you no doubt know, Dr Randstable, on a submarine every cubic inch carries a premium.’ Grass smiled boyishly. ‘Once I clear out all these boosters and payloads, I’ll be free to use the tubes for cultivating orange trees.’ He winked. ‘Project Citrus.’

‘Orange trees!’ Brat’s voice echoed through the great glimmering temple. ‘Orange trees, my left nut!’

The sailors stopped working. They stared down from on high.

‘As you might imagine, General, fresh oranges are difficult to come by at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,’ said Grass. ‘If you ask me, fruit tree conversion is the wave of the future.’

The sailors went back to their disarmament duties, busy as ants on a Popsicle.

Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre had an apocalypse collection. His hobby was the end of the world. When not stunned by gin or engaged in naval activities, he would ransack the ship’s library for a new vision of doomsday, and, finding one, write a bad epic poem about it. Fire, ice, famine, flood, drought, pollution, war – Sverre had collected them all. In his Noah and Naamah the captain had written of the forty-day flood in which earth’s sinners drowned, of Noah sending out a white raven to seek dry land, of the snowy bird finding instead a floating corpse and feasting on it, since which time all its feathers have been black. For Yima Victorious Sverre had written of a fierce endless winter, of Yima receiving instructions from the Zoroastrian God of Light, of the great enclosure into which the hero brought the seeds of men and animals. No humpbacks’ seeds, the God of Light, an early eugenicist, had counseled Yima. No impotents, lunatics, lepers, or jealous lovers.

Sverre sat down at his writing desk and, after thrusting his quill pen into a skull-shaped ink pot, attacked the paper with bold flourishes. Noah’s raven peered at him – an alabaster knickknack, white as a scopas suit. The captain wrote of the sea monster Jormungandr, hidden in the icy depths, a serpent so long it girded the mortal world, Midgard. The Norse god Thor had once hunted the Midgard serpent using a chain baited with the head of an ox. Jormungandr bit. Thor hauled the serpent from the sea, raised his hammer for the deathblow. The chain snapped. But Thor and the serpent were destined to meet again, at Ragnarok, World’s End, and this time—

A pounding halted Sverre’s progress of the Saga of Thor. He inserted his pen in the raven’s mouth, swallowed some gin, staggered across his cabin.

‘These evacuees insisted on seeing you,’ grunted Lieutenant Grass as Sverre yanked open the door.

Brat offered a hostile salute. ‘Captain Sverre, an activity that could seriously erode our security – evidently it goes by the code name Citrus – is presently under way in your missile compartment.’

‘You may leave, Mister Grass,’ said the captain in a foreign accent that refused to declare itself.

Certain that nothing good was about to transpire between Brat and Sverre, George attempted to absent himself by surveying the captain’s elegantly anachronistic cabin – dark wood walls, plush carpets, puffy sofas, antique globe. Perched on the writing desk was an alabaster raven that Holly would have liked.

‘I see you fancy my pet, Mr Paxton,’ said Sverre. ‘His name is Edgar Allan Poe.’

‘Somebody once asked me a riddle,’ said George. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’

‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Sverre. ‘It has no answer.’

‘I’ll go to work on it,’ said Randstable, happily perplexed.

‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ said Sverre. ‘Now here’s one that does have an answer – when is a first strike not a first strike?’

‘When?’ asked Randstable.

‘When it is an anticipatory retaliation,’ said Sverre.

‘Hmm…’ said Randstable, sucking on his eyeglasses frames. ‘Right. Good.’

Brat’s face had acquired the color and proportions of a ripe tomato. ‘I am told that this Project Citrus carries your authorization, sir,’ he hissed, rapping loudly on the launching pad of his man-portable thermonuclear device, ‘and I wish to register the strongest possible objection!’

A smile stole out from Sverre’s black beard. ‘Those Multiprongs just slow us down, and the sooner Grass replaces them with a hydroponic orchard, the better.’ His eyes were glittery black discs. His nose, a noble pyramid, threw a quarter of his countenance into shadow. ‘What’s the matter, General, don’t you like oranges? The fact is, this war doesn’t interest me much any more, and neither does the United States Navy. Anyone want a drink? We serve gin around here.’

Brat twisted his mouth into the quintessence of contempt. ‘I know your breed, Sverre. You’re one of those renegades, aren’t you? You’ve got your emergency-action message, you’re supposed to take out some targets, and now you’re getting all philosophical or something.’

The captain set out four Styrofoam cups on his writing desk and procured a grungy bottle from his claw-hammer coat. ‘The Brazilian Indians foresaw all this,’ he slurred as he poured. ‘They believed the earth was suspended over a fire, like a chicken on a spit.’ He served the gin, then gestured his three guests onto a sofa with scrolled arms and a rosette that put George in mind of tombstone Design No. 8591. As Brat seethed, Sverre wandered back to his desk and took down a slide projector. ‘Before you start leading a mutiny, General’ – the oak paneling on a bulkhead parted to reveal a screen – ‘I want you to see some damage assessments.’

Flicking a switch, Sverre brought utter darkness to a room that had never seen the sun. He turned on the projector, and a bright wedge of light shot forward, hitting the screen. No specks hovered in the beam; the City of New York was a world without dust. Sverre stood before the rectangle of light, his silhouette gesturing broadly. ‘The transmissions we monitored from the National Command Authority suggest that the Soviet Union started the war. The first evidence reached NORAD via airborne look-down radar. A flurry of Russian Spitball cruise missiles was flying over Canada on a trajectory for Washington. Grounds for preemption, the Joint Chiefs argued. And so a surgical counterforce strike was launched against a few selected Soviet ICBM fields and bomber bases. And so the enemy… shot back.’

The captain went to his desk and, swallowing a mouthful of gin, dropped the first slide into place. ‘These pictures were taken through Periscope Number One’s geosynchronous satellite array.’

‘We worked on that rig,’ said Randstable.

‘Like any global conflict,’ said Sverre, ‘World War Three included many exciting and memorable battles.’ A blur lit the screen. Sverre twisted the projector lens, and a charred crevasse appeared. ‘The Battle of Joplin, Missouri,’ he narrated. He changed slides. A burning field, automobiles lying on their roofs like flipped turtles. ‘The Battle of Dearborn, Michigan,’ said Sverre. New slide. A prairie covered with dark scars. ‘The Battle of Dodge City, Kansas,’ the captain explained. New slide. A stand of blistered trees rising from a swamp. ‘The Battle of Winter Haven, Florida.’ New slide. An ocean of ashes. ‘The Battle of Twin Falls, Idaho.’

Now the images came in rapid fire. Racine: Amarillo. Hagerstown. Bowling Green. Chattanooga. Bangor. Within half an hour Sverre had spun through four circular trays, each holding a hundred and twenty slides.

He shut off the bulb, and the fall of Troy, New York, dissolved into nothingness. The evacuees sat in the thick darkness, drinking. Randstable made a sound like a dog having a nightmare. Brat alternated snorts with coughs. For five minutes not a word was spoken.

‘Just how reliable are these damage assessments?’ an invisible Brat said at last.

‘No doubt there are pockets of survivors,’ said Sverre, ‘and I’m fairly confident that ten or fifteen towns were overlooked.’ The lights came on. ‘But on the whole the post-exchange environment is accurately reflected here.’

‘Yeah? Well, that’s absurd,’ said Brat. ‘The MARCH Plan was chock full of escalation controls.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Randstable. ‘Oh, God. Oh, dear.’ The former whiz kid pulled a small magnetic chess set from his jacket. ‘Quick! Does anybody know a good chess problem? Give me a problem, please, somebody!’

Sverre said, ‘Put eight queens on the board in such a way that none can take another.’

‘Not enough queens,’ wheezed Randstable. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve solved it already.’

‘All right. Use all four bishops to—’ Sverre cut himself off, having noticed that Brat’s man-portable thermonuclear device was out of its holster and firmly fixed in the general’s right hand.

‘Captain Sverre, should you disobey my command, I shall exercise my option to fire this missile, thereby airbursting a one-kiloton warhead within ten inches of your body.’ Brat aimed the weapon at Sverre’s stomach. ‘I hereby order you to terminate Project Citrus. I further order you to feed the following strategic enemy targets into your fire-control computers.’ He removed a small key from around his neck and stuck it in the launching pad. ‘The ICBM complex at Novosibirsk, the ICBM complex at Kirensk, the Strategic Rocket Forces headquarters at Kharkov, the warhead factory at Minsk, the central command post at Gorky, the alternate—’

‘We have always been with you,’ interrupted Sverre, his smile ever-growing, his eyes hot and pulsing like those of the vulture George had seen at ground zero, ‘waiting to get in.’

‘I don’t know what school you went to, Captain,’ said Brat, ‘but at the Air Force Academy they teach that winning is better than losing.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Randstable as he set up his chess pieces. ‘Oh, God.’

Sverre placed a bony, weathered hand on George’s shoulder. ‘I think we’ll leave the key strategic decision with Mr Paxton here. Say the word, George, and I’ll send all thirty-six of my Multiprongs, fully armed, against the enemy. A grand-scale one hundred and forty-four megaton retaliatory strike.’

‘You want me to decide?’ said George.

‘Yes,’ said Sverre.

‘Me?’

‘Correct.’

‘Why me?’

‘I’m curious to see what will happen.’

George did not think it right for the fate of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be in his hands.

‘I’m not really qualified for this,’ he said.

‘You’ve fought as many nuclear wars as the rest of us,’ said Sverre.

A mile-high tombstone appeared in George’s mind, Design No. 1067 in Vermont blue-gray. A million names were inscribed in the granite. DULUTH. DODGE CITY. SAN FRANCISCO. PHILADELPHIA. CHRYSLERS. CBS. XEROX CORPORATION. THE SUPER BOWL.

What had Sverre called it? A retaliatory strike? A fair and reasonable notion. They sandblasted us. We must do the same to them.

And yet…

‘Tell me if I’ve got this straight, Brat,’ said George. ‘You want to blow up Russia, correct?’

‘I want to kill the Soviets’ reserve ICBMs and prevent their being salvoed in subsequent attacks,’ Brat replied.

‘Why?’ asked George.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, why?’

‘National defense, that’s why.’

‘Yes, yes, I can understand that,’ said George. ‘Sure. However, if we’re going to have national defense, Brat, don’t we also need, well… you know…’

‘What?’ said Brat.

‘A nation.’

‘It’s a necessary condition,’ said Randstable, whose left cerebral hemisphere was preparing to play chess with his right. ‘Please put that thing away before you get us all killed.’

‘If we don’t take out their reserves,’ Brat insisted, ‘the Soviets will use them to hunt down the survivors.’

‘Painful as it may be, I think we must conclude that MARCH is no longer the operative strategy here,’ said Randstable, staring blankly at the chessboard. ‘We’ve even gone past the SPASM, I’d say – the motive matrix is completely different now.’ He turned suddenly toward Sverre, his fingers splayed and wriggling. ‘But then why this Antarctica business?’

‘Your job for the present,’ said the captain, ‘is to work with Dr Valcourt on conquering your survivor’s guilt.’

Brat perspired and trembled, as if gripped by a high fever. ‘You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.’

‘Right!’ said Sverre. ‘We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal. Mr Paxton, I need your answer.’

XEROX CORPORATION. THE SUPER BOWL. MAXWELL HOUSE COFFEE. HERSHEY BARS. THE WORLD SERIES. CHEERIOS. AUNT ISABEL. COUSIN WILLIE. NICKIE FROSTIG. JUSTINE PAXTON. HOLLY PAXTON.

Vengeance. George pictured the word in his mind. Obviously Brat felt strongly about it. Still, the strategic decision is mine, he thought – mine and mine alone. An epitaph materialized at the bottom of the mile-high tombstone. A ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MEGATON RETALIATORY STRIKE WILL NOT BRING US BACK, it said.

That settled the matter.

‘I believe I would like to start having fresh orange juice with my breakfast,’ said George. ‘Keeps away the scurvy, I hear.’

‘Lousy decision, Paxton,’ fumed Brat. ‘Really bad.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said softly.

The general’s forehead threw off hot droplets. ‘Ten seconds, Captain. That’s all you’ve got, and then David fires his slingshot. Nine… eight… seven…’

‘He’s bluffing,’ said Randstable, who still hadn’t made an opening move. ‘I’ll give you a hundred to one odds he won’t do it.’

Sverre went to his writing desk and continued the Saga of Thor. Brat retargeted the missile.

‘Six… five… four…’

‘I don’t believe I have any,’ said Randstable.

‘Any what?’ asked Sverre.

‘Three…’

‘Survivor’s guilt,’ said Randstable.

‘Two…’

‘We can fix that,’ said Sverre.

An uncanny noise issued from the MARCH Hare. George thought of the cackling piped into the funhouse at the Wildgrove Apple Blossom Fair. Brat’s now flaccid fingers uncurled, and the little missile clattered impotently to the floor. Lying on the rug, it looked more toylike than ever.

