November 7, 1933—The following account was reconstructed by the author, principally utilizing diary entries included in the estate of Mister Charles Priestly, formerly of 124A West 4th St., New York City. Mr. Priestly served in the 9^th New York Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, and upon the war’s completion joined Empire City Casualty Corporation, where he worked in various capacities from 1866 -1883, his final position being that of Vice President of Finance. The final portion of the account is derived from hand-written notes and other related documents found with Mr. Priestly’s remains upon their discovery in the New York caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge earlier this year. Mr. Priestly’s wife Emily survived her husband, but passed away three years after the final date of this account. The historical records of the Brooklyn Bridge Company and detailed diary notes of Master Mechanic Frank Farrington fully support the veracity of the account.

*          *          *

 As I lie here, a bold new century fast approaching, my own brief tenure among the living draws to its ineluctable end. Wise men say this is the moment one’s life ought to pass before one’s eyes, as we contemplate, seriously for the first time, whatever reward awaits beyond death’s chasm. I am, though, fortunate in many respects, not least for the fact that my now imminent demise creeps toward me with gradual and measured intent, affording me the leisure to reflect upon the many adventures that have comprised this life. Indeed, my nearly seven decades upon this earth have been blessed—if that is the right word—with experiences aplenty. I have fought in the greatest conflict this young nation has yet endured, while managing to avoid the violent end that took so many of my comrades in arms. And I have borne witness to some of humankind’s greatest technological achievements—illumination without flame, communication at a distance—each invention more astonishing than the last. But I have written of all these in prior missives. It is my intention herein to describe an occurrence of an entirely different nature, one that involves perforce a belief in the supernatural, or at least a willingness to admit of its possibility. For I can conceive of no other explanation for what I experienced in those days following the dedication of the grandest achievement of the late nineteenth century. I refer, of course, to that architectural masterwork of John and Washington Roebling, the design and construction of the great bridge that now spans the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The events attending the following account took place approximately three months after the dedication of the great bridge in late May of 1883. Though several months past, I remember the day of the dedication as though it were yesterday. My firm is located downtown near Wall Street, and, like nearly every other firm in the city, we had closed up for the day and given our staff leave to participate in the festivities in whatever manner suited them. Countless thousands had descended on lower Manhattan, many from outside the city proper, all of them keen to witness not only the official dedication of the great bridge, but also perchance to catch a glimpse of President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and the numerous other dignitaries scheduled to be on hand for the celebration. Never one for the press of great crowds, I nonetheless steeled myself and joined the immense throng that day, thoroughly enjoying the parades, speeches, and, in particular, the entirely astonishing display of fireworks that ensued once the sun had gone down. It was an absolutely memorable day, one I shall not forget for whatever remaining interval the good Lord chooses to bestow upon me. Indeed, it was the fireworks performance that was much on my mind on the fateful night later that summer for reasons that will shortly be apparent.

As earlier asserted, I have never been one for great crowds. This fear—if that is not too strong a word for it—is a peripheral manifestation of a much greater personal foible, that is, a debilitating claustrophobia that I take enormous pains to keep at bay by avoiding all instances of confined spaces, any of which quickly set my pulse to racing and generate copious perspiration. I am also given to taking every opportunity to enjoy moments of solitude, moments that were surpassingly rare in my profession in those days, but which I nonetheless availed myself of in the hours outside the office whenever practicable. In particular, I was quite fond of late night walks, the bracing air and background din of the city combining to provide me with an environment I found altogether conducive to thinking through and resolving whatever business problems had arisen in the preceding days. Thus it was with the greatest delight that the completion of the bridge afforded me the opportunity to walk at leisure across its magnificent raised promenade, an activity I undertook with some regularity in the weeks following the opening. Several months on, with the bridge still as great a novelty as ever, the crowds remained substantial during daylight hours, but fell to near nonexistence once darkness had descended. Indeed, on the night in question—which, to the best of my recollection was August 17, a Friday—the crowd, at least so far as I could see in either direction, comprised only myself, this unusual fact a consequence of a mild drizzle that had arisen around the time I first made my way up onto the promenade and began my perambulation to Brooklyn and back.

Had I had advance knowledge of how the storm would evolve during my hour or so upon the bridge, I would certainly have made my way home that evening and saved the walk for a less inclement night. In the event, there was only a light drizzle upon my embarkation and, being equipped with an umbrella, I thought little of it and began making my leisurely way to the Brooklyn side, enjoying all the while the mesmerizing effect of the thin undulations of rain against the backdrop of the brilliant arc lights that illuminated the bridge and walkway. By the time I had made my way to the anchor station on the Brooklyn side, the rain had increased noticeably in intensity, in addition to which the rumbles of thunder, only distant at the start of my evening stroll, had risen in intensity and frequency, auguring ill for the remainder of my journey. Still, there was now nothing for it but to make the return trip, weather notwithstanding, and so I turned back, drew my collar up tighter against the rising wind, and began making my way back toward the Manhattan side, intent by this point on home, a dry change of clothes, and a relaxing dinner.

The still-rising tempest, though, apparently had other plans, so that by the time I made the center of the great span, at its highest point above the East River, the rain was falling with remarkable vigor, so much so that I would have flagged down a carriage for the remainder of the journey, had there been any upon the bridge. Sadly, though, all of the carriage drivers had by now had the good sense to make their way back to their stables, assuming that there would be no one so foolish as to be out upon the bridge in such a storm.

It was at this odd moment, with my umbrella having proven of little worth against the intense wind and rain, and my suit very nearly soaked through, that a singular event occurred, one that I am today convinced marked the genesis of all the ensuing days’ events. With the now nearly constant drum of thunder accompanying the storm, there came up the river a great gust of wind, so profound that it obliged me to reach out and grasp the iron railing of the promenade to steady myself until it had passed. And in that precise moment, a great streak of lightning descended from the heavens and struck the top of the New York tower. At least it seemed at the time that this was what had occurred, for the brilliance of the flash combined with the instantaneous cacophonous crash of thunder rendered my senses and judgment more than a little suspect. I am, however, entirely certain of one aspect of what happened in that moment. At the instant of the lightning strike upon the bridge tower, and with my right hand still gripping the wet iron hand railing, I felt a distinctly electrical sensation course through my hand and body before dispersing itself in the drenched surface of the promenade below. Mind you, there was nothing terribly painful or jarring about the shock, certainly not on par with the jolt of lightning and thunder that had precipitated it. It appeared simply that a small fraction of the energy deposited upon the tower by the bolt had made its way through the steel fibers of the bridge’s suspension cables, into the iron handrail, and through my person. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems now that the sensation was more surreal than anything else, electricity of course still being a quite new phenomenon in those days of Edison, Tesla, and their compatriots in that burgeoning industry, with few ordinary citizens as yet having had cause to be exposed to its discomfiting manifestations.

And so, now perceiving no little risk in remaining out in the open in such conditions, I made my way briskly back to the New York side, where as I descended the staircase that led to the street level, good fortune smiled upon me in the person of a lone carriage, horse, and driver, an individual of notable height—a fact apparent despite his seated position—and an especially copious beard which flowed from beneath the wide brim of his hat and which appeared a singular shade of red in the light of the streetlamp beneath which he had brought his carriage to a stop. Thanking him repeatedly for having delivered me from the downpour, I promptly climbed inside for the remainder of my journey home.

It was a mercifully brief ride to my home in the East Village, but one not without its bit of drama as the carriage rocked vigorously to and fro in the still-violent wind. Now safely ensconced inside, I could but imagine the time of it that the poor driver was having perched atop the carriage. Still, arriving at my home some ten minutes later, I departed the cabin and glanced up to see with relief that the poor fellow appeared none the worse for wear, his broad hat and mackinaw having afforded him a good deal more protection than my suit and umbrella had provided for me. Fidgeting in a pocket for the fare, I withdrew the requisite amount, including a gratuity sufficient to the night’s grim conditions. As I reached up, money in hand, toward the shadowed figure, there came yet another violent burst of lightning, one that for an instant illuminated the visage beneath the brim of the wide hat, revealing in that fleeting second, a face which though earlier had appeared unremarkable save for the great beard, now seemed to my wild imagination to be gashed and bleeding in singularly horrific fashion. The blood streaks were rendered black by the glare of the lightning flash, so much so that I started at the sight, dropping a portion of the fare to the street whence I quickly retrieved it, placing it back into the driver’s hand before retreating hastily and making my way inside the foyer. There I was greeted by my wife Emily’s startled gaze, though it was unclear whether her look of concern was in response to my thoroughly drenched condition or the look of incredulity that no doubt still lingered upon my face as a consequence of what I’d seen—or imagined I had seen—beneath the brim of the driver’s hat.

That night, after a thorough drying off and a welcome dinner, I relaxed on our sitting room sofa with a glass of good scotch, my head filled with visions of the events preceding, and in particular the slashed and bloody face of the carriage driver, a visage which while doubtless an artifice of the stark lighting, nevertheless stayed with me through the remainder of that night and on into my dreams. Indeed, the vignettes that accompanied my sleep that night were, for the most part, populated by but a single individual, one whose face I now know well, though the hideous injury I had witnessed on the carriage driver was absent, his expression instead one of recurring terror. Curiously, the individual who haunted my dreams, that night and in the nights that followed, admitted a significantly improved visage from what I had discerned during my mercifully brief encounter with the carriage driver. For in my dreams he was always the same, singularly so. He was preternaturally tall, at least six and a half feet, and slender to the point of gauntness. Further, he was possessed of striking red hair and beard, the former of which was strewn about as though the man were out in a windstorm, and the latter of which I had witnessed on full display whilst dismounting from the carriage earlier in the evening. Having spent the entirety of the night with this fellow, metaphorically as it were, I could not envision anyone encountering him in reality and failing to recall him later.

It was, mercifully though, a Friday night and so the torturous and intermittent sleep I managed that night, though it left me unrefreshed the following morning, did not risk impinging upon my professional duties at the office. My generally soporific state that following day did, however, contribute (or so I imagined it did) to a number of curious, and progressively more disturbing, visions that occurred as the day advanced. As it happened, the weekend was largely my own, Emily having departed quite early that morning for a visit with her sister in Connecticut, advising me as she departed not to expect her return until Friday a week hence. This was, in fact, an increasingly common occurrence, as my wife was on quite close terms with Sarah, her only sibling, who had, just the previous year moved out of the city and away to southern New England, and who was now enduring a medical problem whose details I was uninformed about, but which I was assured by Emily was of a minor nature.

Having seen Emily off to Grand Central station, I made my still-drowsy way to the bathroom for the usual round of morning ablutions. Opting for a hot shower to wash away the residual traces of chill from my previous night’s walk in the rain, my first occasion to gaze into the mirror came thereafter, the glass, however, by now obscured with steam. Thus it was that the first swipe of my hand across the hazy glass caused a start that instantly removed all remaining traces of torpor from my mind. For with that single swipe of my moist hand was revealed not my own familiar face but instead a repetition of the horrific visage I had seen so fleetingly the previous night beneath the brim of the carriage driver’s hat upon the flash of the lightning. There, plain as the morning sun, though only for the briefest of seconds, once again stared back at me the torn and bloody face of the man from my dreams, his expression an enigmatic combination of pain, confusion, and, it seemed to me, accusation. Only then, upon returning my terrified gaze back to the hazy mirror, I saw that it was once again only me, though with eyes very much widened in fright.

Having now been visited twice in quick succession by this ghastly apparition, as well as the hideous dreams of the night preceding, I set out upon a leisurely if slightly trepidatious Saturday, undertaking at first nothing more ambitious than a rereading of Longfellow’s immortal poem Evangeline, the great poet’s passing the previous year having revived my interest in his work. The prior evening’s rainstorm had cleared the air nicely and provided an unexpectedly cool afternoon, particularly for a mid-August day in the city. Having sated my appetite for poetry, I stepped out for a late lunch at a nearby bistro. As I stood atop my stoop locking the front door to the house, I could see beyond the tops of the neighborhood houses the very top of the New York tower of the great bridge, and I found myself lingering for a long moment there, considering what had passed the night before, my thoughts quickly gravitating back to the surpassingly strange visages I had experienced in the hours since returning from my rain-soaked late night walk.

The more I stared out at the distant northern tower, the more I felt drawn to it. Indeed, so engrossed was I in pondering the tower that I utterly failed to hear or acknowledge the greeting of a neighbor passing by on the sidewalk below. It was only upon his repeated attempt at a greeting that I was roused from my trancelike state.

“Rogers,” I replied, slowly making my way down the half dozen stairs that connected my porch to the sidewalk. “So sorry, I’ve been terribly preoccupied today. Forgive my rudeness.” We shook hands and he walked away seemingly none the worse for my inattentiveness. As I had the day to myself, I decided that lunch at a favorite delicatessen on Fulton Street in Brooklyn was in order, a course of action that would take me once again across the bridge, though this time under much more favorable meteorological circumstances than I had endured the preceding night.

As I slowly made my way up the gradually rising New York side of the bridge, I could not help but turn my gaze upward at the colossal granite tower that rose into the New York sky, its deep blue punctuated by only a handful of small clouds. The complex array of cables that rose to meet the tower was a dizzying sight indeed, particularly as passing clouds created the distinctly visceral impression of falling. It was this view that made real the immensity of Washington Roebling’s achievement. The work had taken more than a decade, and had cost the man’s father his life, along with, so they said, no fewer than twenty-eight other men. Indeed, the fatality count varied—from as few as fifteen to as many as forty—depending on the source of the information. Still, there was no denying the majesty of the thing, and I stopped a hundred or so feet shy of the tower and simply stared rapt upward. In that moment of intense focus, a strange thing transpired, only the first in what would turn out to be a day of several strange occurrences.

As I gazed upward at the great tower, I steadied myself with a hand upon one of the iron rails that lined the promenade, just as I’d done in the previous night’s rainstorm. And for a brief moment, I felt, as during the previous night’s storm, that same distinct tingle, as though a small electric current were once again passing through me. As before, it was nothing intense or painful, simply a few seconds of energy that seemed to make its way up my arm and through my body before abating as quickly as it had begun. Having attributed the previous night’s such experience to the lightning strike upon the top of the tower, there was, though, no acounting at all for such a thing in the midst of such a perfectly clear day. I glanced one final time up to the top of the tower, then continued making my way to the Brooklyn side.

A couple of leisurely hours later, around two in the afternoon as I recall, having enjoyed a pleasing lunch and made my way once more back to Manhattan, I was approaching my house when I encountered a good friend and colleague Foster Higgins. We had attended Columbia at the same time, with he a year ahead of myself. And whereas I, being the better at mathematics, had gone into the insurance and investment field, he had been given much more to literature and logic and had made an excellent go as an attorney. We had both remained in Manhattan for our entire subsequent careers, and our professional paths crossed from time to time when my firm required legal advice, which was not at all infrequently. In the years since college we had remained reasonably close, attending one another’s weddings as well as various parties and other affairs. He approached me smiling broadly and extended his hand.

“Priestly, you old dog!” he enthused as he gripped my hand. “I’ve not seen you in two weeks or more. I’d begun to suppose you were avoiding me.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “Just this and that. You know, the vagaries of life.”

“Quite so,” Higgins said. “And besides, I suppose if you truly meant to avoid me, you’d’ve made a better job of it than this. So, where’s your better half today?”

“Off in Connecticut visiting her sister, I’m afraid,” I replied. “She’s seen fit to leave me in charge of the household for a full week, if you can believe that.”

As we stood chatting on the sidewalk, I suggested that we rejoin our conversation over a drink at the pub around the corner from my house, an invitation he readily accepted, his Saturday, to all appearances, being as leisurely as my own. Soon we were ensconced in a booth at the rear of Woodrow’s, a small but well regarded establishment of great tenure in the neighborhood. The place was nearly empty, save for the two of us, and a not terribly busy bartender, owing to the mid-afternoon hour.

My invitation to share a drink with Higgins had not been an entirely random thing. Indeed I was quite keen to share with my friend the curious occurrences of the prior night and this morning. I had always found his mind to be a keen one and I imagined that he might have a theory or two concerning these curious occurrences. And so, after a perfunctory round of catching up on family life, professional travails, and the usual banter, I came around to the business of the bridge and the events attending it. I described in detail my walks of the previous evening and this morning, describing in both cases the curious electrical sensations I had experienced. I went on to share, with some hesitancy for the bizarre nature of it, the visions I had experienced with the carriage driver and the mirror. When I’d described it all, I lifted my glass, took a healthy draught, and leaned back in my seat.

“So what on earth do you make of all that?” I inquired of my friend. “Have I gone mad?”

“You’ve discussed this with Emily?” he replied.

“Good God, no,” I replied. “She’d have me shipped off to Bellevue before the day was out.”

“Yes, just as well,” Higgins agreed. He sat quietly for a moment, considering, I supposed, the details of my account. “You understand,” he said after some uncomfortable seconds of pondering, “that you’re asking me to discard utterly my much cultivated reputation for logic and pragmatism. For it seems to me you’ve set your foot squarely into the realm of the supernatural with all of this.”

“I understand that, of course,” I replied. “But surely logic and pragmatism apply every bit as much in the nether world as they do in our own.”

He considered this rejoinder for a moment and nodded tentatively. “It’s quite possible that you’re right, though of course it goes without saying that my experience in this field is limited, to put it generously.”

I agreed and gestured to the bartender for refills.

“But if, as you suppose, logic and pragmatism are to be applied to your curious circumstance, we need only pick apart the facts of the case, if you’ll pardon the legal parlance, and see where it leads.”

“I knew I’d come to the right place,” I said, offering a smile and receiving one in return.

“Fact number one is that your curious electrical sensation took place not once, but twice, and in precisely the same location upon the bridge. This suggests strongly that whatever underlies your situation has materially to do with the bridge itself. And twice you say you’ve encountered this strange apparition, once beneath the hat of a carriage driver, and then again in your very own bathroom mirror, only this morning. And you’re quite certain it was the same image, and one you’ve never before encountered in any context.”

“That is correct,” I said, “though I have to say that the clarity of the image was greater and of longer duration in the mirror than it was in the attenuated light during the storm last night. Still, I would have to say yes, the same individual.”

“And then,” he continued, “the grimmest detail of all, the disfiguration and blood upon the face. The same both times, you say? That must have been a bit alarming in the midst of a lightning storm.”

“You can only imagine,” I agreed.

“All right, my friend,” he said, “indulge me while I set aside all manner of rationality and share with you the only logical and pragmatic conclusion that this seasoned legal mind can conjure, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

I leaned forward eagerly to hear his assessment.

“It seems clear to me,” he said, “that you’ve been accosted by the spirit of a man who has lost his life during either the construction or subsequent operation of the bridge.”

He stopped and took a sip of his ale, remaining silent for a long moment as though having just delivered a verdict in a courtroom. But he wasn’t quite finished, as it turned out.

“But here’s the intriguing bit,” he continued. “We know from the various news accounts that the number of construction fatalities is not at all certain. Further, if recollection serves concerning the various ghost stories I’ve read in my youth, the spirit would only have cause to reach out—to raise a fuss, as it were—if its fate had gone unacknowledged. After all, men perished in any number of ways during that long decade of work, did they not? They fell from the towers or from the roadbed, died of depth sickness in the caissons, all sorts of things. Is it possible that one or more workers shuffled off this mortal coil without anyone’s knowledge at all? Who can say?”

“Who indeed,” I replied quietly, considering the extraordinary conclusion to which my friend had arrived based upon the evidence I had offered.

“Pity,” he said without elaboration.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, pity that you aren’t more given to the visual arts. Otherwise you could create a drawing of this poor fellow who’s been accosting you.”

“Well, it’s true I’m no artist,” I agreed. “But I’m certainly capable of providing a verbal description. He is . . . was . . . after all, quite singular in appearance.

“All right then, if it’s resolution you’re after, and you’re quite prepared to put yourself out there as perhaps being of less than sound mind, here’s a recommendation with which you can do what you like. Mind you, it’s a terrifically long shot, but still, one never knows. Understanding that many hundreds of men worked on that bridge over the years, and that many came and went without so much as a how-do-you-do to their bosses or coworkers, you might track down and approach whoever was in charge of the day-to-day work, proffer your description, and see if by some miracle the man is recalled, either by a coworker or supervisor.”

“A miracle indeed,” I agreed. “They might ship me off to Bellevue more quickly than my wife.”

“There is always that risk,” Higgins replied. “Of course, if you wish to minimize such risk, you could tell your story in a manner that omits the more . . . spiritual elements.”

“How do you mean exactly,” I asked.

“Simplicity itself. You’re simply searching for a man—of your apparition’s singular appearance of course. He’s a family friend or any other such story you can conjure up. You’ve heard in recent days that he might have been employed in the construction of the bridge and you’d like to track him down. You know, to reestablish communication, that sort of thing. No need to get into electrical currents or ghostly visages in mirrors or driving carriages. Those sorts of details do tend to put people off, you understand.”

“I’m sure I can grasp that,” I said.

“I tell you what,” he said, tossing off the last of his glass and sliding out of his seat to stand. “I do have someplace I need to be in a short while, and it sounds like I’ve perhaps given you a bit of an assignment to tackle. So I’ll leave you to it. But I’ll expect a full report the moment you’ve put this business to rest.” With which exhortation he offered his hand, shook mine briskly, and made his way out of the bar and into the fast approaching evening, leaving me to finish my drink alone and watch as the bar began to fill in earnest.

The following day—my sleep once again assailed by visions of the tall thin red-haired man with the horribly scarred face—I set about in search of a way in which I might act upon Higgins’ advice. It was a Sunday and so no businesses or offices were open. Nevertheless, I felt I might gain some measure of intelligence into the matter by randomly accosting various and sundry people in the vicinity of the bridge. I recalled having heard rumors to the effect that, despite the bridge’s construction being complete, there nonetheless still existed an operations office of some sort. Locating this seemed as reasonable a start as any if I were to get to the bottom of whatever was happening to me.

In the end it proved almost too easy. I made my way to the New York anchorage building where Hicks and Fulton Streets intersected. There, adjacent to the immense front doors, was affixed an ornate brass plaque commemorating the completion of the great bridge, and directly beneath, a more pedestrian one stating that all matters of day-to-day bridge function, along with any questions that members of the public might have on the project, could be addressed at the Office of the Chief Architect, which could be found three blocks to the west, near Fulton and Nassau. I made my way to the stated location and found it, unsurprisingly, to be closed for the day. I made a point to pay it another visit during lunch the next day, Mondays being the closest thing my company had to a slow workday.

As events transpired, the following day was even a bit slower than normal, and I availed myself of the rare opportunity to make my way to the bridge’s operations office in the mid morning. Stepping through the front doors, I was unprepared for the sheer immensity of the interior of the structure, for it was nearly as awe inspiring as the great bridge itself. The ceilings were of the same Gothic design as the bridge and they arose some fifty feet into the air in a series of barrel vaults of the sort often found in cathedrals. The space was so utterly cavernous that it was at first unclear precisely where business was transacted. Only then I noted a smaller, more modest door to my left and tried the door handle, which opened easily, admitting me into a quite traditional office setting, a modest reception desk closest to the door, and behind that a seated woman who seemed genuinely surprised at my appearance.

“Why, good morning, sir,” she said at my approach. “How may I help you?”

“Good day, ma’am,” I replied, removing my hat and glancing about the office. “My name is Charles Priestly.” I instinctively reached into my jacket pocket and produced a business card, handing it to her across the desk. As I stood there before her, it occurred to me that I’d given no thought at all to how I should present my request for information. Surely sharing with a stranger the bizarre events of the preceding few days would give them just cause to question my sanity. Then I thought once again of Higgins’ final advice.

“Ma’am, this may seem a curious request,” I began, “And, to be frank, I’m not even sure I’ve come to the right place. I’m seeking information on an individual who I believe served as a workman on the bridge. I think that he . . . uh . . . he may have been a family member, and I’m keen to learn his whereabouts if it can be determined.”

“Mister Priestly, I believe you almost certainly have come to the right place,” she said. “We maintain quite comprehensive records of everyone who worked on the bridge, from its very inception to the commemoration this past May. Can I ask the individual’s name?”

“Well, that’s the problem, you see, for I do not, in fact, know the man’s name. I have only a physical description. I don’t suppose that makes the business of tracking him down any easier at all, now does it?”

“No, no, I’m afraid it doesn’t,” she agreed, “but perhaps all is not lost. If you can share as much distinctive information as you’re aware of, it’s possible that Mister Farrington might have some recollection of the man. He’s been here ever since—“

At which moment a somewhat spare man with a great gray beard and striking blue eyes emerged from an adjoining office door. “Louise, I wonder if you’ve seen—oh, we have a guest. I do so apologize,” he said, approaching and extending a hand toward me. “Frank Farrington, Master Mechanic, at your service.”

“Charles Priestly, and it’s a genuine pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I replied, recognizing him at once as the man who had gained great notoriety seven years earlier for being the first man to cross the East River by way of the newly erected bridge towers. He had, though, achieved this feat without the benefit of a roadbed, crossing instead using the flimsy expedient of a boatswain’s chair suspended from a single steel cable. “Your assistant believes you may be able to help me identify one of your former workmen. I’ve no doubt there were hundreds during the bridge’s construction, but I’m hopeful that this man’s singular appearance may allow you to recall him.”

“Well, Mister Priestly, why don’t you step into my office and we’ll see if my memory serves as well as I like to think it does.” He turned, drew open his office door, and gestured for me to proceed ahead of him. I noticed immediately a framed copy of the newspaper, the front page of which had borne his image following his renowned crossing of the river.

“It must have been a terrifying thing,” I offered, stepping to the displayed page and giving it a momentarily closer scrutiny.

“You have no idea,” he replied. “Though I, of course, put up a brave front. My primary thought throughout the crossing was whether we’d made a wise decision awarding the steel cable contract to the lowest bidder.”

I, of course, had no knowledge of whether his statement was true or mere hyperbole, so I simply smiled in response and moved to the far end of the office where there stood upon an enormous table an extraordinarily detailed model of the great bridge some twelve feet long. As I bent to examine it more closely, Farrington approached from behind.

“Your work?” I inquired.

“Oh heavens no,” he replied. “I haven’t the eyesight or the patience for such an undertaking. It’s the work of a model maker in Roebling’s company. I’m told it was nearly as challenging an undertaking as the real thing.”

Returning to his desk, he gestured for me to take a seat, then did so himself as well, settling heavily into the large oak chair. “So tell me about this mysterious associate of yours.”

“It’s possible that I may end up wasting a good bit of your time,” I said, “for not only do I not know the name of the man I seek, I also cannot tell you when he might have begun working for you or, for that matter, when he might have departed. I’m afraid all I have to offer is a physical description.”

Farrington leaned forward as though genuinely intrigued, but he said nothing in response.

“He’s a middle aged fellow,” I began, “extremely tall—at least six foot five if he’s an inch—and preternaturally slender. And here’s the unique bit, at least it seems to me anyway. The man had a shock of brilliantly red hair and a long beard and mustaches to match.” I paused, looking for any glimmer of recognition. It was not long in coming.

“Mister Priestly, here I thought you were going to challenge me this morning, and I’m afraid you’ve failed utterly. The man you seek is, as you say, singular, and I couldn’t forget him if my advancing senility were to become complete tomorrow. The man you describe is none other than John Eliot, one of my very finest high tower workers, absolutely fearless of wire work or any other task that required being at the top of the towers or suspended from the cables. Alas, my memory is not quite so rigorous on the specific dates of his employ with the bridge company, though that is easily solved with the help of Miss Chester.”

He rose peremptorily and stepped through his office door and back into the reception area, returning a moment later bearing an immense leather-bound volume, which he dropped with a great thud onto his desk.

“The employment and payment records of every man who so much as lifted a board or pounded a rivet to create the bridge. Sadly, though, it’s all organized chronologically rather than alphabetically. Only give me a moment,” following which exhortation he lifted a pair of spectacles from the desk, dropped them onto the bridge of his nose and began flipping pages in the book. Clearly he’d spent many a long hour with the volume in the past, and his search took no more than a minute.

“Ah, yes, here we are—John Eliot, tower foreman. Says here he began work on August 27, 1872, right around the time the caissons were completed for the New York tower and we’d begun the above-water construction in earnest. The Brooklyn tower was farther along by then, of course, so we needed more men on the New York side, and I recall Eliot arriving at a propitious time, particularly given his ability—preference really—for working at height.”

Farrington flipped numerous additional pages before stopping at one and making a suddenly quizzical face.

“Now there’s an odd thing,” he said. “Eliot was with us right through completion of both towers, but his payment records end in April of 1877. By then, both towers were up and we’d have been well along in the process of running the cables.” He turned one additional page and then flipped back to the prior one. “And this is stranger still,” he said. “According to these records, the man never even claimed his final paycheck. It’s as though he simply vanished, and with the company owing him for two additional weeks’ work. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Certainly plenty of workmen came and went with little notice, but I don’t recall any of them foregoing a final paycheck.”

I rose at Farrington’s observation and stepped once more toward the enormous model of the bridge. “So,” I said, “peering again at the minute details of the model, “I suppose there’s nothing to it but to spend some time with the tax or census offices if I’m to track the man down. That’ll be a challenge. Not a terribly uncommon name, is it?”

“No, no it is not,” Farrington agreed. “And I don’t envy you your task, though I’m pleased we were able to at least supply you with a name and a bit of employment history. That ought to count for something in your search. Wish we’d been able to provide more.”

“Oh no,” I said, as I reached for my coat and hat. “You’ve been more helpful than I had any reasonable right to expect. If I do manage to track down Mister Eliot, I’ll be sure to let him know that you owe him a bit of money.” I placed a business card on the edge of Farrington’s desk and offered an outstretched hand in his direction.

So now I had a name to accompany the visual image that had haunted my past three days. This new information consumed my thoughts for the remainder of the day, so much so that colleagues back at the office noted more than once my apparent lack of concentration on whatever it was they were endeavoring to share with me. Later that evening, still alone at the house, but increasingly anticipating Emily’s return at week’s end, I composed a modest dinner and then sat back in my reading chair to spend a bit more time with my Longfellow anthology. But in the end it proved pointless. My thoughts couldn’t escape the images that had haunted my dreams of late, and Farrington’s observations about John Eliot and his unexpected disappearance six years earlier only exacerbated the turmoil that accompanied my attempts at sleep later that night. The events of the following day did nothing to assuage the situation.

I managed at most three hours of sleep that night and awoke far earlier than my normal time. Tuesday was typically a busy day for the firm and so with no better alternative, I made my way to the office just as the sun was making its way above the horizon. No one was there to greet me save for the night watchman and janitor, and I managed to get quite a lot of work done in the ensuing two hours before the office staff began appearing. Later that morning, following a lengthy meeting with my senior managers, I was passing by the front desk when I was unexpectedly accosted by Miss Henderson, our receptionist.

“Oh, Mister Priestly,” she said, “a courier has just been by and left a message for you.”

Having no cause to expect any such deliveries, I returned to her desk and accepted a small envelope from her outstretched hand.

“I would have brought it round sooner,” she offered, “but you’ve been locked away in meetings all morning.”

“It’s quite all right, Miss Henderson,” I replied. “Thanks very much.”

Nearly all of the mail we received at the office was of an official nature and, as such, usually contained a return address and company logo of some sort on the envelope. This envelope simply bore the name “New York Bridge Company” in the upper corner and my thoughts quite naturally returned to my brief meeting with Farrington the previous morning.