‘I’ve never seen one of those before,’ said Sverre, pointing to Brat’s defenses with his quill pen.

The MARCH Hare collapsed on the sofa, guzzled some gin, and began mourning his dead country through hyperventilation and high-pitched wails.

Sverre left his desk, picked up the weapon. ‘What kind of guidance?’

‘Inertial navigation,’ muttered Randstable, ‘updated by terrain contour matching.’

‘Propulsion?’

‘Air breathing F-218 turbofan engine.’

‘Throw-weight?’

‘Nine pounds.’

Later that day, after the three Erebus evacuees were gone, Sverre ordered his officers and men to their main battle stations. The launch tubes were pressurized to match the outside ocean. The hatches opened. A small rocket in the rail of each Multiprong missile began to burn, boiling pools of water in the tubes. Steam built up, hurling the missiles to the surface, whereupon the main motors ignited. The stages fell away. Within fifteen minutes the warhead buses had scattered their sterile payloads across the Gulf of Mexico, from the Florida Keys to the vanished city of New Orleans.

Like all Philadelphia-class fleet ballistic missile submarines, SSBN 713 City of New York held within its lowest decks a labyrinth of forgotten passageways and unmarked corridors. Leaving Sverre’s cabin, George realized that he and Brat were for the moment not on speaking terms – he could tell by the general’s sour face, his aloof gait – and so he ran ahead, soon finding himself in the submarine equivalent of a back alley. Naked light bulbs swung on brown cords like phosphorescent spiders. The air was murky and still. He became aware of the boat’s sound, a fitful hum. Under other conditions, getting lost this way would have upset him, but he was still feeling extraordinarily good about his strategic decision. Thanks to him, the men, women, and children of the Soviet Union had been spared a retaliatory strike – my monument to Holly, he thought, as glorious and firm as any block of granite.

He pounded on doors. The echoes traveled up and down the empty corridor. He tested the latches. Every cabin was sealed as tight as the cottage-like tomb that the Sweetser family owned back in Rosehaven Cemetery. Fear weaved through his chest and bowels – a creeping conviction that Peach and Cobb would soon appear and inflict some new torture on him. Hell, anybody would have signed that ridiculous sales contract. Anybody. Black blood. Just like Mrs Covington. Certain facts should not be thought about too much. I shall think about something else. Holly saved Russia…

Beneath a nearby door, an orange glow advanced and retreated like surf. George approached, knocked.

‘Come in.’

A female voice. Entering, he saw a monster. He stopped dead and thought, yes, they’re on the loose again, trying to intimidate me…

It looked like a gigantic winged shark. The eyes shot blood, the nostrils flamed and smoked like the vents of a volcano.

He had seen this species before.

‘Hello, George.’

In the center of the cabin an old woman stood hunched over the sort of antique machine that, as he knew from taking Holly to the Boston Children’s Museum, was called a magic lantern. A cone of smoke-filled light spread toward the projected vulture. Shadows hovered above the woman’s nose and cheeks. She removed the vulture, slipped it under a stack of similar glass paintings.

‘Mrs Covington! I never expected to meet you here.’

‘It’s good to see you again, George.’

‘I did those pencil drafts we talked about.’ As usual, Mrs Covington’s presence filled him with well-being. ‘“She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here.” They looked pretty good. Design seven-oh-three-four. I guess they got burned up.’

‘We mustn’t dwell on Wildgrove,’ said Nadine. ‘I loved that town. The children. Nickie Frostig died in my arms. Blast wound.’ She gestured toward the glass slides. ‘Some people say these paintings show the future.’ Her raincoat looked wet and slimy, as if made of live eels. ‘Do you believe in prophecy?’

‘I’m a Unitarian, ma’am.’

‘They’ve been in my family for centuries – painted by Leonardo da Vinci during his last days. The seer Nostradamus – that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting Renaissance scholar – dictated their content. Want to see the future, George?’

She inserted a new slide. A short, muscular, bearded man stood alone on a boundless plain of ice.

‘My goodness, I guess I really am going to Antarctica,’ he said.

She changed slides. George saw himself in the Silver Dollar Casino, playing poker with Randstable and Wengernook.

As the show continued, it proved far more varied and perplexing than the other such presentation he had seen that afternoon. Slide: George sitting at a banquet table, eating ham. Slide: Captain Sverre slashing his own forearm with a knife. Slide: the vulture again, devouring a dead penguin.

A happy family burst upon the wall – husband, wife, young child. They were dressed in scopas suits. The child’s suit was gold. Their various arms and torsos had fused in a complex hug. Their smiles threw back twice the brightness that the lantern flame provided.

No visual image, painted, photographed, or dreamed, had ever moved George so much as that adroitly rendered Leonardo. The child was Holly. Compared with this truth, his realization that the man was himself and that the woman was Dr Morning Valcourt seemed almost dull.

‘I know the man,’ said Nadine. ‘And I’ve seen the woman around here. But the child—’

‘It’s Holly!’ The future! Some people said these paintings showed the future!

‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Dr Valcourt told you that.’

‘But it looks like Holly.’

‘Exactly like her?’

‘Yes. Exactly. Perhaps not exactly. But… if it’s not Holly, then…’

Aubrey?

‘The sister we were going to give Holly?’ he asked.

‘Nobody except you got out of—’

All right. Not her sister. Who then? He studied Dr Valcourt’s glowing, flickering face. Though ill-equipped for smiling – he remembered her chilly persona, her brisk manner – she was doing an excellent job of it.

‘Holly’s stepsister? Dr Valcourt and I will marry and then have a baby girl?’

‘A reasonable interpretation.’

‘I’ll call her Aubrey.’

‘Lovely name. Do you like Dr Valcourt?’

‘Not at all.’ The wrong thing to say, he decided. ‘I’ll learn to like her.’ His bullet wound throbbed with excitement. ‘I’ll do anything to get Aubrey. Marry a snake.’

Nadine yanked the family portrait off the screen. ‘Evidently you will become a father again.’

He envisioned the Giant Ride mechanical horse from Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. Aubrey sat bouncing in the saddle, giggling, trilling. Horse. Donkey. Mule. Infertility… ‘No, that can’t be right either,’ he said. ‘I’m sterile as a mule. That’s what Dr Brust told me. My secondary spermatocytes… the radiation.’

Nadine projected a new slide. A man approached the gates of a fabulous white city. Its marble ramparts glowed beneath a skull-faced moon.

George saw that the pilgrim was himself.

‘Even in this age of chaos,’ said Nadine, ‘there are places one can go to have one’s fertility restored. The earth has its marble cities.’

After swaddling the glass slides in a US Navy bath towel, Nadine slipped them into the pocket of her raincoat. She opened the side of the magic lantern, blew out the flame, and lowered the hot device into a canvas duffel bag.

‘Let me help you with that,’ he said.

She seemed not to hear. Slinging the bundle over her shoulder, she hobbled into the corridor. He followed her up a long spiral staircase. So great was his obsession with the thought of Holly’s reincarnation – Aubrey Paxton, predicted by Nostradamus, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, fathered by George Paxton, borne by Morning Valcourt – that he was taken aback upon seeing that Nadine had led him to the deck of the surfaced submarine. The air was choked with puffs of dark vapor. Waves detonated along the speeding prow. The wind stung his cheeks; it tugged his hair like a comb in the hands of a vindictive parent. God! So cold!

An open sailboat bobbed beside the hull, Nadine sitting in the stern. After hoisting the sail, she reached into her raincoat and pulled out a magic lantern slide, placing her gloved hand over the painted surface to protect it from spray. George took it like a starving man receiving bread.

‘How can I find that city?’ he called.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, casting off.

‘Was this Nostradamus any good?’

‘He was on to something.’

A great, ever-expanding wedge of ocean and air grew between them. George looked at his Leonardo – the detail was astonishing, like the circuits on a computer chip, and he was especially impressed by the firm, crisp contours of Aubrey’s beautiful face. The wind quickened. Sea water began dripping from his hair. He moved the painting away before it got wet, tucked it under his shirt. When he glanced toward the horizon, Nadine Covington’s sailboat had become a firm white sliver beating its way south toward the horse latitudes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘I had a happy childhood,’ said George at the beginning of his first treatment session.

‘Happy childhoods are overrated,’ his therapist replied.

When George first met her, he had found Morning Valcourt vaguely attractive, but now he saw that the surgical mask she wore during their encounter in the radiation unit had been covering cheeks littered with scab-like freckles, a nose that seemed always to be experiencing a stench, and a mouth perpetually poised on the brink of a snarl. Yet Leonardo had given her a warm smile… obviously an artist of formidable imagination.

‘I’ll be honest,’ she said. ‘Survivor’s guilt threatens its victims with sudden mental collapse. To prevent this, we must tear certain facts from the shadowland of denial, thrusting them into the daylight of consciousness.’

Could this pompous woman really be Aubrey’s mother? When would the warm smiling start?

‘Any trouble sleeping lately?’ she asked.

‘I used to suffer from somnambulism. A couple of ensigns cured me of that.’

‘What ensigns?’

‘Peach and Cobb. They said they’ve always been with me, waiting to get in.’

‘But you’re sleeping through the night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Losing weight?’

‘No.’

‘Bowels okay?’

‘Fine.’ It would take considerable ambition to fall in love with this woman.

‘I’ve been prescribing a lot of sedatives lately,’ she said, ‘but in your case I’d rather not. They found you clutching a golden scopas suit.’

‘I got it from an inventor. Professor Theophilus Carter. He made me sign a sales contract.’

‘I know. A confession of complicity. I don’t approve of such things. Tell me what happened after you left Carter’s shop.’

George sucked air across his teeth, making the roots ache. He spoke of searing light and a mushroom cloud, of fires, wounds, black dust, and cries for water, of people needing burn wards that no longer existed. A desperate pause followed each image, so that the hour was nearly up by the time he got to the smashed Giant Ride horse. ‘She loved that stupid thing,’ he said. Scar tissue grew in his throat.

‘It’s unendurable, isn’t it?’

The tenderness in Morning’s voice caught him by surprise. ‘Unendurable,’ he repeated.

‘Chicago winters got awfully cold,’ she continued softly, ‘but I had lots of books in the apartment, shelves floor to ceiling, so we were quite snug, me and the cats. I used to put all the warm authors on the windward side – Emily Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald. Henry James gives off his own draft. I lived a block from my little sister – a Methodist minister and in her own way a better therapist than I. We called Linda the white sheep of the family. All I want is to be able to bury her.’ Leonardo was right: Morning could smile. This was not the joyful smile of the mother in the portrait, however, but the brave, taut smile of someone fighting tears. ‘Linda was the best person I ever knew.’

‘That would make a good epitaph. I keep wondering how they feel about being dead.’

‘Your wife and daughter?’

‘Yes, And the others.’

‘You wonder how they feel—?’

‘About being dead. That’s crazy, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think it’s crazy?’

‘They’re dead. They don’t feel anything about it… Sverre said there are pockets of survivors.’

‘No doubt.’

‘You don’t suppose—?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I just thought—’

‘You entered the bomb crater, right? And then your neighbor shot you?’

George chomped on his lower lip. ‘I ended up on the ground. Next thing I knew, a vulture was hovering over me.’

‘A what?’

‘A vulture. A large black vulture – big as one of those flying dinosaurs, you know, the pterodactyls.’

‘The pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.’ She issued a succinct, intellectual frown. ‘Close enough. This is not the first time a vulture has entered the annals of psychotherapy. The species once haunted the great Leonardo.’

‘Leonardo da Vinci?’ George asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I have one of his paintings.’

‘You believe that you own an original Leonardo?’

‘I do own one. I keep it in my cabin.’

She gave her eyes a quick toss to the left, as if to say, Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we, you lunatic, and stood up. Her stiff and forbidding gray suit was like a whole-body chastity belt.

She walked to a bookcase stuffed with volumes on brain diseases. Her office reconciled the rational and the primal – an anatomy chart, a Navaho tapestry, a ceramic brain, a Hindu god, a biofeedback rig, an obsidian knife that had last seen employment in a human sacrifice. She removed a slender volume, flashed the title – Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality – opened it. ‘When Leonardo was a baby,’ she said, ‘a vulture swooped down to his cradle and massaged his lips with its tail. Or so he believed. Did your vulture do that?’

‘My vulture?’

‘The one that appeared at ground zero.’

‘Are you saying it was a hallucination?’

‘Do you think it was a hallucination?’

‘I don’t know.’ George was not forming a very positive first impression of psychotherapy. ‘My vulture did not massage my lips,’ he reported.

‘Leonardo, it seems, was illegitimate. He and his mother had an intense relationship – much kissing and pampering.’ She hugged a phantom baby. ‘You must understand that, in ancient times, maternity cults commonly centered on vultures. The Egyptians believed it was a species without males, inseminated by the winds. Through the vulture fantasy, Leonardo was confessing to a sexually charged relationship with his mother – or so Freud theorized. The tail prying open the lips. The insertion.’