Returning to my desk, I took a seat, cut open the envelope, and withdrew a single twice-folded sheet of paper on which was typed one lengthy paragraph followed by Farrington’s signature.

“Mister Priestly,” it began, “It was a genuine pleasure to make your acquaintance yesterday. I am pleased that we were able to supply you with the information you were seeking, but I am writing to beg your indulgence and forgiveness in so far as my assistant and I have located one additional bit of information that may be of further value to you concerning our former employee John Eliot. A short time after his unexplained failure to appear for work back in April 1877, a woman appeared at our office inquiring after him. Based on her physical appearance (quite tall, slender, and with hair every bit as red as John’s) I surmised her to be a relative. Indeed, she revealed herself to be John’s younger sister Gretchen, and she seemed, as I recall, to be in a good deal of distress. The two, she subsequently explained, occupied an apartment in Brooklyn at 242B Fulton Street and her brother had always been a man of singularly regular habits, leaving from and returning to the apartment in a predictable manner, and, more importantly, being altogether forthright in his handling of debts such as rent, food, etc. Thus it was that his failure to appear one evening following work in early April of that year, or on any day thereafter, had clearly caused her a significant amount of agitation. I share this information in case you wish to continue pursuing your search for the man, though I cannot, of course, vouch for whether the woman still occupies the apartment at this same address. I wish you all the best in your endeavors, and do not hesitate to visit again if we can be of further assistance. Fondest regards. Frank Farrington”

I read the note a second time and was just refolding it when there came a knock at my office door, a colleague needing to address a business matter of some urgency. The remainder of that Tuesday was consumed with the usual panoply of office tasks and it wasn’t until the walk home that evening that I had the first opportunity to give earnest thought to how I ought to respond to Farrington’s message. There was, though, never the slightest doubt that I would employ the information he had provided and attempt to locate the sister. Indeed, so suddenly committed was I to this course of action, that I forewent my journey home and hailed a carriage, instructing the driver to deliver me to the address the message had provided. This, of course, necessitated yet another passage over the bridge, a crossing which, though it had previously filled me with wonder at the architectural achievement, now instead increasingly caused me no small amount of trepidation.

The driver made short work of locating the Fulton Street apartment, and I stepped down from the carriage, handing him the fare, half expecting to again see the horrific visage beneath his hat brim that I had on that rainy night now four days hence. Mercifully no such event ensued and he simply offered a smile and a tip of the hat as he departed. I briefly pondered asking him to wait there for the return trip home, but, uncertain how long my visit might be, opted against it.

The apartment building offered a single modestly framed door, leading up to which were seven stone steps, which I counted as I ascended each one. Though I had as yet no clear premise upon which to build my conclusion, I nonetheless felt that events were building to some sort of conclusion, and I was keen to etch every nuance of the experience into my mind as best I could manage. Hesitating only a moment at the top of the stoop, I reached for the brass knocker and gave it a couple of sharp raps. After what felt a lengthy wait, accompanied by various rustling about beyond, the door was tentatively opened and an elderly man met my gaze with a mix of suspicion and tiredness.

“Apologies for the late hour,” I began. “I am looking for apartment 242B. Perhaps you could point me in the—”

“That’ll be Gretchen,” he offered briskly, gesturing up the staircase. “Second floor, third door on the left.”

He turned peremptorily and entered the apartment doorway whence he had come. “Such a terrible business,” he said by way of final comment before closing the door behind him. “Terrible business indeed.” He offered no further explanation for the unsolicited observation.

Following the man’s clear but mysterious directions, I made my way up the staircase, each step offering a creak of protest at the imposition of my weight. Making my way down the dark hallway, I found that indeed, the third doorway on the left was 242B. I could hear from beyond the door the sounds of dishes being moved about, though the lack of voices suggested that the occupant was alone. I knocked gently on the heavy wooden door, waiting just seconds until it was drawn open and I knew that I had come to exactly the right place. For there before me stood the precise visage, albeit female, of the man whose face had haunted my waking and sleeping hours these past few days.

“Ma’am,” I began awkwardly, removing my hat and extending a hand, “I apologize profusely for disturbing your dinner hour, but I’m afraid I’ve come on a matter of some urgency. May I assume that you are Miss Eliot?”

“You may indeed,” she replied, “though I’m afraid you have me at a bit of a disadvantage. She had as yet made no gesture suggesting that I was welcome to enter the apartment.

“Oh, again my apologies. Where are my manners? My name is Priestly. Charles Priestly.”

“And what is it I can do for you this evening, Mister Priestly?”

“I’ve come about your brother John,” I offered in response. And in that moment, a terrible shadow seemed to pass across her face, though only for a second, following which the pleasant smile returned and she drew the door wide and motioned me to enter.

“Again,” I said, “ I am so terribly sorry to disturb your dinner. Indeed as I entered I could clearly see the table set for one and could smell the aroma emanating from the kitchen area. “I’ll be as brief as I can manage.”

“Nonsense, Mister Priestly. I will discuss the matter of my brother for as long as we have something to talk about. I should, though, preface our discussion with the fact that I have not seen so much as a trace of John for more than six years. Neither had my sister, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, so he had two sisters then,” I replied. “The man at the bridge company who provided me with your information suggested that there was only one—one named Gretchen.”

“An understandable confusion,” the woman said. “Gretchen is . . . was . . . my younger sister and this is her apartment. I am Clara and I’ve only just arrived in town yesterday. My sister has just passed away, you see, and I’ve come to look after her affairs.”

“Well, I’m terribly sorry to hear it,” I said. “Was she ill?”

“For a long time in fact. But she was unfortunately never one for complaining or communicating her problems with her family.”

I did not respond, but only looked at her with an expression that must have been curious enough for her to feel the need to clarify.

“She passed four nights ago from a long-standing case of influenza. Honestly, how she managed to survive this long without medical care or decent heat is beyond me.” She dropped slowly into a nearby chair and momentarily put her face in her hands.

“It was Friday night that she passed, right in the midst of that terrific thunderstorm we had.”

I nodded, thinking back in that moment to my late-night walk across the bridge and the curious incident of the lightning bolt.

“Well, I trust you will accept my sincerest condolences,” I replied in response to the woman’s terse account of her sister’s passing. “So Gretchen would then be the one who lived here with John during his time on the bridge?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And never a better brother could you possibly encounter. He stayed with her here for the entire five years he worked on the bridge. In truth, he saved her from penury, Mister Priestly. Not to air too much family laundry for a stranger, but I’m afraid Gretchen was never one for earning a living on her own. John was her salvation . . . until, of course, he disappeared.”

“Yes, yes, I am aware,” I replied. “April of 1877 if my information is correct.”

“Why, that is correct as correct can be, Mister Priestly. And may I ask how you came to learn of John’s disappearance with such precision?”

“I’ve had a recent chat with a Mister Farrington, former master mechanic on the bridge where your brother worked. He is quite fastidious in his record keeping.”

She gestured for me to remove my coat and take a seat in a living room chair, whilst she joined me in another, sitting directly across, perched lithely on the chair’s very edge, as though energized by the thought of learning something new about her missing sibling.

“Yes,” she said, leaping up once again, and stepping toward the kitchen. “Can I offer you a drink, Mister Priestly?” I accepted gratefully and was shortly presented with a glass of sherry of more than passing quality. As she placed it on the table before me, she continued. “John was on the bridge for nearly five years before he vanished as you say in April six years ago. He lived here with Gretchen the entire time. He is—was—older than she by a bit over four years.” A noticeable tremor had entered her voice. “She queried the police at the time of course, but nothing came of it. All they would say was that bridge workers came and went all the time and that there was really nothing at all they could do on the matter.”

“And did you or your sister have occasion to speak with Mister Farrington or anyone else on the bridge following John’s disappearance?”

“She did speak with someone in that office, in fact. It may have been Mister Farrington, but I can’t be certain. In any event, whomever she spoke with was of no more help than the police. So far as they knew, he had simply failed to show up for work one day, and that was that.”

“And did they mention when Gretchen spoke with them that he had failed to even claim his final paycheck?” I asked.

“That they did not mention,” she said. “And it certainly darkens the mystery, don’t you think? Men who run off don’t typically do so without claiming all of the money to which they’re entitled, now do they.”

No, ma’am, they do not,” I agreed. A lengthy silence ensued.

“But what does all of this have to do with you, Mister Priestly?” she asked, finally getting to the most obvious question of all, and the one I had done the least to prepare an answer for.

I was keen to not give the woman any reason for hope in the matter of her lost brother, but keen as well to not deepen the already clearly deep hurt she felt at his loss and that of her sister. Still, there was no way of dancing around the matter.

“I have reason to believe that he may indeed not have run out on his job at all,” I said, building to what exactly I wasn’t at all certain. “I have it on the authority of the bridge’s master mechanic that your brother was both diligent and skillful in his work, and dependable as well in the timing of his morning appearances and his evening departures.”

“He was indeed, Mister Priestly,” she replied. “Gretchen assured me that he left here every morning precisely at 6:45, and returned promptly at 7:00 in the evening, excepting only the occasional stopover for groceries on the way home. And, for the record, the night that he failed to return was not a grocery night. That was usually Tuesday, and Gretchen said it was a Thursday that he failed to return.”

She sat in another long moment of silence before asking the question whose inevitability was exceeded only by its utter lack of sufficient response.

“Mister Priestly, do you believe that something awful happened to John? I mean, it was known to be a quite dangerous job. I read in the papers that by the end of it something like twenty-five men had died.” Whether or not she was curious as to why I was in possession of knowledge about her brother was unclear, but she chose not to pursue the matter, for which I was genuinely glad, considering the nature of the matter that had brought me to her door.

“Miss Eliot, I honestly do not know the answer to your question, though it strikes me as one worthy of more investigation than it clearly received at the time. Of course, if something indeed did happen to your brother, it’s only fair to observe that it might have been at the bridge or indeed elsewhere in the city. However, given what we know about his punctuality and diligence, if an accident did take place, the bridge is the logical expectation.”

“But surely,” she said, “all of the other men who suffered accidents there were accounted for and treated with—well . . . “ She lowered her eyes momentarily, displaying more strength in maintaining this discussion than I’d had any reasonable right to expect. “Still,” she continued, “it’s been six years.”

I rose from my seat, keen to not delay the woman’s dinner any longer. Bidding her goodbye, I indicated that it was my intention to explore the matter further in the days to come and that on the remote chance I learned anything of consequence, I would of a certainty share the information with her.

“Mister Priestly, I thank you sincerely for anything you can do, especially if it brings any sort of closure to the matter that would suffice for the insurance company. There are still burial expenses, that sort of thing.”

Her parting comment took me by surprise and I stopped in the midst of putting my coat back on. I’m sorry, “I said. “How is an insurance company involved?”

“My brother was, as we’ve discussed, an extremely responsible man, Mister Priestly. He had taken out a life insurance policy upon joining the bridge crew. He recognized, of course, that his work was terribly hazardous, and he wanted to ensure that Gretchen would be taken care of in the unlikely event that something terrible should befall him on the job.”

“And was the policy never paid?” I asked, certain that I knew the answer already.

“Never a penny, Mister Priestly, and that is the circumstance that caused my sister’s penury in the years following his disappearance. They blamed it, so they said, on our inability to prove that he had, in fact, passed on. He was never found, you see.”

As the details of her account slowly emerged, I could not help but note a coldness arising inside of me as I slowly finished inserting my arm into my coat sleeve. “I wonder, Miss Eliot, Do you happen to recall the firm’s name?”

Oh, without question, Mister Priestly,” she said without hesitation. “Empire City Casualty Corporation. We have the original policy and all of our correspondence right here in her desk.”

I stood for one more silent moment before turning toward the door.

“Well, I will certainly get in touch with you or your sister if I should come across any information that brings this unfortunate matter to a resolution,” I said, offering her my hand in a parting greeting.

As I descended the seven steps outside her door and raised my hand to a passing carriage, I was suddenly uncertain whether the chill I felt was the night air or the weight of what I had just learned from John Eliot’s older sister.

The following day at the office was characterized by such a complete lack of focus and productivity on my part that colleagues offered uncertain glances in my direction on multiple occasions. By mid-afternoon, I conceded defeat, picked up hat and coat, and made for the front door, making a point of not looking at the company name emblazoned on the wall, precisely as I’d done numerous times throughout the day to that point. For though I was not now employed in the insurance and casualty area of my firm’s business, I most assuredly had been six years ago and my membership in that fraternity whose name Clara Eliot had uttered the previous evening had set like a stone within me ever since.

Even as I made my way from the office, I was as certain of my destination as I was that I must now get well and truly to the bottom of whatever fate had befallen John Eliot, if not for my own sanity, then surely for his sister’s benefit. Within the hour I was sitting once more before Frank Farrington’s capacious desk. During the forty-odd minutes it took me to walk across town to his office I had resolved to do whatever was within my power to determine—and if at all possible to prove—the fate that had befallen John Eliot, this resolution due in more or less equal measures to the curious apparitions that had beset me in the past few days and my direct connection with the firm that had denied his insurance policy, thus potentially contributing to his younger sister’s premature demise.

Despite this newfound resolve, I had nevertheless not put nearly the degree of forethought that I should have into what additional germane insights I might glean from the master mechanic, and yet there I sat.

“So then,” Farrington said, “you’ve met Eliot’s sister.”

“I have,” I replied, “though not the one I expected to meet.” I explained to him the tragic fate of Eliot’s younger sister and the current state of affairs of the elder one. I saw, though, no point in bringing up the matter of the insurance, constructing the rationale for my interest in the matter on my earlier foundation of Eliot having been a distant family member.

“Clara describes him as singularly diligent in having cared for his younger sister—not at all the sort to have simply disappeared without a word,” I continued. “Is there any chance an accident might have occurred? The sort of thing that might go unreported? The family is, of course, as keen as ever to learn what happened.”

“I understand fully,” Farrington replied, raising a hand to his chin as though in deep consideration. “Eliot was a superior worker at height, spent nearly all of his workdays at the top of the tower, hanging cable, that sort of thing.”

“And might there . . .” I paused before completing the thought. “Might there have been a fall then?”

Farrington considered this for a moment before reaching into a desk drawer and extracting a thin folder of papers, which he opened and regarded briefly.

“I keep a list of the fate of every man who gave his life in the service of the bridge, Mister Priestly,” he said, gesturing to the folder. “All thirty-seven of them.”

“Can I assume,” I said, “that more than one met his fate in a fall . . . I mean given the nature of the work and all?”

“Of course, of course,” he replied, “though fewer than you might have thought. Just six of the thirty-seven, in fact. The men who worked at height were, as you can imagine, extremely good at it. We lost more to early problems with pressure in the caissons.”

“Also, one imagines that were someone to fall from a tower, there would be plenty of others around to know of it.”

“Indeed,” Farrington agreed. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Mister Priestly, but there were only two places to land, either in the river or onto the base of the tower itself.”

“Were there times when a worker—one such as John Eliot—might have been working alone on a tower, after the others had left for the day? Might an accident then have gone unnoticed?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Farrington said. “Still, falling into the river so close to the shoreline would have resulted in discovery of the body shortly thereafter. Or, if the unfortunate wretch were to strike the tower, he would be discovered promptly the next workday.”

“And did either of those occurrences take place to your knowledge?” I asked.

“As it happens, no, Mister Priestly. Every fatality was witnessed by one or more coworkers.”

As I pondered Farrington’s words, I rose from my seat and wandered about the office considering the blueprints and other framed technical documents with which the office was replete. I stopped before a large diagram of one of the mammoth tower structures, peering at it quite closely.

“The base of each tower is solid, yes?” I said, continuing to peer closely at the diagram.

“Quite solid, Mister Priestly. Solid granite or limestone block, depending on which section you’re looking at.”

I lifted a finger to the glass that protected the diagram. “And yet there are hollow bits throughout. Quite large ones.”

“You have a keen eye, Mister Priestly. There are four capacious openings in each tower that extend from the top of the base down to where the stone meets each caisson below the water. They are vestiges of the entrances through which workers entered and exited the caissons.”

“And these openings, they would have been open at the top, at least for some portion of the construction?”

“Indeed they would,” Farrington said. “Though they’ve now been sealed, of course. There are doors for inspectors, but they are quite secure. It wouldn’t do to have vagrants finding their way inside, you understand. It’s not at all safe. Are you positing that Mister Eliot perhaps fell into one of the caisson access openings?”

“It seems a very low probability event, doesn’t it,” I said, scrutinizing further the astonishingly detailed diagram. Besides which, if he had met such a fate, surely a caisson worker would have discovered him the following day.”

“Well, only up until the caisson work was complete, which would of course have been the case long before the towers began going up. The New York caisson was complete and filled in the summer of 1872, so no one would have had cause to enter the access chambers in the five years between then and when our Mister Eliot went missing.”

“Meaning that a body might go unnoticed at the bottom of a hole like that for a very long time, or perhaps never be discovered at all.”

Farrington sat quietly, seeming to ponder this bizarre possibility. “Mister Priestly,” he began, “it’s eleven years since anyone’s been in those caisson rooms. I’m afraid the company would never conscience . . .”

“Oh no, of course,” I replied promptly. “You misunderstand me, Mister Farrington. I’m not suggesting anything . . . just, you know, contemplating distant possibilities.”

I remained before the technical diagram for some time, continuing to ponder its many intricacies. And in that moment, as Farrington continued to sit in silence, I made what would, in the end, turn out to be a fateful decision.

“Tell me, Mister Farrington,” I said, turning to face him directly, “are you a believer in the supernatural?”

He made in response a face that seemed to suggest that this was the most natural question in the world. “Mister Priestly,” he responded after some consideration, “I count myself a God-fearing man, which, of course, means I am obliged to answer your question in the affirmative, though what it might have to do with the matter of John Eliot is not at all apparent, save of course for the ultimate dispensation of his immortal soul, a matter beyond the abilities of you or I to influence, I’m afraid.”

“Indeed, indeed,” I said, returning to the chair before his desk and retaking my seat. “At risk of imposing further on your already generously offered time, I wonder if you’re up for hearing the entire truth of this matter,”

In response, Farrington leaned forward, looked at me inquisitively, and silently extracted a fresh cigar from a box on his desk. Lighting it thoughtfully, he leaned back in silent encouragement of whatever I might have to say.

Twenty-five minutes later, he knew everything that I knew about the curious matter of John Eliot, his sisters (including the grim fate of the younger), the visitations I had endured since that first night in the storm, and even my firm’s involvement in this tragic saga. Having divulged it all, I sat silently for a long moment, pondering how I might conclude my strange tale.

“I cannot say whether it is from guilt or fear or simply justice, Mister Farrington,” I said. “But I mean to get to the bottom of the matter if God wills it.”

Later that evening, as I sat aimlessly sketching from memory some of the details I had noted in the technical drawings on Farrington’s walls, there came a sharp rap upon my front door. I opened the door to discover a messenger with a thin envelope bearing my name and the same New York Bridge Company logo as the envelope I’d received in my office the previous day.

Mister Priestly, the message began, deepest apologies for the late intrusion, but I’ve given a great deal of thought to our discussion of earlier today and I’ve concluded that I should like to assist in whatever manner I can to enable you to resolve the unfortunate matter of John Eliot’s disappearance. Doing so will not only help to set your mind at ease, but also mine, as I have always had a deep affinity for the men who worked with me throughout the bridge project. Eliot’s disappearance has, since its occurrence, been a source of deep frustration for me, and your appearance in my office on Friday last has only served to reopen a wound that I thought to have been long closed.

Please meet me at the base of the New York tower tonight at 11:00. Wear old clothes and come equipped with a lantern and plenty of fuel. I look forward to working with you to resolve this mystery once and for all if possible. Yours sincerely, Frank Farrington

It was a remarkable turn of events and I did not at first know quite what to make of it. But in the end there was nothing for it but to meet Farrington, for, after all, who knew more about the bridge and its construction than its master mechanic? And if, perchance, Eliot was to be found somewhere in the foundations of the great bridge, I was certainly ill equipped to undertake such a search on my own.

And so it came to pass that I found myself ascending the bridge promenade from the New York side around 10:30 that evening. The night air was unpleasantly warm and dank, with just enough of an occasional cool breeze to portend a storm before the night as over. As I approached the tower, I could not help but gaze once more up at the massive stone works that soared into the night sky. I made the base of the tower with fifteen minutes or so to spare and so stood gazing back at the magnificent lights of the city. Far in the distance to my left, on Bedloe’s Island, construction works were being put in place for what was expected to become a massive pedestal on which would stand an even more massive monument to be shipped here from France in a few years time. This enormous new statue, it was said, would serve as an exclamation point on the continent’s most extraordinary city, welcoming all who made their way here, whether from elsewhere in the country or from even farther away.

Shifting my gaze now to the city skyline, I discerned a lone figure coming up the promenade from the New York side. Though the slow-moving figure was of no particular distinction, I took it immediately to be Farrington, for who else had cause to be in this place at such an hour? In the end, my instinct was correct, and I extended a hand as the man drew near.

“It’s an astonishing achievement,” I offered by way of greeting. “Simply astonishing.”

“I cannot disagree,” he replied. “And I will surely participate in nothing grander in whatever days remain to me on this earth.”

We stood for a moment, gazing silently up at the vast granite tower that rose above us. I had followed Farrington’s instructions to the letter and had beside me on the ground a lantern and a half-gallon can of fuel, the combination of which could be expected to last for several hours if necessary. He had arrived similarly equipped, bearing, as well, what appeared to be a tool bag.

“Your message seemed to suggest that you have a plan of some sort for how we might proceed in investigating the matter of what transpired with Mr. Eliot,” I said after a long moment. “You seem prepared for any contingency,” I added, gesturing to his bag.

“Indeed,” he replied. “My years on the bridge taught me, if nothing else, to be prepared for all manner of unexpected events. I mean to conduct a thorough exploration of the caisson base below us, and it’s been a very long time since anyone has been down there.”

“And will we have cause to examine the Brooklyn tower as well,” I asked, realizing my mistake nearly as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

“No need, Mr. Priestly,” he replied with the expected response. “John Eliot never worked on that tower during his employ with the company. Which is not to say he wouldn’t have visited it from time to time, only that he never spent protracted periods there.”

“So,” I said, looking about uncertainly, “how does one go about getting below?”

He lifted his bag and lantern in response and gestured with his chin toward a heavy iron gate at a spot in the promenade fencing. In my many weeks of traversing the promenade I had never noticed it, so elegantly was it integrated into the structure.

“I trust you’ve brought comfortable shoes, Mr. Priestly,” he said. “We’ve a bit of climbing ahead of us.”

He did not exaggerate. For no sooner were we through the gate, which opened with the shriek of neglect using one of the myriad keys on his belt hook, then we were faced with a great iron doorway set into the side of the tower’s stone wall. This succumbed to yet another of Farrington’s keys, following which we found ourselves inside the tower atop a spiral staircase that plummeted downward into a black void whose bottom was utterly indiscernible despite both of our lanterns.

“You’re not afraid of heights, I hope,” he asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Doesn’t much matter now, does it?” was my only rejoinder.

The descent was narrow and treacherous and it wasn’t long before I began to feel the chill of the narrow stone column in which we were descending. We were fifteen minutes or so making the descent, arriving at last upon an open expanse of stone some fifty feet on a side with vaulted ceilings ten or so feet above us. He stepped briskly to a spot some twenty feet distant where set into the floor there lay a double iron doorway held fast by an immense padlock.

“Imagine a time only a few years ago, Mr. Priestly, when dozens of men were up and down those stairs all day long, and also in and out of the caisson through this hatchway here.” He gestured toward the ancient-looking iron doorway. It appeared to my eye to be hundreds of years old and not the sort of thing that would have been in active use only in the prior decade.

“Now comes the tricky bit,” he said auspiciously, placing his tool bag and lantern on the stone floor and searching his key ring once again. He produced a suitably large, ominous-looking skeleton key and inserted it into the padlock. It did not at first appear to be keen on turning.

“The river air is tough on iron,” he offered laconically, reaching into his bag for a small can of oil. Within moments, the lock succumbed to his efforts.

“Give us a hand here,” he said, grasping one side of the great door. The pair of doors were great heavy things, each eight feet or so by four, and it was all the two of us could do to flip each one up and over, leaving behind a square black opening in the floor some eight feet square. I cast a dispirited look at the opening.

“And you mean to go down there,” I asked uncertainly.

“I’m afraid it’s why we’ve come, Mr. Priestly,” he said.

As I stared into the abyss, I felt the familiar chill across the back of my neck that was not the product of the river air but rather of my own encroaching fears. There was, though, no turning back at this point, and so I did my level best to regain control of my senses.

“This will take a couple of trips,” he noted, setting aside his tool bag, attaching his lantern to his belt, and swinging his legs out over the edge to access the top of the wall-mounted ladder that was our only means of descent into the void. “It’s a bit of a climb down, so take care and keep a good grip on the rungs.” Then, without further comment, his head disappeared below the edge and he was gone into the blackness. I took care to mimic his actions, attaching my lantern to one side of my belt and the fuel can to the other. These while somewhat awkward were not especially heavy and so I managed to get my legs swung round and onto the ladder without great difficulty. A quick glance downward revealed that Farrington had already made it to the bottom, which appeared to be some thirty feet below. Moments later I joined him there and we found ourselves standing on a vast floor of granite slabs whose surface was noticeably moist.

“At this point, we are some twenty feet below the surface of the river,” he noted, causing me to glance involuntarily around at the walls that surrounded us. “There are dozens of men,” he continued, “who worked down here every day for more than a year.”

He cast his gaze about the great space for a long few moments and then placed a hand back on the lower rung of the ladder.

“Mister Priestly, I’ll need a couple of items from my tool bag,” he said. “Indulge me, if you will, and begin having a look around while I fetch them. It won’t be a moment.” And with that he began his ascent.

“And what exactly is it I’m looking for?” I called after him. It seemed difficult to believe, but in all of the effort of getting here, I had momentarily lost sight of why we had come.

“Why, any signs of John Eliot, of course,” he replied, providing the obvious response, peering down from now nearly halfway up the ladder.

And so, lifting my lantern, I set off toward the far corner of the vast open space, still unsure exactly what I was searching for. I supposed in that moment that if there were anything to be found, it would be obvious when it appeared. As I made my way uncertainly across the farthest areas of the caisson’s upper surface, holding my lantern before me, I began to notice a series of grinding sounds emanating from the opening in the ceiling whence Farrington and I had made our entry into this chamber. I thought little of it, however, trusting that the master mechanic was attending to some engineering matter or other. As I searched, I found little of note, save for occasional bits of old lumber and, at one point, what appeared to be a large masonry hammer. After ten minutes or so of this futile searching about, Farrington suddenly called out to me. From the resonance of it, it sounded as though he was still up at the top of the ladder.

“Mr. Priestly,” he called, “where have you gotten to?”

I made my way quickly back to the base of the ladder and peered upward at the impossibly small, dimly lit square opening high above. I could make out the silhouette of Farrington’s head and shoulders centered in the opening.

“Still here, Mr. Farrington,” I responded, “just having a look about as you said. Nothing much to report, I’m afraid.”

“Ah well,” he replied, his voice having taken on an oddly calm tone that seemed suddenly not at all in keeping with the gravity of our situation. “Do me a favor, Mr. Priestly, and stand to one side if you would.” He gestured with one arm, suggesting that I should move to my right somewhat, though I had no earthly idea what he was getting at. Nevertheless I complied, continuing to peer upward.

“Will you be joining me in the search, Mr. Farrington,” I called up, endeavoring to effect a light-hearted tone.

“Sadly, I’m afraid I will not, Mr. Priestly,” was his reply. And just as I was beginning to comprehend the meaning of this incongruous response, there came a great wrenching sound of iron on stone from above and I watched in horror as the iron ladder slowly fell away from the wall and crashed to the floor beside me.

I was momentarily dumbstruck and could only stare upward as he continued looking down.

“What on earth is the meaning of this?” I called up to him. “How am I to climb out now?”

“Mr. Priestly, now that you are safe and secure, I am going to take a moment to tell you a story, one that will, I hope, help you to understand the circumstance in which you now find yourself.”

He first proceeded to assume what I thought a singularly insouciant pose, sitting on the edge of the hatchway opening, his legs swung down over the edge, his head still a black silhouette against the faint light of his lantern. I still had no idea what was happening, but repeated glances down at the massive iron ladder lying on the floor caused the chill on the back of my neck to grow.

“Some years ago—six actually,” he began, his voice low now, but quite clear due to the resonance of the stone walls that surrounded us, “it was brought to my attention by one of my foremen that one of our finest high-line workers, John Eliot, had, for no good reason that anyone knew, stopped appearing for work. The sad truth of the matter is that to this day, no one has any idea what might have happened to him. Personally I doubt your accident theory, though you’ll have plenty of time to explore and satisfy yourself that he did not, in fact, fall into the tower base. I knew John well and watched him work many times. He was as gifted as any circus aerialist, Mr. Priestly, and the likelihood of him falling to his death is, in my view, inconceivable. Still, one never knows; you may find him yet. In any event, you’ll have plenty of time to look.”

At this point in his diatribe, my only conclusion was that I was in the hands of a madman, for I had no idea at all what he was going on about.

“If that is true,” I called up, “then why all of this?” I threw my arms outward. “Why did you bring me down here at all?”

“Ah, that is a question, isn’t it, Mr. Priestly. Why? I do suppose I owe you an explanation, especially seeing as how this is the final time you and I will have occasion to speak. You see, about a month after John went missing, his sister Gretchen visited me in my office asking after him, just as you did last Friday. Pity you never got to meet Gretchen, Mr. Priestly; lovely girl, cared deeply for her brother. But it was quite clear that she was utterly helpless without him, both financially and psychologically. The good news—if you care to call it that—is that John, being the stalwart guardian that he was—and knowing full well the risky nature of his work—had taken out an insurance policy in Gretchen’s name. The problem, the reason she came to me, was that she needed affirmation of his demise in order to make a claim against the policy. And so I did the very best I could for the girl, Mr. Priestly. But I was in a bind, you see. I could only testify that there was no evidence he had suffered any sort of accident on the bridge, but that we had not seen him in several weeks and so perhaps some unfortunate mishap had befallen him elsewhere in the city. Would you like to see what I sent to the insurance company, Mr. Priestly?”

At which point, he tossed down to me a single sheet of paper that floated slowly to the floor at my feet. I lifted it and considered the words. The letter was a carbon copy, bearing the bridge company letterhead and dated a month after Eliot’s disappearance from work. It read precisely as Farrington had said.

“Anyway,” Farrington continued, “she sent my letter—that letter there—along with the requisite insurance documents to the company as a claim. Of course it was a modest policy, not the sort of thing that would have made the girl wealthy, you understand. It might not have even sustained her for more than a few years. But it would have been something, Mr. Priestly. Something. And would you care to have a look at the response she received from the insurer? She brought me the return letter a few weeks after she’d applied. I’ve saved it all these years.”

Once again, he tossed down a single page as before. This time, I hesitated a long moment before bending to lift it from the floor, for I knew what I would see as surely as I knew now what fate awaited me. The logo of the Empire City Casualty Corporation stood boldly at the top of the page and beneath it a terse two paragraphs addressed to a Miss Gretchen Eliot explaining that no payments would be made against the policy unless the remains of the deceased could be produced and positively identified as those of the named individual on the policy. And there at the bottom, the signature of Charles Priestly, written with the same bold fountain pen I had been given by my father upon graduation from college many years hence.

“She visited me several times in the years after that, Mr. Priestly. Many times indeed, hoping against hope that some news of John would save her from the penury that was now her lot. With each visit, she was a bit more frail, a bit more hopeless. You know, in some ways I may be as guilty in all of this as you are, Mr. Priestly. I saw where it was all going and I did nothing aside from continually assuring her that I would let her know the moment I heard something definitive about her brother, which of course never came to pass. But there were no official actions at my disposal, no company mechanism for handling such a tragic situation. You, on the other hand, had a responsibility, a duty, Mr. Priestly. Don’t get me wrong though. I’m sure you had well-established policies in place that forbade payment without proof of death. And no, we couldn’t prove definitively what had befallen the man. But still, it was such a trivial amount for a firm like yours, don’t you agree? Still, rules are rules, aren’t they? And if we allow humanity to get in the way of our rules, what then would become of civilization? Better that a helpless young girl dies of starvation and sickness. Mr. Priestly, I’ll wager you never knew a thing about poor Gretchen’s fate until you happened to visit her apartment yesterday.

Well, what’s done is done, I suppose. And so I’ve waited all this time. I’d thought it was all over and done with myself, truth be told, particularly once I saw the obituary about Gretchen a few days ago. And then, not three days later, there appears at my office door Mister Charles Priestly himself. It’s been a challenging five days, of that I can assure you, pretending to converse with you in a calm professional manner, all the while imagining a moment like this one. To be honest with you, I wasn’t certain how I might bring about justice for Gretchen, Mr. Priestly. Only then you handed me the means on a silver plate, with your ghost stories and your grim apparitions. Surely John is calling out to have his remains located so that he can rest in peace. And so here we are, Mr. Priestly. Or rather, here you are.”

The cold sweat that had begun across the back of my neck upon our initial descent down the tower stair, and which had grown with each ensuing moment, had now advanced to a state of full panic as the thought of what Farrington had in mind became ever clearer.

“Mister Farrington, you’ve more than made your point,” was the best I could muster in that moment of terror. Surely the man was only carrying out these theatrics in order to somehow assuage his own sense of responsibility over the fate of Gretchen Eliot, and by extension my own complicity as well. “Help me out of here and I will see to it first thing tomorrow that the policy is paid in full . . . with double indemnity as well. I swear it on my life.”

I then heard from the opening the slightest and yet most horrifying sound I had ever experienced in my life. For it was no more than the faintest of laughs, the self-satisfied sort that one hears from a person convinced he has a firm upper hand in whatever negotiation is occurring.

“Mr. Priestly, your company’s money does not matter any longer,” he replied. “Poor Gretchen is past hope, as you well know.”

“But there is a sister, Farrington. An older sister named Clara. Surely . . .”

“Surely nothing, Mr. Priestly. I’m no insurance expert like yourself, but I know that Gretchen was the only beneficiary named on the policy. She showed it to me, you see. And so, with her demise, all obligations of your firm vanished. Legally speaking, the matter is ended . . . only not quite, as it happens, now that I think on it.”

The man was, it was now apparent, quite mad with vengeance, and I was to be on the receiving end of it.

“The company—their money, their rules—don’t matter,” I shouted up at him. “I’ll pay the policy from my own funds. I have more than enough in the bank.”

“That’s quite generous of you, Mr. Priestly,” he replied, “but you keep forgetting that there is no longer a beneficiary. Poor John is gone to wherever he’s gone to, and Gretchen has departed for what we can only hope is a better place.”

“But the older sister . . . “

“The older sister has no part to play in our little drama. She has her own life to lead. But, Mr. Priestly, there is one other player in this that you’ve not thought to mention at all.”

“I could not imagine who he was now referring to, until in a flash it came to me and my eyes grew even wider with fear.”

“Emily is innocent of any of this,” I shouted. “She knows nothing of my professional work. She’s never even heard of John Eliot, or Gretchen, or any of it.”

“But Mr. Priestly, don’t you see the sheer beauty in that; the circularity of the entire situation? It’s so perfect, it’s almost mathematical. You, her beloved husband—just like John Eliot—have simply disappeared from the face of the earth without explanation. And although you will have, no doubt, taken out an insurance policy on your own life to provide for her, she will sadly never receive that payment for precisely the same regulatory reasons that Gretchen was never paid. So unless she has the wherewithal to provide for herself from here on, Emily, like poor Gretchen, will live out her days in an ever-increasing state of penury, all while believing that her loving husband has abandoned her. You see how it is . . . When I first learned of Gretchen’s passing, I merely wanted to make you aware of—to at least feel a measure of guilt for—your role in her tragedy. But with your able assistance, it has all worked out so much better, don’t you agree?”

With this bit of rhetorical flourish, he rose from his seated position and reached for one corner of the heavy iron hatchway door, which ne now flung closed with a tremendous reverberation and with a strength that seemed far in excess of what he had demonstrated when we had both opened them earlier. With half of the opening now closed, Farrington peered down through the remaining section for a parting observation.

“Oh and fear not, Mr. Priestly. Unlike poor John Eliot, whose fate we will never know, you will be discovered, though at some length, I’m afraid. In my engineering instructions, I’ve specified that all of the caisson chambers are to be thoroughly inspected every fifty years in case there should be leakage from the river or any other structural defects. You require only patience.”

And with that awful assertion, he threw closed the other half of the iron hatchway door. A second later, I heard the terrible heavy click of the closing padlock as he returned it to its place on the hatchway hasp.

My lantern and additional fuel will sustain me for two hours, perhaps a bit longer. After that will come blackness, starvation, and slow torturous death. There is no reason to suppose that anyone will come in search of me. Emily will not return until Friday, two days hence, and I, like an imbecile, have left no note or other information at home indicating contact with Farrington, or providing any other information that might give her cause to search for me. It is just as Farrington said: She will think me to have abandoned her to her fate without explanation or remorse.

Attempting to lift the iron ladder back into place is as pointless as it is futile. It weighs many hundreds of pounds and would be beyond the abilities of half a dozen men of my size, besides which even if I were to succeed in lifting it into place, the hatchway is locked.

Neither can there be justice for Farrington’s murderous act. If his assertion is correct about the length of time before anyone visits this dank tomb again, he will have long since deceased before that time. I will, though, note here for posterity, if nothing else, that it is he, and he alone, who is guilty of my cruel murder. May his posterity and that of his descendants be the worse for it.

And so, with the remaining moments of light that remain to me, and in the hope that sometime in a distant future these notes will be discovered, I write only that I love my dear Emily beyond words, my final thoughts are of her and her alone, and I apologize deeply for the pain and anguish that this turn of events will doubtless bring upon her.

As my lantern flickers and dies for the final time, I note also for posterity the greatest grimmest irony of this entire miserable situation. In the brief moments of light afforded me after Farrington closed the hatchway door, I did, in fact, discover in the rearmost area of the caisson access room a badly decayed set of human remains, twisted and contorted as though from great injury, and beyond all recognition save for the immense and unmistakable red beard and hair of John Eliot, with whom, it appears, I am fated to spend my eternity.

“Are you sure? This operation cannot be undone.”

Ryker inhales sharply then lets his finger fall onto the return key. The six red lines flash once, twice, then go solid bold red. He turns in his chair to face Bethel. “That’s it,” he says quietly. “We’re out.” There is a look of genuine shock on the young technician’s face. “What now?” he says.

2 Hours Earlier

Devon Stewart darts from his car through the dense downpour and under the portico in front of the MindState building. He shakes the water from his jacket collar and slicks back his hair. He wears jeans and an open-collar dress shirt and carries beneath his left arm a thin portfolio containing business papers and a laptop computer. It is just past seven and early evening thundershowers in south Florida are a routine occurrence, but, unlike at Miami International Airport, where this sudden squall will ground flights for the next two hours, he has been assured that the weather will in no way affect the journey on which he is about to embark. Stewart trusts that this promise proves to be accurate. He has a critical business meeting in Sydney, Australia in less than two hours time.

Inside, in the lobby, he steps to the slick stainless steel counter and with a smile and subtle nod of greeting extends a hand toward the receptionist, a hand containing a thin metallic card with a computer chip embedded in its center. There is no writing on the card or other markings of any kind. The receptionist smiles and nods in reply, accepts the card, and inserts it into a reader. Stewart’s image and itinerary appear instantly on the screen before her. She taps the screen with two practiced gestures, then turns back to face him.

“Welcome to MindState, Mister Stewart. We are right on schedule. Your attendant will be with you in just a moment. In the meantime, if I can borrow your papers, passport, laptop, and any other documents you want transferred, I’ll get them all uploaded and ready. One less thing to worry about later.” Stewart hands her the portfolio. “Have a seat,” she says, “and Mister Bethel will be with you shortly.” This will be only the second time that Stewart has met Christopher Bethel. The first had been the previous week during the briefing where the MindState process had been described in all its fantastic detail.

5 Days Earlier

“Mister Stewart, good morning! A genuine pleasure to finally meet you.” Bethel, dressed in a near-skin-tight suit that looks like a cross between a chef’s jacket and an Italian designer suit, exudes confidence and professionalism as the men sit alone in a large conference room. There is a display screen at the front of the room, currently showing the MindState logo, rotating in high-resolution three-D. Before Stewart there lies a thin folder containing the promotional literature describing MindState’s various service offerings. But he won’t need to read the colorful pages. That’s what Bethel is here for.

“Mister Stewart, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, as I know you’re a busy guy. Also I expect you may have heard at least some of the details about MindState from the associate who recommended you to us. Nevertheless, as this is your first trip, I’ll just take a few minutes and go through the highlights of the experience so you know what to expect. Then if you have any questions, either now or before you leave on Monday, I’ll answer those as well.

Two weeks earlier, Devon Stewart’s company, a large electric power provider serving the southeastern portion of the United States, had completed all but the final terms of a very large business deal with a technology company in eastern Australia. Devon had been assigned the task of flying to Sydney to complete the transaction and returning home with a signed contract. The deal was valued at nearly one hundred fifty million dollars over its five-year term. And while the opportunity to negotiate and finalize such an immense deal was a great career move for Devon, the prospect of thirty hours of flying in each direction had proven somewhat less than enthralling—five days of traveling for what would amount to a single two-hour meeting. He’d mentioned that annoying detail to a department colleague over lunch the following day.

“So screw the flying,” the colleague had immediately responded. “Just do MindState. It’s approved by accounting now. Costs about the same as business class, but no jet lag, no wasted time. It’s pretty awesome, I gotta tell you. I’ve gone three times with them. Any flight longer than two hours, you’ll never go back to airplanes.”

Devon had heard about MindState through the grapevine, but it was a relatively new service and he’d never taken the time to learn the details. Hence today’s visit.

“So, first of all, how does it actually work?” Bethel begins. The display changes to a split-screen photo. On the left a man appears to be asleep in a high-tech recliner. A thin silver dome covers the upper half of his head. On the right, another man stands smiling in full suit and tie, briefcase hanging from one hand. In the background are palm trees and what looks like a hotel.

“With MindState you are transported to your destination of choice, but without ever actually leaving home. The process is nearly instantaneous and the distance doesn’t matter in the slightest.” This assertion elicits a furrowed brow from Devon.

“Think of it as being about halfway between flying conventionally and those teleportation devices you used to see on science fiction TV shows. MindState currently has arrival and departure ports in forty-seven cities around the world, with more coming on line every day. Miami is one of six in the U.S. Conveniently for you, Sydney is one of two in Australia.”

“But it’s not flying and it’s not … teleportation,” Devon says.

“Probably the easiest way to think about it would be cloning, though that’s not really accurate either, as you’ll see in a moment. The first thing we do is obtain a DNA sample—cheek swab is fine, takes maybe five seconds. The second part—where the magic really happens—is that we do a full scan of your brain, or potentially just a portion of it—I’ll come back to that in a minute. Those two ingredients are all we need to replicate you in the destination of your choosing. Each receiving port has a selection of preexisting stock body frames. We simply use your DNA info to create the requisite facial and other surface features—a new skin, if you like. We then upload your brain scan info, and voila—it’s you.”

“So there’s another me running around in Sydney while I’m here in Miami.”

“To put it simply, yes. Except that while you are conducting business or vacationing in Sydney, the genuine you is lounging comfortably here in Miami in an induced sleep, fed with a glucose drip tube.”

“Then when my trip is over …”

“Well, there’s a bit more magic that happens before the trip is over, because when you return and wake up here in Miami, everything in your mind will be precisely as if you’d flown to Sydney and back, transacted your business, done your souvenir shopping, the works. Only things missing from the experience will be the jet lag and the time wasted flying there and back. That little sleight of hand is accomplished using our proprietary live data link. Your sleeping brain here in Miami is connected at all times to your Proxy brain—that’s the term we use for your traveling self—so that everything you do, say, or experience on your trip is being uploaded to your real brain as it’s happening. That way nothing is lost and you wake up here with complete memory of your trip.”

“And it’s a completely convincing ‘me’ that’s there in Sydney?”

“Not just convincing, Mister Stewart. It is, in every respect that matters, actually you. It’s your mind, your thoughts, your actions. From the perspective of everyone you interact with while you’re there, it truly is you. Whether any of your associates know that you’re a Proxy depends entirely on whether or not you choose to tell them. The fact that it’s a Proxy body matters not in the slightest. Indeed, the fact that it’s a Proxy has several important benefits that you can’t get by flying conventionally.”

Bethel pauses, advances to the next slide on the display screen. It’s a bullet list containing seven specific items.

“I’ll tackle these in no particular order, though each benefit is pretty compelling in its own right. First, since we’re reconstructing your physical self at the destination, even though we base that self on your DNA, we have the flexibility to tweak it a bit. Say you want to shed a few pounds for that vacation trip or you want your hairline a little less receded. Those can all be accommodated simply by indicating the changes you’d like on your registration form. In addition, because it’s a brand new body, any physical issues you might have here don’t follow you there. Your bum knee, high blood pressure, whatever—all that stays home so you can fully enjoy yourself while traveling.”

“That sounds pretty awesome,” Devon replies, smiling, “but if you can do that for a traveler, why wouldn’t you sell that capability as a way for anyone who wants to … you know … upgrade their body right here at home?”

“Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to us, Mister Stewart. The one downside—so far—to our Proxy technology is that it’s short-term only. These Proxies are strictly temporary. They last about a month currently, though the actual duration varies by how much they’re stressed during the trip. If you fly to Sydney and then try to run a marathon or go mountain climbing, that’ll affect your longevity. Of course, one of the many functions provided by the data link I described earlier is that we are keeping constant watch over the state of your Proxy while you’re traveling. If it starts to look like there will be any issues, we give you an early heads-up.”

“And then what?”

“Well, most of our travelers are doing trips that come nowhere near a full month. In the rare occasions where someone does, you simply go back to the port where you arrived and spend an hour or so receiving a refreshed body. Just reset the clock as it were.”

“Which no doubt incurs an upcharge,” Stewart replies.

“Yes indeed it does,” Bethel says. “As it happens, there are numerous options associated with our service that affect the final price you pay. However, the standard fee—the one you’ve been quoted—covers the original Proxy with thirty-day guarantee, all accommodations here in Miami while you’re away, digital transmission and storage of your brain scan and DNA sample, and full scan and transmission of your passport, laptop, and paperwork. When you arrive in Sydney, you will be offered a choice of clothing, and provided with identical copies of all your paperwork and a fully mirrored laptop. Miss Temple, who you met in the lobby, has by now already sent your laptop scan and paperwork to Sydney where they are doubtless putting all of that together for you as we speak.”

“What happens on the immigration and legal stuff? I’m still an American in Australia, even if I’m only a copy.”

“Yes, while technology marches on here at MindState, sadly government regulations do not. We will scan your passport into U.S. Immigration here before you leave, and there will be a totally legal copy of it waiting for you with everything else in Sydney. Their immigration official will then scan it before you leave the MindState center there.”

“So what are the downsides of this approach to traveling? No free lunches, right?”

“Well, the temporary nature of the Proxies is the biggest thing at this point, though our scientists are working diligently on extending that. The only other one of any significance is that nothing physical can be transported in either direction, of course, so if you buy any souvenirs, you’ll need to have them shipped back, which we can handle for you when you report back to our facility in Sydney. Any modifications to your laptop files or additional paperwork resulting from your trip will also be rescanned and sent back here so that they’re waiting for you when you return.”

“I’ve gotta tell you, Mister Bethel, it all sounds pretty crazy frankly.”

“Yeah, we get that reaction a lot from first timers. But you’ll be surprised—delighted we hope—at how uneventful it all feels. I mentioned a moment ago that there are various ways of bringing your cost down if that’s a concern. I talked before about the brain scan. Your current price includes the full scan, absolutely everything that’s in your head at the moment of departure. It won’t surprise you to learn that that is a terrific amount of information. While it varies from person to person, the average is about one hundred fifty terabytes. Takes about ten minutes to transmit all of that to the destination. However, you can cut a bit off your transmission and storage cost by simply deciding to cut back on how much we transmit and store.”

“Why on earth would I not want … everything?” Devon asks.

“A lot of people in your situation—business travelers—find they have no meaningful need for all of their childhood memories and so forth for a business meeting. You can simply specify that the scan only encompass from, say, age twenty onward. Odds are pretty good your business negotiations won’t require that you remember your interactions with your third grade teacher or the name of your dog growing up. Oddly enough—and this was frankly an unexpected side effect—in addition to cost saving, a few folks have come back telling us that not having all that old stuff in their heads made their thinking on the road faster and clearer.”

Bethel turns back to face the screen.

“So, other interesting benefits of our approach to travel. Unlike flying, there is no physical risk with MindState. If your plane crashes with conventional travel, well, that’s it, isn’t it? With us, if anything happens to damage your Proxy while you’re traveling, it’s no big deal. Your insurance policy covers any damage, your real-time data link ensures that your brain here in Miami is up to date, and you wake up fit as a fiddle. Also, because the real you is sitting back here in Miami, there’s no risk of kidnapping for our clients who travel to risky places. Every Proxy is clearly marked with a unique encoding emblem on the left forearm, so any potential kidnapper knows right away there’s simply no point. Who’s going to pay ransom for a body that’s going to be gone in thirty days, right?”

“But how would you know here that something like that had happened to me there? I’m assuming that you aren’t monitoring everything I’m doing there. Privacy, you know.”

“Oh, absolutely, Mister Stewart. Privacy is key to everything we do. All of your experiential data is encrypted before transmission and then streamed directly into your brain here, so that we have no access to it at all. The only thing we do know at all times is your Proxy’s whereabouts, just as a safety measure. There’s a tiny locator chip embedded in your Proxy that provides a continuous set of geographical coordinates. But here’s the cool part. Because we value not only your privacy but also your personal control throughout the trip, each Proxy contains several internal switch functions that we’ll show you before you leave. They involve applying pressure to various fingertips in certain sequences to alert us to something w should know about or take action on from our end.”

Bethel advances the display page. It contains a long bullet list of items.

“You don’t have to memorize all of these. We’ll give you a wallet card with the rest of your things in Sydney. The most important one, though, is the first. That’s the safety alert. You would use it, for example, in the kidnapping situation we talked about. Three quick squeezes to the left pinkie tip, followed by three more to the opposite pinkie. That tells us to break the data link and do a full scram—a wipe down—of all brain data in your Proxy.”

“Oh and while we’re on this page, here’s another nifty function that some people find useful. You can temporarily break the data link from your end by holding pressure on your right thumb tip for five seconds. This is for people who want to do something while traveling that they’d just as soon not have a memory of when they get home. It breaks the stream of data being sent to your brain here in Miami until you restart it with the same thumb pressure. I don’t think I need to go into the sorts of situations where you might not want a permanent memory or you’d like to create a measure of plausible deniability. Oh, and one more thing. As I said earlier, your safety and privacy are our primary concerns, so if you temporarily break the data link, this in no way inhibits our ability to track your location and take other emergency actions if necessary.”

Bethel scrolls backward to the benefits page again.

“So why do I need to be asleep here while my Proxy is doing business in Sydney?”

“Two reasons. First, the datalink requires that you’re hardwired into our system on this end. While you’re asleep in the chair, you’ll have several tiny electrodes attached to your scalp. These facilitate the data transfer. The process only works wirelessly at the far end, meaning you can go anywhere you like in Sydney, as long as you don’t find someplace so remote that you’re out of transmission range.”

“The other reason is far more important. It’s simple psychology really,” Bethel says. “It’s important—critical actually—that your brain be receiving only one set of inputs at a time. If you were awake and running around Miami while your Proxy was doing the same in Sydney, your brain would undergo what we call a data crash, or, if you want to get technical, a synchronicity conflict. You’d be trying to simultaneously process, store, and reconcile two totally conflicting sets of experiences. That’s the sort of thing that very quickly leads to schizophrenia. Therefore, only one set of experiences at a time.”

Devon rises from his chair and steps to the window of the conference room. He looks out for a long moment, then turns back to face Bethel.

“Have you guys run into any legal issues with this service? I mean, it’s still pretty new and I’m guessing some of the possible difficulties haven’t been tested in court yet. Does my proxy’s signature count as a legally binding signature on a contract? If my Proxy committed a crime in Sydney, what exactly does that mean for me—the real me?”

“The answer to the signature question is absolutely. To date no one has contested the legality of a Proxy’s signature on any document. The answer to your other question is ‘it’s complicated.’ Remember, when you’re done transacting your business over there, you’re instantly back here. In the event you managed to actually get yourself incarcerated for something, then you have to start thinking about the thirty-day longevity of the Proxy. While it’s never been tested yet—thank goodness—our advice to anyone who manages to get themselves arrested for something—legitimately or not—is to treat it like the kidnapping situation we discussed. Just hit the panic button—sorry, invoke the scram sequence—the pinkie one—and we’ll shut you down from here. After that, we let the two state departments work it out. Like I said, best that we haven’t run into that situation yet. So no DUI’s, right?!”

5 Days Later

“Mister Stewart, excellent to see you again!” Bethel says as he approaches, extending an enthusiastic hand in Devon’s direction.

“You as well,” Devon replies, offering a smile that is as not-tentative as he can manage. He’s by now heard everything there is to hear about the technology that will, within the next hour, have him conducting business halfway around the world while sleeping in a chair here in Miami. He is, though, still having considerable difficulty wrapping his head around that idea even as Bethel waves a key card at a wall-mounted security reader and leads him through a heavy steel door. If the MindState lobby is modeled on a Ritz Carlton hotel lobby, the area behind the steel door is pure tech—a corridor of smoked glass and polished aluminum framing, straight and long enough to have a discernible vanishing point perhaps fifty yards distant. And the plush carpet in the lobby has given way to polished black granite. Devon has been advised to come today wearing something comfortable since his clothing here in Miami will have nothing at all to do with how he will look while in Sydney. Bethel stops in front of a door that looks exactly like all of the other doors, except that this one has the number thirty-seven printed on it in what might be Art Deco font. Another wave of Bethel’s key card and the pair make their way inside following which the door closes behind Devon with a whisper. Inside a technician sits at a desk wearing a uniform identical to Bethel’s. Before him are arrayed half a dozen computer screens.

“Mister Stewart, this is Andrew Ryker,” Bethel says. “He will be in charge of the technical side of your trip today.” Ryker extends a hand and Devon accepts it. His eyes quickly scan the room, and it suddenly occurs to Devon that he is reminded of a dentist’s office. The first room, where they now stand, is small and as clinical looking as the corridor outside. There are no decorations on the aluminum walls save for a large raised MindState logo. Through a wide opening at the far end of the room, is another similar sized room, this one equipped with a heavily reclined chair in its center, one that, again, is strikingly similar, at least in appearance, to the one at Devon’s dentist. But actually, that’s not quite right, is it? There is one big difference: the large silver hemispherical device mounted at the top of the chair, now tilted back on a hinge of some sort.

“Let me guess,” Devon says, mustering a wry smile. “My head goes under that.” He gestures toward the hemisphere with his chin.

“It does indeed,” Bethel offers. “But only after we attach a few electrodes to your scalp and get you comfortable in the chair. Not to worry though. You’ll soon be asleep and dreaming of koalas and Vegemite. Go ahead and have a seat, settle in, and Mister Ryker will get your sedative going.”

As Devon settles into the large chair and leans back, Bethel glances at a large clock on the wall. “It’s seven forty-five now on Tuesday and Sydney is fifteen hours ahead of us, meaning it’s ten forty-five on Wednesday morning there. We’ll be maybe another half hour prepping here, plus another half hour of scanning and data transmission time. You should wake up in Sydney just before noon local time. You’ll be at most another forty-five minutes at that end getting clothes and collecting your laptop and papers. Our car service should have you at your meeting by, traffic permitting, two o’clock or so.”

“Meeting’s not ‘til three, so that sounds like a schedule I can work with,” Devon replies. As he speaks, Ryker approaches on his left side and gently lifts Devon’s arm. A quick antiseptic swab, the momentary prick of a needle, and he is back at the control station.

“The sedative will begin to work in three minutes or so,” Bethel says. “Any last questions I can answer in the meantime?”

“Tell me, Mister Bethel,” Devon says, “have you undertaken one of these … trips yourself?”

“I have indeed, Mister Stewart. In fact, it is a requirement of the job. Mister Ryker and I have each gone twice. For me it was one day in Paris and another in Shanghai. Mister Ryker spent a few hours in Los Angeles and another in … where was it again?” He turn momentarily in Ryker’s direction.

“London … made a weekend of it,” Ryker offers before turning back to the screens.

“Yes, London, that’s it,” Bethel says. “Always wanted to go to London. Haven’t managed it yet.” He turns back to note that Devon’s eyelids have very nearly closed and his breathing has taken on a distinctly heavy tone. “Minute forty-five,” he says quietly to himself. “Quicker than most.” He steps to the control center and does a quick scan of the screens. “Let’s give him another couple of minutes before we establish the glucose feed and initiate the scan.”

Ryker rises from his seat and steps to a supply locker. He opens the door and rummages inside, extracting several small bits of equipment. He glances toward the chair and then turns back to focus on snapping together several of the cranial probes that will allow the connecting of Devon’s brain waves to the scanning system. After a couple of minutes he looks in Bethel’s direction.

“How do we look?” Ryker says.

Bethel looks intently at a couple of the screens, types something briefly on the keyboard, then glances one final time at the screen before acknowledging with a nod that Ryker can press ahead with the procedure.

“Let’s send Mister Stewart on his way, shall we?” he says.

Ryker collects the scalp probes and steps toward Devon, now well and truly asleep in the chair. He first secures Devon’s wrists and ankles to the chair to preclude him moving about in his sleep and falling out unexpectedly. He then lifts a small electric razor from the table adjacent the chair and skillfully shaves a dozen tiny bare spots, each about a quarter inch in diameter, in various locations on Devon’s scalp. He attaches an adhesive-tipped probe to each bare spot and the other end of each wire to a connection at the base of the silver hemispheric dome. He looks back toward Bethel at the control console.

“We reading okay?” he asks.

Bethel looks at the central control screen for a quick moment before flashing Ryker a thumbs-up.

Ryker carefully lowers the dome over Devon’s head, which it covers all the way to the level of the tip of his nose. He then lifts another antiseptic swab from the table, does a quick cleaning of a spot on Devon’s left forearm before inserting a large IV drip line. Securing it with surgical tape, he connects the other end of the line to a bag hanging from a metal arm above the table. This is the glucose and sodium chloride infusion that will sustain Devon throughout his three-day journey. One of Ryker’s several duties during Devon’s trip will be to replace the bag every twelve hours. He checks the wrist and ankle braces one final time, glances quickly at the tiny lights that flash periodically in a row across the front of the dome, then steps to where Bethel is typing on the keyboard.

Bethel rises from the chair. “Mister Ryker, I will leave it to you to run the scan and get everything transmitted to Sydney. I’m going to run to the cafeteria and grab a sandwich and I’ll be back to check on our friend here in fifteen or so. Can I bring you anything?”

Ryker raises a silent hand by way of negative response and settles into the control chair, where he immediately begins typing the commands that will initiate Devon’s brain scan. Bethel offers a quick affirming pat on Ryker’s shoulder and turns for the door.

Devon has opted for the unabbreviated brain scan, and so eighteen minutes later, with Bethel not yet returned from the cafeteria, Ryker has completed the scan and begun transmitting the file to the Sydney receiving center. The final file size—at one hundred seventy-three terabytes—is somewhat larger than the average quoted by Bethel in the earlier presentation, but it is by no means exceptional. Nor is a larger-than-average brain scan file an indication of anything exceptional about Devon himself. File size is less about intellect and more about the magnitude of experiential data accumulated by an individual over a lifetime. As a general matter, older travelers have larger files, as do those who have traveled a great deal or who have, through other means, amassed a larger-than-average amount of life experience.

With a press of the transmit icon on Ryker’s system user interface, Devon’s brain scan and DNA information are sent via high-speed datalink to Sydney, a process that requires all of ninety-seven seconds. With that action completed, responsibility for the remainder of Devon’s journey falls to the technicians in Australia. All that remains for Ryker—barring a problem of some sort—is monitoring the health and wellbeing of Devon’s body here in Miami and arranging for his recovery in three days’ time. He is typing log entries into the computer when, moments later, Bethel reenters the room carrying a white paper bag and cardboard cup holder bearing two large coffees.

“Figured it couldn’t hurt,” Bethel says, extracting one of the cups and setting it on the table adjacent the computer console. “We’ve got three more travelers to process before the night is over. He takes a seat and opens the bag, the smell of grilled hamburger filling the control room.

Wednesday morning, eleven eighteen local time in Sydney, and Devon Stewart slowly awakens to find himself sitting in a chair identical to the one in which he fell asleep back in Miami only moments earlier. Each of the one hundred fifty-four identical rooms in MindState’s thirty-seven worldwide stations can act as either transmitting or receiving locations. The only discernible differences between the Devon Stewart now awkwardly lifting himself from his seat in Sydney and the one sleeping soundly in Miami is that the one in Sydney weighs fifteen pounds less than his genuine counterpart and he is wearing nothing but a generic pair of underwear.

“Welcome to Sydney,” an overly ebullient technician says, offering a supporting arm as Devon rises from his seat. “Watch your step please. It takes a moment to acclimate, especially for first-time travelers.” With Devon now sitting on the side of the chair and his bare feet planted on the floor, the technician offers him a paper cup containing a clear liquid. “It’s just water, but with a few electrolytes mixed in. It’ll help you adjust quicker. The new Proxies always arrive a bit dehydrated.”

The technician’s use of the word ‘Proxy’ doesn’t register at first in Devon’s still-cloudy mind. But then, moments later, as his mind and body come into focus, he begins to process what has just taken place, where he is, and—more importantly—who he is.

I am a synthetic copy of myself, sitting nine thousand miles away from my real self. Everything that I see, say, think, and do for the next three days here in Sydney will be transmitted into the mind of . . . me, sitting asleep back in Florida. For fuck’s sake . . .

It had all been explained to him in detail days earlier, but the realization that it has really taken place is still a mind-blowing thing. Devon downs the rest of the water and stands for the first time. He glances down at the floor and notices a distinctly thinner waistline. For the first time since his arrival three minutes earlier, Devon smiles.