‘I thought we were going to talk about my problems,’ said George.

She slammed the book shut with the suddenness of a steel trap being sprung. ‘On Monday your immersion in death begins,’ she announced evenly.

George took out his wallet and removed a rectangle from its blurry plastic envelope. ‘Do me a favor? Hide this where I can’t find it.’ He set the rectangle on the desk. ‘I keep looking at it.’

The therapist picked up Holly’s picture – her official class photograph from the Sunflower Nursery School – and placed it in her top desk drawer.

While Holly’s nursery school picture had been a wellspring of grief – ‘unendurable’ was his therapist’s word, the perfect word, for his loss – the portrait of himself, Aubrey, and Morning was another matter entirely. He looked at it whenever he could, testing it under different kinds of light, memorizing each brush stroke. On Saturday afternoon he looked at it for so long that he lost track of time, consequently arriving several minutes late for the screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s lengthy film adaptation of War and Peace.

Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were walking through the woods. ‘If evil men can work together to get what they want,’ said the narrator, ‘then so can good men, to get what they want.’

George enjoyed the battles of Schoengraben and Austerlitz. The lines of infantrymen stretched on and on, far beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.

When the lights came up for the first intermission, he saw that the only people in the little theater were himself, an enlisted man, Randstable, and – shifting now in the row ahead, turning to face George – an older gentleman who, with his bushy beard and substantial abdomen, might have found employment as Santa Claus’s stunt double.

‘Hello, friend.’ When Santa Claus smiled, his beard expanded like a peacock’s tail.

‘Are you an Erebus evacuee?’ George asked.

‘Brian Overwhite,’ said Santa, nodding. ‘US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.’

‘I’d heard you were aboard.’

‘My ticket for Geneva had just arrived – we were about to begin the STABLE III talks – when this war… incredible, isn’t it? The mind isn’t built for such things. Nuclear exchanges. Failed deterrence. STABLE III would have put tough limits on missile throw-weight and anti-satellite weapons – that was my hope, anyway.’

‘I’m George Paxton.’ He went to shake Overwhite’s hand. A sling cradled the negotiator’s right arm. ‘Were you in one of the battles?’

‘No – two unreasonable ensigns came after me. Cousins.’

‘I know who you mean.’

‘They said, “You’ve spent your life controlling other people’s arms, and now we’re going to control yours!” So they broke it. Snapped the damn ulna. I reported the incident to Lieutenant Grass. Now get this – the man laughed at me. That’s right. He laughed.’

‘There seems to be some kind of resentment against us,’ said George. ‘Take me, for example. I was placed in a torpedo tube.’

‘Resentment? Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.’ Overwhite scratched his cast, as if trying to relieve an itch. ‘Tell me, George, which do you fear more, the gamma rays or the betas?’

‘What?’

‘The gammas go shooting right through you, zip, zip, but the betas ride in on the food you eat and the air you breathe.’ Overwhite reached under his beard and caressed his throat. ‘The buildup in the thyroid is what you’ve got to watch for. The betas go for the thyroid, especially with the children. It’s a terrible thing when they won’t even let you negotiate a simple goddamn arms control agreement.’

George wished that War and Peace would start again. ‘Good movie, huh?’

‘I can see your viewpoint. Eight hours of mongrel film technique in the service of murky Soviet propaganda, and yet there’s much to admire – the energetic grandeur, the meticulous Tolstoyan ambience.’ Overwhite massaged his elbow. ‘Cancer almost never forms in the elbows.’

‘Not much of a turnout,’ said George.

‘These enlisted men, all they want is Clint Eastwood and tits.’ Overwhite interlaced his fingers. ‘Cancer doesn’t bother with the fingers, either, not as a rule.’ He rubbed his chest. ‘In general, we needn’t worry about breast cancer.’

Later that afternoon, the Russians fled from the Battle of Borodino, Andrei died of his wounds, the Grand Army occupied Moscow, Napoleon suffered his calamitous retreat, and Pierre ended up with the vital and appealing Natasha Rostov.

Morning Valcourt is probably quite vital and appealing, George decided, once you get to know her.

From the perspective of the average consumer, psychotherapists in the second half of the twentieth century were an overpaid population. A hundred dollars an hour seemed a high price for the privilege of being listened to. What people don’t realize, Morning thought, is that I never stop working, night or day. When I’m having lunch, I’m working. I dream about my patients.

She sat down in the middle of the periscope room and arranged her lunch. A thermos of skim milk, a cucumber sandwich. She wanted to lose five pounds by the end of the voyage. Her Defense Department patient came to mind. Wengernook. All those feelings – he actually saw his wife die of radiation sickness – and no vocabulary for them. He talks about ballistic missile defenses. And Randstable, rambling on about inertial guidance and his old ‘think tank.’ He confuses systems analysis with thought. And the arms controller. Poor Overwhite, riddled with nonexistent tumors. Repression…

She finished her lunch, stuffed the refuse into the garbage scoop.

And Paxton. Why does he look at me that way? It’s not sex, not entirely. He wants something else from me.

The door hissed open.

George knew that, as a Unitarian, he was not competent to deal with metaphysical commodities, including prophetic glass paintings. He had decided to approach the situation on the theory that his Leonardo did not spell out an inevitable fate but, rather, a possible future, something that he could make happen through diligence and creativity. I shall not let Leonardo and Nostradamus and Holly’s stepsister down, he had resolved. I shall woo Morning Valcourt, make myself fascinating to her, fall in love with her, convince her to become my wife.

‘You and I have a lot in common,’ he said, entering the periscope room. ‘Did you know that selling tombstones is quite similar to psychotherapy? I would talk to people about their troubles.’

‘We’re the talking cure,’ she said tonelessly.

‘For example, we had guilt stones. Also self-hatred stones.’

‘Oh.’

He saw that he had been misinterpreting her face. The odd tilt of her mouth came not from snarling but from speaking so much truth, while the sharp flare of her nostrils traced to sensitivity rather than snobbery. He twisted his wedding ring. Forgive me, Justine.

‘I want you to see a fire,’ she said.

‘A fire? I got enough of that at Wildgrove.’ All business, this woman.

‘Wildgrove was nothing.’ She led him toward Periscope Number One. ‘Odessa had the distinction of being the last city to receive a warhead. It was attacked five days ago by the strategic submarine Atlanta. It’s still burning.’

‘Odessa? You mean… they hit Russia’s cities after all? They didn’t just go for the missile bases?’

‘Basic nuclear strategy. We took out their fixed silos, but they thought we were after their cities, so they went after our cities, and… quid pro quo.’

George pressed his eyes against the soft rubber viewfinder. A frantic orange haze appeared. He adjusted the focus. Odessa vibrated with flames. Inky smoke filled the heavens. ‘Fabrics, insulation, oil stores, polymers – there’s plenty to keep it going,’ Morning narrated. ‘The survivors must inhale a demon’s breath of dioxins and furans.’

‘You know so much, Dr Valcourt,’ he said in what he hoped was a seductive tone. The periscope room, he decided, was a lousy environment for making romance bloom. He would have to take her on a date. Would the movies be best? The bowling alley? The casino?

She pulled on the periscope handle, aiming the device at the continent where the United States of America had once been located. Fires. Back to the Soviet Union. Fires. America. City fires. Oil well fires. Coal seam fires. Grassland fires. Peat marsh fires. Forest fires. A pall of mist hung in the air, black as the blood of Nadine Covington and Ensign Peach. The Northern Hemisphere was wrapped in soot.

That night – Monday night – George dreamed he was made of smoke. His smoke legs would not let him walk. He could hold nothing in his smoke hands.

Then came Tuesday. The periscope room again.

‘Can you tell me what day it is, George?’ she asked.

Was it his imagination, or were her questions getting increasingly pointless? ‘The tenth of January. I’ve been aboard three weeks.’

‘Good. But out there it’s the beginning of July.’

‘Out where?’

‘In the world.’

‘What?’

‘Time is ruined, George – one of the many effects of nuclear war that nobody quite anticipated. All those fundamental particles being annihilated – time gets twisted and folded. A minute passes in here, but out there it might be an hour, a day, or a week.’

‘Folded?’

‘Like a Chinese screen. Post-exchange physics – something even Einstein didn’t foresee. In local regions of the quantum-dynamics fabric, space is taking on the role of time, and vice versa. According to our best evidence, there are only two places where the old ways of counting time still work. This ship is one of them. Antarctica is the other. Are you upset?’

He recalled the book he used to read Holly, Carrie of Cape Cod, full of clams and hermit crabs. I am a hermit crab, he decided. Place a blowtorch against my shell, I won’t feel it. Scratch me – no pain. ‘If time is crinkled, then time is crinkled,’ he said. ‘We hermit crabs can take anything.’

‘You what crabs?’

‘Hermit crabs.’

‘Yes. Hermit crabs. Good,’ Morning said. ‘Hermit crabs seek out shells because they want to survive,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘Hermit crabs believe in the future,’ his therapist concluded.

She’s starting to care about me, he thought. Should I show her my Leonardo? (Look, Dr Valcourt – you and I are destined to marry and have babies!) No. Not yet – she won’t understand. It might come across as a joke, or a symptom of survivor’s guilt, or a weird seduction attempt.

‘Jocotepec, Mexico,’ she said.

He leaned toward the eyepiece, twisted the focus knob.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to deal with ice.’

A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot – blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.

‘I thought you said July.’

‘July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.’

She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist. Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.

Wednesday.

‘Fourteen months have passed,’ said Morning. ‘It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.’ Morning closed her eyes. ‘The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?’ Her sigh was shrill, piercing. ‘Famine,’ she said.

George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, ‘Is this really the way to cure me?’

‘Yes,’ she said, as if that settled the matter. ‘Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds – those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse – roots reaching into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy…’

The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.

‘The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out…’

She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.

‘Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas…’

Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.

‘Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas…’

A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.

‘You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?’

Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.

The famine session left George quaking on the floor.

Thursday.

‘Five years have passed,’ said Morning. ‘And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.’

She worked the focus knob.

‘It’s time we dealt with pestilence,’ she said.

No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.

A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.

‘His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,’ Morning explained. ‘He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.’

The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.

‘If you were a disease – viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery – you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs – all these circumstances bode well.’

At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus…

Friday.

‘Infertility,’ said Morning.

The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.

A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. ‘The radiation,’ Morning explained. ‘They’ll never have children.’

They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.

A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. ‘Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,’ Morning noted, ‘and no good will come of it.’

‘You must tell me something,’ said George, reeling with nausea. ‘Who will treat your survivor’s guilt?’

The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, ‘I don’t know.’

For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.

Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. ‘Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.’ The cards rippled through his hands. ‘Deuces wild.’

George said, ‘Today through the periscope I saw—’

‘You saw, you saw,’ said Brat, sneering. ‘Jack bets.’

‘One dollar,’ said Overwhite.

‘I’m out,’ said Wengernook.

‘Raise,’ said Randstable.

George said, ‘Morning showed me—’

‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Brat. ‘How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?’

No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. ‘Ace bets.’

‘We saw it too,’ said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. ‘Jesus.’

‘Sugar Brook built that scope,’ said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. ‘Not my department, though – the command-and-control guys.’

‘Three dollars,’ said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.

‘I have a question.’ George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. ‘If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?’

‘Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,’ said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain. ‘It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.’

‘You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,’ said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. ‘It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.’

‘But it happened,’ said George. ‘Right on our planet.’

‘That’s just one particular case,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match. ‘In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and…’ He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.

‘First ace bets,’ said Brat.

‘And a much more desirable outcome,’ said Wengernook.

‘I’ve got it!’ said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.

‘Got what?’ asked George.

‘The solution!’ said Randstable.

‘To the war?’ asked George.

‘To the riddle.’ The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.

‘What riddle?’

‘Sverre’s riddle – why is a raven like a writing desk?’

‘Why?’

‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.

She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.

A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.

George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.

The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.

George sat down beneath the periscope and panted. ‘We’re through?’ he said, half inquiring, half asserting.

‘At this irrevocable point in history,’ said Morning, ‘not one human being exists anywhere – with the frail and tentative exception of this boat.’

The hermit crab had left his shell. He was a shivering mass of tender protoplasm. ‘Nobody can ride a mechanical horse.’

‘True.’

‘Or see the Big Dipper.’

‘Correct.’

‘Or take acting lessons.’

He was weeping now, copiously, and he could not tell whether his tears were for Justine, Holly, the Frenchman who had clawed the potato out of the ground, the Iranian school teacher who had died of louse-borne typhus, the last woman on earth…

Morning knelt beside the hurt man. She hugged him and dried his tears.

He returned her embrace. His bullet wound throbbed like a castanet grafted to his stomach. As if to stop the spasms, he reached into his shirt. His fingers touched glass, and slowly he withdrew his Leonardo.

‘Look at this,’ he said, licking his tears. ‘It’s you. And me. And our child.’