“Take your time collecting yourself,” the technician says. “There’s a restroom through that door. There are toothbrushes, combs, razors, whatever you need. Beyond the restroom is a room with a full range of clothing, all sized to fit you. You’re free to choose whatever as you like, then pack whatever clothing and toiletries you’ll need for your visit in the luggage provided. There’s no hurry; your car will be out front in about half an hour. With traffic at this time of day you should make your meeting with nearly an hour to spare.”

Good thing, thinks Devon. That’ll give me time to make a quick call home and let Carrie know I made it okay.

Except that Carrie, Devon’s wife of nearly seven years, is already on the phone with Devon, or a Devon, at any rate. And this is not a call to confirm his safe arrival in Sydney. Rather it is to let her know that something has gone terribly wrong and for some reason he has been sent to Stockholm, Sweden, where it is currently 3:18 in the morning and everyone—both Devon and the Stockholm receiving technician, the only person on staff at this unholy hour—is confused.

But not nearly as confused as wife Carrie, who, immediately after hanging up from speaking with Devon in Stockholm, receives a pretty much identical call from Devon again, only this time from Tokyo, again wondering why he is here instead of in Sydney.

As part of the white-glove service model of MindState, travelers are provided with a service hotline phone number that is staffed twenty-four-seven. The agents working the service desk become concerned when they receive the call from Devon in Stockholm expressing frustration and confusion at his unexpected situation. Their concern rises a notch to confusion when the allegedly same traveler calls from Frankfurt moments later. By the time the fourth such call arrives at the twelve-minute mark—from Sao Paolo—they know that something seriously horrific has taken place and they have patched Chris Bethel in Miami onto the line. Following five frantic minutes of conversation, Bethel drops the line and turns to face Ryker, who is busily manipulating menus and commands on his computer screen.

It is a state of affairs unprecedented in MindState history, an admittedly brief period of just six years. The worst malfunction to have taken place to this point is the failed transmission of brain scan or DNA data to a receiving station, in which case the data are simply resent, typically without further incident. The engineers at MindState will be several days diagnosing exactly how it came to pass that Devon Stewart’s DNA and brain scan information were simultaneously transmitted to seven different receiving stations around the world. In the end it will be determined that a lightning strike during the height of the thunderstorm in Miami at the time of transmission brought on a brief but severe power surge that caused a reboot of the computer’s operating system, a reboot designed to be indiscernibly quick, which would normally be a good thing, except that in this case it was so quick as to have utterly escaped notice by Ryker, with immense consequences.

Compounding the unexpected and unprecedented situation, when the insanely complex computer code was created that make the MindState functions work, it had occurred to no one that such a duplicate transmission was remotely possible. As a consequence of that failure of imagination, it also occurred to none of the developers to build in logic that would preclude such a simultaneous transmission and subsequent fabrication of identical Proxies at multiple receiving locations. And finally, because the various actions required to create a traveler Proxy are so vastly complex, the system was designed to be fully automatic, with technicians becoming involved only at the point of assisting in the awakening and processing of the Proxy. At the moment of receipt and validation of the DNA and brain scan information, the suitable Proxy frame/body is retrieved from an underground storage area. It is then surfaced to match the original traveler using the supplied DNA information. The brain scan information is downloaded and validated for accuracy. Finally, the completed proxy is placed, via a series of beautifully choreographed robotic systems, into the seat whence it is then assisted in awakening by the receiving technician, dressed, and sent on its way. All of which is why the six technicians in Stockholm, Tokyo, Frankfurt, London, Sao Paolo, and Toronto each thought relatively little of the unexpected arrival of a traveler from Miami, unexpected inasmuch as last-minute trips took place with some frequency and the technicians had learned to not be too terribly surprised by the arrival of previously unannounced Proxies.

In summary, the only correct thing to have happened in the minutes following Devon’s transmission from Miami is that he was, in fact, successfully transmitted to Sydney per his original plans. Indeed, the Devon in Sydney has no reason to suspect anything is amiss, until, that is, he calls his business contact at the downtown office of the associate he is scheduled to meet in an hour’s time to let him know that he has arrived safely and on schedule in Sydney and that he will be at the scheduled meeting in about forty-five minutes.

“I’m sorry, but I’m a bit confused” the associate says. “We’ve already gone ahead and postponed the meeting.”

“Why on earth would you have done that,” Devon replies in confusion.

“Because, Mister Stewart, you yourself just rang us from Stockholm to say that there was a problem with your travel arrangements and you wouldn’t be able to make it today.”

After a moment of profuse apology and talk of rescheduling, Devon’s next call is to the MindState service line. He is quickly put through to Bethel in Miami. He does his best to maintain composure, no mean feat under the circumstances.

“Kindly explain, Mister Bethel, why—how—I would make a call from Stockholm to cancel my Sydney meeting when (a) I have never in my life been to Stockholm, and (b) I am here in Sydney precisely as planned.”

“Mister Stewart, as you’re doubtless aware by now, something quite strange has taken place and we are working diligently to get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, I’m afraid I need to ask you to remain there at the Sydney station until we’ve sorted it out. I’ll be back to you with all speed.” The line drops and Devon stands, phone in hand, dressed in the best fitting designer business suit he has ever worn in his life. The receiving technician sits at the control console, doing his level best to avoid eye contact.

“I’m seeing seven locations,” Ryker says, pointing to a list on the screen before him, “seven including Sydney. How in the name of Christ is that even possible?”

“Mister Ryker, at this moment I am unable to answer that question. But I can tell you this much. Mister Stewart here,” he gestures toward the adjoining room where Devon remains asleep, “will not survive the experience if he spends any amount of time at all receiving seven simultaneous data feeds from seven Proxies.” Bethel momentarily closes his eyes and rubs them hard with his palms.

“Cut the links,” he says. “We need to cut them all now.”

“But if we cut the links,” Ryker replies, “then we lose—“

“I KNOW what the fuck we LOSE,” Bethel shouts back. Ryker reaches for the keyboard.

“Wait,” Bethel says, his voice relatively normal again. “Cut them all except for Sydney. That one’s okay, right?”

Ryker glances at the screen. “Yes, Sydney appears to be fine, except that our Proxy there is very confused at the moment.

“Okay,” Bethel says, “Cut everything except Sydney. We’ll sort out tracking and everything else later. Let’s start by not killing our client, eh? Or turning him into a schizophrenic.”

“It’s a very unique name, the name of my favorite character from my favorite book around the time you were born.”

“Unique, yeah, I’ll give you that—bonus points for uniqueness. But a fantasy novel? Hobbits? Dwarves? Elves? So, were you and dad, like, hippies or something? What else was in the running that lost out to Arwen? Moonpie? Swampgrass?” Arry lowered her head for a moment and rubbed hard at the bridge of her nose. Maybe it was the late hour, or the alcohol. All she knew was that it had taken her twenty-two years to have this conversation, and so far it wasn’t looking like it would turn out to have been worth the wait. In truth she didn’t mind the name. She was simply curious to understand how a parent—or a pair of them—chooses to send a kid out into the world with such an obscure, basically made-up name. Only her questioning was coming out like irritation instead of curiosity. Which hadn’t been the idea, at least not consciously.

“No, not hippies, darling,” her mother said—a mother, now long widowed and making the best of a single life in a big city. A mother who did her level best to appear staunchly independent and not needy, but who did, in fact, deeply need her daughter’s love, or attention, or something. “It was the nineties and it was Oregon and there was this thing … this thing where you didn’t make Bobs or Sues or Marys because that was ordinary and people hadn’t come there to be ordinary. It’s hard to explain. We never meant to annoy you or put you in a difficult situation. We just wanted you to be … unique.”

Arry rose and walked to the kitchen counter. She chose from among the dozen half-filled bottles there and poured an inch or so into her glass. It was the color of honey and it left a satisfying thin coating on the inside of the glass when she swirled it briefly. She sat again, took a sip, let the heat of the liquid calm her, waited for the silence to abate.

“Did you being a Mary have anything to do with it?” Before the sentence was even completed, Arry wondered if it had come out as possibly hurtful or insulting.

“You mean was I compensating or something like that? Goodness no. My friends back then were all a bunch of Susans and Elizabeths too. I think the most unusual friend name I can remember was maybe Heather. But it was more of a generational thing. There were a lot of transplanted Midwesterners. Heck, at least I was just Mary. One of the women at our school was Peggy Sue, and you had to say the whole thing or she’d go mental.”

“So,” Arry said, “was it some sort of contest? Who could come up with the most off-the-wall baby name?”

“Nothing competitive, though, looking back on it, I’ll say there was … an undercurrent, a tacit acknowledgment, or maybe an approval sort of thing that went on for a long while. But it ran in phases, you know, just like today. Think about it. If you had a daughter now, you’d stay just as far away from Mary and Sue as we did. Only now it’d be Chelsea or Austin or Ashley. There’s always going to be some external influence, some sense of fashion when it comes to names.”

“Was it about who could ‘out-unique’ everyone else?”

“It’s a funny way of putting it, but I’d be lying if I denied there was a bit of that going on. Just in your daycare there was, let’s see, a Fraloe, a Constance, a Yarsty, and, oh, what was that really odd one … oh, Pringle.”

“Pringle? For real?” Arry said, stopping for a second the motion of the glass to her lips. “Pringle …”

“Believe it or not,” her mother replied smiling. “You could’ve been named after a junk food snack instead of a character from a novel. At least it was more interesting than naming you after one of your aunts or grandmothers.”

“I think I’d’ve preferred Dorito,” Arry said, and they both laughed loudly, a not terribly common occurrence these days, but, Arry thought, not an unpleasant sensation.

Arry did not talk with her mother much these days. It seemed, in fact, like no one much talked with anyone any more. Communication was something you did on your smartphone, but certainly not by any means as banal as actually speaking with the other person. You texted them. They texted you back, or not. Or maybe you wrote something clever on their social media page, or you ‘liked’ or otherwise acknowledged something that they posted. And, of course, you posted hopefully clever or entertaining things on your social media page, then sat waiting for the acknowledgement of others, without which life somehow seemed a bit less worth living. The world had become a place where people had friends they had never met, where communication was a unidirectional thing, and the synthetic sound of an arriving text was welcome, but the ring of an arriving call was the sound of antiquity, a thing to avoided, possibly even feared. Why did they even bother making phones that allowed talking?, one of Brim’s friends had asked a couple of weeks ago over lunch. And what was the deal with voicemail? He had been deadly serious.

All but the very closest of Arry’s friends thought Arry was her full name, and she had never made any effort to disabuse them of this belief. Arwen sounded like a made-up name, which, of course, is exactly what it was, made up by J.R.R. Tolkien and lifted straight from the pages of The Lord of the Rings by her mother, a lifelong lover of fantasy literature. Arry’s mother had explained the origin of her name once the girl had become a teenager, old enough to read the books and appreciate the character’s strength and nobility. And so she’d read the books, still had the tattered paperbacks in her bedroom someplace. But it hadn’t made her name feel any less strange, less foreign. She spent her adolescence being forced to spell it every time she told someone her name for the first time. And she had, at an early age, developed an offhand dismissal of her mother’s weirdness whenever she was questioned about it.

Arry had ceased using her full name in all official capacities by the time she’d begun applying for college. She was Arry on her driver’s license, her resume, her bank account. It would say Arry on her diploma next year. She had gone out with Rick (what a terribly banal name) for over a month before confessing to him the strange truth. And he had laughed when she told him, thus validating her judgment in the matter. He had also pointed out—the first person to do so in her entire life, amazingly enough—that Arry was kind of an accidentally cool name in the sense that it sounded almost like aria, a melody. Later, her mother had found the coincidence interesting, but swore that the thought had played no part in the original choice of name, probably because it had never even occurred to her at the time that Arry would become the nickname for Arwen.

Three days later, as Arry wandered the narrow corridors of the Strand Bookstore in lower Manhattan, turning sideways occasionally to allow other browsers to squeeze by, the name thing popped into her head once more. Perhaps it was brought on by the flurry of author names on the shelves around her, or perhaps by the recollection of Rick’s reaction on learning the truth of her own name a few days earlier. She had been there nearly two hours, partly searching for copies of books on the reading list for the coming spring semester—her last as an undergraduate—and partly because she simply loved the store. She loved the immensity of the place (What had the ad said? Something about eighteen miles of books? Was that even possible?). She loved the way the stairs creaked when you walked upstairs to the higher floors. She loved the smell of actual physical books—paper, ink, and glue. Best of all was the fourth floor, with its seemingly random assortment of old first editions, and its glass cases where they kept the really good stuff, signed first printings she’d never be able to afford. Every time she visited, there were new treasures to drool over—on this day, a signed first printing of Orwell’s “1984,” for fourteen thousand dollars. That was almost car-buying money, except, of course, who in Manhattan gave the slightest damn about cars? She bent forward, staring intently through the glass at the volume, opened to the autograph page, its edges ever so slightly foxed. Yes, she would go to law school, make plenty of money, and then one day, one day.

“Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” came a voice from over her left shoulder.

Startled, Arry turned to see a thin ancient man with a wild white spray of hair and a gray suit at least three sizes too big. He looked like a stereotype—of something—and she forced herself not to laugh.

“It does,” she said. “It truly does.”

“I like when people appreciate books, really appreciate them,” he replied. “But I love it when they recognize and go into a trance over a true classic.”

“A trance?” Arry said, “I think that might be over—”

“You were bent over looking at the Orwell for two full minutes without moving.”

She considered this assertion for a moment. In order for the man’s statement to be true, it also meant he had to have spent two full minutes looking at her unnoticed. She considered this as well.

“Okay,” she said, at last managing a smile. “I’ll concede the point. Maybe a mild trance. But I’m back now, and, anyway, it’ll be a cold day in hell when I can afford to own anything like that.”

“Oh don’t sell yourself short, young lady. One day, before you know it, you’ll be through with law school and a partner in some big fancy firm downtown. Then you’ll be back here with a big fistful of cash ready to pounce on whatever is in that case.”

Arry’s eyes grew a couple of sizes bigger. “How did you—”

“Oh, I know a lot of things,” he said. “I have what folks call a gift, though sometimes I wonder. I look and I see things. That’s all—just look and see.”

“You mean like Sherlock Holmes,” Arry said. “You look at my shoes and you can tell me the route I took to get to the store today?”

“Oh no, dear, nothing so mundane as Holmes, though he’s clever enough, I’ll grant you. No, I look inside, though I can’t exactly say how.”

Arry was warming up to the old man, a distinctly un-New York way to regard a stranger, but she felt he was okay, harmless, maybe even fun.

She stood and turned to face him squarely. She was a full head taller and at least twenty pounds heavier than the man, and it occurred to her that he reminded her of an old elf, a character from a Harry Potter movie perhaps. She decided, then and there, to regard him as cute—not romantic cute, but puppy dog cute—and quite possibly charming.

“Okay then.” She placed her hands akimbo and said, “What do you see?”

“Hmm,” he replied, feigning great concentration. “I see a college senior—smart, maybe NYU or Columbia—who’s majoring in a liberal arts program. I see history or maybe political science, then law school. I see a young woman who’s a little bit scared of the real world, somebody who’s never been out of New York, and who wonders if she’s truly the sophisticated city girl that she fancies herself.”

“That’s not bad,” Arry said. “Consider me impressed.”

“Oh, he continued, “and I see someone who’s not too terribly pleased with her name.”

“Okay, now you’re freaking me out a little,” Arry said, relinquishing her pose.

“Oh, I get that quite a lot,” he said. “You take it better than most.”

“Hold on,” she said. “I know what’s going on here. You’re some long lost uncle I’ve never met, and you recognized me, and my mother has told you my life’s story.”

“No, no, my dear, nothing like that, though I’m sure I’d be proud to have such a niece. No, like I said, I’m just an old man with an odd and remarkably impractical talent.”

“So,” Arry said, “do you work here—in the store?”

“Heavens no.” He paused, reconsidering his response. “Well, maybe in a manner of speaking. They tolerate my hanging around, so long as I’m not a bother. Turns out I have another talent that’s useful to them from time to time.”

“Even more useful than psychoanalyzing young coeds?” Arry said.

“Actually yes. You see, I have an excellent memory for books. Every book, every author. All right here.” He tapped his right temple with an index finger.

“What do you mean, ‘every book’?” Arry asked.

“I’ve spent a large part of the last forty years wandering this store, looking at everything. I’m a walking talking card catalog.” He paused again. “You’re not old enough to know what that was … but I’m one.”

“So, a customer walks in and says ‘Where are the F. Scott Fitzgerald novels?’, you can tell them.”

“Oh, you don’t understand, dear,” the man said. “Anybody working in the store can answer that question. But if you want to know the exact number of Fitzgerald volumes in the store and where every last one of them is located—their titles, their prices, their conditions…” He threw open his hands, as if to say ‘I’m your man.’

“Seriously?” Arry said.

“Try me,” he replied.

“How many copies of The Old Man and the Sea are in the store?”

“Oh and I thought you’d challenge me,” he said. “one hundred six at the moment. Eighty-nine paperbacks on the first floor, fourteen hardbacks of various editions on the second floor, two book club edition firsts here on four, and one really good one in the back that they only show to special people. It’s a true first printing, with a near perfect jacket. Easily worth twenty grand.”

Brim stared at the man, eyes wide. “How do I know you’re not just making that up?”

The man gestured toward the back of the store with his head and Arry followed, not quite believing that she was actually doing it. The man walked past the ends of four tall bookshelves near the rear of the store and darted down the fifth aisle, stopping about halfway down and raising a hand to the fifth shelf up from the bottom. There on the shelf stood two book club editions of Hemingway’s classic novella, distinguishable from the true first printing by the slightly different tint of blue on the rear jacket author photo, the Book Club language printed on the inside front flap, and the lack of a Scribner’s colophon on the copyright page.

Arry slowly replaced the book club edition on the shelf.

“Jesus,” she said, her voice very low.

“Yeah, I know,” the man replied.

Twenty minutes later, having put her new friend’s unusual skills to more practical use, she had—with his able assistance—successfully located all of the titles on her semester reading list. It was only later, on the Number One train heading north, that she realized she had spoken with the strange man for the better part of an hour without ever disclosing her name or managing to learn his.

Two weeks passed and, with the start of the new semester Arry had no cause to recall her conversation with the curious old man. Indeed she might never have had reason to think of him again, but for the announcement her literature professor made early on a Tuesday morning, apologizing sheepishly while letting the class know that he had inadvertently omitted two titles from the semester reading list. It was a short class day for Arry, and she decided to take the opportunity for another trip downtown to the Strand. It was one of those perfect New York City autumn days, the kind that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced that clarity and crispness in person, and so she got off the subway a few stops early and walked a couple dozen blocks down Broadway until the store’s big red sign came into view.

It didn’t take long to find one of the two titles she needed, but the second proved elusive, so much so that after twenty minutes of searching, both in the new and used sections of the store, she finally succumbed to asking for assistance from a clerk at the first-floor customer service desk. A further few minutes of searching together produced no copies, a rare occurrence indeed, given the many thousands of volumes stocked by the store.

“Tell you what,” the clerk said, back at the front counter. “We’ll track one down and give you a call once we have it. Meanwhile, tell your professor to stop requiring such obscure titles!”

“It’s okay,” Arry replied. “There’s no real hurry. We don’t need that one until later in the semester.” She paused and glanced around the main floor of the immense store. “It’s too bad that old fellow I met last time I was here isn’t around. He would’ve found it in a second.” The clerk responded with a quizzical look.

“Oh yeah,” Arry said, “it was like he had the entire store memorized. Helped me find about two dozen other books in like ten minutes. I imagine he does that sort of thing for lots of customers by the sound of it. Said he’s in here pretty much all the time.”

“Did this handy fellow happen to have a name?” the clerk asked.

“As a matter of fact, I never asked him for it,” Arry said. “But he was quite distinctive—tiny guy, very old, lots of crazy white hair, very chatty and friendly. Certainly knew everything about the store—and about books—that there is to know.”

“Wow,” the clerk replied. “It is a pity he’s not here today. Almost sounds like Ben himself, come back to help out the wayward book lover.” With this ambiguous reference, the clerk smiled and handed Arry a slip of paper with a name and phone number.

“Just give me a call in a few days and I’ll let you know if we’ve found it yet.” She gestured to the book in Arry’s hand. “Do you want to pay for that one now or have me hold onto it until we find your other title?”

“May as well grab this one now—get a head start on my reading.” Arry smiled and handed the clerk the book and her credit card. Placing the book into a bag, the clerk glanced at the card prior to swiping it at the register.

“This is you?” she said, gesturing with the card. “You’re Arwen Clarkson?”

“Far as I know,” Arry said. Despite all of her efforts to keep her full name off the various documents and records in her life, this one had snuck through because her first credit card had been provided through her mother’s account, and her mother had filled out the application form. By the time the card had arrived in the mail, it was too late and Arry had chosen to not make a big deal out of it.

“Okay, so that’s pretty interesting,” the clerk said. “Has anyone said anything to you in the past few weeks about picking up a package here?”

“No, at least not that I recall,” Arry replied. “I mean I haven’t tried to order any other books or anything like that—before today anyway.”

“Well, this is gonna sound a little weird—maybe—but there’s a package here with your name on it. Been here for about two weeks. No one knew quite what to do with it. There was no phone number or email or anything, just your name. The manager even spent some time searching online, but there are a lot of Clarksons in New York. He didn’t see any listings with your first name.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Arry said. “My listed address is still with my parents, under my mom’s name actually.”

“Makes sense,” the clerk replied. “Hold on, let me go check the office. I think the manager still has it in there.” She vanished through a door behind the counter and Arry could hear several seconds of subdued dialog coming from the room. Moments later the clerk returned, accompanied by a tall middle-aged man bearing a small package wrapped in brown paper, the kind they used to make grocery bags out of. The package was wrapped with a decidedly old-looking twine, tied in a simple bow. The name Arwen Clarkson was written in clear cursive on the front. The manager looked at Arry and then down at the package.

“You’re Arwen Clarkson,” he said, more statement than question. Arry nodded. “Well,” he continued, “unless you know another Arwen Clarkson in New York, I’m guessing this is yours.” He handed the package toward Arry, who accepted it tentatively. “Who do you know who writes with a fountain pen?” the manager asked smiling. Arry shrugged.

“Should I … should I open it?” she said.

“Entirely up to you, Miss Clarkson,” the manager said. “Naturally we’re all curious. It’s been lying around here for days, apparently just waiting for you to happen to wander in.”

“But who …” Arry began, “who just leaves a package in a random store in a city of ten million people on the off chance the recipient will show up? It’s not as though I got a call about it or anything.”

“Well, serendipitous occurrences aren’t exactly unprecedented in this store,” replied the manager, “though this one certainly ranks right up there.”

Arry set the package on the counter, looking intently once more at the small neatly written name—her full name—on the brown paper wrapping. There were no other markings of any kind. Tentatively she untied the bow and laid the twine to one side. The store clerk and manager looked on in silence. She slowly, methodically, peeled away the heavy brown paper to reveal a stack of three seemingly identical hardback volumes. As the last layer of paper fell away there came an audible gasp from both the store manager and the clerk. Arry looked up at them in response before even taking a good look at what she had just unwrapped.

“Oh … my … God,” the manager expounded on his earlier exclamation. “Young lady, you have a VERY good friend or secret admirer.” He looked back down at the three volumes and then back at Arry. “May I?” he asked, with an almost longing look.

Arry nodded, not yet appreciating the full magnitude of what lay before her, though both store employees certainly appeared to. The manager lifted the top volume and opened the dun colored cover with near reverence, carefully turning the pages to reveal the book’s copyright page, which he examined for what seemed an awfully long minute. He repeated this process with the other two matching volumes, while his colleague watched and Arry stood silently wondering at what could merit such rapt attention. Whatever it was apparently now belonged to her.

“Miss Clarkson,” the manager said, slowly removing his glasses and pressing hard both eyes, “I’ve worked in rare books for nearly fifteen years, and I’ve never seen the likes of this … of these.” He slowly spun the stack of volumes so that they faced in Arry’s direction. “This is a first edition—more to the point, a first printing—of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Judging by the information on the copyright page and the condition of the books—which is frankly astonishing—it’s a wonderfully matched set. The maps are all fine, the prices are untouched. They appear to be unread.”

“So … it’s valuable?” Arry asked, feeling a bit silly saying it, given the reverential reaction of the manager and his colleague.

“Miss Clarkson, would you mind terribly if we continued this conversation in my office? I’d feel better if this wasn’t sitting out with so many people around.” He carefully lifted the three books and gestured Arry around the end of the counter and toward the office door. He set the books on his desk and returned to the door, which he closed. The clerk had remained behind at the counter and it was now just the two of them in the manager’s office.

Arry took a seat. She had, to this point, not even touched one of the books.

“Miss Clarkson,” the manager began, taking his own seat behind the desk, “do you have any idea who might’ve left these for you?”

“I know it sounds odd as can be,” Arry said, “but I honestly have no idea at all.”

“Well, whoever it is clearly thinks very highly of you. This is a nearly perfect set of first printings of Tolkien’s classic fantasy trilogy. We have nothing in the store at this moment—including in our safe—that is as valuable as this set of volumes. I would, of course, recommend getting a professional appraisal from a Tolkien expert, but in my opinion, in this condition these three books are worth something north of seventy-five thousand dollars.”

Arry sat silently for a long moment, unsure whether to be shocked, euphoric, or something else entirely.

“I still … I just can’t imagine who …” she said, at last leaning forward to lift the top volume and open the cover.

“There’s a sealed envelope inside that first volume,” the manager said. “Perhaps your benefactor left you some explanation as to why and how these have come into your possession. Are you a rare book collector, Miss Clarkson?”

“No, not at all,” she replied. She drew the small tan envelope from the first volume and considered it. Her name was inscribed on the front precisely as it appeared on the paper that had covered the books, still with fountain pen, still her full name—Arwen Clarkson. She glanced up at the manager, shrugged, and gently tore along the top of the envelope. She extracted a small folded note card, opened it, and read silently. As the manager looked on patiently, Arry’s eyes grew slightly wider. The note comprised just four brief sentences, but Arry knew in that moment that the contents of the note were for her alone. She folded the notecard closed and slid it back into the envelope, which she placed in her purse.

“I have a feeling my mother may be able to shed some light on this little mystery,” Arry said. “I’ll show the books and the note to her and see what she thinks about the whole thing.”

“In that case, Miss Clarkson, I’ll let you be on your way, but only after congratulating you on a marvelous acquisition. Let me wrap these back up for you so they’ll be safe and sound. May I also encourage you to take a cab home. This is really not the sort of thing you want to be carrying around on the subway.” He stood and walked back out to the counter, returning seconds later with the original brown wrapping material and twine in one hand and a heavy Strand shopping bag in the other. “If you should decide to consider selling the set at some point, then of course we’d be thrilled to discuss the possibilities with you at your convenience.” Wrapping the books carefully, he tied the twine as it had originally arrived and placed the package in Arry’s hands. “Miss Clarkson, I confess I am genuinely envious,” he said, holding the door for her as she departed his office. “And I’d love to hear the details at some point of how this all came to be.” He shook Arry’s hand and she stepped through the Strand front door and onto the sidewalk. Glancing down at the bag by her side, she considered the store manager’s words and raised her hand for a passing taxi.

Miss Clarkson,

I thoroughly enjoyed our brief introduction a few days ago, and I thought who better to share this wonderful story with than a young lady who not only appreciates the classics but who happens, as well, to be named for one of the strongest leading female protagonists in all of literature. As for how I know your name when you had no occasion to offer it to me, let’s just say that I’m inordinately perceptive, or perhaps only lucky. In any event, I sincerely hope you will enjoy this small token of my appreciation. Perhaps we will meet once again when you’re back in the store.

Fondest Regards,

Ben Bass

Arry read it through three more times on the cab ride uptown, but it made no more sense on the final read than it had on the first. Back home, she wasn’t at all sure how to explain this extraordinary occurrence to her mother, and so, for now at least, she chose not to attempt it, save for a simple question.

“Mom, does the name Ben Bass mean anything to you?”

“No … no, can’t say that it does. Why?”

“Oh, uh, no reason,” Arry said. “Just somebody who came up in class today. Thought you might have run into him in your reading or whatever.”

She set the book bag in her bedroom and spent the next hour in the bathtub pondering the events of the day. Later that evening, with her mother gone out for an errand and a half-eaten container of shrimp lo mein by her side, Arry tried her best to study for the coming day’s class. But a half hour into it, she succumbed to futility, set her textbook aside, and opened her laptop. She typed the simple string ‘Ben Bass and Strand’ into the search bar. Instantly there lay before her an endless list of references, including a Wikipedia page, the existence of which suggested that he was a person of some consequence.

Opening the page, she was surprisingly unsurprised to see that the grainy photo in the right column was indeed the white-haired old man she had spoken with at the bookstore. She read through the brief article. Ben Bass had founded the Strand Used Bookstore in 1927, starting with just three hundred dollars. Upon his retirement, he had handed the store over to his son Fred, who in turn had passed it on to his daughter Nancy, who still ran the store. And then had come the final sentence. ‘Ben Bass passed away in 1978 at age 77.’ Which was forty years ago. Which meant … Arry read a couple of other stories about Bass and the Strand. They all stated the same age and date of the founder’s passing. Forty years.

Which meant that the only possible explanation for all that had occurred—the initial interaction, the searching together for books, the arrival of the package—was an impossible explanation.

“It’s a pity he’s not here today. Almost sounds like Ben himself, come back to help out the wayward book lover.” The counter clerk’s words came again to Arry and she turned to gaze once more at the Strand bag lying on her bed. The innocuous phrase ‘come back to help’ was, with the benefit of hindsight, an ambiguous one, absent certain critical information, such as that the store’s founder had been dead for four decades.

Arry did not sleep that night, save for brief fitful intervals filled not so much with dreams as curious images of the old man’s face or his wrinkled hand reaching up onto a shelf to grasp a book. In her dreams Ben was always smiling, but he never said anything. Her first class the following day—the one she had so unsuccessfully studied for this evening—began at 9:30, but Arry would not be in attendance. By then she was already on the Number One train, headed downtown, back to the Strand. There were answers to be found and there was no other place she was going to find them.

Arry didn’t have anything like a plan for what to do once she arrived at the store, but she felt as though whatever answers awaited must surely be on the fourth floor, back where it had all started. Rather than take the elevator, she made her way slowly, painfully slowly up the stairs, each step creaking as though welcoming her return. It was still early and a weekday, so there was no one in sight once she reached the fourth floor. She glanced left, then right, not at all sure what she was looking for. With no better plan, she stepped back to the glass display case where she had first seen the George Orwell novel weeks earlier. It was gone now, bought, she supposed, by some well-healed collector. In its place lay a copy of the original paperback edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, opened to the copyright page. It was the Shakespeare & Company edition, a third printing dated January 1923. The page was very thin, foxed to a delicate brown around the edges. It seemed so fragile that she imagined the pages would crumble simply by looking at them. The price tag lying next to the book read eighteen thousand dollars.

“They will, you know,” came a familiar voice from over her left shoulder.

Arry resisted the urge to turn around. She wasn’t ready. “They will what?” she replied quietly.

“Crumble … the pages, that is. It’s a terribly ephemeral thing. Only reason that one is so cheap is because it’s a third printing. If it was a first, there’d be another zero at the end.”