‘I don’t understand. Are you an artist?’

‘I told you about it before. The painter was Leonardo da Vinci. You know – the man with the vulture complex.’

‘A forgery, right?’

‘An original Leonardo – inspired by the brilliant prophet Nostradamus. It predicts the future. See? Holly’s stepsister is coming. You’ll be the mother.’

She took the slide. Light ascended from the glass and ignited her blue-green eyes. ‘It really does look like me. Spooky.’

‘It’s you.’

‘And the child…?’

‘If Justine had gotten pregnant again, we would have named the baby Aubrey. Have you ever had a child?’

‘No.’

‘They do all these amazing things.’

‘I’ve never been married. Aubrey?’

‘Aubrey Paxton.’

‘Pretty name.’

‘And there will be others. Aubrey’s brothers and sisters. Holly always wanted a sister.’

‘Why would anybody want to bring children into—?’

‘Into this world? I may not know about psychology or sundeath, Dr Valcourt, but I did learn something at the Crippen Monument Works. Our children will take whatever world they can get.’

‘You’re sterile.’

‘I have reason to believe the condition is not permanent.’

‘Next you’ll be saying we have the power to restore the race.’

Justine Paxton had frequently accused her husband of lacking ambition. She should hear what I’m about to say, he thought. ‘Maybe we do.’ (Maybe they did!) ‘Maybe it’s one of those unexpected effects of nuclear war you’re always talking about. Your own fertility is…?’

‘No problems that I know about.’ She hefted the slide, ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and furrows of paint. ‘Where did you get this thing?’

‘A civilian passenger. Nadine Covington. Her blood is black.’

‘Black?’

‘Like ink.’

‘I doubt that she can be trusted.’

‘I trust her.’

Without unlocking arms, they stood up. Again they embraced. George took his Leonardo back and departed with the words ‘restore the race’ ringing in his ears. There, you see, my poor, extinct Justine? You did not marry a lazy man after all.

The extinction of one’s own species is an event not easily comprehended. Only by using Periscope Number One privately, over and over, did George begin to grasp the contours of the event. He studied his planet for hours on end, rubbing his nose in oblivion. He even looked at the stars. Nothing. Nothing save the burned land, the poisoned water, the harsh stillness, the rare clam, the occasional roach, the intermittent swatch of grass, the clusters of salt-pickled corpses floating in the South Atlantic timefolds like barges of flesh.

Brian Overwhite was wrong. The human mind can accommodate anything. Some parents beat their children. Auschwitz. Sundeath. It’s just blood, the mind says. It’s only pain. It’s merely putting people into ovens. It’s simply the end of the world…

Long ago, George’s grandfather had died on the last day of June, an event that had plunged the family into a quandary. Should they hold the usual Fourth of July picnic? George’s grandfather loved the Fourth of July. He always built cherry-bomb-tipped skyrockets for the occasion, deploying them against a balsa wood model of Fort McHenry. During the battle, the family would sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while toy frigates shot marbles at the ramparts and the cherry bombs detonated around a tattered little American flag.

The solution to the dilemma came from George’s Aunt Isabel. ‘Daddy would want us to celebrate,’ she asserted. ‘Daddy would be angry at us if we didn’t have a good time,’ she insisted.

The picnic happened, and with a vengeance. Horseshoes flew, beer flowed, banjos sang, chickens vanished without a trace, blueberry pies were reported missing in action, and rockets glared redly over Fort McHenry. Everyone agreed that Aunt Isabel had made the right decision.

And so it was that whenever Chief Petty Officer Rush brought the dinner menu around, George always checked off the most opulent and sauce-laden dishes. He began frequenting the Silver Dollar Casino, making wild, Scotch-inspired bets at the blackjack table. The invitation to Captain Sverre’s banquet sent waves of joyous anticipation – food! coffee! dessert! – through his body.

‘Your species would want you to celebrate,’ he told himself. ‘Your species would be angry at you if you didn’t have a good time,’ he decided.

Swathed in velvet drapes, lit by crystal chandeliers, the main mess hall of the City of New York proved just how tasteful and sophisticated defense spending could be. The banquet itself, by contrast, followed the gaudy lines of Imperial Rome, with an eye to Babylon and a nod to Gomorrah – gold plates, bejeweled goblets. The tablecloth was thick enough to blot a liter of priceless wine without leaving a drop. The serving staff – a dozen seamen and noncorns – patrolled the borders in their dress blues, pushing carts brimming with slabs of ham, planks of beef, heaps of bread, cauldrons of soup, and pots of satiny black coffee.

Ceramic dolphins held the place cards. George ended up between Overwhite and Reverend Sparrow – in the crossfire of a debate over the STABLE II treaty. (Evidently one of Sparrow’s broadcasts had figured decisively in the US Senate’s decision not to ratify this agreement.) Sadness and confusion enveloped his friends like gray scopas suits – the human extinction was not sitting well with them. Wengernook sucked on an unlit cigarette. Randstable built strange perpetual-motion devices out of the silverware and then knocked them over. Brat was down to about a hundred and thirty pounds. Overwhite’s beard looked mangy. Sparrow’s voluminous smile had wilted. They should all go see Mrs Covington, George decided. They should find out about their futures.

At the far end of the table Captain Sverre spoke with a civilian, a small, raffish fellow who managed to look youthful and eminent at the same time. Between remarks they stuffed themselves in gluttonous rivalry, Sverre favoring ham, the young man specializing in roast beef. Sverre’s gin bottle sat faithfully at his elbow. Gravy stains bloomed on the young man’s dark suit.

Brat was saying, ‘Personally, I think this race-loss business has been exaggerated. Psychotherapists like to be dramatic.’

Wengernook nodded in agreement. ‘The earth is really much more resilient than those periscope views suggest.’

The serving staff was well-meaning but graceless, dumping food on the table as if shoveling coal into the furnace of a tramp steamer. Champagne came forth in torrents. George drank enough to put music in the air and a pleasant buzz between his ears.

He had to admit it – Morning had not taken to the Aubrey Paxton idea with great enthusiasm. Just remember, he told himself, it’s a big step for a woman, having a kid, restarting a species. You must let the idea grow on her.

‘They don’t run very good movies on this ship,’ said Reverend Sparrow. ‘War and Peace, what a boring mess.’

‘What should they run, your old TV shows?’ sneered Overwhite.

‘Ever see King of Kings?’ said Sparrow. ‘It’s wonderful the way Orson Welles pronounces the T in “apostles.”’ He placed George’s shoulder in a warm grip. ‘I’m still praying for you.’

‘That’s nice,’ said George.

As soon as dessert arrived – the evacuees could corrupt themselves with either German chocolate cake or lemon meringue pie – Sverre drew a carving knife from a ham and clanked it against his water glass. All eyes shot toward him. The serving staff scurried out of the hall.

‘Antarctica,’ whispered Randstable. ‘He’s going to tell us about Antarctica.’

‘Tonight’s banquet was advertised as a celebration,’ the captain began. ‘Dr Valcourt reports that, when we dock at McMurdo Station, six rational and competent survivors will disembark. We are here to rejoice in your cure. You have looked extinction in the face and lived. Operation Erebus will succeed.’

He set the carving knife on a linen napkin, poured gin into a gold goblet, drank.

‘Extinction. Such a sterile word, so Latin. What does it mean? When you kill a species, good guests, you do not simply kill its current members, you also kill the generation that lies dormant in its germ cells – and, thus, the generation that the descendants of those germ cells would have made, and the next generation, and the next. Extinction is an endless crime, quietly slaughtering all the lives that would have been. The human birth canal is the only way into human existence, gentlemen. There is no other port of entry.’

‘What is this guy, one of those warrior intellectuals?’ whispered Wengernook.

‘Lawrence of Arabia joins the Navy,’ said Brat.

Sverre took off his claw-hammer coat, tossed it on the floor, and rolled up his shirt sleeve.

‘At a certain moment in the great nuclear arms race, it became common knowledge that an extinction was in the offing. The universe trembled with the news. Your species mattered, gentlemen – more than you knew. The planets reeled, the trees wept, the rocks cried out. But from which place did the greatest anger issue? From the place that keeps my kind. We have always been with you, waiting to get in… and now the door has been shut.’

‘That keeps his what?’ said Brat.

‘His kind,’ said Overwhite.

‘Oh God,’ said Randstable.

‘Shut,’ repeated Sverre.

George’s bullet wound began to throb. Waiting to get in…

‘So great was our anger that, shortly before the war, we achieved a tenuous hold on life,’ said Sverre. ‘We even managed to insert ourselves into your affairs.’

‘Do any of you know what he’s talking about?’ said Brat.

‘Oh, dear, I think so,’ said Randstable. ‘Oh, God.’

Sverre picked up the knife, which was long and shiny with fat. What happened next would visit George’s dreams for many nights to come. Slowly, wincingly, Sverre opened his arm. Arteries came asunder. Muscles perished. A lustrous black liquid spurted from the wound, as if someone had drilled for, and found, oil in his flesh. A sulphurous odor rushed out. Once on the tablecloth, the blood did not die, but collected itself into a viscous lump. The lump became a small, screaming, human head with a face that bore a disquieting resemblance to Sverre’s.

‘We are the inheritors who can never take title,’ said the bleeding captain. ‘We are the darkblood multitudes whose ancestors were exterminated before they could sire us,’ asserted the pilot of the City of New York.

He sat down, pressed a napkin against his wound, and anesthetized himself with gin. The blood-head dissolved into a puddle.

‘We are the unadmitted,’ said Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy.

Nuclear war entails many surprising effects. George had learned this from his therapist. The unadmitted…

Overwhite’s lips encircled words he could not voice. Brat looked dredged in flour. Wengernook tore the unlit cigarette from his mouth and eviscerated it. An aura of wrath surrounded Reverend Sparrow. ‘Foul wizard!’ he cried. ‘“But the abominable and sorcerers shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire!”’ he quoted.

‘Mercy! A discontinuity!’ gasped Randstable, pulling a pocket calculator from his vest.

‘You mean it’s a trick?’ said George.

‘Trick? No – a quantum aberration.’ Randstable stroked the little keyboard. ‘Normally such things happen only at the subatomic level, when your pions and antineutrinos and so on burst out of nothing as vacuum fluctuations.’ A string of zeros appeared on the display screen. ‘In the macroworld, where you have your people and so on, the expected frequency of such an event is very, very low – just shy of zero, in fact.’

The captain told of his locked-out race. He took his guests back to the time of the materializations, bade them see the Antarctic glaciers gestate men, women, and children, each scheduled to gain the continent at the high point of his would-be life, the time of greatest fulfillment and promise.

‘Watch us rise through the ice, crack into the frigid dawn, rub the snow from our eyes, stretch our hypothetical limbs. My parents were killed in the Battle of Washington exactly two weeks before they would have conceived me. I would have gone to Annapolis. I would have served my country with honor and distinction. I would have—’

Bypassing the goblet, Sverre drank directly from the bottle.

‘Do you know what our outrage was worth? A year. A year is nothing, gentlemen. Half my life is already gone. I can tell you how many hours I have left. How many minutes.’

Faces jumped into George’s brain. Nadine Covington. Theophilus Carter. Ensign Peach. Darkbloods all.

Morning Valcourt.

Was she one of them? Was Aubrey’s mother a woman from the future?

‘If unadmitted, you must use your sojourn well,’ said Sverre. ‘A year is nothing.’

First priority – get warm. And so you become pirates, plundering the scopas suit barges on their transpacific crossings.

‘Such attire is excellent for keeping out the cold,’ the captain explained.

A year. Nothing. You cannot raise a family in a year. You cannot forge a great republic. But you can, with luck, after making appropriate political arrangements, track down certain key individuals and call them to account. So you build a courthouse. Judge’s bench. Witness stand. Prisoner’s dock. A Multiprong submarine lies at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Unadmitted Navy frogmen bring her up. You set sail. You snatch six men from the jaws of the holocaust. You want more – President Orlaff, Senator Krogh, the Secretary of the Navy, the National Security Advisor – but they are already dead.

‘Courthouse?’ Brat tried to eat a forkful of German chocolate cake, failed. ‘Is that what he said?’

‘Courthouse,’ muttered Randstable.

‘We want admittance,’ said Sverre. ‘Instead we must settle for knowledge. You will tell us why this war was necessary. Consider how fortunate you are. We could have left you to the flames, as we elected to do with them. The others. Their gimcrack Party, their bankrupt Marxism, their outrageous pretensions – all blessedly extinct. You, by contrast, are ambiguous. You don’t add up. It was your ambiguousness that saved you, that alone.’

George had never thought of himself as being ambiguous.

‘Surely you don’t presume to lay this tragedy at our feet,’ grumbled Overwhite. ‘We did everything in our power to prevent—’

‘Er, wait a minute, Brian,’ said Randstable. ‘Surely they do presume to lay this tragedy at our feet. I mean, when you consider that the alternative is… you know. The extinction loop.’

‘You have no jurisdiction over us,’ said Wengernook. ‘Zero. None. Nada.’

A new voice said, ‘I’m afraid that’s not true.’

Sverre’s table companion was standing. ‘The McMurdo Sound Agreement charters an International Military and Civilian Tribunal,’ asserted the young man as he devoured a glob of lemon meringue pie. ‘The first appendix lists the counts against you. Have no fear – we shall challenge the competence of the court as soon as the trial begins.’

George’s appetite for dessert, a primary drive not long ago, was completely gone. Counts against us? Trial? All because of some ridiculous sales contract?

‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Brat.

‘Your advocate. Martin Bonenfant, unadmitted counsel for the defense. My staff and I have been hired to argue your case before the judges. I strongly recommend that you retain us.’

‘We don’t need a goddamn lawyer,’ asserted Wengernook.

Bonenfant raked his fingers through his glossy black hair. ‘Yes, you do – though your case is much better than you might suppose. We’ve been researching your enemy’s morals, as well as the many imaginative ways you sought to prevent mutual destruction. Do you realize that the Soviets violated the spirit and at times the letter of both STABLE agreements?’ He devoured more lemon meringue pie. ‘And if all else fails, I’ve got a rabbit or two in my hat. I believe we should go for acquittals, count by count.’

He’s so young, George thought. They sent a child to defend us.

‘Yes, an acquittal strategy is certainly the way to play this one,’ muttered Randstable. Turning, he solicited his co-defendants with large, clumsy gestures. ‘Let me put it this way. A photon that doesn’t exist can borrow energy from the uncertainty relation to make a real positron-electron pair, which annihilates to produce the photon that created it in the first place.’

‘Sounds like witchcraft,’ said Sparrow.

‘No,’ said Randstable. ‘Physics.’

Slowly, anxiously, Bonenfant licked lemon muck from his lips. For the unadmitted, evidently, there was urgency in every pleasure. He explained that, if let upon the earth, he would have been a civil liberties lawyer living in Philadelphia. He would have defended child murderers and neo-Nazis.

George stood up. ‘I would like to assert here and now that I am—’

The event that kept him from saying ‘innocent,’ stopping his tongue as abruptly as an arrow stops a bird in flight, was the sudden arrival of the City of New York’s officers and men. Lieutenant Grass, Ensign Peach, Ensign Cobb, Lieutenant Brust, Chief Petty Officer Rush – and over two hundred others. Down the spiral staircase they came, straight into the main mess hall, a roiling mob.

Snatching steak knives from the banquet table, the front-line officers slashed themselves, then passed the knives to the waiting sailors. Chandelier light sparkled in the black rivers. Clouds of burning sulphur rolled through the mess hall. Unadmitted blood filled the wine glasses and frosted the desserts; it speckled Wengernook’s brow, splattered Sparrow’s hair, rushed down Randstable’s cheeks, matted Overwhite’s beard, stuck to Brat’s hands, pooled in George’s lap.

‘Admit us!’ cried the nullified descendants. ‘Let us in!’

A swamp of blood collected in the center of the table. It swirled and bubbled, spitting out ashes. As Peach and Cobb gestured toward the vortex, something took form – an ebony sculpture rising awkwardly from the ghostly tissues.

A model scaffold. A miniature noose. A little hanging corpse – a doll two feet long, its face a blob, its tongue lolling on black lips. Slowly, drippingly, like a reverse-motion film of a melting figurine, features emerged, eyes, nose, mouth.

George reached into his pocket and drew out his Leonardo. This family is mine, he told himself. No canceled generations can take it from me.

‘Count One – Crimes Against Peace!’ screamed Peach.

‘Count Two – War Crimes!’ screamed Cobb.

‘Count Three – Crimes Against Humanity!’

‘Count Four – Crimes Against the Future!’

The sculpted corpse had acquired Wengernook’s face. It wept tears of ink.

The cousins blew on the scaffold. The black oozy face transmogrified. Now Randstable was being executed for war crimes. Now Sparrow. Overwhite. Brat.

‘They’re just trying to scare us,’ said the general.

‘They’re succeeding,’ said Randstable.

‘All they want is an explanation,’ said Overwhite.

George pressed his lips to the painting, kissed Holly’s stepsister. He looked at the doll, saw what he knew was coming, a relentless transformation of the Brat-face into a George-face. He had always wished his nose was smaller. There will be a birth, he vowed. For unto us an Aubrey Paxton will be born. Nostradamus was on to something. I am innocent. Aubrey will be admitted to the good, resilient earth.

CHAPTER NINE

Morning finished reading the last chapter of Merribell Braddock’s Scarlet Passions, closed the book, and, without particularly meaning to, sighed.

Before her career was cut short by the end of the world, Merribell Braddock had single-handedly contributed over three hundred titles to the genre of romantic fiction. Scarlet Passions was as false as Olaf Sverre’s left eye, and yet, because it described the love of a woman for a man, Morning was touched. Poor extinct Merribell had reached right into Morning’s throat and raised a lump. The guileful author was making her see that her feelings for George – for his rough body and deceptively simple personality – definitely qualified as romantic.

‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’ he said to her as he entered the office.

‘Them?’

‘The unadmitted. I love a shadow.’

‘I’m human,’ she said. ‘I’m human, and you love your dead wife, and I’m not her.’

George released a sharp, explosive moan. Why bring up Justine? Wasn’t it their duty to focus on the future? ‘You’re asking me to believe there were no unadmitted therapists in Antarctica? They had to go outside their race?’

‘The McMurdo framers failed to anticipate the survivor’s guilt problem. When they went to Chicago to kidnap Randstable, I offered my services. I was given an audience with Sverre. He hired me. No pay – but I would get to live out my life, such as it is.’

She removed the sacrificial knife from the wall and rested the blade against her wrist.

‘My blood is as red as yours, George. It’s as red as the blood of the innocents whose hearts were excised by this knife.’

He thought of her coming pain, winced. ‘Don’t. I’ve seen enough blood lately.’ She was human.

Human… and something of a whore.

‘How can you work for these… discontinuities?’

‘I owe them my survival. So do you.’

‘I hate them.’

‘They come to see me. They are, as you might imagine, troubled. An intolerable case load. I try my best. I listen to them, but I can’t give them what they want.’

‘They want—?’

‘Memories. Real memories, with a bite. They tell me of their lovers, friends, careers, obsessions, but it all happened to somebody else. Seaman Sparks wants me to teach him what music was like, good music – jazz, baroque, not the treacle they pump through the intercom. He would have played the flute. Then there’s Lieutenant Grass. He’s trying to recall his brother – fishing trips, touch football. It’s rare for relatives actually to find each other. Not enough time, too big a continent, and if they do connect the ages are usually wrong. Old women run across their pre-adolescent husbands. Newlyweds stumble into their middle-aged children.’

‘Are they always sad?’ George asked.

‘They have their flashes – moments you and I would call satisfaction, even joy. But most of the time, life is something they read about in a book. Yesterday Seaman Raskin said to me, “Imagine sittings in a gray, still, empty room, taking an endless true-or-false test, getting each question right, and realizing you’ll never experience anything else.”’ She nicked her desk with the sacrificial knife. ‘Don’t ever confuse unadmittance with living, George.’

‘I still hate them. Anybody would have signed that sales contract.’

‘Let me guess. You’re feeling… betrayed? Framed? Manipulated?’

‘All those things.’

‘Manipulated by your therapist? By the darkbloods?’

‘Both. You never cared about me.’

‘Don’t say what you know isn’t true.’

‘You just wanted to patch me together so I’d be fit to stand trial.’

With the sacrificial knife she began flipping back pages of Scarlet Passions. ‘Give me your Leonardo.’

‘What makes you think I have it?’

‘Give it to me.’

He pulled the painting from his shirt. She received it respectfully, holding it by the edges.

‘I don’t know what to make of this.’ Morning touched her unconceived daughter’s hair. ‘But I like what it shows. I like everything about it. Your hand is almost on my breast.’

She’s starting to get it right, he thought. Love. Marriage. Sex. Children. Species regeneration. ‘I must find a city with marble walls. They cure infertility there.’

‘It could be a hoax, of course,’ she said. ‘Nadine Covington’s bid for revenge.’

‘I believe the painting. So do you.’ Love. Marriage. Sex. But not necessarily in that order. ‘Tonight we’ll have a drink together in the Silver Dollar Casino.’

‘No.’

‘If we’re going to marry and raise a family, we should get to know each other.’

‘I cannot have a drink with you.’ She returned the Leonardo. ‘The darkbloods are here, George. They have gained the continent. Do you truly understand your situation? If the judges find against you, nothing we want – a wedding, Aubrey, her siblings – none of it will happen.’ Leaning toward him, she spoke in a frantic whisper. ‘From now on, we must never be seen together. We can’t let anyone claim that I lack objectivity. “Dr Valcourt? Oh, she’s his ex-therapist, nothing more.” I’m coming to your trial, friend. Morning Valcourt, witness for the defense. I know something that will help your case.’

‘I won’t just walk away from you. I won’t.’

Her conspiratorial voice dropped even lower. ‘You will. Until the hour of my testimony, I’ll be gone from your life. Do you understand? Gone. Searching for me will prove futile. No one can master the back passageways here, the dead ends.’

‘What do you know that will help my case?’

‘I know that I care deeply about you.’

They parted not by kissing, not by hugging, but by discreetly brushing their fingertips together. For George it was one of the most fleshly and impassioned experiences of his life. The sensation lingered in his hands. The pleasure stayed in his memory, waiting to be called up whenever he wanted to feel it.

Captain Sverre was right. A year is nothing. So far, at age thirty-five, George had known twelve thousand days full of physical sensations, many of them astonishingly wonderful – drinking coffee, reading to his daughter, touching fingertips with Morning Valcourt. But a year is nothing. No wonder the unadmitted wanted to hang him.

The Erebus Poker Club did not accomplish much poker that weekend. Brat kept forgetting what beat a straight. Whenever it was Wengernook’s deal, he couldn’t remember which cards should go up and which down. Overwhite got the chips confused, insisting that he was betting five dollars when he was really betting one.

‘These damn zombies,’ said Brat. ‘They just don’t seem real to me, know what I mean? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this whole business was being cooked up in Moscow.’ Not a single aspect of the general – posture, visage, tone of voice – suggested that he believed himself. The unadmitted were here. They had gained the continent. They were as real as South African granite.

‘Provided that the conservation of electric charge and the balance between particles and antiparticles are obeyed,’ said Randstable, ‘there is nothing to stop a lot of molecules, even organic molecules, from materializing and then combining into lifeforms… er, assuming that the discrepancy is never noticed, of course.’

‘And if the discrepancy is noticed?’ asked Wengernook.

‘The molecules disappear, naturally,’ said Randstable.

‘But we did notice,’ said Brat. ‘And the zombies are still around.’

‘That’s got me stumped too,”’ said Randstable.

‘Know what I think, William?’ said Wengernook. ‘I think you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’

‘I wonder if we’ll get a fair trial,’ said George.

‘I wonder if wishes are horses,’ said Brat. He tried to shuffle, made a mess of it. ‘Believe me, fellas, the whole thing is a sham, like those show trials of Stalin’s. Our best chance would be a prison break.’

‘My father was a lawyer,’ said Wengernook. ‘All those counts against us – it’s what you call a retroactive indictment. We didn’t violate any laws, so they had to go out and invent some, ex post facto. If Bonenfant knows his stuff, he’ll get the case dismissed for lack of precedents.’

‘Maybe we should testify,’ said Overwhite. He checked himself for jaw tumors. ‘I see their point of view, more or less.’

‘Hell, Brian, they’re a bunch of hanging judges,’ said Brat. ‘This is vigilante vengeance. Don’t you understand?’

‘I think we owe them something,’ said Overwhite.

‘We owe them nothing,’ said Brat.

‘We owe them an explanation,’ insisted Overwhite.

‘We’re innocent,’ said Wengernook.

‘They’re more innocent,’ said Overwhite.

‘If I was in their shoes,’ said George, ‘I’d be curious about a lot of things too.’

She was not in her office. She was not in the skating rink. The bowling alley held no trace of her. The movie theater was empty.

He stayed for the feature, Panic in the Year Zero. In this low-budget melodrama from American International, Ray Milland survived a thermonuclear holocaust by driving into the country in a car full of groceries.

He went to the library. Morning was not there. He found a college biology text, leafed through it. The section on the male reproductive system was surprisingly detailed and frank. A gonad appeared in cross-section. Explicit drawings depicted the seminiferous tubules, the spermatids, the spermatogonia, and the spermatocytes. ‘Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids,’ Dr Brust had told him. He closed the book and smiled with satisfaction. When I get to the marble city, he thought, I’ll be able to tell them exactly what needs doing…

He decided to try Lieutenant Grass’s hydroponic orange grove. Perhaps she liked oranges.