Arry slowly turned to find the same tiny man, the same white shock of hair, the exact same suit as before, standing there, looking not at her but at the precious volume in the glass case.

“Ben,” she said, mustering every fragment of composure she possessed, “it is Ben, right?” The old man only nodded, ever so slightly, his gaze still focused on the Joyce volume.

“We need to talk,” she said. “We really need to talk.”

“That will be fine,” Ben replied, finally turning his gaze toward Arry, his uplifted face practically aglow with a smile. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

― Gustave Flaubert

Armstrong Station – Thursday, March 14, 2097, 4:42 pm EST

“This is our last case, so make it count. Supply ship’s not due for another couple of days.” Takashi lowers the large cardboard box of toilet paper to the galley floor and rises with a grunt.

Allard looks up from whatever he’s tinkering with under the microwave console and chuckles. “If twenty-three of us can’t make ninety-six rolls of toilet paper last for two more days, there is something seriously wrong with this crew. That’s like two rolls a day per person. Just steer clear of the burritos.”

Northwest Oregon Oncology, Office 2104 – 12 Days Earlier

“Year … year and a half. Tough to say with cases like yours.”

The doctor sits, upright and as professional as he imagines he should be behind his desk. Three, four times a week he has some version of this conversation. In fourteen years it’s never gotten any easier to deliver the news. Sometimes it’s operable. Sometimes it’s treatable. Sometimes it’s neither. In Katzenbach’s case, it’s neither, news made all the more difficult by the fact that the man—a seasoned pilot of over twenty years—has shown no symptoms to this point, the growth discovered only by chance during a routine physical.

“And my flight status?” Katzenbach asks, sitting in the chair in which hundreds have sat hearing similar news. “I’m supposed to go again in two weeks.”

“I’m required to file your report with the flight surgeon, of course,” the doctor replies. He hesitates, maintaining eye contact with Katzenbach. Eye contact is important in these conversations. “But I see no reason to recommend grounding you absent any discernible symptoms. And besides,” he adds, leaning back, managing a smile, a rare thing in these circumstances. “As busy as things have been around here in recent days, there’s a decent chance we won’t get around to even file the thing until after you’ve left on your mission. Misplaced folders … computer glitches … you know…”

Katzenbach smiles back, wan, but a smile nonetheless.

USS Icarus – Thursday, March 14, 2097, 5:12 pm EST

“TLI burn in three, two, one … commence.”

Icarus is a somewhat long in the tooth but still very capable cargo supply vessel, one that has made the round trip between earth and the moon twenty-six times in the past decade. The vessel can be configured for up to thirty passengers, though just six are onboard today, Icarus’s copious and flexible cargo bay having been outfitted for nearly maximum capacity on this mission. It is the first cargo resupply mission to Armstrong Station in nearly three months, and the scientists and engineers currently deployed there have begun running low on everything from ketchup to, oddly enough, plutonium. How one runs low on plutonium is not entirely clear to Icarus pilot Geoffrey Katzenbach. Nevertheless, short they are, a situation the Icarus crew is poised to remedy with the thirty-five kilograms of highly radioactive material they have safely shielded and stored in the rearmost cargo compartment.

The Pentagon, Basement Level, Rm. BE817 – 3 Days Earlier

“Are we entirely clear about the mission parameters, Doctor Danziger?” The two-star Air Force general sits behind his desk, dressed in full formal blues, the better to impress upon the nuclear physicist the gravity of his situation.

“And if I say no?” Danziger replies. He has known that he would be a member of the Icarus 27 mission for nearly a year. He has known the true purpose of the mission—and his role in it—for just over one week.

“If you say no, Doctor, you will be scrubbed from the mission due to a last-minute health problem, and your back-up, Doctor Swenson, will take your place. If, on the other hand, you work with us in the manner we’ve discussed, you will return to earth in a couple of weeks, the nation will, of course, be thankful for the role you played rescuing the crew from a parlous situation, and a few weeks thereafter, once the news of the tragic accident has passed through the inevitable news cycle, your recent grant request will be generously funded and you will not want for research funds for the remainder of your career. Of course, if you choose not to go, well, you know how challenging it can be nowadays getting grants approved.”

Danziger sits silent, pensive. As the days have grown closer, he wonders whether he should have simply said no from the very outset. But now he knows all of the facts of the mission, the goal. He doesn’t have a shred of plausible deniability remaining. He imagines for a moment sitting in a chair describing this very conversation before a Senate subcommittee.

“The cargo manifest has been suitably updated?” he says. The Icarus’s cargo manifest reflects, along with the endless containers of food, consumables, and technical equipment that the lunar base goes through every quarter, seven additional generic-looking containers, each heavily shielded, each bearing a five-kilogram sphere of enriched plutonium. The supply mission controllers are ostensibly sending up the plutonium in order to enlarge the scope and scale of a number of research experiments currently taking place in a secure building at Armstrong Station. In actual fact, despite the notations on the manifest, the cargo hold of Icarus contains not seven but eighteen such containers, their combined contents totaling ninety kilograms of the lethal material. And, in fact, the nuclear research team at Armstrong Station already has more than enough plutonium on-site to support all foreseeable research needs for the coming two years or more.

“The manifest says what it needs to say,” the general replies.

“And the navigation computer?”

“Preloaded with the coordinates to Yang Liwei Station.”

“And the engine control malfunction?”

“Doctor, we have covered this all multiple times,” the general says. “You need do nothing aside from steering Commander Katzenbach in the proper direction when the time comes. The rest will take care of itself automatically.”

“And you’re certain?” Danziger says. “The activities at the Chinese station.”

“That is far above either of our pay grades, Doctor. A decision has been made that these … activities, as you say … are no longer in our national interest. You are doing your country a great service.”

Danziger does not feel like he is performing a great service. Still, he has come this far.

USS Icarus – 5:14 pm EST

Icarus, at one hundred sixty-five meters in length and a gross weight of just under 2500 metric tons, is maxed out this time around. The ship is just completing its fourth orbit of earth, circling the planet at a leisurely 27,000 kilometers per hour. To break free of her home planet’s gravity and begin the three day journey to Armstrong Station will require a four hundred forty-seven second burn of the big ship’s three main engines, a maneuver designed to accelerate the vessel to just over 42,000 kph, sending the crew on a gracefully arcing trajectory that will intercept the moon precisely three and a quarter days from the end of the trans-lunar injection burn.

With the larger than average mass of the Icarus’s cargo load, the passengers—pilot, copilot, and four scientists beginning their six-month tour of duty on the remote station—scarcely register the increased acceleration. They are, nonetheless, safely strapped into their seats, free to move weightlessly about the cabin only after the burn is complete and one final round of operational checks have been performed by Katzenbach and his copilot Almira Karimi. After that, the trip will be an uneventful three days of reading up on their research and admiring the view backward toward earth and forward toward the approaching moon, all while trying their level best not to succumb to the sickness that so often accompanies space travel. It is Katzenbach’s seventh trip piloting Icarus. For Karimi, it’s her third run. None of the four passengers have ever been in space before entering orbit some six hours previous. One—geologist Bradley Johansson—had his head in a motion sickness bag before the end of the first orbit, but he seems acclimated now. Mechanical engineer Janine Kelly made it through the four preliminary orbits, but is looking decidedly queasy at the moment. Nuclear engineer Bryan Danziger and epidemiologist Ashraf Kumar are doing okay so far. You just never know. Despite nearly a century and a half of progress in space travel, no one has yet quite solved the problem of zero-gravity sickness. Indeed the four specialists had been encouraged during their mission training to not feel badly about getting sick, as even certified astronauts frequently succumb during their first real flight into space.

“Counting down ten seconds to TLI cutout,” comes Karimi’s voice over the vessel’s intercom system. All the passengers are plugged in and free to share in the crew’s communications or not, as they prefer. However, during critical flight phases, like the current TLI burn, they have only passive listening capability. “Four … three … two … one … cutoff.”

Icarus’s three immense engines are located some seventy-five meters behind the heavily insulated crew cabin and there is no sound discernible to the passengers, even at the present full throttle. There is, though, an ever-so-slight vibration that resonates through the cabin, and, of course, also the slight backward push of acceleration as they are thrust toward their rendezvous with the moon. The four passengers have arrived here with no preconceptions of what engine cutout ought to feel like, aside from the cursory verbal description provided during flight training. Expectations aside, what they feel at the moment of scheduled cutout is utterly unchanged from what they have been feeling for the four hundred forty-seven seconds of the TLI burn, both the gentle push of acceleration and the faint vibration through the walls of the cabin. It is as though the engines are still running as before. Katzenbach and Karimi, however, don’t need the vibration of the ship or the feel of acceleration to realize that the engines have not cut off at the prescribed time.

The TLI cycle is a fully automated process controlled by the flight computer, and no action is supposed to be required of the crew to either initiate or terminate the burn. Their role during this critical maneuver is simply to observe and ensure that things happen as they have been programmed to happen, intervening only if necessary. And while they have a myriad of instruments and computer screens before them to inform them about every aspect of the ship’s operation, there is one situation they are utterly unaware of, one that, in any event, they could do nothing about even if they did know, one that will have a profound impact on the journey they are only now embarking upon. It is a rare but entirely plausible event that will be explored and written about at immense length in the investigations to will be conducted in the days to come. Just seventeen seconds prior to TLI cutoff, the official post-accident account will assert, a stray cosmic ray—with which space is densely populated, and against which incursions space vehicles have been shielded since the dawn of the space age—has, against all probability, made its way through the shielding adjacent Icarus’s main flight computer and into the microscopic integrated circuitry that governs the operation of the ship’s automated flight controls. This single photon has impinged upon a critical spot on one of the flight computer’s millions of logic gates, in this case the logic gate tasked with sending the signal to turn the ship’s engines on and off. Also, the official story will continue, it is this same logic gate that is responsible for sending the shutdown signal whether said shutdown is automated or manually commanded. But there is no reason why Katzenbach or Karimi would have had any knowledge of such an event, whether real or imagined, nor any understanding of how it might have come to pass. They are pilots trained in the fundamentals of operating a spacecraft, and while there’s a decent chance they know what a cosmic ray is, at least at a basic level, they lack utterly the avionics engineering or physics knowledge to appreciate, much less do anything about, this rarest of phenomena that all future accident records will swear has befallen them.

Six seconds after scheduled main engine shutdown, Karimi is the first to verbalize the problem. But no one—least of all Katzenbach—finds this in the least surprising. Karimi has spent a lifetime being first to notice things and first to say something about them, irrespective of whether or not it is her place to do so. First is the word that anyone who knows Karimi would conjure if asked to reduce their assessment of her to a single syllable. Firstborn in her family and first of nine siblings to attend college and graduate school. First to complete an MIT graduate engineering program in less than twelve months. First to obtain atmospheric and transatmospheric flight credentials in fewer than six months. And first Iranian female to copilot a supply flight to Armstrong Station on the moon. Perhaps not the most exotic space mission in history, but still, first is first.

“Failure of auto engine shutdown,” Karimi says, her voice the monotone of a professional. “Initiate manual override.” The cabin PA system remains on, so that the four passengers hear the statements.

“Confirm manual override,” Katzenbach echoes. He reaches above his head and flips a series of switches, then leans forward and makes a quick gesture on a touchscreen before him. “Manual override complete.” The light thrum of the engines through the cabin walls does not change. It is twenty-four seconds since scheduled cutoff.

“Manual override ineffective,” Karimi responds. “Engines remain at one hundred percent. Velocity forty-seven thousand, twelve percent above nominal.”

“Icarus, this is Dallas control,” comes a new voice over the intercom, “Please advise, we are registering TLI burn plus thirty-three seconds.

“Roger, Dallas,” Katzenbach responds. “We are addressing major system error. Automatic engine cutoff failure. Stand by.”

“Velocity fifty-five thousand, thirty-one percent above nominal,” Karimi says, and flips a switch that cuts off the cabin intercom. Her voice is still calm and in control, but there is no need for the passengers to hear what is transpiring. She glances quickly toward Katzenbach, who does not look back. The four passengers, none with any prior spaceflight experience, have, though, heard enough to glance at one another expressing, if not concern, at least uncertainty. The conversation does not sound routine.

“Nav system recalculating trajectory,” Karimi observes laconically as she glances at a large screen in the center console that separates her seat from Katzenbach’s. Although the engine control portion of Icarus’s flight computer has malfunctioned, the ship’s navigation system is fine, and it is doing what is was designed to do, i.e., guide the ship to a landing on the pad at Armstrong Station with a circular error probability of not more than twenty meters. The ship’s increased speed means it will arrive at Armstrong seven hours sooner than expected and, as a result, the moon will have traveled fewer miles in its orbit around earth than expected. Hence the complex recalculation of the ship’s trajectory, calculations that are continuing since Icarus has not yet stopped accelerating.

“Damn it,” says Katzenbach, the first thin crack in his cold veneer of experience. He has amassed more than nineteen hundred hours as command pilot on both orbital and translunar flights. “Dallas, all efforts at engine cutoff are ineffective. We are at full burn, now one hundred sixteen seconds past scheduled shutdown. Velocity fifty-nine thousand and still increasing.”

More dialog ensues, the voices of Katzenbach, Karimi, and the mission controller in Dallas growing increasingly intense as the seconds pass. Dallas attempts to transmit remote shutdown signals while the pilot and copilot try every step they know to stop the ship’s three immense fuel-hungry engines. For seven and a half minutes the crew, and their controllers on the ground, struggle to regain control of the vessel’s propulsion. Another minute passes, then another. Finally, after nearly twelve minutes of unabated thrust, the cabin walls suddenly, abruptly cease their vibrations, the thrust-level readouts on the pilot and copilot screens fall to zero, and the ship’s acceleration ceases. There is silence on the intercom for a few seconds.

“Icarus,” comes the voice from the ground controller, “we show you with engine cutoff. Please confirm.”

“Dallas, that is a roger,” Katzenbach responds. “We have zero main engine thrust, zero acceleration. Velocity stable … at eighty-five thousand.”

“Icarus, please confirm velocity eighty-five thousand. Say again, please confirm stable velocity.” The vehicle’s final velocity is more than double the nominal value that it should be following a normal translunar injection burn.

“Dallas, confirming eight-five thousand final TLI velocity,” Katzenbach replies after a moment’s hesitation. “And, Dallas, that is the good news,” he continues. “The bad news is that all system readings indicate Icarus has fully exhausted its onboard fuel supply.”

“Say again, Icarus,” comes the voice from Dallas.

“Dallas,” Katzenbach says, his voice bearing a low but discernible waver, “Icarus onboard fuel tanks are at zero capacity. The only reason the TLI burn stopped is because we exhausted the fuel supply.”

“Roger that,” comes the voice from the ground controller. “Zero fuel.” He says nothing further for the moment.

USS Icarus – 5:29 pm EST

Janine Kelly has spent nearly the entire fifteen minutes since the start of the TLI burn with her head buried in a technical journal. She is of the view that engrossing oneself in something requiring concentration reduces the likelihood of getting sick from weightlessness. This has turned out to be only partially true. On the one hand, she, unlike two other passengers onboard Icarus, has not vomited since entering orbit several hours earlier. On the other hand, her stomach has felt somewhat less than settled since that time. It is possible that her initial theory is a flawed one. But it is also possible that the experiment was imperfect in that only part of her attention was given over to the journal in her lap, the remaining portion having, for some time, been focused on being reunited with her husband who has been working at Armstrong Station for the past three months. At the moment, though, her eyes are back on the journal, and so she is mildly startled when Katzenbach directs a few brief comments to Karimi before unbuckling his seatbelts, rising, and turning to join the passengers. The ambient noise level in the cabin is low, with nothing but the faint hum of electronic equipment to interfere with his voice. Each of the four specialists on board is uniquely well trained in their area of expertise, but none has the training or understanding to appreciate the gravity of the situation in which they are now playing such an integral part. Katzenbach has come to bring them up to speed.

“We have an extremely rare but serious situation developing,” he begins. His tone is once again even and professional. Although this is his first bona fide emergency while on a space flight, he has experienced more than one in his days flying aircraft for the military. He knows how to maintain his cool.

Even though Katzenbach has had limited time working with his four passengers prior to the launch, he knows them all reasonably well and is on friendly terms with each. His utter lack of friendly demeanor in this moment is immediately apparent.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” he continues, “but there is a high likelihood that we have just suffered a catastrophic failure.” The fact that the ship is preceding along its planned route in what appears to be an uneventful manner leaves the four unclear as to what Katzenbach is talking about.

“Has something broken on the ship?” Kelly asks, the first of the four to respond to Katzenbach’s opening comments with anything other than a fixed stare. There was no reason for the passengers to be conversant prior to launch in the specifics of the flight profile, meaning there is no reason for any to be aware of how long the TLI burn should have taken.

“A failure of some sort—we don’t know exactly what yet—caused the translunar injection burn to last far longer than it should have, about two and a half times longer. There are, or may be at any rate, several problematic consequences of that fact.”

“But at least we are successfully out of orbit and en route to Armstrong,” Kelly responds.

“Oh, that we are,” Katzenbach says. For all of his adult life, and much to his wife’s continuing annoyance, his go-to approach to difficult situations has been humor. He is speaking now somewhat slower than he otherwise would, uncertain what is the best rhetorical approach to take in delivering the message he needs to deliver. “We are well on our way to the station. As I said, though, several problems now face us. We are supposed to have left earth orbit at about 42,000 kilometers per hour. Instead, by the time the engines shut down we were traveling at 85,000. In and of itself, even though that is excessive by any estimation, it would not be an unrecoverable situation, as our navigation computers are easily capable of altering our trajectory to compensate for the increased velocity.”

Without turning his gaze away from Katzenbach, Danziger, the nuclear engineer, summarizes the situation more concisely than the pilot would have managed in ten more minutes of talking.

“We can’t stop the ship,” he says. “We’re out of fuel.”

Katzenbach stares back for a long moment, uncertain whether to be annoyed at Danziger for his impertinence, or grateful for his brief but entirely accurate delivery of the message that everyone on board will know soon enough anyway.

“What does that mean?” Kumar asks. She is the only medically trained person on board, possibly even the most intelligent among the six, but her knowledge of the operation of the vessel in which she is now hurtling toward the moon is limited, to put it kindly.

But on this journey in particular, Kumar is more inclined to be aware of potential safety issues on the ship than are any of the other passengers or crew. For the plutonium is not the only item in the Icarus’s cargo hold that presents a serious potential hazard in the event of a landing at Armstrong Station that is other than successful. Indeed, while the rationale for sending an epidemiologist to a moon research station in the first place is far from obvious to the layperson, her presence aboard at this inauspicious moment is entirely understandable upon a more detailed examination of the cargo manifest. Three steel cases in the cargo hold—each secured with far greater care than even those holding the plutonium—contain samples of viruses developed for potential weapons use, but subsequently deemed too dangerous to be stored anyplace on earth. Kumar’s purpose during her six-month tour at Armstrong Station is twofold: safely deliver the samples to the viral laboratory for long-term storage, and continue research into the viability of the viruses for their intended purpose in the presence of an extremely hostile environment like the moon’s, one replete with zero atmosphere, profound cold, and high levels of ambient radiation. No one on board is aware of the cargo she bears, save for herself and Katzenbach.

“It means,” offers Danziger, “that unless we pull something seriously clever out of our collective behinds, we are, in about twenty-nine hours if my math is right, going to make a fairly dramatic arrival at Armstrong Station.”

“You have a way with words,” Katzenbach replies, managing a wan smile. “Dramatic is certainly one way of putting it. We are, at the moment, passengers on a missile being guided by a navigation computer whose sole purpose in life is to ensure that we intercept the cross hairs at the base of the Armstrong Station landing pad. And if, as Doctor Danziger here says, nothing changes in pretty short order, we are going to strike those crosshairs with a velocity sufficient to leave a very large crater where the station used to be.

“Based on lunar geology,” chimes in Bradley Johansson, “and our approximate mass and velocity, a crater about seven hundred meters in diameter, maybe seventy-five deep.”

“Whereas Armstrong Station is, if memory serves, something like one hundred thirty meters in diameter, roughly speaking,” Danziger adds. “What advice do our colleagues in Dallas have to offer? I’m guessing they don’t find this state of affairs to be at all satisfactory.”

“They are evaluating the situation as we speak,” Katzenbach says. Another long moment of silence as electronics continue to hum in the background.

“What about the shuttle?” Kelly says. “They said during flight training that it’s got room for twenty, right?”

“Yes,” Katzenbach says, “the shuttle is functional and has more than ample space.”

“And it has an isolated fuel system,” Danziger says. “Whatever malfunction caused the main engine shut-off to fail may not have affected the tanks in the shuttle. Katzenbach cannot imagine how Danziger is aware of this detail of the Icarus’s construction, but the nuclear engineer is correct in his statement. The ship’s emergency vehicle can support up to twenty passengers and has onboard provisions for up to two weeks in space. During normal launch and inflight operations its fuel system is isolated from that of Icarus. Katzenbach swings his mouth mike down and mumbles a few words to Karimi, still sitting alone in the front of the vessel. She reaches out, taps a few buttons on the center console, then speaks back to Katzenbach.

“It appears that Doctor Danziger here is correct, with bonus points awarded for taking the time to read the ship’s technical specifications. Major Karimi indicates that the shuttle is, in fact, fine and that its fuel stores are unaffected by our unfortunate state of affairs.

“So that’s good news, right?” Johansson says.

“Less than you might think,” Katzenbach replies. Even if we abandon Icarus, and even if the available fuel onboard the shuttle could slow us enough to manage a rendezvous with Collins Station—which is an exceptionally big if for a shuttle that would still be moving at the same speed as Icarus—that does not in any way change the fact that following our flight to safety, Icarus would continue making a beeline for Armstrong at eighty-five thousand kilometers per hour.”

“Commander, how much fuel is onboard the shuttle?” Danziger still running numbers in his head. “And can it be transferred into Icarus’s main fuel system?”

“Yes, the fuel can be transferred between Icarus and the shuttle in either direction,” Katzenbach says. “But it only holds enough to maneuver the shuttle itself, meaning a bit more than one percent of the fuel volume of Icarus’s full capacity. We’d need to check with the computer, but it’s enough—maybe—to gradually slow the shuttle and get it into lunar orbit. It’s not enough to do a damn thing for Icarus. Besides which, given the malfunction that got us here in the first place, there’s no way of knowing how the Icarus’s main engines would respond to the sudden availability of more fuel. Maybe they do nothing. Maybe they do not respond when we try to turn them back on. Maybe they start up again on their own and waste the whole lot.”

“Didn’t you also say,” Johansson says, “that the flight computer is going to try to ensure that the ship lands at Armstrong regardless of what velocity the ship is traveling?”

It suddenly occurs to Katzenbach that these four individuals, none of them in any way flight qualified except as passengers, are taking part with remarkable stoicism in a discussion about whether or not there is any likelihood of them surviving the journey.

“With a bit of work,” he says, “the navigation computer can be overridden.”

Kelly rises gracefully from her seat, pulls herself weightless toward a large viewing port, and stares out for a moment at the blackness. There is no appreciable sense of motion provided by the distant stars. They could just as easily be standing still.

She spins slowly to face Katzenbach again. “Which way is the shuttle oriented on the ship?” she asks.

“Oriented?” Katzenbach responds. “How do you mean?”

“Which direction is the thrust vector relative to our direction of travel?”

It seems an oddly incongruous question given the circumstances.

“They are collinear,” Katzenbach replies after thinking for a second. The shuttle is on the bottom of the hull aiming forward.”

“Can it be changed?” Danziger says. He thinks he gets what Kelly is considering. “Look,” he says, “try this on for size. If we move into the shuttle, disable Icarus’s navigation computer, then separate from the ship and maneuver so that the nose of the shuttle is against the side of the Icarus, then hit the engines on the shuttle, that pushes Icarus off-course, right? With over a day of travel to go, just a tiny push should allow it to miss Armstrong.”

Katzenbach ponders the proposed scenario for a moment. “That is all actually possible,” he says, “except for one thing.”

Johansson finishes the explanation. “Except that performing this maneuver, pushing Icarus off-course enough to miss Armstrong Station, leaves the shuttle with no fuel … which leaves us sailing off into … wherever, instead of rendezvousing with the orbiting lunar station.”

“We save ourselves …” Kelly says, grasping an armrest and awkwardly pulling herself back into her seat.”

“Or we save the station,” Danziger finishes her sentence.

A long pause ensues while all reflect on this choice.

“Could the staff at Armstrong make a run for Yang Liwei? At least get out of harm’s way?” Kelly says. “Doesn’t help the station, but at least …”

“Dallas has already let them know what’s happening, but the rovers are no good on two counts,” Danziger replies. “The Chinese station is nearly four hundred kilometers away and the rovers max out at ninety-five kilometers range. Also, only two rovers and each carries just six passengers. No way twenty-three people fit. Best they’re gonna manage is putting on suits and walking clear of the impact area. Then they’ve got seven, eight hours of air in the suits, after which …”

35 Hazelwood Drive, Denver, Colorado – 5 Days Earlier

“Yeah, we leave Monday morning around 5:30. I’ll be up all night beforehand, I expect. Good thing I’ve got three days on the flight to sleep.” Janine Kelly stops for a moment, allowing the brief audio delay to catch up. Phone calls from earth to Armstrong Station are not only expensive, but also slightly awkward due to the round-trip signal delay.

“Well,” comes Will Kelly’s voice—its audio quality, delay notwithstanding, quite good, remarkable considering the number of hops the signal needs to go through to get from Armstrong to the Kelly’s home in Denver. “I hope you manage to get plenty of sleep en route. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do once you arrive. Three months surrounded by nothing but two dozen scientists is not exactly a recipe for marital bliss.”

“I know, love,” Janine replies. “Believe me, I feel your pain. If all goes smoothly, we should be in sometime around midday on Thursday. Can you hold out that long?”

“Guess I don’t have much choice, now do I?” he replies. “Of course then we get three months together here and after that another three month moratorium while I head home and you stay behind. We really need to talk with somebody about the scheduling of these rotations.”

“I’m not sure who that would be exactly, but I can’t disagree.”

“Well, see if you can make that happen before you leave, huh? The monastic lifestyle isn’t exactly my thing. Oh hey, beautiful, gotta go, okay. Specimens are barking my name. Travel safe and I’ll see you for lunch on Thursday.”

“All right, Will,” she replies. “Stay warm up there, okay? Don’t be roaming around outside in that three hundred below. Sweet dreams.”

Janine punches the disconnect button on her phone. Will Kelly has been working at Armstrong Station for nearly twelve weeks, conducting biology experiments, specifically learning whether there is anything remotely nutritional about lunar regolith that would make it worth gathering for agricultural purposes. Three months away from home for a work assignment is a significant sacrifice, though certainly nothing compared to the yearlong deployments that military members routinely endure. All in all, though, it’s been a tougher challenge for Will than it has been for Janine.

“You’re gonna have to talk to him about this at some point, you know.”

On the other side of Janine Kelly’s king-size bed, wearing nothing but a sheer pair of boxers as he bends down to pull on a sock, sits Bradley Johansson, who will, in five days time, be leaving with Janine for their three-month deployment to Armstrong Station.

“Yeah,” she replies, lifting the duvet cover searching for underwear. “Yeah …”

USS Icarus – 5:43 pm EST

“There’s also the small matter of the plutonium,” Johansson says. “The kind of impact we’re talking about would vaporize all of it and contaminate miles of lunar surface. Of course, Doctor Danziger here is far more qualified than I to opine on all the unfortunate details of such a cataclysmic event, but I feel safe in guessing that, given the moon’s low gravity and the violence of our impact, the radius of radioactive contamination would vastly exceed the dimensions of the crater that we create.”

All sit for another long silent moment contemplating the gravity of Johansson’s comment. Despite his expertise in the matter having been invoked, Danziger feels no need to expound on what has been said. At last Katzenbach speaks once more, saying more or less what they all know to be true.

“Look, there’s really no choice, is there? We take the shuttle and do what we can to push Icarus and ourselves away from Armstrong. With more than a day yet before arrival, it shouldn’t take much of a nudge now to get it off course. With two weeks worth of rations onboard the shuttle, who knows? Better than being at the bottom of a smoking hole on the moon.”

No one appears keen to dispute either the chosen course of action or the captain’s graphic imagery.

“All right then,” he says, “gather up whatever you feel like you need to bring. We’ll get the navigation computer shut down and meet there in twenty.”

Twenty-six minutes later, all six crew and passengers have moved from the Icarus’s main cabin into the shuttle. In the intervening minutes, Karimi has been on the radio with Dallas explaining what they mean to do. Everyone is in agreement that it’s not a great plan, but it’s the least bad choice from a short list of bad ideas. While Karimi has been engaged in this conversation, Katzenbach has gone through the numerous technical machinations required to take the ship’s navigation computers offline. The Icarus was never intended to operate in manual mode, and disabling the autonomous guidance systems is a non-trivial series of steps that have required consulting the ship’s technical documents. No one has memorized the steps, as it was never imagined that a scenario would occur that might call for it. But the displays are all dark now in the main cabin, and the only onboard computers still active are those in the shuttle cockpit, which Karimi is now bringing to life.

The shuttle’s tanks contain sufficient fuel for one uninterrupted full-power burn of about ninety seconds. However, the tiny ship comprises only about one percent of the mass of the Icarus, even with the larger ship’s now-empty fuel tanks. Still, with a bit of analysis they have determined that their best approach to save Armstrong Station from obliteration and leave at least a lingering hope for themselves thereafter, is to push Icarus from the side for sixty or so seconds, and to then disengage from the big ship and use their remaining fuel to reduce their own velocity as much as possible. There is no chance of making it into lunar orbit, as the greatest reduction they can possibly manage will still leave them traveling in excess of 48,000 kilometers per hour, far too fast for lunar orbit insertion. With several weeks of supplies onboard, the crew’s only hope of survival is that they can slow themselves enough to allow an earth-based rescue mission to catch up to them, a mission that Dallas control assures them is already in the works, but which cannot launch for at least ten days. With a maximum fuel load and skeleton crew, Dallas control estimates that the rescue vessel could reach them in something like two months time.

Therefore, in preparation for what promises to be a long and boring ride, the six have moved as many additional supplies and water containers into the shuttle as will fit, which is quite a lot actually, given all of the unoccupied seats. If there’s a longevity challenge for the six, it will be on the life support side of things. Even though equipped with adequate oxygen scrubbing systems to sustain a full complement of twenty for a week or so, the air in the shuttle will be getting pretty gritty by week six or thereabouts. That doesn’t set too well with control’s two-month rescue estimate. But it’s what they’ve got.

In any event, the immediate priority is moving Icarus off its current course toward Armstrong Station. Katzenbach glances back over his right shoulder for a second at his passengers, then reaches up to an overhead console where he grips a large red handle and draws it down firmly. The only sense of a resulting action is a series of loud bangs from outside the shuttle’s hull. They are free of Icarus. Through the shuttle’s side windows they see only open space and there is no discernible change in their motion for the first few seconds. Only then they feel the slightest nudge of acceleration as Katzenbach begins burning a bit of the shuttle’s precious fuel to move it toward the center of Icarus’s massive hull. It’s not like changing the course of a boat or aircraft on earth, where you can simply point the nose and the rest will follow. In the vacuum of space, pushing the nose to one side will simply spin the ship around its center of mass while it continues on its original course, not a solution to the problem at all. In this case, they must move the entire massive vessel—all 2,500 tons—to one side.