A fruity scent throbbed through the missile compartment as he slipped into Tube Sixteen. The tree looked vigorous and fecund. He grabbed an orange, tore it from the branch. Succulent. Perfect. Were oranges now extinct? Had unadmitted orange trees been permitted a fleeting tenure on the earth?

He left Tube Sixteen and, sitting down on the cold steel deck, began his vigil. In his mind the portrait of his latent family multiplied into an entire museum. He saw himself walking along a bright corridor, sun-washed windows on one side, paintings on the other. He paused before Morning in a wedding dress – at least, it was probably Morning, though it also looked a bit like Justine. The signature was Leonardo’s. Next he inspected a mental painting of himself and Morning making love, brewing the next generation. Oh, how he missed sex, how he hated subsisting on onanism. (We must never be seen together… I’ll be gone from your life.)

International Military and Civilian Tribunal: phooey. International Kangaroo Court. Yes, Brat had his faults, he was too hasty with his man-portable thermonuclear device, and he hadn’t understood that a nation that doesn’t exist doesn’t need to defend itself, but this ‘crimes against the future’ stuff was really stretching it. Overwhite? A windbag, sure, but not a dangerous man. Randstable? He could barely walk across a room. Wengernook? He cheated at poker, but that was about it. Reverend Sparrow? Come off it. No, not one of George’s new friends deserved to be in this jam.

A hideous odor cut into his thoughts. He stood up, peered around Tube Sixteen. A young civilian reminiscent of Martin Bonenfant, but with blond hair and a baby-pink complexion, crouched in the middle of the compartment, opening a hatch in the floor. He wore a business suit. The stench evidently traced to the duffel bag on his shoulder.

The intruder disappeared through the hatch. Creeping forward, George followed him down.

A dark, mucosal passageway lay under the missile compartment. It might have been tunneled out by a large earthworm. (Were there unadmitted worms in the world?) The young man stepped into an alcove bathed in a sallow light of uncertain origin. Rusty iron rods went floor to ceiling, turning the alcove into a cage. Inside, a trapped bird the size of a pterodactyl snorted and squirmed.

George thought perhaps he was again seeing Mrs Covington’s magic lantern show. But no, this vulture – his vulture, as Morning would have it – was alive, as alive as eaters of the dead ever get. It looked exactly as it had at ground zero – tattered wings, rancid eyes, steam-shovel beak, broken posture. And Morning had assumed it was a hallucination. Hah…

The vulture’s young keeper pulled a penguin carcass from the bag. He looked foolish standing there in his business suit, holding carrion. He pushed the penguin between the bars. The vulture pinned it against the floor with its claw, tore it to pieces, feasted noisily. The keeper winced and gagged, unable to constrain his disgust.

Sneaking back down the passageway, George began to tremble. My family is dead, my planet is dead, my gonads are dead, I’m a prisoner of the murdered future, I’m going to be hanged for a crime I didn’t commit, there’s a vulture on the submarine, a real vulture, a huge crazy real vulture… He climbed to the missile deck. A species without males – that’s what the ancient Egyptians believed, according to Morning. Inseminated by the winds.

It occurred to him that he knew nothing about Morning’s religious convictions. On Sunday he went to church, hoping she might show up.

The City of New York’s chapel was an all-purpose facility, with missals and icons suited to almost any sacramental need a sailor in the US Navy might have. George sat in the back pew along with the Presbyterian Brat, the Lutheran Wengernook, and three noncommissioned officers of indeterminate denomination. Ship’s Chaplain was a lieutenant named Owen Soapstone. George felt at home in Soapstone’s flock, for had the chaplain been born, he would have followed up his navy stint with a long career as a Unitarian minister. He mounted the pulpit and opened an Unadmitted Bible. A respectful hush settled over the congregation.

‘In the end Humankind destroyed the heaven and the earth,’ Soapstone began.

‘Oh, boy,’ said Brat.

‘One-track minds,’ said Wengernook.

‘And Humankind said, “Let there be security,” and there was security. And Humankind tested the security, that it would detonate. And Humankind divided the U-235 from the U-238. And the evening and the morning were the first strike.’ Soapstone looked up from the book. ‘Some commentators feel that the author should have inserted, “And Humankind saw the security, that it was evil.” Others point out that such a view was not universally shared.’

‘I didn’t come to hear this crap,’ Wengernook announced, rising.

A tremor passed through the chapel. The bulkheads moaned. As Wengernook stalked out, a lily-filled vase fell over and shattered.

Casting his eyes heavenward, Soapstone continued. ‘And Humankind said, “Let there be a holocaust in the midst of the dry land.” And Humankind poisoned the aquifers that were below the dry land and scorched the ozone that was above the dry land. And the evening and the morning were the second strike.’ Soapstone closed the Bible on his hand, a bookmark of flesh. ‘Many commentators reject the author’s use of the term “Humankind” as bombastic and sentimental, arguing that blame should be affixed more selectively. Other commentators—’

The chapel was on the move, pitching and rolling. Altar candles took to the air like twigs in a gale. Rivets detached themselves from the ceiling and rained into the aisles. Twisting in their seats, the panicked churchgoers grabbed the backs of their pews and hung on like people who had lives.

George decided that he could not cope with another unexpected effect of nuclear war.

Round and round went the room, ever rising, as if traveling up the surface of an enormous corkscrew. The ride seemed to unleash some latent fundamentalism in Soapstone. He embraced his pulpit, binding himself to it like a helmsman lashed to a ship’s wheel. The chaplain’s reading became a fire-and-brimstone sermon, his eyes spinning, his tongue spiraling, each word a scream.

‘And Humankind said, “Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!” And the evening and the morning—’

A candlestick clipped Soapstone’s nose, releasing black blood. His Bible flew up as if being juggled by a poltergeist, then crashed through a stained-glass window. The congregation tumbled into the aisles, George sputtering, Brat cursing prolifically. Still hugging the pulpit, Soapstone continued from memory.

‘And Humankind said, “Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!” And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, “Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—”’

George sailed into the outstretched arms of Saint Sebastian. As he and the statue collided, skullbone against marble, he experienced sensations reminiscent of being shot by John Frostig, but when he looked up he did not see his vulture. Of course – it’s under the missile deck, he thought. It’s in a cage. It can’t come for me this time…

He awoke in his bunk, staring at dead sea horses. Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret were now pulpy blobs floating near the top of the tank. He had nurtured them as best he could, raising the new generation, maintaining the old, talking to them, but his efforts were not equal to their death wish. Bits of Soapstone’s sermon drifted through his brain. And Humankind said, Be fruitless, and barren…

‘We hit rough water,’ said a voice from nowhere.

George blinked. The MARCH Hare’s emaciated form stood over him, proffering a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. His face showed abundant evidence of the recent chaos: bruises, bandages, clotting cuts.

‘Worse than rough,’ Brat continued. ‘A maelstrom.’

George’s head felt as if it had been recently employed as the ball in some violent team sport. He fingered his scalp. The major lump was surrounded by tender foothills. He slurped down coffee. ‘Maelstrom?’

‘Big fat one.’ With unrestrained glee Brat described the whirlpool – a latter-day Charybdis sucking in a hundred tons of water every second, chewing her way across the sea, feasting on archipelagoes, washing them down with vast areas of the South Atlantic. ‘Now, here’s the sweet part. The thing pitched us right out of the water. Believe it or not, we’re on God’s dry land.’

George stumbled from his bunk and, after securing the necessary material from the bathroom, began wrapping the little equine corpses in toilet paper shrouds. ‘Land? You mean Antarctica?’

‘Antarctica is a thousand miles away. We’re beached on an island off the Cape of Good Hope. Saw it through the periscope. Tide’s going out. Tomorrow it will return and raise us up.’ Brat’s eyes expanded with crazed joy. ‘I’ve got a question for you, Paxton, and if the answer is yes, then God is surely in His heaven. You brought a scopas suit on board – right?’

George silently recited an epitaph for Jeremiah Sea Horse – HE WAS A GOOD FATHER – and nodded.

‘Could I see it?’ Brat asked.

The tomb inscriber went to his closet and took down Holly’s undelivered Christmas present. Brat pounced on it, ripping the Colt .45 from the utility belt and sticking it in his man-portable thermonuclear device holster.

‘That happens to be my gun, Brat. Or, to be precise, my daughter’s gun.’

‘You’re welcome to join me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Through the amidships hatch.’

‘You mean – an escape?’

‘If the natives prove unfriendly, we can build a raft and sail to the mainland. We’ll find the pockets of civilization, help them clean the shit off the fan blades. We’ll put it all together. The world is our oyster, Paxton.’

‘Our dead oyster.’ He wrapped up Suzy, composed her epitaph: A FINE SWIMMER.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust your survival instincts?’ asked the general. ‘Got a dishonorable discharge from the Boy Scouts?’

‘This strikes me as a foolish idea, Brat.’

‘There must be lots of untargeted towns out there.’

‘It’s the back of the moon out there.’

‘That’s what you think. I’ve been telling you all along this extinction stuff was a lot of horse manure. There’s a city on this very island, a whole city, not a crack anywhere.’

‘A city?’

‘I saw it.’

‘What kind of city?’

‘It’s… I don’t know. A city.’

‘Does it have white walls?’

‘Yeah. White walls. Like marble. How did you know that?’

CHAPTER TEN

Holly’s pistol proved unnecessary. No sailors were on watch outside George’s cabin or in the corridors beyond. The flight to the amidships hatch was accomplished without spilling a single drop of black blood.

They popped the hatch, leaped up. George underwent a succession of pleasant shocks – technological hum to whispering surf, chilly submarine to warm night, canned oxygen to sweet air. Formless tufts of decaying jungle growth reached out and smothered the grounded prow. A full moon looked down, its brilliant whites and harsh blacks forming a luminous celestial skull.

The fugitives raced between the rows of missile doors – steel cables girded the walkway – climbed out on a rear diving plane, and dropped into the shallows. George followed Brat’s moonlit form wading to shore.

Beyond the beach stretched a tidal marsh, a miasma of malodorous silt and terminally ill grasses. The fugitives slogged through the mud, George moving with a vitality acquired from his years of hauling granite. The swamp belched fierce gases; the air heaved with the sticky residue of the vanished sun. High above, beyond the hot sky, the stars of the southern hemisphere welded themselves into grotesque and pornographic constellations.

The clay ground became soft, then hard, kiln-fired. Threaded by mist, great stone slabs grew from the plain. They were riddled with holes – missing gobbets of slate and marble suggesting that some rock-eating vulture had feasted here. Moonlight splashed against the slabs, darkening the plain with perforated shadows.

The ground folded, hills bellied up. Trees broke from the bottom of the ravine like immense black hands. They bore not fruit but violence – thorns that were spikes, seed pods that were the heads of medieval maces. The moon took on a deathly pallor, becoming in George’s mind the corpse of his planet’s sun, sundeath syndrome leaving behind something to bury.

At the base of each tree, rings of mushrooms went round and round. For species living in the post-exchange environment, their abundance and variety were astonishing. George and Brat ran past mushrooms shaped like elf hats and others shaped like horns of plenty. There were trumpet mushrooms, umbrella mushrooms, candlestick mushrooms, phallus mushrooms, pig-snout mushrooms, toadstools, toadchairs, toadtables, and toadhammocks. Spiraling out of the forest, the island’s vast fungus population spread across dead meadows and desiccated fields like an army of maggots, right up to the gates of the city.

The city. It was as Brat had promised, whole, impounded by blast wave, unburned by thermal pulse. The marble walls glowed like phosphorous, the marble towers sweated in the torrid night. Fat vines slithered up and down the parapets. Gray, withered leaves, each the size and complexion of a shroud, lolled on the vines, embracing the ramparts as petals embrace the organs of a flower, so that the city seemed a kind of plant sprung from some mutant, war-irradiated spore. At one point the ramparts divided to receive a thick, tumid river. The main gate was open and unattended, the guard towers deserted. The fugitives entered freely.

A bent city. Twisted alleys, fractured sidewalks, crooked courts, each lamp post curved like the spinal column of a hunchback. Tall marble buildings leaned over the cobblestone thoroughfares, in certain places touching, fusing to create tunnels and high walk-ways. The fog, fat and milky, floated through the city like a cataract lifted from the eye of a giant. Dank vapors escaped from the well shafts and sewer gratings. As the river advanced it became the city’s prisoner, chained by bridges of stone, bound by levees of concrete, forced to feed a labyrinth of canals.

On the coiled and buckled streets, figures moved in a shadowy parade.

‘There – what did I tell you?’ said the MARCH Hare. ‘This extinction has been blown all out of proportion. We’re a tough breed, Paxton. Who knows? Maybe one of these survivors is that fertility expert you want.’

George paused beside a wrought iron gate and caught his breath. Had the war completely bypassed this island? Or had a faction of darkbloods emigrated from Antarctica and set up a colony off the tip of Africa? Closer observation suggested that the marchers were not unadmitted – certainly they bore little resemblance to Olaf Sverre’s cynical and irreverent Navy. They were like their city, palsied, broken, lost. Something pathological had visited these people – if not the war, then an equivalent catastrophe. They stepped to the beat of a convulsing drummer. They gasped like beached fish. Their clothing, a potpourri of styles and eras, was in worse shape than a scopas suit wardrobe after a thermonuclear exchange – rends, gashes, holes, with bare flesh beneath, yellow flesh, white, brown, cracked and gelatinous, here and there melting to bone.

‘Quite a show they put on, huh?’ said Brat. ‘Folk festival, I guess.’

Whenever he tried speaking with one of the marchers, the best he got was a blank look, more often a moan transmitting stenches and despair.

‘They don’t understand English,’ the general concluded.

The defendants moved down the sultry, glutted streets, jostling through the parade but in no way joining it. They came upon a plaza. Bricks glowed beneath the death’s-head moon. A defunct fountain lay in a web of fog. Across the way, a bright shop beamed through the night like a huge kerosene lantern.

The paunchy window was filled with hats. George gulped.

How had it managed to survive the Battle of Boston? How had it gotten here? Even the sign was intact: THE MAD TEA PARTY – REMARKABLE THINGS FOR HUMAN BODIES, followed by PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS CARTER – TAILOR, HATTER, FURRIER, INVENTOR, PROPRIETOR.

‘Looks like my best shot is to buy a costume and disappear into this Mardi Gras thing until the tide takes Sverre away,’ said Brat. ‘Are you really determined to get your balls back in order?’

‘Yes.’

‘I imagine I’ve got some pretty fantastic adventures ahead. I could use a man like you on my team, somebody who’s smart, strong… a little pig-headed.’

‘Sorry, Brat. A cure, then Antarctica, then a family – I’ve seen it all.’

The bells tinkled mournfully as the defendants entered. Gushing sweat, they wove through the vast collection of costumed mannequins. World War Three had not been kind to Carter’s inventory. The disintegrating tweeds of Edwardian gentlemen dusted the broken armor of Japanese knights. Eighteenth-century waistcoats rubbed tattered shoulders with nineteenth-century gowns.

‘Do you need lodgings?’ a voice called out in a British accent. ‘Several funerals are happening upstairs. Would you like a room with a viewing?’

The MAD Hatter had aged, not by the decades that had elapsed outside the darkblood realms, but enough to push him past the mortal side of sixty – eyes receding, red hair fading toward pink, brow stippled with liver spots. His top hat appeared to have contracted eczema.

‘I was sorry to hear of your species’s death,’ he said. ‘I meant to send a sympathy card. They don’t make belated sympathy cards, do they? “So sorry I missed your mother’s bout with cancer.”’

For the first time since the celebration banquet, George’s bullet wound began to throb. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble because of you, Professor.’

‘Trouble?’ said the Hatter.

‘I’m on trial for ending the world.’

‘Just remember, it could be worse. You could not be on trial for ending the world. You could be the corpus delicti instead. Signing that sales contract was the smartest thing you ever did.’

‘Hey, you know this bird?’ Brat asked of George.

Theophilus pulled off his hat. ‘Bird? The raven is a bird, also the vulture, but not I. You’re not a bird either, General Tarmac, though we’d all be better off if you were. Say, George, did you ever find out why a raven is like a writing desk?’

‘Right now I’m trying to find out about fertility. My secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’

The Hatter’s sigh was long and musical. ‘There just isn’t much reproduction going on in the world any more, is there? What with the extinction and everything. These post-exchange environments have little to recommend them.’

‘Extinction?’ said Brat. ‘Nonsense, the streets are teeming with your customers. You must do a pretty good business around carnival time.’

Spontaneously – no one knew who was leading and who following – the three men went to the window. The parade crawled across the plaza like some huge organism, flagella and antennae lashing in all directions.

‘Welcome to the City of the Invalidated Past,’ said the Hatter, ‘or, if you prefer, the Necropolis of History, or, if you don’t prefer, the City of the Invalidated Past. It’s your kind of town, George. Yours too, General.’ He jabbed his index finger toward the window. ‘Look, there’s a guard from the court of Harun al-Rashid in eighth-century Baghdad. And a Roman civil engineer who built a water mill in 143 BC. A merchant responsible for bringing improved plow designs to Flanders in 1074. A bishop who participated in the Council of Trent. A worker on Henry Ford’s original assembly line… Think about it! These people actually lived!’ Theophilus held his top hat in front of his heart. ‘They got up each morning. They breathed, argued, screwed, moved their bowels. They saw the sun. They had opinions about cats. Listen, do you hear it? Do you hear their sorrow? Their sobs and wails? They’re sad because they’ve been invalidated. When you turn the human race into garbage, you also turn history into garbage. “Why did we bother to invent writing?” they ask. “Or spinning jennies? Why did we trouble ourselves with the cathedrals?”’

They followed the Hatter’s short beckoning arm as he led them back to the counter, behind the velvet drapes, and into a hot, squalid room suggesting a laboratory from which nothing beneficial ever issued. Detached human heads were suspended over steaming vats of what looked like liquid flesh. Disconnected limbs swam in tanks of purple fluid. Skeletons dangled from the ceiling as if waiting to make their entrances in some demented marionette show. George felt that he was about as far from a fertility clinic as he could get.

‘This is where Victor Frankenstein did his post-graduate work,’ said Theophilus. Rusty surgical instruments and corroded technological bric-a-brac filled a dozen cabinets. ‘This is where Thomas Edison invented the burned-out light bulb.’

The Hatter, George decided, had lost his mind. Was it possible for a lunatic to go mad?

Tea things overran a linen-swathed table. Hungry and thirsty from their dash across the island, the fugitives sat down and indulged themselves, gulping hot tea, gobbling their way through a heap of stale rolls and crumpets. The Hatter joined them.

‘Every night, corpses float through the city,’ he explained merrily, smearing butter on a bran muffin.

‘War victims?’ A silly question, George thought. Of course they were war victims.

‘No, they died long before the war, centuries before in some cases. I pull them from the river. I dress them. I perform surgery. No problem finding spare parts. The whole world is made of spare parts now. Out go the shriveled organs and the dehydrated blood. In go the relays, motors, microprocessors, voice synthesizers, and spark plugs. But does that do it? Of course not. What is history without hopes, ideals, neuroses, illusions? Hence – my Z-1000 computer over there. Isn’t it wonderful what a man can do with a little technology and some free time?’

‘Oh, I get it – they’re robots!’ said Brat. ‘It’s like Walt Disney.’

‘If admitted,’ said Theophilus, ‘I would have lived in the early twenty-first century, turning out automatons as efficiently as a cobbler turns out shoes.’ He went to his work table and began transferring eyeballs from one glass jar to another, tossing the rejects into a teacup.

‘This can’t be the shop you had back in Boston,’ said George. How far the Hatter had sunk – from designing scopas suits to desecrating war victims.

‘My humble establishment is like the submarine from which you escaped,’ Theophilus explained. ‘It flits about from place to place. More twenty-first century know-how.’

‘I must say, Carter, you’ve got an impressive project under way here,’ said Brat. ‘My hat goes off to you.’

‘First I have to sell you one.’

‘Probably not the best way to keep civilization afloat, but still ingenious.’ The MARCH Hare grabbed a crumpet, slammed it into his tea.

‘Brat, those aren’t people in that parade!’ said George. ‘Don’t you understand?’

The Hatter cackled.

Brat ate the soggy crumpet. ‘In any event, it’s this flying shop of yours that really interests me. I’m trying to hook up with the other survivors. Can you run me over to the mainland?’

‘Most ambitious, General,’ said Theophilus. ‘You can’t make deals with extinction, but you can make deals with me. To wit – help us with tonight’s labors, and I shall fly you wherever you want.’

A hospital gurney displayed the topography of a sheeted female corpse. Approaching, the Hatter uncovered her. She was Oriental and, considering her water-logged condition, quite beautiful.

‘Born in the twelfth century. Southeast Asia, the Khmer Empire. These eyes once beheld the Angkor Wat temple complex for the royal phallic cult. Imagine – a royal phallic cult once existed in medieval Cambodia!’

‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ snapped George, restoring the sheet.

‘I have nothing but respect for the dead,’ said the Hatter. ‘Why do you think I work so hard on the parade? Night and day – my monument to the invalidated past. You know about monuments.’

‘This is lunatic’s business!’ said George. He made a fist but could not decide what to do with it. ‘Disgusting! She isn’t from the twelfth century, she’s just another victim of radiation or hunger or—’

‘Actually, I find the whole thing rather sane,’ said Brat.

‘Sane? Sane? Call me sane, will you?’ screamed the Hatter. ‘They called the Joint Chiefs of Staff sane! They called the National Security Council sane!’

He went to his Z-1000 computer, arching his fingers over the keyboard as if playing a concerto.

‘Mostly it’s the supporting cast of history who wash up here, but sometimes we get a star. On Sunday I found Nostradamus, that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting scholar of the Renaissance. What I wouldn’t give for Hitler. I can change the past, you see – I can improve it. Last night Joan of Arc burned ten priests at the stake. If I had Hitler, I’d make him Jewish. Spermatids, George? Was that your wish? Little baby sperm? You’ve come to the right place.’

‘I have to see a fertility expert.’

‘I am one. I can make you as fertile as an alley cat.’

The Hatter dashed into a dark alcove, its entrance flanked by two dressmaker’s dummies, headless and skinny. Seconds later he emerged holding a crumbling, mossy hunk of bark. A white mushroom – robust, symmetrical, and shaped like a church bell – clung to the wood. ‘Behold your friend and mine, Agaricus cameroonis.’

‘Toadstools can be poison, I hear,’ said George.

‘Thermonuclear mushrooms cause sterility, Cameroon mushrooms cure it. Or, to be technical, Cameroon mushrooms promote spermatid production in irradiated seminiferous tubules. This fact has been known since 2015 AD.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Have you a choice?’

George’s bullet wound was thumping crazily now. Why couldn’t Mrs Covington’s magic lantern show have been more explicit on this matter? A simple slide of him devouring a Cameroon mushroom – was that too much to ask? Why did the post-exchange environment involve so damn many decisions?

‘Walk through our forest on a moonlit night,’ said the Hatter, ‘and with luck you’ll spot Agaricus cameroonis lifting his wan head through the crevice in a rotting log. But don’t expect to see him there the next day, for at the first blush of dawn he slips back into his palace of decay and hides. You’re looking at a rare one, George, a collector’s item. You aren’t going to find this fellow in your local drug store.’

‘All right. I’ll eat it.’

‘Nope. Sorry. Bad idea.’ Theophilus thrust the Agaricus cameroonis under his morning coat. ‘You don’t really want children. They make a lot of noise, they spill their milk, they leave their crayons all over the place.’

‘Please…’

‘First you must answer the question.’ He rubbed the concealed fungus.

‘What question?’

‘Ah – what question? Good question.’

‘Maybe he means the question about the raven and the writing desk,’ said Brat.

‘Yes! That’s it!’ said the Hatter. ‘Nobody has figured that one out!’

Nobody except Dr William Randstable, thought George, struggling to avoid a grin.

‘Beyond their expertise in spermatid production,’ said the Hatter, ‘Cameroon mushrooms make marvelous soup and terrific—’

‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said George, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said a raven is like a writing desk’ – he paused for dramatic effect – ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

The Hatter huffed and puffed like Rumpelstiltskin hearing the miller’s daughter say, ‘Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?’ He did a manic little dance, smashing his high-button shoes into the floor.

‘You must promise to name all the children after me,’ he said as he pulled the Agaricus cameroonis from his coat.

‘All but the first,’ said George.

He tore the mushroom from its bark, thrust it in his mouth. The meat trembled on his tongue, and he chewed. It tasted like what it was, mushroom flesh, tangy, succulent, damp. A soft buzz traveled from his stomach to his gonads. As he closed his eyes, his mind overflowed with his psychic museum – pictures of his forthcoming family thriving in the timefolds. Aubrey and her siblings romped through a tropical paradise. Glow-faced boys devoured uncontaminated fruit. Lithe girls swam in clean waves.

Nostradamus was on to something, Mrs Covington had said.

‘Is that it?’ George asked. ‘Am I fertile now?’

‘No,’ said the Hatter.

‘But soon – right?’

‘Nope. Sorry.’

‘You said I’d be an alley cat.’

‘Spermatids do you no good until they enter your epididymis, where they can mature, grow tails, acquire motility, and learn the facts of life. Unfortunately, your Spermatids will be too feeble for that.’

‘Too feeble?’

‘Weak as newborn babes.’

‘Can I help them?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘How?’

‘The South Pole.’

‘The what?’

‘The magnetic forces at the South Pole have been known to steer spermatids on their proper course.’

‘The South Pole – in Antarctica?’

‘This sounds like bushwa to me,’ said Brat. ‘I’d be careful if I were you, Paxton.’