With more than twenty-four hours remaining en route, the slightest nudge off course should be sufficient to steer the Icarus out of harm’s way. But because they cannot access the cargo section of the ship in flight, they have no ability to offload Danziger’s plutonium or Kumar’s viruses, and so must ensure, as best they can, that the big ship misses the moon entirely. Dallas’s calculations match their own and all are in agreement that sixty seconds of maximum pushing in the proper direction should do the trick. With a bit more delicate maneuvering, Katzenbach has the shuttle alongside the section of the Icarus that Dallas’s engineers have indicated to be the center of mass of the fuel-less vessel. With a twist of the control stick, he performs a ninety-degree pirouette at the conclusion of which the massive body of the supply ship fills the forward screen of the shuttle. They are, though, still twenty or so meters away and Katzenbach taps the stick forward with quick delicate movements. All he can think as he does this is that with every puff of thrust, that’s a bit more speed they will be racing away from earth with, away from the rescue vessel.

Ten interminable seconds later, the Icarus growing impossibly large in the shuttle’s forward window, and there comes the gentle bump of contact—metal on metal, for the two vessels were never meant to meet in such a manner. And then, as quickly, the shuttle begins to drift gently backward, Newton’s equal and opposite reaction. Katzenbach brushes the control stick once more, and the rearward movement stops. The shuttle hovers inches from the side of Icarus.

“Okay,” Katzenbach says, “we ready to do this?”

But he is only a voice on the intercom system at this point, his eyes staring forward in concentration. No one has ever done quite what he is about to attempt. How will the shuttle respond to full thrust and an inability to move forward at anything but the snail’s crawl dictated by the mass of Icarus? Will it remain straight? Or perhaps the shuttle will squirt off to one side if his contact with the large ship isn’t perfectly orthogonal? There are no do-overs, no room for error.

“We’ll ramp the thrust up slowly to make sure we’re aligned properly,” he says, an authority in his voice that he does not actually feel. “Karimi, start the clock on my mark. Then give me a countdown from fifty seconds to sixty.”

“Roger,” Karimi replies. “countdown for the final ten seconds of the burn.”

“On my mark,” Katzenbach says. “Five … four … three … two …”

“Wait! … Stop! …” comes a voice over the intercom system that is neither Katzenbach’s nor Karimi’s. Katzenbach lifts his hand from the control stick.

“Is there a problem Doctor Danziger?”

“Yeah … there … there kind of is a problem.”

“One that affects what we’re about to do here?”

“Yes, I’m afraid … very much so.”

Katzenbach removes his headsets and undoes his seatbelts. Pushing upward from his seat, he turns gracefully, weightlessly, and draws himself back into the passenger area of the shuttle, pulling himself into a seat between Danziger and Kelly. Everyone has heard his comment over the intercom system and all eyes are now fixed in his direction.

“Please make it quick, Doctor Danziger. You’re aware that the longer we wait to do this, the less likely it is to be successful.”

“It doesn’t matter. It won’t work,” Danziger begins. Despite the cool temperature inside the shuttle, there is noticeable perspiration on his forehead. “And besides, you’re working from false information.”

“And you are, no doubt, about to enlighten us,” Katzenbach says.

“Yes. Yes, I am. But I’m afraid it won’t be that quick. There’s a lot to explain.”

Katzenbach waits silently. Everyone waits silently. Danziger shifts his gaze uncertainly from one passenger to another.

“Two and a half months ago, the U.S. Department of Defense learned that the Yang Liwei Station, located three hundred and eighty-seven kilometers from Armstrong Station, is not engaged in purely scientific research as they have asserted for the past several years. In fact, they have been for some time actively developing weapons. I don’t know what sort, but the fact that the Chinese government deems them too secretive or risky to develop on earth has generated a good deal of concern in Washington, as you can imagine.”

“And what,” replies Katzenbach, “does any of that have to do with us?”

“”The U.S. government—under the very highest levels of security clearance—has, since that discovery, been actively planning a mission to … neutralize the Chinese station.”

“Let me try again, Doctor. What does such a plan have to do with a supply ship that is currently on course to collide with Armstrong Station—in just over twenty-five hours as it happens.”

“Because Icarus is not heading for Armstrong Station,” Danziger says. More silence, in this case the silence of incomprehensibility.

“Doctor, the ship’s navigation computers show us quite incontrovertibly on a direct trajectory for Armstrong. Dallas control confirms as much.”

“Captain, you don’t understand. I’m afraid we are participants in a complex plan to destroy the Chinese station. That plan began some seven weeks ago with the development of a modified version of Icarus’s navigation and flight control software, software that was uploaded into the ship’s computers about forty-eight hours before we launched earlier today. That software is designed to do several things in order to achieve its mission.”

“That mission, according to you, being to fly at high velocity into the Chinese station,” Katzenbach says.

“Plausibly deniable as just a tragic accident, no doubt,” Johansson adds.

“Something like that,” Danziger says. “One of the functions of the modified software was to cause the extended TLI burn and to thus exhaust most of our fuel. It was also programmed to show an incorrect fuel level on the Icarus. In fact, Captain, the ship still retains something like one percent of its original fuel—not enough to slow the ship appreciably, but enough to maintain its course back toward Yang Liwei in the event that we attempt to divert it off course.”

“As we were just about to do,” Katzenbach says.

“Exactly. We would have moved Icarus slightly off-course, then used the remaining shuttle fuel to attempt to drop into lunar orbit, only to have Icarus realign its course and careen into Yang Liwei anyway. The revised nav software also displays a false destination—Armstrong Station. The real destination coordinates—the coordinates of Yang Liwei—are hidden within the code.”

“Would it be safe to assume that this is not exactly an officially sanctioned government operation, Doctor?” Katzenbach says, though he knows the answer all too well.

“To my knowledge only two people are aware of what is happening here. Major General Alistair Sheldon at the Pentagon, architect of the plan, and one DOD software developer. Even the technician who uploaded the new software into Icarus believed it was a legitimate build, created simply to add a couple of minor diagnostic upgrades.”

“Then, of course, there’s you,” Katzenbach wryly adds.

“Yes, well, I’m nothing but a cheap insurance policy.”

“So, the theory was what exactly?” Katzenbach says. “That we would all die diving into Yang Liwei. No witnesses, just a good clean accident, apologies to our families from the state department, and everything good to go after that? Tell me this, Doctor. How does the plutonium on board Icarus factor into this grand plan? Contaminate the site so as to preclude any future reconstruction by the Chinese?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, Captain,” Danziger says. “And I suppose at this point it won’t surprise you to learn that there’s rather more of it onboard than is stated on the manifest—three times more in fact.”

“So did the good general seriously imagine that we’d all just serenely dive into the moon once we believed we were out of fuel?”

“No, he gave you a bit more credit than that. He imagined you’d do exactly what you were getting ready to do just now. If he’d had his druthers, he would have found a way to remove the fuel from the shuttle or consume it in the extended TLI burn. But even he wasn’t clever enough to figure out how to do that undetected. Next best thing was to leave a little bit of fuel on Icarus, to counteract anything you might try to do with the shuttle.”

“So, to summarize, what you’re telling us is that you’re part of a conspiracy that could quite possibly start World War Three.” Danziger sits silent in response to this assertion.

“Which begs the obvious question—why are you bothering to tell us all of this rather than simply letting the plan play out as you’ve described?”

“Captain, you still don’t quite understand. Me telling you this IS part of the plan. Had I not, you’d’ve wasted two thirds of the shuttle’s fuel futilely pushing the Icarus aside, only to have it realign its course anyway. In doing so, you would have likely eliminated our chance of a successful lunar orbital injection and rendezvous with Collins Station. It was never the intent to take the lives of anyone onboard Icarus. This way, now that you know all the facts, you simply let Icarus go on its way to Yang Liwei, and we’re left with plenty of fuel for a lunar rendezvous. Your government is pleased that everyone is safe and sound—”

“Except, of course, for the nineteen people at Yang Liwei.”

“Well, yes … there’s that,” Danziger replies.

“Judged by your General Sheldon to be expendable, no doubt.”

“Either him or someone above him, in any event, someone vastly above our pay grades.”

“Tell me this, Doctor Danziger,” Katzenbach says. “Is it your apparently very well informed view that there is nothing at all we can do to stop this outcome, save for abandoning Icarus and heading for Collins Station?”

“Afraid so, Captain. Everything is automated from this point on.”

“And what happens when we get to Armstrong Station and share your account with the commander there? It will all sound rather treasonous, don’t you think? Are you prepared to take one for the team?”

“Oh not at all, Captain. Remember, Icarus is going to arrive well ahead of us, and in rather a spectacular fashion, I’m afraid. Of course, there will be no evidence left, just a lot of dust—very radioactive dust, as it happens. No one is going to be too terribly keen to do any on-site investigations for quite a long time. All you’ll have is my account of things, which I, naturally, will be obliged to deny vehemently, in the interest of national security, you understand.”

Katzenbach considers Danziger’s words for a moment before placing his headphones back on his head.

“Tell me, Lieutenant Karimi,” he says into the mike, “I haven’t had a look at your resume in some time. Do I recollect correctly that in addition to being an able pilot, you are also rather handy with computer programming?”

“It was my minor in grad school, Captain,” she replies. “Operating systems mainly. Bit out of date, I expect.”

“Tell me this, Lieutenant, if I get you back onboard Icarus, do you imagine that you could access the nav computer code and make a couple of changes?”

“It’s not really meant to be modified in flight, but worth a shot, Captain. We still have a fair bit of time if Doctor Danziger is correct and there’s some fuel left onboard.”

“Excellent,” Katzenbach replies, rising to return to his seat. Within moments, he has the shuttle re-docked with Icarus and all six crew and passengers are back in their original positions in the main cabin.

“How do you imagine this is going to work, Captain?” Danziger says. “You can’t slow Icarus.”

“No, Doctor, we cannot. But here’s what we can do. As soon as Lieutenant Karimi finishes with her system updates, we can update the destination coordinates so that Icarus misses the moon entirely. Once the ship’s trajectory has been suitably modified, we can then access whatever fuel remains and transfer it onto the shuttle to make up for all of our maneuvering earlier. Good to have as much of a buffer for our lunar rendezvous as possible.”

“And I imagine that once all is said and done, you’ll share your ludicrous story about a treasonous conspiracy to destroy the Chinese lunar research station.”

“Actually, Doctor, I’ve thought about that, and I think we’re better off saving that one for when we’ve returned to earth and we can be sure the details are going to someone with a suitable security clearance. Wouldn’t do to have it show up in the public news. That’d be quite an international incident, don’t you think? Even if it didn’t succeed.”

“Doesn’t matter who you tell, “Danziger replies. “You’ve still got no proof except for what I said.”

“Which we have a handy copy of in the ship’s recorded voice log. Oh, and we also have a copy of your original modified navigation software, which I’m sure Lieutenant Karimi was thorough enough to shoot a copy of before making her updates.” As he says this, Karimi, without glancing back, holds up her hand in which is held a palm-sized remote memory drive. At this, Danziger’s forehead begins to perspire once more and, in a moment of sudden desperation, he tries to propel himself from his seat and toward Karimi. But he doesn’t get far. Spinning to avoid Katzenbach’s lunging grasp, he forgets that there are others in the cabin, others who have heard the entire account of their situation. The strong arm that grabs Danziger’s wrist is that of Johansson the geologist. Thrust back into his seat once more, Danziger stops struggling for a moment, only stares ahead and toward Katzenbach with something between hatred and resignation in his eyes. His gaze at Katzenbach is so intense in that moment that he completely misses Kelly moving slowly toward him from the left. Only when she has pulled tight the zip-tie around his wrist and the arm of his seat does he realize the magnitude of his situation. With a bit more assistance from Johansson and surprisingly little resistance from Danziger, the nuclear engineer is now secured in his seat and silent, though breathing heavily.

“Lieutenant Karimi, how are we doing?” Katzenbach asks.

“Nearly there, Captain,” she replies. “I’ve reprogrammed the computer to change heading well away from any possible lunar impact, but to wait for five minutes after the shuttle is clear and has begun to slow before starting the adjustment burn. No point making our rendezvous more challenging when we’re already headed in the right direction. I’ve also topped off the shuttle tanks. But there’s still plenty here for Icarus to do what she needs to do.”

“So we’re good,” Katzenbach says.

“Good as we’re going to get. It’s still going to be quite a ride slowing the shuttle down to lunar insertion speed. We should be okay though—maybe even have enough left over to help with the rendezvous a bit. The heading adjustment clock for Icarus starts the moment we undock.”

“All right then,” Katzenbach says. “Time’s a wasting.” He rises from his seat, grabs a small pouch with his belongings and moves toward the door that leads to the shuttle.

“And what about our conspirator here?” Johansson asks, gesturing toward Danziger, still tied firmly to his seat.

“Oh, I think the good doctor has seen the error of his ways. No reason to subject him and the whole country to all the grief and expense of a long trial. I think the best course would be to let him stay right here with Icarus. He’ll have plenty of time to reflect on things. Tell you what, Doctor. We’ll leave you a knife so you can cut yourself free. It’ll take a while, but you’ve got plenty of time ahead of you.”

Danziger’s eyes go wide at the realization of what Katzenbach has in mind. “Jesus, you can’t just leave—”

“Doctor, Doctor, calm down. This beats a trial for treason, life in prison. Besides, you’ll have the whole ship to yourself. There’s years worth of food and water aboard, scrubbers will keep you in air pretty much indefinitely. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Lieutenant Karimi was good enough to call down to Dallas and cancel the rescue mission. Sadly, though, you won’t be able to make any more radio calls, unless, that is, you can manage to guess a pretty long password. Course you’ll have time to play with that too. Look at the bright side—you’ll be a hero back on earth. The man who selflessly gave his life to save his crew and fellow passengers when their supply ship tragically malfunctioned. And besides that, after six months or so, you’ll have the honor of having traveled farther from earth than any other human.”

Katzenbach draws a small knife from his pouch and leaves it folded on the floor just out of reach of Danziger’s feet. It will take the bound man a while to reach it and use it to free himself.

“You’re a murdering bastard,” Danziger manages, his voice choked more with fear than hatred.

“Now Doctor Danziger, no hard feelings,” Katzenbach replies. “Remember, you were the guy ready to kill an entire station’s worth of Chinese, and possibly us in the bargain.”

He moves through the door with Karimi and the three other passengers. With a hiss, the door slides closed and Danziger is alone. He doesn’t even hurry to reach the knife. What difference will it make?

Ten minutes later, the Icarus’s shuttle unlocks once again from the main ship, pivots one hundred and eighty degrees about so that its engines are facing backward. Having cleared Icarus by a safe hundred meters or so, Katzenbach grips the control stick as Karimi initiates the command to turn on the shuttle’s engines. All are thrown backward into their seats as the tiny ship begins bleeding off velocity. After a minute of full throttle burn, with velocity safely down enough for lunar orbit insertion, she shuts down the engines and Katzenbach rotates the shuttle back around so that they are again facing in the direction they’re traveling. In the forward screen they can now see the approaching gray circle of the moon, though it is still nearly a day away. And to one side, there appears suddenly a brilliant but tiny white plume, the exhaust of Icarus as the great ship makes its final course adjustment, slipping safely to one side of the moon, racing outward.

Armstrong Station – Saturday, March 17, 2097, 11:17 pm EST

Janine and Will Kelly sit side by side on the narrow bed in her tiny crew quarters. It’s been just over three hours since the shuttle from the orbiting Collins Station delivered the five Icarus crewmembers to Armstrong Station. The initial debrief with station leaders about the events aboard Icarus leading to the supply mission’s failure had taken the better part of the first two hours. Katzenbach had done most of the talking during the debrief session, and had indicated only the high-level elements of the account—an unknown system error had caused an extended TLI burn resulting in fuel exhaustion, the crew had managed to avert a catastrophic collision with Armstrong Station, the tragic result of which had been the death of one the passengers, nuclear engineer Bryan Danziger, whose remains were unfortunately unrecoverable. Following this preliminary discussion, crew members were judged to have endured enough travail for the moment and had been released to join team members or, in Janine’s case, her husband, the meeting ending with the station commander’s assurance that there would plenty more investigating in the days to come.

“Was it anyone I know?” Will asks, looking straight into the wall a few feet in front of him rather than into his wife’s eyes. His voice is steady, perhaps surprisingly so, given the gravity of the revelation Janine has only just shared with him. She doesn’t answer right away and he speaks again. “Actually, you know what—don’t tell me. Probably better. That way we’ll both be blissfully ignorant. You have your secrets, I’ll have mine, and we’ll just start things over. If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not just about what I want,” she replies. Since arriving safely at Collins Station, Janine Kelly has decided to come clean with her husband and to accept whatever consequences her confession might cause. She has imagined all sorts of reactions—anger, disappointment, indifference even. What she had not in any way imagined was the response she had received, that her infidelity during the couple’s long separation had been matched by one of Will’s own, with someone who has shared his past three months here at Armstrong. Like Will, she has opted for not knowing, but wonders what the coming days and weeks will be like as a result of that decision. Nine of the twenty-four residents of Armstrong Station are women. Will she ever not wonder each time she interacts with one of them.

“We have another three months apart coming right up,” she says.

“We’ll do better,” he replies.

“We could hardly do worse,” she replies. Neither laugh.

U.S. Military Court of Appeals, Military Courtroom 104A – Monday, July 10, 2097, 1:48 pm EST

It’s one of half a dozen small nondescript courtrooms in the basement of the United States Court of Military Appeals on East Street NW in Washington D.C. There is no jury and there are no public attendees. There isn’t even a proper judge’s dock, only a long wooden table at which sit three men dressed in formal military attire—three officers, the lowest ranking among them a three-star lieutenant general, and all possessed of the highest possible military security clearance. Before the table sit two men: Major General Alistair Sheldon and a fifth officer, a colonel, assigned as Sheldon’s defense counsel, though the role is clearly a perfunctory one. There will be no witnesses, either for or against Sheldon. He has spoken with no one, including his defense attorney, since being escorted from his Pentagon office one week prior. The case against him has been more than sufficiently made by the damning words of Bryan Danziger on the Icarus’s audio recording, the software records provided by the ship’s commander, and a number of password-protected files subsequently found on his personal computer. Though the case against Sheldon was already more than adequate to ensure his incarceration for the remainder of his natural life, he has not improved his prospects any by refusing to divulge the name of the software engineer who worked with him to create the updates that led to the loss of Icarus and the near annihilation of the Chinese lunar research station.

As to whether or not the general’s allegations about weapons research at Yang Liwei Station are true, that is a matter for another day. For now, the only remaining work is the signing of a top secret order that will remand Sheldon to isolated incarceration at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a decision that is not so much about vengeance—indeed the generals behind the table sympathize to a degree with Sheldon’s beliefs and his actions—but rather about secrecy. Word of what has very nearly taken place must never get out. As for Sheldon’s family, they will know only that he has been sent away on a top-secret mission. Some months from now, they will receive word of a tragic accident and they will attend his funeral with full military honors, complete with the tri-folded flag of a grateful nation.

Shepard Flight Center – Thursday, December 3, 2097, 2:42 am EST

A small rocket stands bathed in brilliant spotlights on one of the seven launch pads at Dallas’s Shepard Launch Complex. A few hundred meters away, the Atlantic Ocean laps the shoreline, waiting, if required, to serve as a safety net in the event the launch does not go as perfectly as this occasion demands. For this is no ordinary launch. The vehicle has only one purpose—speed, and only one item of importance onboard—a ten-megaton nuclear warhead. But while this seems, at first blush, to be nothing more than an ordinary ICBM, it is, in fact, not destined for some rogue nation. It is, instead, headed toward the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Icarus is now nearly nine months past the moon’s orbit and about as far out as the orbit of Jupiter. Despite the vanishingly small odds of the unpowered supply ship actually coming into contact with another planet or species somewhere in the cosmos, the U.S. government has determined the risk of even the slightest chance to be unacceptable, what with the combination of nuclear material and hardened viruses stowed in the ship’s cargo hold. Today’s mission will leave earth orbit and chase down Icarus, employing all the speed it can muster, and tracking the big cargo vessel with a continuous stream of navigation data relayed from several large tracking antennae on earth. Best estimates are that an intercept will take about fourteen months. A proximity detector will detonate the warhead once the chase vehicle has gotten to within a kilometer of Icarus.

Geoffrey Katzenbach watches from the control room’s observation window as the small nimble ship rises rapidly from the launchpad on a long column of flame. For a fleeting moment, it brilliantly illuminates the surrounding blackness. Then as quickly it is gone, just another tiny white dot blending in with a billion other pinpoints in the night sky. There is no real reason for Katzenbach to be present for the launch, just his own desire for closure. He’s made his formal application the preceding week for retirement from flight duty, and even though he still feels as healthy as he’s ever felt, the results of recent tests clearly support the relentless progress of his disease.

Icarus – Thursday, February 13, 2099, 12:02 am EST

Danziger makes a note in his journal “Day 700. Icarus continues to perform flawlessly. Supplies fine. Oxygen fine. Same old.”

He’s never, in his two years alone in the vastness of space, been quite sure why he’s keeping a journal. Maybe one day, long after his supplies have been exhausted and he’s either starved to death or suffocated from lack of air, the ship will be found by someone … something. They will wonder why he came to be here. It could take years, decades, centuries. He’s considered many times simply blowing a hatch, evacuating the ship, ending it all in one brief burst of outrage. But he just can’t bring himself to do it: some oddly implausible blend of hope and cowardice. But there is no reason for hope. He’s been heading away from earth for nearly two years. As the bastard Katzenbach had wryly predicted just before abandoning Danziger, he is indeed now farther from earth than any human has ever been. He had pretty much given up on hope the moment the hatch door had slid shut. Hadn’t even bothered stretching for the knife and cutting himself loose for a full two hours after the shuttle left. No, no reason for hope at all.

And yeah, there is plenty of food, enough for eight or nine more years at least. The air scrubbers and temperature system all work automatically and flawlessly, driven by a nuclear power system that will not exhaust its fuel supply for centuries. He is forty-two years old. Can a man stand what might plausibly be fifty years alone in space? It has been nearly two years so far without a sound save for the endless low hum of the computers and air scrubber. He talks to himself from time to time, if only to hear something different. But really, what is there to say? There is no change even in the lighting, nothing to distinguish night from day save for the clock that counts off the minutes and days according to the caprice of time on a far-away planet he will never see again. No … no reason for hope at all. Only what is that low beeping sound? That’s new.

Danziger pulls himself slowly to the computer screen in the center of the cockpit display. It has registered nothing but empty blackness since the day he was first sent off on his own. Only now here is a message, a simple line of text that cannot possibly be real, a handful of words in luminous green. A vessel approaches, a ship with a U.S. serial number. But what possible explanation can there be. Just one—Katzenbach has had second thoughts, has convinced the government, military, someone, to send a rescue mission. The text on the screen rolls out a second line of information, a statement of distance. The approaching vessel is one thousand kilometers away and quickly closing the distance to Icarus. If only the radio worked. He could announce that yes there is someone alive here, someone to make the long journey worthwhile. But he’s never figured out the radios, despite months of trying. All he can do is wait. Here’s a new position update—nine hundred kilometers. It’s gaining on him at about ten kilometers every five minutes. Whatever is coming for him is coming fast. If it continues at this closing rate, the rescue ship, his unimagined deliverance, will be here in just over eight hours. Danziger wishes he could look back and watch the approach, but the Icarus cockpit windows face only forward. He imagines there must be a way to configure a display screen to see backward, but he has no idea how to make such a thing happen. He can only wait and watch the distance count down on the display. And so that’s what he will do. Nine hundred eighty kilometers. Now nine hundred seventy. After two years, eight hours will go by so fast he’ll scarcely notice. All he needs to do is be patient and wait.

Aside from the overall egalitarianism of the place, there are some other aspects of life in the hereafter (for lack of a better term) that it might also be handy to know about for the folks who are still alive. Being aware of these things would save everybody an awful lot of worrying and, more importantly, really cut down on all the persecuting and killing over whose god is the right one. Because a lot of that stuff about heaven and hell and standing in long lines to be judged is, best I can tell so far anyway, a big load of made-up nonsense. When all is said and done, everybody—white, black, brown, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, atheist—ends up in exactly the same place—this place—doing pretty much the same thing. And so, one the one hand, knowing that there is, in fact, an afterlife is, I suppose, the good news. The bad news is that it bears absolutely no resemblance to anything that anyone still alive is expecting.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s plenty of other stuff up here to feel good about, some of which will surprise folks (unclear why I persist in using terms like ‘up’ when I have no actual sense of reference relative to earth to know whether this place is up, down, or in an entirely different dimension of some sort). Random example: everybody is, to all appearances, pretty much the same age, which is around mid-thirties. So that’s cool, considering that most people, if they’re lucky, die when they’re much older. Also—and this is even better—there is no evidence of disease or other health issues of any kind. Everybody looks pretty vibrant and together and all.

The bad news—at least that’s how it seemed when I first heard about it—is that all that youth and vibrancy is kind of a waste because there’s really not much of anything at all to do here. People just walk around, sit around, occasionally talk to each other. That’s about it. Most of the things that were part of normal life on earth are totally absent here. There are no houses, no buildings, no jobs, no food, no recreation that I can discern, just . . . nothing of a material or superficial nature. Which, when I describe it that way, actually sounds kinda hellish, now that I think about it. And yet I’ve spoken to several folks who have been here a long time (inasmuch as time actually means anything here—more on that in a bit), and they all seem pretty content and well adjusted. So maybe boredom is only a problem when you’ve just come from a life spent doing lots of stuff.

Oh, and one other thing I’m sure you’ll find interesting—the answer to a question that may have occurred to you at some point (though oddly it’s never once addressed in any of the popular religious texts). The clothing here is utterly identical for everybody. We wear pants (everybody—there’s no gender distinction in clothes, or much of anything else for that matter) that are kind of halfway between a khaki color and a medium gray, a white button-up shirt with short sleeves (more than adequate since, best I can tell, it’s always about seventy-two here), and these really comfortable white slip-on shoes, kind of a canvas thing with rubber on the bottom, almost but not quite a slipper. And here’s a thing that’s taken a bit of getting used to. Not only is this the only outfit, but you only have one and you never take it off. It doesn’t get dirty, it doesn’t wear out, and everybody’s fits them perfectly. Also—long as we’re talking about cosmetic appearance—all the men’s hair is pretty much the same, as is all the women’s. For the men it’s a close-cut look, not quite military, but not far off. For the women, it’s shoulder length. The only differences in hair are that everybody has whatever hair color and degree of curliness, straightness, etc. that they had in life, so at least there’s that.

More linguistic weirdness—use of the word ‘have.’ I talked earlier about ‘having’ clothing. Aside from that, though, no one here ‘has’ anything at all. Concepts like wealth and possessions are utterly foreign, which, of course, means no rich people or poor people. No one wants for anything because there’s nothing to have and nothing to lack, if that makes any sense. This, in turn, means that concepts like aspiration, striving, and coveting are meaningless. I’m pretty sure I knew plenty of people in my former life who would regard these as significant improvements in the human condition.

So let’s see—other things you’re used to that you’re going to have to get unused to here: It’s always daytime, like summer in Norway! Only that works out better than you’d think, since no one ever sleeps. The whole circadian rhythm thing doesn’t appear to exist here at all. But it’s even stranger than that, particularly when you first show up. There’s no geography, if you can imagine that. The ground is really more of a floor, kind of a seamless sheet of travertine tile, totally flat extending to infinity in every direction. And there’s nothing you would recognize as a sky. When you look up or around, everything you’d think of as the sky is simply this pale gray void, sort of like a winter day in Seattle, only without the cold and the rain. All of which means that with the totally homogeneous environment and everybody dressed the same, looking around isn’t terribly rewarding, as there really isn’t much of anything to see except for other people.

So I hear what you’re saying right about now: no food, no jobs, no environment, no day/night, what the heck do people do all day? Well, this is where it gets genuinely weird, and not all that easy to describe. In fact, I’m new enough here so that I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing. I guess I would describe it as the ultimate expression of zen: pure contemplation punctuated with occasional conversations with others if you feel like it. The only thing to do here is to simply be. The yoga and meditation people are gonna love it! But it gets even stranger because here’s the other thing. Everybody comes here as a totally clean slate. All that business on earth about being reunited with old dead loved ones is right out the window. No one comes here bearing any memories at all of their previous life, including having any recollection at all about who you knew, who you were married to, related to, or anyone else. Not only that, but all of the things you knew in life—your education, your job, your hobbies, all of that—it’s all wiped clean. You come here with a completely free and empty mind, which I guess is where all of the contemplation comes into play. And, oddly enough, the notion of different languages is right out the window too. Everybody understands everybody else without difficulty. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what language it is, but everyone here knows it. So that’s a plus. And, lest you get the wrong idea about all the homogeneity that I’m describing, there are still plenty of races and colors, though no one seems to much care. Whatever you were in life is what you are here; it’s just the language that’s the same.

Being new here, I’ve found myself wondering if this is the actual end game as far as eternity is concerned, or if perhaps it’s some sort of waiting area, like what the Catholics used to call Purgatory. I haven’t got a clear sense of that yet because, as I suggested earlier, time is a funny thing here. There are no clocks or watches, no phones, nothing at all that would give you a sense of time, which, combined with the whole no day/night thing, means that any notion of how long you’ve been here quickly vanishes. In the early going I tried asking a few people how long they’d been here, and the answer invariably was “a while.” Not that helpful, I remember thinking at the time, though now I’m kinda starting to get what they meant.

In thinking about all this from the perspective of what people on earth are being taught about heaven, hell, and all that, it doesn’t really fit any of the stories. It’s certainly better than what people have been told over the years about hell. There’s no fire and brimstone, no demons running around with pitchforks, no eternal torment. So that’s a great thing. Heaven, on the other hand, was always a somewhat nebulous concept in all those earthly teachings—streets paved with gold, many mansions, that sort of thing. But there was never really any discussion about what you would actually do for eternity once you got there. Like I said at the outset, I spent most of my life as a nonbeliever, so I didn’t really live with any preconceptions about what eternity was going to be all about, if anything. But I did grow up in a church and so naturally I heard all the same accounts everyone else did. I guess in a way this place is at least somewhat heavenly, only without the white gowns, harps, streets of gold and all that. Oh, and, of course, no almighty deities to worship, pray to, or any of that. Which raises another interesting subject.

I’ve not discerned anything here yet that looks like politics or hierarchy. There are no meetings or agendas, nothing that looks like government, and no one who shows any signs of being in charge—mortals, gods, or otherwise. The only things I’ve learned since arriving are what I’ve gleaned from my brief conversations with other random people I’ve encountered. One minor difference between people that I can point to is that, like on earth, there is a definite range of personalities. Some are quite loquacious and will sit and talk with you at great length, whereas others are, while not outright rude, certainly reticent, even appearing sometimes to be borderline upset, perhaps because this place doesn’t quite fit their expectations as a place to spend eternity, though that is pure speculation on my part.