‘Stand on the exact endpoint of the earth’s axis for one full minute,’ said Theophilus with the imperial confidence of a contract bridge champion sitting down to a game of go fish, ‘and the next day you’ll be able to book passage for four hundred million sperm at a time.’

‘Paxton just ate a mushroom,’ said Sverre, squinting into Periscope Number One.

‘Why?’ asked Morning.

‘To cure his sterility,’ said Sverre. ‘State of the art medicine, circa 2015.’

‘He’s been wanting a family.’

‘If there’s justice in this world, he’ll get a noose.’

‘I believe he’s innocent.’

‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘No.’ She nudged Sverre away from the eyepiece and focused on her beloved.

He was crossing the plaza, Brat on one side, the MAD Hatter on the other. They cut through the spastic parade and approached the river, its dark surface swept by moonbeams and wisps of fog.

‘I seem to recall that sex was something quite special,’ said Sverre. ‘Had I lived, I would have been a devotee of sex.’

‘Sex was something quite special,’ Morning confirmed. How perfect George looked as he moved down the concrete steps and jumped onto the Hatter’s barge – how right was the sweat on his brow, how correct the cords of his muscles.

Sverre noted her wistful smile. ‘What is it like, Dr Valcourt?’

‘It?’

‘Having red blood. Living.’

‘Ambiguous.’

The captain pointed to the long black scab on his forearm. ‘Then it is in every way better than unadmittance.’

Removing his stovepipe hat, he blew on the fur and watched it tremble. A memory dragged itself forward like a dying animal. He clutched at it. Intimations of mortality. A blur. Something to do with love. Love for a parent? A child? Sharper now. A wife. He would have been married. Christine? No, Kristin… Kristin who? He couldn’t recall her last name. Kristin the pretty ensign. She would have been crazy about amusement parks. He saw her on a merry-go-round. Kristin, lovely Kristin, astride a wooden horse, going merrily around, singing, laughing.

Dissolving…

He reached out with his spindly fingers, stroked Morning’s cheek. ‘You are a woman of great passion. I felt that when I hired you.’ A tear formed in his right eye, a drop of gin in his left, and he pulled away. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t call you to my bed. I am more honorable than that.’

And less potent, he thought.

The bottle had wrecked him. His Number One Periscope did not go up.

‘You must understand – Paxton is my patient,’ said Morning, tightening her grip on the scope handle. ‘I cured him. Naturally I want him to have ambitions.’

Pacing furiously around the room, Sverre attempted to coax additional Kristin images out of his brain – a fruitless enterprise, as he knew it would be – then returned to Morning and asked, ‘Where are they now?’

‘On a barge,’ she reported. ‘They’re collecting war dead. The Hatter is frustrated. He wants all of history in his parade, and he’s afraid that it will always be…’

‘Incomplete!’ wailed the Hatter. ‘Lord knows I try, but there’s a limit to what one man can do.’

The fugitives crouched in the stem and surveyed the night’s catch. Theophilus had made them fishers of men; under the influence of George’s muscled arms, four corpses had risen from the river. Droplets speckled their brine-cured flesh. Grave robbing, George realized – whether the violated medium was earth or water – was a damning, unholy enterprise, blasphemous even by Unitarian standards.

‘A fine haul, no doubt about it,’ said the Hatter, misreading George’s dazed look. ‘Still, we have a long way to go.’

According to Theophilus, they had retrieved a former patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a gladiator whose highly entertaining death had occurred in 56 BC, a clerk employed by the Bank of Amsterdam from 1610 to 1629, and a Viking.

A resurrected galley slave poled the barge forward. Blind marble houses glided by. Bridges passed overhead, dark arching shapes that put George in mind of his vulture.

‘Do you realize I don’t have a single subject of the Pharaoh Akhnaton? Not one.’ Bubbles of sweat dotted the Hatter’s forehead. ‘The Arabian Caliphate and Abu Bakr? Nobody. The Gupta Court of fourth-century India? Zero!’ Lunging forward, he grabbed George’s shirt, bunching the material in his fists. ‘And victims? Don’t remind me! There’s a severe victim shortage in this city, I can tell you. Yes, I’ve got Napoleon covered, and the Trojan War, but what about the Young Turk Revolution of 1908? The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842? The Crusades, for Christ’s sake! Don’t even talk to me about the Crusades!’

The Hatter took the tiller and steered them toward a concrete pier. The moonstruck water threw bright, dancing sine waves on the steps leading up to the street.

‘This is where you get off,’ he announced as the galley slave moored the barge.

‘You promised to take me to the mainland!’ Brat protested.

A fearsome drumming echoed through the marble city, as if a rain made of shrapnel and bones were felling on its streets.

‘I lied,’ said the Hatter.

‘You what?’ screamed Brat.

‘Something wrong with your hearing, General? I’ve got a root back at the shop that cures deafness. I lied. Folks around here don’t like the idea of your war crimes going unpunished. They’re coming, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want to guess what they’ll do when they arrive, but it’s certain to include tearing you limb from limb. You’ll wish you’d taken your chances with the court.’

‘I was going to take my chances with the court!’ said George. The drumming grew louder. Footfalls, he concluded – the clogs, galoshes, pumps, sandals, and buskins of Professor Carter’s citizens. ‘I’m innocent!’

‘Innocent, eh? Then why is the world over?’

‘You gave me spermatids, and now you’re going to have me killed?’ asked George.

Theophilus jumped onto the pier. ‘It’s the post-exchange environment. Nobody behaves rationally any more.’

As the mob rumbled forward, Brat drew Holly’s pistol and aimed it at the Hatter’s chest. ‘Call off your dogs, Carter! Call them off, or I’ll shoot!’

‘There’s a logic to what you’re saying,’ said Theophilus, ‘but, being insane, I cannot grasp it.’

Whereupon George, out of motives he would never fully comprehend, snatched the pistol from Brat and hurled it toward the front of the barge. The weapon glanced off the gladiator’s head, plopping into the dark gray river and vanishing instantly.

‘What’s happening?’ Morning asked.

‘Your lover just saved the Hatter’s life,’ Sverre replied, leaning away from the eyepiece. ‘Oh, and something else.’

‘Yes?’

‘They’re in a lot of trouble with history.’

Up and down the crippled, dawn-lit avenues the bewildered defendants ran, Theophilus’s citizens in frantic pursuit, a booming cloud of invalidated peasants, princes, beggars, scholars, scientists, farmers, clerics, and soldiers. Every time George looked back, he noticed a different category of pre-nuclear weapon. The macabre rattle of spears, swords, muskets, and battle axes filled his ears, mixing with the mob’s computer-generated howls. These things are just puppets, he reminded himself – they cannot harm me. He could understand the post-exchange environment being horrible and depressing, but did it also have to be ludicrous?

As the defendants reached the main gate, a fat citizen with teeth like barbed wire popped out of a turret and, ever beholden to the Z-1000, cried, ‘I am not garbage!’

Stomping mushrooms under their boots, George and Brat ran beyond the walls, through the ravine, across the field of megaliths. Marsh gases hit them like a fist. Spears flew past. As the defendants charged into the muck, tiny fireballs began choking the sky. George glanced over his shoulder. The citizens had deployed a weapon of singular malevolence. Puppets, he recited again. Puppets, they’re just puppets. The flaming arrows fell everywhere, hissing against the silt, setting the dead grass on fire. The air thickened with a smell akin to unadmitted blood. A brawny officer from Genghis Khan’s army, dressed in what looked like the plating of some particularly vile and stupid dinosaur, sent a fireball sizzling over George’s scalp.

Directly ahead lay the submarine, wallowing in the rising tide. George rejoiced to see that the amidships hatch was still ajar. Or am I hallucinating? he wondered. No, it really looked open. There was definitely a chance they would succeed in getting themselves recaptured by Operation Erebus.

But the swamp, George learned, was in conspiracy with the invalidated past. It seized his boots, holding him fast with its dark paste. Brat, he saw, was also stuck, rooted to the island like a tree, writhing and raging. The clockwork mob slogged forward, spears poised, swords waving, flesh slipping from their faces like ill-fitting masks, so that each citizen soon wore a skull’s persistent smile.

Craning his jeopardized neck, George fixed on the hull, and it was at this critical moment in his fortunes, when death-by-history seemed a foregone conclusion, that all eighteen port-side missile doors suddenly flew open, their oil-soaked hinges making no sound. Instantly the ship took on the appearance of a medieval parapet. Olaf Sverre’s navy, armed with scopas suit guns, came streaming out of the hatches, Peach and Cobb in the lead, their chubby faces split by smirks. Oh, brave, splendid men, thought George, you will all receive medals for this. Taking cover behind the battlements, the unadmitted sailors aimed their lovely Colt .45 pistols, their beautiful twelve-gauge shotguns, and their gorgeous HK 91 assault rifles.

Sverre stood atop the sail, his frame tall and sharp against the reddening sky, his stovepipe hat cocked toward the sunrise. A loud, unintelligible noise came from his mouth, a sound that George hoped and prayed was an order to open fire.

Targeted by hands that had been alive for barely two hundred and fifty days, the bullets flew in all directions, but even so random a salvo was enough to drop half the citizens. Relays and motors spurted from busted flesh. Bodies hit the swamp, flopping, wriggling, plastering themselves with silt. A broken samurai rolled up to George’s knees. Its cries evoked a phonograph needle skidding along the surface of a record.

The surviving citizens retaliated. Spears smashed uselessly into the hull, sling-tossed rocks bounced off the missile doors like hail encountering a tin roof. Sverre – oh, excellent soldier, glorious hero – ordered a second salvo. Fifty more died, but history had not yet learned the meaning of defeat. The citizens kept coming. Burning arrows suffused the swamp with smoke and otherworldly light. George felt a trembling in his recently resuscitated…

Gonads, thought Sverre. This fight is doing something to my gonads. (Keep it going, men! Let’s get more smoke over there to the left, more chaos to the right, bring up the heavy artillery – I want trumpets, drums, banners, flying earth, explosions of many colors!) When he once again called for fire, he realized that remembered passions were now coursing through his ducts and veins, as if they had been waiting for the proper stimuli. How subtle were the uses of pitched battle! In his mind he left the field, the better to savor the rare and precious images.

Yes, it was all quite clear. He would have invited Kristin the pretty ensign to Barbados, and they would have made love in the open water – a steamy night, smooth breezes, insects and birds surrounding them with primordial jazz. (Did he propose to her that same weekend? Yes, most likely.) Excited by the fabulous souvenir, Sverre’s penis now assumed heroic proportions, pushing against his trousers, eager to get into the world. Oh, how he wished his life had happened, the Caribbean part if nothing else. Unadmittance was so unfair. No wonder he drank.

He ordered a fourth round. Among many others, a Renaissance soldier fell, a young man who had fought side by side with Pope Julius II at the siege of Ferrara. The skull-faced soldier struggled to his feet, drew his sword, and rushed toward the mired defendants.

‘Fire!’ shouted Sverre.

The bullets came in a great slashing volley, dissecting the soldier like so many scalpels, turning him into a heap of rubber and plastic. The defendants laughed with astonishment and relief. And then, suddenly, Sverre saw that it was over, saw that like a nuclear strategist he had run out of targets, and a short while later his fine, impossible erection went away.

After his exec had taken the Erebus defendants from the field and returned them to the ship, Sverre climbed down the hull and, gin bottle at the ready, waded through the biotechnical carnage. He inspected the shattered torsos, the dismembered limbs, the severed pieces of muddy flesh. He was exhilarated and sickened – exhilarated by the slaughter, sickened by his exhilaration.

War, he had learned, was fun. Massacre, when accomplished efficiently and successfully, entails profound emotional fulfillment. Ordering sailors to open fire will, under certain conditions, make a man’s blood sing – admitted blood, unadmitted blood, no difference. Ah, but he would sleep well that night, no need for an eye filled with gin! He stared at the mess and wept. By what right do we accuse the Erebus Six? How are we better than they? The tribunal is a fraud. I shall deliver my prisoners – here they are, learned judges, every one of them healthy and intact, mission accomplished – but I shall not dance at their execution.

Half an hour went by. Eighteen hundred seconds that, despite the care he normally took to squeeze every drop from his sojourn, Sverre would never be able to recall. Lieutenant Grass arrived. Paxton and Tarmac were in their cabins, the exec reported. Guards posted, double locks on the doors.

‘Are we cleared for sea, Mister Grass?’ Sverre asked.

‘Cleared for sea – yes, sir.’

‘Then we’d better get on with it.’

‘Take her out?’

‘Take her out.’

‘All engines ahead full?’

‘All engines ahead full.’

‘Set course for McMurdo Station?’

‘Set course for McMurdo Station.’

Harsh winds descended. The morning grew dark. The shadowed ship heaved up and down, back and forth, eager for the open South Atlantic. Sverre crossed the swamp at a funereal pace, drinking, coughing, shuddering from the cold in his rubber eye, cautiously picking his way through the invalidated past.