So, lots more questions than answers at this point, I’m afraid, but I’m still kind of getting acclimated, so I’ll have to send another update later, once I’ve gotten the hang of the place a bit more. The really big question, of course, is whether this is it or just some sort of staging ground. No idea on that. Other questions naturally occur: Is there sex here? Will I need to get a haircut? Will I ever encounter anyone I actually recognize? Does anything ever change? It’s way too early to tell. All I can do at this point is keep talking to people and see what more I can learn. My only advice for now is to not beat yourself up too much about sleeping late and missing church last Sunday.

The book would presumably be based on the topic already agreed in the brief four-page overview he’d provided to his agent nine months earlier when, based on the at least reasonable success of his inaugural novel, the publisher had agreed—with barely concealed minimal enthusiasm—to support a sophomore effort. That first novel had been a more or less autobiographical thing about his miserable upbringing in an impoverished west Missouri neighborhood. And sure he’d taken some liberties with the whole poverty thing, but it was a novel, right? It said so right there on the cover. So what did it matter if his eleven-year-old best friend from the apartment upstairs hadn’t really been killed in a drive-by shooting? Or that his father hadn’t been an abusive alcoholic who beat the shit out of his mother each night for exercise before going to bed. It made for great prose and didn’t people love reading about miserable lives that weren’t their own.

Starvation, deprivation, disease, substance abuse, physical mistreatment, gambling, lying, cheating, exploitation, racism, envy, infidelity, incest, mistrust—the list as endless as it was depressing, and readers just couldn’t get enough. Seven deadly sins? Get serious. There are dozens of them. The always fecund plains of narrative endeavor, ground plowed with relentless repetition (and a good deal more skill than Rick possessed) by the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison. Had anybody ever won a Pulitzer, Booker, or Nobel for a happy story, an uplifting self-affirming tale of personal success and fulfillment? Never. Kill the family dog. Sell the children into slavery. Push grandma off a cliff. Make the baby still-born. The more grim and miserable you could make it, the more the books flew off the shelf. Nothing sold like a good dysfunctional family story, filled with visits by unloved relatives, angst-ridden holidays, unfulfilled dreams for the children, or the occasional unexpected fatality.

How to square that with the other popular notion that reading was supposed to be about escapism? Who in the hell wants to escape to a make-believe world of squalor, torture, or misery? Lots of people apparently. Why did readers devour Angela’s Ashes? Could they truly not wait to see what new calamity would befall the impoverished immigrant family? How many more of the author’s siblings had to wither and die of starvation? How many evil slumlords could turn the wretched family out into the frigid New York streets? Not enough, it seemed.

And so, God help him, Rick had done it too. He’d given disease to infants, starved the ones who survived, hell he’d even killed off the dog. Not a bit of which had actually happened to him growing up, or even to anyone he knew now or had grown up with. He had been raised in an upper middle class neighborhood fifteen miles west of Newark, New Jersey, a two-minute drive from the Bridgewater Mall. The most serious problem he could remember from childhood was that his father wouldn’t buy him his own car when he got his license nine days after his sixteenth birthday. But who the hell wanted to read about that? So he had spent his final year of grad school and another year after that reading every piece of dysfunctional family literature he could lay hands on—Russian, English, Irish (nobody did familial misery like the Irish), and then he’d cobbled together his own version with just enough finesse and descriptiveness that his agent had been able to sell it to a second-tier publisher who wasn’t all that concerned about its obviously derivative nature, just so long as he could swear there was no outright plagiarism, which Rick was able to do with a straight face … barely.

Only now that book—which had sold forty-seven thousand copies in hardback, another sixty-two in paperback, was nearly two years in the rearview mirror, while he was stuck in the here and now, staring at a computer file that currently comprised ten thousand four hundred and seventeen words no one had yet seen except for him, but which any reader with a seventh grade education would immediately recognize as being derivative of his already derivative first work. Rick was not a panic attack sort of guy under normal circumstances, but as he sat staring at the blinking cursor on his computer screen, he felt a first wave of cold sweat begin to creep up the center of his back.

He sat like that, sweating and cursing quietly, for another two minutes, eyes fixed hard on the screen, fingers lightly touching the keypad, before finally typing the word ‘fuck’ three consecutive times on a new line, and underlining and highlighting the words for good measure. Quietly verbalizing what he had just written, he rose from his chair, deciding the same thing he had decided at about this time on each of the preceding fifteen days, i.e., that one more day wasn’t going to make much difference in the depth of the hole he had by now dug for himself. No harm in busting out the shovel for one more go. He walked to the closet, grabbed the first jacket he found, and drew the front door closed behind him. Bennington’s Pub was two blocks down the sidewalk, and it seemed at least plausible that a good writing idea might just as well come to him with a scotch or two under his belt as not.

One hour and five shots later, Rick sat at the far left end of the bar, empty glass in front of him, staring at an increasingly frightening self-portrait in the bar mirror, wondering if five shots was perhaps too much, given that there was still a bit of daylight coming through the bar’s front window. He turned away, made eye contact with the bartender, and gestured with sufficient clarity to indicate that a refill was in order. Turning back to face the mirror again, the image was still there and Rick did the only thing he could think of to make it go away. He closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyeballs, so hard that brilliant sparkles of green and blue appeared in the blackness. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes and waited to see if by some miracle the man in the mirror had changed or, preferably, vanished. Not only had the man neither vanished nor changed, he was now accompanied by a new face just to his right, a face that seemed immediately otherworldly, even by the degraded standards of one who was just now having a sixth shot of scotch set on the bar before him.

“This one’s on me, friend,” the new man said, handing a bill to the bartender. Rick stared at him in the mirror for a long silent moment before finally speaking.

“And to what do I owe the generosity?” Rick said, turning at last to face his new companion.

“Perhaps I’m just the benevolent type,” the man replied.

“And perhaps you have some sort of agenda to which I am not yet privy.”

“Ah, the suspicious mind,” the man said. “It’s possible I’ve made a terrible mistake.” He shifted his weight as though preparing to leave.

“No … look, I’m sorry,” Rick said. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything. It’s just I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a bad time.”

“Doing a bit of wallowing in the puddle of self-pity, are we?” The man gestured toward the row of empty glasses.

“Hah! Would that it was only a puddle, but yes, that’s the gist. I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a creative doldrums.”

“The tormented artiste,” the man replied. He paused for a moment before placing his right palm to his head, extending his left in Rick’s direction, and feigning a gesture of self-effacement. “But where are my manners. Here we sit conversing and you don’t know me from, well, Adam. I’m Luther Pendergast. And you’re, of course, Rick Fleming.”

Rick was by now too inebriated to manage a look of surprise. “And how did you come by that tidbit of information?”

“I fancy myself something of a reader and I recognized you from your book jacket photo.”

“Congratulations, friend. You are one of a small but distinguished fraternity.”

“Now then, don’t be too hard on yourself,” Luther said. “You did better than a lot of first-time novelists, and there is genuine potential in your writing.”

“Well, you’re a gentleman for saying so,” Rick replied. “And a damned liar as well, but I’ll thank you nonetheless.”

“I’m no liar, Rick,” Luther replied. “I know talent when I see it, and the only thing between you and a seriously great piece of literature is a burst of inspiration.”

“And as you can see,” Rick said raising his shot glass theatrically, “that is precisely what I am working on at this very moment.”

Luther smiled broadly. “Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but I would suggest to you that there might be a better way.”

“And are you, sir, by any chance in possession of this better way?”

“I may be, my friend. I just may be.”

Luther rose from his barstool and spied a booth along the back wall of the bar. He gestured with a jerk of his chin in that direction, and Rick, taking the hint, reached for his shot glass, only to discover that it was empty. He shrugged and dismounted from his stool, wobbling a bit uncertainly as he followed Luther toward the back. He had no idea why he was following a man he’d known for all of five minutes, but he had no other plans for the evening and if it delayed the moment when he’d again be staring blankly at his computer, so much the better.

“May I ask you a bit of a personal question?” Luther said as they slid into the booth. Before Rick could respond, Luther had raised two fingers in the direction of the waitress. “I understand we’ve only just met, so I totally understand if—”

“No, really, it’s nothing,” Rick replied with a dismissive gesture of his right hand. The waitress appeared bearing a fresh round of drinks. “I’m an open book.” He grimaced at the bad pun. “Besides, you’re a reader, so, there’s that.”

“You a religious man, Rick?” Luther asked.

“No, sir. I shamelessly confess that I am a godless heathen. It’s actually rather expected in my line of work, as you will doubtless know. Though I was brought up in the loving embrace of The Roman Catholic Church, I strayed from the path early in adulthood and have never looked back. I do still know the liturgy though. No lifetime of fruitless hedonism can erase that which the Holy See hath planted, eh?”

“So, God be with you then,” Luther said, managing a wry smile.

“And also with you, my friend,” Rick replied, raising his seventh glass of the as-yet young evening.

“Well spoken,” said Luther. “Well spoken indeed.” He met Rick’s raised glass with his own and smiled broadly. “Tell me, Rick, what would you say if I suggested to you a transaction that was simultaneously effective and amazing, something that stretched the bounds of all credulity?”

“I suppose I would respond like any man who is nearly through his seventh shot of Scotch, meaning that I will do you the courtesy of listening intently while also trying very hard not to vomit.”

“That’s all a man can ask,” Luther replied smiling. “And perhaps, you being a purveyor of fiction, I hope you will grant me more latitude than the average layperson.”

Rick leaned back in his seat a bit in an attempt to convey casual insouciance, but instead knocked over his shot glass on the table, spilling out a small remaining portion of liquid.

“Well, damn it,” he said to no one. Luther met Rick’s eyes with his own while gesturing once more toward the hovering waitress and rotating his fingertips in a keep-them-coming gesture.

“Rick, you are a well-read fellow, so you’ve no doubt spent some time with von Goethe and his most famous character.”

“Faust of ‘Faustian bargain’ fame,” Rick replied. He lifted the empty glass from the table and peered inside more intently than the situation deserved. “Interesting that you bring that up actually. I am fairly certain that even now, as I sit here enraptured in good conversation and the solace of gratuitous liquor, I will pay with my immortal soul tomorrow morning.”

“Suppose, Rick, I were to say to you that I am possessed of some of the same … gifts as the individual with whom Faust struck his famous bargain in that story.”

“So, are you saying to me that you are the devil incarnate? Beelzebub? Mephistopheles himself, descended to this earth to somehow arrest the pitiful decline of an insignificant novelist? Seems to me Lucifer would have better ways to spend his time.”

“It is a trifle more complicated than that, Rick.”

“Well then, being as how the hour is still young and I am more than a little inebriated and unlikely to do anything of consequence for the rest of the evening, I would take some satisfaction in hearing all the details of your story, beginning, of course, with why me?”

“Rick, let me start by disabusing you of your original assumption. I am not, in fact, Satan, nor any of his numerous historical incarnations. I am, however, affiliated with his … organization and empowered to negotiate on his behalf.”

“So you’re some sort of … agent then? Scouring the world for desperate souls willing to exchange their eternal bliss for … money and success?”

“An oversimplification indeed, but in truth not far from the mark,” Luther said, leaning back in his seat and managing a wry smile as he sipped from his glass.

“You know, … Luther,” Rick said, “I can’t help but wonder if you’re an associate not of a demon but rather of my literary agent, sent here to frighten me into spending more time at the computer writing and less time imbibing. If so, it is a clever machination on her part, and you’ll kindly offer my regards to Kimberley next time you see her.”

Rick slid awkwardly across the seat and struggled to rise, but he only managed to rise partway before the forces of gravity and alcohol conspired to drop him back onto his seat.

“Rick, our … organization has been at this quite a long time, as you will doubtless know. The story with which you are familiar—the von Goethe play—is a nineteenth century creation. But this endeavor—this program if you like—has been going on for a bit over five hundred years.”

“Earthly pleasures in exchange for eternal damnation.”

“You have a gift for distilling complex things to their essence, Rick. But, in fact, we have evolved rather a lot in the past half millennium or so. Though we are now, as ever, primarily accountable for souls, we possess a great deal more flexibility these days in what we are able to offer by way of, shall we say, emoluments.”

“Luther, there is a little something you should know about me before you waste any more of your time or drink money on me, something that impacts directly on the veracity of any offers you might be inclined to extend to me.”

“You are an atheist,” Luther replied.

“So, if you already know this, if you know that I do not believe in heaven, hell, or any of the assorted deities that you claim to represent—or presumably oppose—then why waste your time on me?”

“Rick,” Luther said, “I assume you’ve heard the old aphorism ‘Just because you believe a thing doesn’t mean it’s true.’ Well, the converse applies as well. Your failure to believe in a thing does not mean that it does not exist. It is of no consequence to me what you do or do not believe. In fact, your lack of faith actually works in my favor, in the sense that if you believe there exists no afterlife, then what do you have to lose by entering into a business arrangement with me, if only out of curiosity?”

“All right,” said Rick, “let’s just suppose I play along for a moment in what I have no doubt is an elaborate practical joke being played by … someone. What exactly would you be offering me by way of exchange for the soul that I don’t believe I possess?”

“Oh, I should think that would be obvious,” Luther responded. “You aspire to literary acclaim and all that accompanies it. With nothing more than a simple handshake, such a life can be yours.”

“In exchange for?”

“Well, Rick, don’t think of it as your soul. Think of it as guaranteed eternal employment after death.”

“Why exactly would I require employment after death? Does one need an income in the hereafter?”

“Fair point, and a poor choice of words on my part,” Luther said. “Let’s just say you’d have an unending purpose.”

“Setting aside for a moment the exact nature of that purpose, I confess I’m a bit confused on all this. The point of the Faustian bargain, at least as I recall it, was that the protagonist would enjoy a lifetime of fame and prosperity in exchange for spending eternity in perdition. You’re offering me eternal purpose as well as success and acclaim in this life. Where is the downside?”

“The downside, my perspicacious friend, is that being in the employ of my … superior requires that you—what’s the word—relocate.”

“So we’re talking about Hell.”

“Indeed. And it pains me to report that it is every bit as grim as the various holy books make it out to be—fire, brimstone, eternal torment, the works.”

“Well now you’ve gone and confused me again, Luther. How am I supposed to eternally fulfill this purpose you spoke about earlier—whatever it is—if I’m in Hell being tortured, roasted, whatever? Oh, and as long as I’m asking questions, you seem in quite fine shape for a guy living in eternal perdition.”

“You’ll receive all the details if you decide to accept my offer, but the short version is that we operate on what you would think of as an incentive scheme. The more individuals I sign up for our … program, the less time I am obliged to spend down there myself.”

“And if I were to accept your generous offer, I would become a recruiter like yourself?”

“Hard to say for sure, but I’d guess not,” Luther said. “There are a lot of roles that need filling. Difficult to say in advance what yours might be, except to say that they all have strict productivity goals—quotas if you like.”

“So you work up here to make your quota, and if you fail to make it, you’re back downstairs.”

“An oversimplification once more, but yes, something like that, Rick.”

“Honestly, it sounds to me like a pyramid scheme. The more recruits you sign up, the more benefits accrue to you as a result.”

“A defamatory choice of words, but in truth not a bad analogy.”

Rick sat silently for a moment, considering everything his new friend had said. He assumed, on the one hand, that it was all some ridiculous scheme cooked up by a friend. On the other hand, he was by nature a curious guy and inclined to want to see how unusual situations played themselves out. He was also, by this point, more than a little inebriated, which doubtless affected his judgment.

“All right, Luther,” he said, leaning back and crossing his arms in what he hoped was an air of insouciance. “Let’s suppose I’m inclined to go along with your proposal. Tell me, if you will, precisely what it is I would be agreeing to.”

“The deal, Rick, is a simple one, and a no-lose proposition for you, I might add. When you leave here you will return to your office, where you will begin writing a new novel that will receive such immense acclaim and success that you will scarcely know how to respond. And to ensure your success, our claim on your services will not become effective until ten years after you’ve sold one million worldwide copies of your book.”

Rick chuckled quietly. “A million copies …”

“A million,” Luther repeated. “total—hardback, paperback, e-book, audio, whatever.”

“Ten years. So I don’t get the normal full lifetime.”

“Well, there’s got to be some upside for us, Rick.” Luther said. “And besides, who’s to say how long it will take to sell that sort of quantity. The clock on the decade doesn’t start until you hit that million threshold. We both know how many copies of your first novel you sold, yes?”

“Yes, Luther, everyone knows that, I’m afraid. And thanks for the reminder.”

“Oh, and Rick, since we both agree that you regard all of this as nonsense, and because there’s some sense that you’ll turn me down for that reason alone, I’ve been authorized to sweeten the pot a bit upfront, just to convince you we’re on the up and up.”

“And which pot would that be exactly?” Rick asked.

“Why your pot, of course. Have a quick look at your checking account balance,” Luther replied. Rick took his cell phone out of his pocket and quickly accessed his checking account. It took a bit of doing for his drunken eyes to focus on the small screen, but once he did he was shocked to discover a balance that appeared to be ten grand higher than it had been that morning.

“Just a small advance,” Luther said, “on your future financial success.”

Rick stared at the screen for a long moment, looked quickly up at Luther, then back down at the screen again.

“Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m unconcerned about how you accessed my bank account, and focus instead on why you would do such a thing. Not, by the way, to say that I’m not grateful.”

“Simply a gesture of good faith,” Luther said. “To prove that our intentions are honorable. Of course, the deposit is contingent on your accepting my offer.”

“Of course,” Rick repeated. “Is there some sort of contract involved?”

“Nothing more than a handshake—a gentleman’s agreement,” Luther said.

Rick sat pondering these things, to the best that his clouded mind could manage.

“Ten years,” he said once more to himself. “Does all of this apply just to the first book, or am I guaranteed this riotous success for anything else I should happen to write for the remainder of my life?”

“Why, Rick, it almost sounds like you’re negotiating with me!” Luther replied, offering a wide and genuine grin.

“Luther, I can barely talk. I’m certainly in no shape for negotiation. I’m just curious is all.”

“Well curiosity is a positive sign,” Luther said. “It means you’re taking my offer at least somewhat seriously. We may yet come to an agreement. And yes, to your question, the acclaim and success that you yearn for is yours for the duration of your life, in as great or as small measure as you choose. It’s limited only by your productivity. You can keep on writing after you sell your first million copies, or, if you like, you can spend the ensuing decade basking in the success and leisure provided by that one title. Entirely up to you.”

Luther leaned back with arms folded and said nothing further, only stared at Rick with black penetrating eyes. Rick tried to stare back, but he could not sustain the effort and after a few seconds dropped his gaze to his empty shot glass. After a minute or so of silence, punctuated only by the routine clinking, pouring, and murmur of the thinly populated bar, Luther began sliding out of his seat as though to leave. As he began to stand, he reached into his jacket pocket.

“Tell you what, Rick. I’ll leave you a car—”

“No, no … I’m sorry,” Rick said, gesturing for Luther to retake his seat. “I’m just a little zoned out is all.” He leaned forward awkwardly and took the business card from Luther’s hand, moving it forward and back in an ultimately futile attempt to read it in the poor lighting of the bar and with his less than fully functional eyesight. Suddenly, Rick slammed his hand down on the table with all the resolution he could muster in the moment. The noise momentarily attracted a few turned heads.

“Fuck it!” he said, offering a sudden broad smile. “It’s not like I’m going to get a better offer, right? And even if everything you’re saying is complete and utter bullshit—which I thoroughly expect, just between me and you—ten grand is still ten grand.” Rick momentarily pointed an unsteady finger at Luther and then leaned back into his seat as though contemplating his own words. “And besides,” he continued after a long pause, “who’s to say I don’t just go home, keep the ten grand, go to sleep, and not write a damned thing. Then the money’s mine and I’m free and clear according to your conditions, right?”

“That is a distinct possibility,” Luther admitted with a wry smile, “but I’m confident you’re going to get home tonight and discover that you simply cannot help yourself. Why, I’d be surprised if you haven’t cranked out a chapter or two before you even turn out the lights tonight.”

“But,” Rick said, his voice suddenly exuding a mix of drunkenness and enthusiasm, “no million seller, no eternity in perdition. That’s the deal.”

“That is indeed the deal,” Luther confirmed.

Rick rose awkwardly and extended his hand. “And one more round to toast our new business relationship.”

Luther raised a hand toward the waitress and a new round was promptly delivered. By the time the two men departed the bar an hour later, three more rounds had been consumed, and though Luther seemed utterly unaffected, it wasn’t at all obvious that Rick would even manage the three block walk back to his apartment. Luther was only too happy to accompany him the short distance and to shake his hand at the front door of the building.

“You keep in touch,” Luther offered with a final shake of Rick’s hand.

“Keep in touch …” Rick managed. “And how do I keep—”

Luther reached out and gently tapped at the card inside Rick’s breast pocket.

“Right … right … the card,” Rick replied, gesturing awkwardly toward his head.

In the end Luther did somewhat overestimate Rick’s ability to begin writing right away that night, though in fairness to Rick, it was past 2:00 a.m. by the time he made it into bed. Still, as he lay there, fully clothed and uncertain as to whether he would or would not vomit before going to sleep, ideas had already begun swirling about in his immensely inebriated head, a couple of which he managed to mumble into his cell phone’s voice recorder before passing out. He would not awaken until noon the following day, and with one hell of a headache to boot.

Staggering to the bathroom, all Rick could recall about the previous night was someone named Luther—Luther, from what Rick now felt certain must have been a bad alcohol-infused dream. Luther, who had somehow caused ten thousand apparently genuine dollars to appear in his barely liquid checking account. Luther, who now quite possibly had a claim on his immortal soul, except what rube would possibly believe a thing like that?

Once out of bed and more or less on his feet, Rick did several things in quick succession. He palmed and dry swallowed four Advil, removed his clothes from the night before (still redolent of bourbon), spent a quality half hour in the shower, brushed his teeth, put on clean clothes, and took a seat at the kitchen table. The memo light on his phone was blinking, so he pushed the button and heard an incoherent thirty or so seconds of mumbling emerge. But it didn’t matter. He had a grip on the new idea and, headache or no, it seemed a fairly decent one. This time he jotted it down on a scrap of paper, taking care to write clearly. But rather than dive immediately into exploring the possibilities of the new idea, it occurred to Rick to first try a quick experiment. He would reread the thirty-five pages he had been laboring over for the past few weeks, to determine whether any of it was worth pursuing. In the end, it didn’t take long at all.

“What the hell was I thinking?” Rick muttered to himself as he tossed the pages into the nearest trashcan with disgust. A few moments later he was seated before his laptop typing away like a man possessed. Six hours and thirty-seven pages later, he arose from the chair, wondering if perhaps some lunch wasn’t in order, despite it being nearly dusk. He could not recall ever feeling quite like this, having just written in a single sitting more than he had in his previous six weeks of trying. Lunch be damned, he thought, grabbing a soda from the refrigerator and retaking his seat at the table. Writers wait years for this sort of momentum to happen. Once more his fingers touched the keys, and by 1:00 a.m. the new manuscript was up to sixty-four pages. Seven months for four hundred pages? Hell, at this rate, he’d be done by the weekend! As his fingers flew, he gave not a moment’s thought to Luther or to the surreal conversation of the preceding night.

Three weeks passed, during which meals were missed, sleep was lost, and the stack of printed pages on the kitchen table grew from nothing to more than three inches in height. The only significant breaks Rick took were to use the bathroom, greet take-out food deliverers at his front door, and utilize over half of the windfall cash in his checking account to pay delinquent bills, the latter much to his landlord’s surprise and delight. Though thoroughly enjoying the unimaginable productivity and inspiration, Rick remained careful enough to stop every twenty pages or so and print a hard copy of what he had drafted, terrified that some horrible malfunction of his laptop might cause it all to be lost. Besides the added safety, printing out the manuscript and placing it into an ever-growing pile afforded a satisfyingly tangible sense of progress that simply looking at the word counter on his text editor did not.

Four weeks more and the stack of paper had grown to more than six inches, so tenuously stacked that at one point more than half of the pages slid from the table and onto the floor, vindicating Rick’s early decision to include page numbers. Three days shy of two months and Rick struck the final key—a period—on his laptop and declared the manuscript—the draft at least—complete, all two hundred and seventeen thousand odd words of it. During the course of the frenetic two-month writing marathon, Rick had received occasional calls from his agent, inquiring as to his progress on what was by no means a late manuscript, but which it nonetheless behooved her to check up on, as her income was inextricably linked to whatever monies would be generated by Rick’s book. He assured her that things were moving along far better than either of them had any right to expect, particularly given his history of less than timely submittals, and that she should, against every instinct she possessed, just trust him on this one. She told him that she would, but was nevertheless stunned into momentary speechlessness when he walked into her office the following Monday morning and dropped the ten-pound box of paper on her desk. A label was stuck to the top of the box bearing the single word ‘Pastimes.’

“It’s a little more than we talked about,” he said, “but I figure it’ll lose some in the editing.”

But it didn’t, at least not much. What emerged from the publisher’s presses thirteen weeks later was a six hundred and ninety-three-page tour de force that was variously described by early reviewers as “that rarest of rarities in which a sophomore work utterly eclipses the author’s inaugural offering,” and “a novel that reminds us of why we read.”

Before he’d had so much as a chance to take in the rave reviews and the raucous receptions he received on his twenty-city book tour, Rick woke nine weeks later to the news that he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer. This only served to increase the throngs who appeared at his readings, though not nearly to the extent that winning the award for fiction the following spring did. Throughout the year or so after his initial (and thus far only) meeting with Luther, Rick thought of the curious stranger from time to time, though mostly just to wonder if the entire conversation in the bar that night had been nothing more than an alcohol infused dream. It was an easy enough thing to dismiss, particularly as each passing day made his success a bit more real. And God knew he was having more than his share of alcohol infused dreams lately. There were receptions, parties, dinners, so many social engagements, in fact, that Rick was completely blindsided on the night, almost one year to the day after his meeting with Luther, that his agent had clinked her champagne glass at a party and quieted the enthusiastic crowd to announce that worldwide hardback sales of Pastimes, already available in seven languages, had officially exceeded one million copies. An ebullient cheer arose from the crowd as Rick raised a dismissive hand. In the end, he raised his glass along with the rest, but even amidst the raucous celebration—the proudest moment of his still-young writing career—Rick’s thoughts drifted back to the bar, the hazy conversation, and what may or may not have been a fateful handshake.

But the dream continued, with even more enthusiasm than before—the paperback release, an additional nine translations, the film released to rave reviews at Cannes the following May. And all the while, as time allowed between the readings, interviews, and social commitments, Rick kept writing. In slightly less than two years from the day when he’d dropped the completed manuscript of Pastimes onto his agent’s desk, the next novel, his third, was finished and the entire process repeated more or less the same as the previous time—reviews, awards, huge sales, profound amounts of money, so much so that Rick and Gretchen, his now girlfriend, purchased a fifth-floor condo on Central Park West, complete with panoramic bay window overlooking Central Park.

By the eighth year they were married, and by the ninth they had their first child, a girl, and Rick was well along on his fifth novel, with one Pulitzer, two National Book Awards, and more minor honors under his belt than he could count. It had all been such a whirlwind that in the most recent five years Rick had had not one conscious thought about that night in what must surely have been a previous life. Luther did, though, make occasional appearances in Rick’s dreams, but these evaporated with the morning light, leaving his mind free to conjure the twenty to twenty-five pages that he was now reliably producing each day that he wasn’t on the road.

Then there arrived the morning in late September, the early fall air aglow with that clarity that makes New York worth living in the entire rest of the year. He was awake early and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and a notepad before him. As he raised the cup for a sip, a possibly interesting idea entered his head and he set the cup down, reached for the pen, and put it to the pad. There was nothing more frustrating than a good idea that vanished before it could be written down. He drew the pen across the page but it left no mark. He shook it a time or two and tried again but with no better result.

“Well, shit,” he murmured.

“Now what’s the problem?” Gretchen responded, entering the kitchen behind him. She bent over and offered a light kiss before reaching for the refrigerator door.

“Oh nothing,” Rick replied. “Stupid pen.” He stood, picked up the pen, and tossed it into the kitchen garbage pail before joining her at the refrigerator. “If you tell me you’ll love me forever, I might make you an omelet,” he said, kissing the back of her neck.

“Rick, Rick, Rick,” she replied, turning to embrace him, “of course I will love you forever. But I have a meeting downtown in half an hour, so I’ll have to take a rain check on the omelet. I’ve barely got time to drop Katie off at the nanny’s.”

Right on cue, a squeal arose from the bedroom and Gretchen ran in response. Moments later the two females in Rick’s life were standing at the front door offering parting kisses and promising to be home in time for lunch. Alone once more in the apartment, Rick, still hanging onto the new idea that had popped into his head over coffee, reached into a utility cup on the kitchen counter, drew out another pen, and sat back down before his notepad. But once more touching the tip of the pen to paper produced nothing, despite Rick’s repeated smacking of the pen on the side of the counter.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, a bit louder now that he was alone. Tossing the second pen into the trash pail, he picked up the coffee cup and walked to his office. Taking a seat at the desk, he hit the wake button on his computer and took another sip while he waited for it to start up. With a blank text editor screen before him, he opted to first document his idea from the kitchen, rather than risk losing it, before diving into the day’s planned pages for the latest novel. Only then a truly odd thing happened; when he began typing on the keyboard, nothing at all appeared on the screen. Rick wasn’t especially technically astute, so the best he could manage was to check the cable between the keyboard and the computer. Everything looked fine, and the only other thing he could come up with was to shut down the program and start it again. When that produced no improvement, he resorted to his very last idea, shutting down the entire computer and booting it up again. But still, nothing he typed on the keyboard appeared on the screen. His next thought was a mildly frantic one—what about the new manuscript?

Rick closed the blank document and opened the main folder where all the files related to his current project were stored, including all his research documents as well as the manuscript itself, now nearly four hundred pages in length. And it was in this moment that the first true sense of panic began to creep in. The project folder was completely empty. With another few minutes of searching through folders, the situation began to seem serious indeed. Every writing file that he had on the computer—all the final manuscripts for every book he’d ever written—were completely missing. The only conclusion was that something horrific had happened with the hard drive on his computer, something which caused Rick to say a silent prayer of thanks for the consistent diligence with which he backed everything up at the end of each work day, both on an external drive and in a large cloud account. It took another ten minutes for Rick to begin coming to the realization that he might actually be in serious trouble. The external drive was empty. His cloud account was empty. That meant the only remaining form of back-up for the new novel was the binder filled with pages that he printed out every evening against the remote possibility of just such a calamity. As he turned in his chair for the bookshelf where the binder was stored, the doorbell rang. Uttering a silent curse, he rose and walked to the front door. Who the hell was here this early in the morning and how had they gotten past the doorman without being rung up first? He turned the doorknob, pulled open the door, and there in the corridor was a face from a long-ago dream.

“Rick! What an absolute thrill to see you once again.”

Luther offered a smile as broad as a smile can be and stepped past Rick into the apartment without having been offered any invitation at all to do so.

“Sorry it’s so early,” he said, “but I have a lot of stops to make today, and I figured you’d be up working anyway. You always were a morning person, right?”

He walked about the apartment, peering into the glass-front bookcase at the collection of Rick’s most prominent awards.

“Hey, congrats on the Pulitzer, buddy! And you nailed it on our first project. You’re a real overachiever. You’ve been a busy guy: five novels, thirty-seven countries, more awards than you have space for … and just look at this place!” Luther spread his arms widely and enthusiastically. To this point Rick had not uttered a sound.

“Oh, and hey, you’re welcome for the extension, by the way.”

“Extension?” Rick managed meekly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Luther said, “your actual contract date was nine days ago. I was never that good with dates, you know. Sometimes that actually kinda bites me in the ass with the boss.”

“So what are you…” Rick started.

“Oh, so, this is your big day, buddy! New gig, change of scenery. You know, today is the first day of the rest of your eternity! I don’t know who came up with that one, but I love it.”

“So this is my…” Rick was having obvious difficulty processing what was happening. He fell onto a bar stool in the kitchen.

“So, let me guess,” Luther said, “you’ve had some problems this morning with your computer?”

“Was that…”

Luther threw up both palms and offered another immense smile. “Guilty as charged, my friend!”

“So you’re expecting me to come with you…or something?”

“Oh hey no, that’s the good news. So we have this new program now where you get to stay right where you are. This works out better for everyone actually, Space is getting a little tight down there.”

“So, nothing changes?” Rick managed, the slightest hint of hope creeping into his voice.

“Oh no, there will be loads of changes,” Luther said. “It is Hell after all. I mean c’mon.”

“Such as…”

“So there’s one there,” Luther gesturing to the front door, which had, in the course of their conversation, become a solid wall. Luther extended his arms outward, snapped both fingers, and every window in the apartment vanished, replaced by more solid walls.

“I mean, seriously, Rick, there’s no section of Hell with a view of Central Park, right?”

“So I can never leave?”

“Good for you,” Luther said. “You always were a quick learner.”

“But what about Gretchen and Katie? How are they supposed to—”

“They’re not supposed to do anything that has to do with you, my friend. That phase of your life is over, I’m afraid. As far as they know, you vanished while they were downtown, never to be heard from again. Oh, but not to worry. They have plenty of money in the bank, so they’ll be fine. I can’t say they’re going to think much of you after this, though. I mean, vanishing without so much as a note. Really, Rick?”

“But they’ll try to come back to this apartment…right here!” Rick stood, growing more animated. “In about three hours.”

“And they’ll find it just like it is now. Well, except that all of your stuff will be gone. Think of this as more of a special accommodation for you, kind of a simulacrum, if you like.”

Rick fell back onto the bar stool once more.

“And so … what. I just sit here for eternity…and write?”

“Oh, Rick, sadly, I’m afraid that’s going to be a problem too. That whole thing this morning with your files, and the pen, and the keyboard—you haven’t figured that out yet, my friend?”

Rick stared blankly back.

“C’mon, Rick, it’s Hell. You know how this works. Oh all that Dante crap about levels and fire and brimstone and demons. That’s not what you were thinking is it? That’s just marketing stuff. No, we’re way more imaginative than that these days. These days Hell is uniquely tailored to the needs of each member. I don’t know—maybe ‘member’ isn’t the best word, but you get the idea. We put a lot of thought into how each person is going to spend their hereafter. So what is it that Rick likes to do best? Write stories! So here’s how this is going to work. For the rest of your—well, forever actually—you’re going to stay here in your nice apartment, and you’re going to have the most awesome ideas for new novels and stories—bestsellers, instant classics. But…”

“But?” Rick replied, his voice fainter still.

“But you’ll never be able to write any of them down. No writing, no typing, no nothing. Is that awesome!? It’s irony, man. Thought it up myself.” Luther smiled self-contentedly.

“And what about food and, and, other … stuff?”

“Oh, not to worry, my friend. That’s all gone. We wanted to make sure you have maximum time to enjoy your new … arrangement. No food, no bathroom breaks, no sleep even. Twenty-four seven coming up with ideas you can’t do anything with.”

“I may as well just kill myself,” Rick said quietly.

“Well, that’s not going to be a problem, Rick. You’re immortal now, you see. No windows to jump out of, no knives, no pills.”

“And that’s it,” Rick said. “I just sit here until I go mad. Is that the idea?”

Without warning Rick rose from the bar stool and lunged at Luther. But it was to no effect, for he passed right through as though Luther wasn’t there.

“No need for violence, Rick. Deal’s a deal, after all, right? And look, at least you’re with your stuff. Well, most of it.” He gestured toward the bookcase and all of the medals and certificates inside vanished.”

“That’s the other neat little touch we dreamed up just for you. We’ve taken the liberty of eliminating your entire legacy. Yeah, it was a little tricky—lot of logistical work—but we’ve eliminated every copy of every book you ever wrote, every award you ever won, the works. No one—not even your family—will ever remember that you did anything with your life other than leave your wife and daughter inexplicably.”

Rick lay on the floor where he had fallen. He stared back helplessly at Luther but made no move to rise.

“Well, hey, that’s pretty much it. Just wanted to make sure you knew what you’re dealing with here. You be well … and keep those ideas coming, eh?!”

As Rick watched helplessly, Luther stepped to where the front door had previously been—a space now occupied by solid wall—and stepped through like it wasn’t even there.

MacDonald’s statement is neither rhetorical nor a mere exercise in eschatological musing, though the pair, fast friends since their college days, now nearly sixty years past, spend no shortage of time engaging in precisely this sort of dialog. Indeed, questions surrounding death—both the events leading to it and those that might follow afterward—have been much on the minds of both men, each now well into his ninth decade.

“I’m simply suggesting,” Henderson says, leaning forward to encourage the fire with a poker, “that if we lived forever we’d take the whole thing for granted and thus render it meaningless.”

“Or that our decisions concerning how to go about living that life would no longer matter,” MacDonald replies. “After all, if you know you’re going to live forever, you can do whatever you like. Where are the consequences of your poor decisions?”

“Well now you’ve gone and eviscerated the entire thesis,” Henderson says. “It may well be that it’s precisely the opposite. If you and I, mere mortals that we are, choose to make poor decisions, we will lead a miserable life, but one that lasts only a few decades. If, though, you are immortal and a bad decision maker, you may well create for yourself an eternity of hopelessness and poverty. Hell, mess up badly enough and perhaps you could get yourself thrown into prison for all eternity. Now wouldn’t that be an ironic thing.”

“Wrong again, my friend. As an immortal you have the benefit of limitless time to recognize the error of your ways and take steps to set things right.”

Henderson ponders this rejoinder, then peers at his near-empty drink. He rises and walks to the bar against the far wall. Dropping fresh ice cubes into his glass, he looks back in MacDonald’s direction. “Seems like the sort of thing that’d eventually drive a man mad.”

“What? Immortality? People have dreamt of it since the dawn of time. Fountain of youth. Ponce de Leon. All that falderal.”

“But think of it,” Henderson replies, retaking his seat. “Never mind that you’d have to endure the awfulness of watching your loved ones wither and die while you linger relentlessly on. You’d be in a perpetual state of pursuing a better life than the one you have. And no sooner would you believe you had it nailed, when along would come someone else whose life seemed somehow more desirable than your own, and off you’d go in pursuit of that. There’d be no end to it.”

“So, best that we only get the one shot at it then. Is that it?”

“I wouldn’t say the idea of immortality’s an entirely unattractive one. Only that it’s certainly not all upside.”

“You know,” MacDonald says, taking another sip, “a depressing thought occurs to me. If there is an afterlife, it will be a terrible thing indeed if you have to spend it in the physical shape you’re in at the moment of your demise. If it turns out Heaven is nothing more than a big nursing home in the sky, I’m not so sure folks’d be all that keen on the idea.”

“As far as I am aware, none of the various holy books address that particular nuance of eternity, though I confess it is a sobering thought. Still, the Bible does talk of the torment of Hell as being about heat and thirst and all sorts of physical unpleasantness. Seems to me that in order for that to be the case, we’d need to be there in corporeal form. After all, you can’t physically torture an ephemeral spirit. And surely if that is the case, then Heaven must, as well, be the sort of place where one enjoys the pleasures of the flesh, wouldn’t you think?”

“Except that we’re told that it’s precisely those pleasures of the flesh that’ll get you turned away at the pearly gates. I tell you, the whole story just reeks of inconsistency. Take avarice for example. The good book talks of streets paved with gold as though that should be a compelling argument for wanting to spend eternity there. But surely the attraction of gold is reserved for only those possessed of great avarice, not exactly the sort you’d expect to receive an invitation. I gave the whole ridiculous thing up years ago. Couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

Henderson considers this point for a moment before waving his hand dismissively. “We are ruminating on matters that are well above our theological pay grade.”

McDonald grunts in grudging agreement, raises the glass to his lips, replaces it on the end table.

“Tell me something,” Henderson says after a lengthy pause. “How long would you estimate we have known each other?”

“No estimate required, my friend. I recall it as though it were yesterday. We met in third-period physics class when we were sophomores at Columbia. I know because you were sitting behind me during Professor Billings’ midterm, shamelessly attempting to copy off my exam paper.”

“Outrageous slander!” Henderson says with mock anger. “I had already completed my exam and was only looking over your shoulder to determine what was taking you so long.”

“Now there’s a bit of revisionist history,” McDonald replies. “Remind me again which of us it was who managed an A- in that class and which only passed by the skin of his proverbial teeth.”

“I wonder if in your dotage you have begun to exaggerate your level of academic achievement. Pray tell, if you were such a scholar in physics why did you end up going to law school?”

“My advisor assured me that among my many talents was a gift for argument.”

“That and the fact that a JD could be achieved in three years whereas a physics Ph.D. would have taken you more like seven or eight.”

“Or four in your case.”

“Yes, well, philosophy is an abstract field, so unlike, say, physics or chemistry, in which propositions must be irrefutably tested and proven, in my case all that was required was copious pontification.”

“A skill at which you have few rivals, I dare say.”

“So we have known each other for a very long time. On that much we agree.”

“More than half a century, much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Well then, Counselor, I propose a challenge for you.”

“You know, Professor, that I am always up for a worthy contest.”

“It will,” Henderson says, “require that you exhibit both candor and equanimity.”

“I accept the terms of your proposal and await your challenge.”

“Know also, my friend, that it may not be without a measure of psychological pain.”

“Oh, for the love of God, man, get on with it. Did you never learn that once you’ve made the sale you should stop selling?”

“Actually, I’d never heard that pithy bit of folklore, but it sounds wise enough.”

MacDonald does not offer a rejoinder, but simply sits, glass in hand, awaiting whatever Henderson is about to proffer.

“Well,” Henderson says, removing his glasses and pointing a stem assertively toward his friend, “the wager is that—”

“Wait, wait,” interrupts MacDonald. “No one said anything about a wager. If that’s what you’re on about, then what shall be the terms of the wager?”

“Ah, fair point, and a rare oversight on my part,” says Henderson. “Hmm, what indeed? A bottle of the loser’s finest bourbon to the winner!”

“Now there’s a fine joke!” says MacDonald, “for there you sit already drinking my finest bourbon. Where’s the downside for you in such a transaction?”

“All right, all right. How about this then? Loser prepares dinner for the winner.”

“Now those are terms I can live with,” says MacDonald. “And may I request in advance your stunning pasta carbonara.”

“You are a presumptuous fellow indeed,” says Henderson. “Now shall we get on with it, or shall we spend the rest of the evening negotiating terms?”

MacDonald nods silently.

“All right,” says Henderson. “My challenge is a simple one. Given the half-century or so that we have known each other, it is fair to surmise that we know nearly everything there is to know about one another. Therefore, the test is to come up with some morsel about your life that I am not aware of, and vice versa for myself. Needless to say, this is an honor system sort of affair, since only you can judge whether or not you were aware of whatever I put forth, and I trust you will acknowledge this in a forthright manner. And, of course, you can trust me to do the same.”

“There remains only the matter of who goes first,” says McDonald.

“Simple enough,” replies Henderson. “Since it’s my challenge, I concede the opening gambit to my worthy opponent.”

“Spoken like a gentleman, and I accept your generous offer,” says McDonald. “So, you say, it is up to me to reveal something about my life—my history—of which you are unaware.”

Both friends sit silently for a long moment, each contemplating the other. At last, McDonald leans forward, sips from his bourbon glass, and speaks.

“I applied to every Ivy League university and was turned down by all but Harvard.”

“Oh, good God, man,” Henderson says, half laughing. “You’ll need to do a better job than that if you’re to avoid cooking my supper. You’ve told me that story at least a dozen times, right down to the details about the date the rejection letters arrived in your mailbox. January seventeenth, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, in case you doubt the veracity of my answer. And I’ll bet you still have all of the letters stashed away in your desk someplace.”

“Fair enough,” McDonald replies. “Perhaps my memory isn’t what it once was after all. The question is, can you do better?”

“I imagine I can, only let’s keep it simple for the moment, lest I crush your spirit too quickly.” Henderson pauses a moment, grins at McDonald. “All right, it’s true, I was copying answers from your exam in that first physics class. I was always a wretch at science. Still am, in fact.”

“Well, it’s gentlemanly of you to concede the point after all these years, but surely that doesn’t qualify as any great revelation. You claimed to be pondering why I was taking so long on my exam, yet each time you glanced over my shoulder, you returned to writing feverishly in your own booklet. That’s what we attorneys would regard as prima facie evidence.”

“Luckily for me, the statute of limitations has long since expired on my academic malfeasance,” Henderson adds, a hopeful note in his voice.

“Ah, that’s where you’re mistaken, my friend,” MacDonald replies. “In fact, I am duty bound by my professional oath and the university’s honor code to report your admission of malfeasance to the board of trustees and you may expect to have your diploma revoked in due course.”

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, they’d better hurry up and get on with it. I don’t expect to be around all that much longer.”

“For God’s sake, Robert. You certainly are in a funk today. First, all that business about immortality, and now you talk of shuffling off this mortal coil as though it were some imminent occurrence.”

“Oh sorry, you’re right,” Henderson says, “I’m not trying to be maudlin or anything. It’s just, well, ever since Jason announced his retirement last week, I can’t help but reflect. Don’t get me wrong—he’s a wonderful son, best a father could ask for. But when our children are old enough to retire, what on earth does that make us?”

“What it makes us is ancient as dirt, my friend. There’s no denying it. But surely surviving to see your children live full lives beats the alternative.”

“Oh, no question. I’d much prefer to sit here enjoying your fire and drinking your bourbon over decomposing in a box someplace.” Henderson rises and steps toward the mantel above the fireplace. He turns and raises a hand toward MacDonald as though about to make a point. But he only sighs and lowers his hand without saying anything further.

“You know,” MacDonald says, taking a quick sip and adjusting his position in his chair, “I think I’m beginning to understand your problem.”

“Oh God, you’re not going to start getting Freudian on me again, are you?”

“Heavens no,” MacDonald replies. He rises and steps to the bar once more. Ice tinkles in his glass. “Here’s the thing. I’ve always regarded myself as a man of science and reason. A lifelong attorney whose measure of success can be succinctly boiled down to banalities like courtroom victories and fees billed. You, on the other hand, are a philosopher, a man of deep thought, steeped in the collective wisdom of the ages. I wonder if you don’t lack an objective measurement scheme for your own life. Oh sure, you’re tenured, department chairman, and all that. By any objective measure, your life has been a rewarding and worthwhile one. And yet …”

“And yet what?” Henderson says, lifting an inquisitive palm.

“I wonder if perhaps you’ve immersed yourself in so many different philosophical systems—Greeks, Romans, Asians, Europeans—that you’ve never thought to construct a belief system that is well and truly your own. Oh, God knows you’ve published a mountain of papers and books espousing ideas, debating this or that school of thought, but what is it you actually believe, Robert? What are your guiding principles?”

“Well one,” Henderson begins, smiling, “would have to be maximizing the quantity of your liquor that I consume while preserving my own cache.”

“And a laudable goal it is,” MacDonald replies, “easily quantifiable at that. But surely something more lofty than bourbon has governed your life to this point.”

“Seriously?” Henderson says, feigning a grim look.

“Seriously,” MacDonald replies. Henderson steps away from the fireplace and retakes his seat.

“The late great Thomas Aquinas said in his Summa Theologica ‘this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided.’ I believe that was Aquinas’s pithy way of saying ‘don’t be an asshole.’ That pretty much sums it all up for me.” That’s also, by the way, why I gave up religion. I found that I didn’t need deities or holy books in my life in order to know that I shouldn’t be an asshole to my fellow man.”

“Would that all of humankind could come to that stark realization,” MacDonald says. “Which, come to think of it, is a wonderful segue to my revealing something that’s sure to win me a dinner … It is still my turn, if I’m not mistaken.”

Henderson nods and gestures his agreement.

“Suppose I were to tell you that I dated Gwen during freshman year—for about a month as I recall.”

“Oh, good Lord, man,” Henderson says, “do you imagine I could remain married to the woman for sixty-four years and not know that? You must think I’ve gone soft already.”

“So she told you then.”

“Of course she told me, on our first date for God’s sake. ‘How on earth’ she said … wait, let me be sure I recall this right … ‘How on earth could anyone go out with a physics major?’ she said. ‘They’re so damned cold and analytical.’”

“Oh, cold and analytical, is it?” MacDonald replies. “Not a torrid and flamboyant philosophy major.”

“And there’s a good chance she was being overly kind. Remember, she knew by junior year that we were friends, so naturally she wouldn’t have wanted to offend.”

“Cold and analytical indeed,” Macdonald mutters beneath his breath. He takes a sip from his bourbon. “Why, I have half a mind to march my cold analytical ass right down to the club and have a word with your better half.”

“By all means,” Henderson says with a laugh. “She’ll be happy to corroborate my account. Oh, and while you’re out, don’t forget to stop off at the grocery store and pick up whatever you’ll need to prepare my carbonara tomorrow evening. Be sure to get a good fresh pecorino romano … and not that pre-grated business. I prefer it freshly grated.”

MacDonald rises from his seat, walks once more to the fireplace where he lifts the poker and rearranges the logs unnecessarily. He turns and points the poker in Henderson’s direction in mock threat.

“Pecorino it is,” he says, replacing the poker. He steps toward the bar, collecting Henderson’s empty glass en route. As he drops fresh ice cubes into both glasses, a stiff wind outside rattles the window. A knot pops in the fireplace.

1955 was barely half over and already it had been a year of auspicious beginnings and hopeful changes. President Eisenhower had, in February, sent the first handful of advisors to an obscure country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam, assuring Americans that it was strictly a training assignment and that the men would be home before year’s end. In March a dashing young guy with jet-black hair and a pretty good singing voice had made his first television appearance—guy named Elvis something or other. And up in Illinois an ambitious and entrepreneurial businessman named Ray Kroc had opened a little hamburger stand known as McDonald’s, bragging that he was offering something new he called “fast food,” like anybody would want that.

Russell Freeley was vaguely aware of the Vietnam thing, though, like nearly all of America, he had no idea where it was. He recalled having heard something about it on the evening news while eating supper with his wife and eight-year-old son one night a few months back. The velvety-voiced singer and the fast new hamburger stand were developments he would have become aware of had he managed to still be around in a few years time. But his primary focus today—two of them actually—was much closer to home: his long-awaited promotion at work and the fact that today, in about four hours time, there was going to be a total solar eclipse, the first in decades and almost totally viewable right here in southern New England. In honor of the promotion, and because Russell was a pretty serious astronomy hobbyist, he had treated himself to a day off from work. Edgar was off school for the summer and Susan was in the kitchen engrossed in packing up for the big family outing. What his son and wife did not know was that there was one additional adventurous aspect to the trip that he had yet to reveal.

“Lift it real careful,” Russell said, guiding Edgar in helping to move the small tripod-mounted telescope from the front office of the house, out the front door, and toward the opened back hatch of the family station wagon. “Now turn it and slide it in across the blanket.” Russell was perfectly capable of moving the telescope by himself, but he took every opportunity to engage his son in his hobby, hoping, like so many parents, to pass on his interests to the next generation.

“Eddie!” came a call from inside the house.

“Thanks,” Russell said with a pat on his son’s shoulder, “better hop to and see what your mom wants.”

“Egg salad, baloney, or PBJ?” Susan Freeley asked as her son came running into the kitchen.

“Baloney,” he replied without hesitation, “with cheese!” He turned to head back outside, but was stopped by his mother’s voice once more, a bit more stern.

“With cheese what?”

“Baloney with cheese, please,” he replied sheepishly.

“Thank you, Eddie. Now you can go back and help your dad.”

Forty-five minutes later, the sandwiches all made, the car packed with telescope, blankets, three sets of cardboard eclipse viewing glasses, and one small duffel bag that Russell had packed himself and made sure to close tightly before loading it into the back, the three were in the car and backing out of the driveway.

“Are we going to the park?” Eddie piped up from the back seat.

“Oh no, sir, we are not going to the park,” Russell replied. “We are going someplace special indeed, and it will take us about half an hour to get there, so get comfy.”

Susan turned and offered an uncertain look. “Why so far? Wouldn’t the eclipse look pretty much the same wherever we are?”

“Yes it would, but there is one more little surprise about this trip that I have not yet shared with you.”

Susan made a face like she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about surprises, but said nothing in reply.

“Do we get a hint what it is?” Eddie said.

“No easy hints,” Russell replied, “but tell you what. You can ask me whatever yes or no questions you want about it, and I will answer truthfully.”

Which they did for the next thirty-five minutes, with Eddie only managing to discern that they were headed for some sort of outdoor adventure that, in fact, had nothing to do with the eclipse, but which involved some form of exploration. Once off the main road, getting to the final destination required driving a mile or so down a dirt road, so seldom used that the center strip was grown up with weeds that brushed against the bottom of the car as they slowly made their way.

“Good Heavens, Russell, where on earth are you taking us?” were the only words Susan had uttered in the last fifteen minutes of the trip. Eddie, though, was utterly unconcerned with the remoteness of their destination and exuded enthusiasm for whatever awaited.

It was just past noon when the car finally drew to a stop in a clearing adjacent to an immense meadow. Along one side of the meadow stood a large formation of rock that extended as far as they could see and which defined the beginning of a row of small hills to the west. With the car’s engine off and faintly ticking as it began to cool, the Freeley family flung open the doors of the station wagon, climbed out, and stretched their legs.

“Should we unpack the telescope?” Eddie asked enthusiastically.

“Oh not yet,” Russell replied. “The eclipse isn’t for another couple of hours. And besides, we have our other little adventure to attend to first.”

Both mother and son looked out across the vast open field, its grass knee-high and waving gracefully in the light breeze. They regarded the adjacent rock formation to their right with quizzical expressions. Nothing they could see looked too terribly adventurous. Russell opened the back door of the wagon and lifted out the duffel bag.

“We’re going to need a little equipment for this adventure and I have come prepared.”

More curious looks from Susan and barely contained excitement from Eddie as Russell led them across the meadow and toward the edge of the rock formation.

“So, a couple of guys from the office stumbled on this last month and I’ve been dying to check it out ever since. Just need to get my bearings.” He paused for a second, tuned back to glance at the now distant car, then back toward the rocks. “Just to the right of the biggest oak tree …” He took off again with renewed conviction, and his wife and son followed, still with no idea what was actually happening.

Fifteen minutes later they were at the base of a sprawling oak tree, its leaves the tender green of early summer. Five more minutes and they were standing at the base of the rock formation, gazing up at an imposing collection of granite slabs and boulders, stacked with wild abandon one atop another.

“Russell,” Susan said uncertainly, “please do not tell me you expect us to climb this thing.”

“Oh heavens no,” he replied, “nothing so daring as that.” He led them a few steps farther forward until they were between two large boulders and facing a thin vertical opening. “We are going under it.” Russell thrust out his right hand dramatically in the direction of the dark narrow gap and smiled a broad smile. “Who even knew there were caves in Connecticut, right?”

“But,” he said, dropping the duffel bag to the ground and kneeling to unzip it, “safety first.” He lifted out three thin plastic helmets, a length of rope, and a large kerosene lantern. “I’ve not been inside yet, but my friends tell me it’s pretty flat, so no real climbing required. He rose, but then remembered one last detail and knelt again. Reaching inside he felt around in one end of the bag and finally extracted a large piece of chalk. “We don’t want to get lost, right?” he said, thrusting the piece into his pocket.

“Gosh,” Eddie said, struggling to strap on his helmet, “what do you think’s in there, Dad?”

Russell reached under his son’s neck and fastened the awkward fitting. “That, my boy, is precisely what we have come to find out! And as far as I know, we are the very first Freeleys ever to set foot in a cave.”

Susan was standing with her helmet still in her hand and she was not conveying nearly the same level of enthusiasm as Eddie or his father. “I don’t know, dear. Do you think it’s safe?”

“We’ll be fine, Susan. And we’re not going to go very far inside—no Tom Sawyer adventures for us. Just a quick look around and then we’ll come back, have lunch, and watch the sun disappear.” He reached out and took the helmet in his hand, placing it gently on his wife’s head. “Just in case there are any low spots—wouldn’t want to knock your head.”

“Oops,” Russell said, bending once more to the duffel bag, “almost forgot the most important thing.” He pulled out a small camera, gesturing for Susan and Eddie to move so that they were standing together in front of the cave entrance. He gestured them closer, then took a few quick shots. Handing the camera to Susan, he took her place next to Eddie. Throwing his arm around his son and smiling broadly, she snapped a few more photos and handed the camera back. Russell drew the lanyard around his neck. “I suppose we can leave the bag here,” he said, “no one around for miles.”

Lifting the lantern, he withdrew a matchbox from his pocket, struck one, and got the wick lit. “All right, campers. Let’s see what there is to see.”

The entrance was initially quite narrow but plenty high. Each of them—even Eddie—had to turn at least slightly sideways to fit through. Once inside, the cave widened out enough for them to walk comfortably, though the floor was uneven and they took care not to twist an ankle. With just the one lantern, Russell took the lead and Susan and Eddie followed close behind.

“Watch your step,” Russell said, glancing back over his shoulder. “My friends said they spent a couple hours in here and it goes on forever.” He turned and looked forward once more. The light from the lantern disappeared thirty or so feet in front of them and beyond that only blackness. “Eddie, is this cool or what?” His words and their footfalls echoed from off the stone walls.

The light from the wick was extremely white and it cast crisp shadows on the cave walls and ceiling. The air was a good deal cooler than outside and quite damp. And there was a smell, hard to pin down, but definitely the smell of something—something organic and possibly very very old. Who knew what sorts of animals had spent time in here? But all they saw was stone and their own jerky shadows as they made their way. It was difficult to sense direction with the floor, walls, and ceiling all of the same irregular granite, but after fifty yards or so, they began to get the sense that their path was bending slightly downward and to the left. But even that might have been an illusion with no real frame of reference.

The first branch came after another twenty yards or so. The ceiling dipped low enough now so that they were forced to get down on hands and knees for a few feet before standing once more. Back on their feet, there were presented with two openings—a choice, left or right. In the far distance they could hear for the first time what was almost certainly the sound of moving water.

“Which way, sport?” Russell said, his voice echoing ominously off the stone walls. The boy thought for a moment and pointed to his left. Russell paused, drew the chalk from his pocket and drew an arrow on the wall pointing in the direction they had come. The three then squeezed through another narrow passage that opened up into a space large enough to almost qualify as a room.

“I think we need a couple of action shots,” Russell declared, his voice reverberating off the high ceiling. He pulled from his jacket pocket a square flashcube and inserted it into the top of the camera. “Would you do the first honors, love?” holding the camera in Susan’s direction. They each took a photo of the other two, and then proceeded on with their exploration. There was still the distant sound of running water, but the three talked hardly at all, instead taking in the strange rock formations and occasional bits of wildlife—an insect here, a salamander there—that inhabited this normally lightless environment, scurrying away at the lantern’s brilliance. They had been walking for perhaps twenty-five minutes, in what felt like the same gradually downward and leftward direction, when they heard the first odd and unexpected sound. Except it wasn’t really a sound, was it? It might have even been just a variation on the rushing water they’d been hearing since shortly after entering, like the sound something might make if it were walking through the moving water.

Russell heard it; at least he thought he did. But he wasn’t sure if the others did and he saw no merit in bringing it to the attention of the others, particularly as Susan had demonstrated nothing but anxiety since they’d entered the cave. He glanced down at his watch—an hour and a half left before the start of the eclipse.

“We’d probably ought to head back, huh?” he said. “That’s enough exploring for one day. We still need to set up the telescope and get the filters put on.”

And then the noise—the one that sounded like something moving through water—came again, noticeably louder, noticeably enough so there was no question they all heard it. Susan glanced at Russell and offered a slight tilt of the head, but no one said anything. He stepped between the two of them and began the trek back the way they had come. Getting to this farthest point in their trek had involved six branches along the way and Russell had marked each clearly with the chalk from his pocket. It was a virtually foolproof system for remembering your way back, a system with only a single flaw. Light was required in order to see the marks on the walls, a flaw that occurred to Russell only in the seconds immediately after he carelessly set his foot into a crack in the floor, twisted his ankle, and fell, cursing loudly and dashing the lantern against the floor, extinguishing it. To further exacerbate Russell’s pain and frustration, in clutching at the ground to right himself in the darkness, he placed his hand squarely onto a fragment of the lantern’s broken glass, which was both sharp and still blisteringly hot. This mistake elicited another round of profanity, in response to which Eddie said simply, “Dad, can you turn the light back on? It’s kinda scary.”

“Eddie,” he said, finally righting himself, carefully so as to avoid striking his head, “hold on one second buddy. I need to figure out what’s what here.”

“Russell, are you okay?” Susan said, her voice now with a noticeable quiver to it.

He did not respond for a moment, fumbling for a moment in his pants pocket for the box of matches.

“Russell …” she said once more.

More rustling sounds, then a scratch, and the brilliant bloom of a match flame that settled into a dull orange glow. It lasted only ten or so seconds, but the faint illumination was long enough and bright enough for Susan to see the blood covering much of her husband’s hand, blood that illuminated black in the glow of the match.

“Ow … shit!” he said as the burning match reached his fingertips and he dropped it to the floor where it sputtered and went out.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Look, guys, here’s what we need to do. I’m gonna light another match and we all need to look around best we can and find the bottom piece of the lantern. It’s painted red and it’s got the kerosene tank and the wick. We need that. If you see it, say so, and get to it before the match goes out. Ready?”

Another long scratching sound, another bright flare, and all three quickly searched the cave floor as best they could in the faint glow.

“Dad!” Eddie shouted as the match flame neared Russell’s fingers once more. “Over there, on your left … maybe four feet.” Russell turned just as his fingertips got another burn from another extinguishing match, and in that instant the boy was right. There was a flash of red paint, the wick, and also shards of what remained of the glass housing around the perimeter of the fuel case.

“Good eyes, son,” Russell said, in darkness once more. The sense of relief in his voice was palpable. “Okay, hold on for a sec. I’m gonna get myself closer before I light another match.” Before stepping carefully in what he believed was the right direction from his brief glimpse, Russell realized he ought to determine what their match situation was and so he felt carefully around in the small box, taking care not to drop any. About half a box. That was a good thing—a good thing if all they had to do was get the lantern wick burning again, and if the fuel can was intact, and if the wick burned correctly without the benefit of the glass housing, which was not at all how it had been designed to work. If it turned out the wick wouldn’t burn and they needed to use matches to navigate a half-hour walk back out of the cave, half a box was not comforting at all. Not at all.

As it happened, Russell’s blind movement toward the lantern base was well calculated, particularly given the single fleeting second that he had laid eyes upon it. He had descended to hands and knees and crawled in what he supposed was the right direction, feeling ahead with outstretched hands. The happiest sound he had heard since his initial fall was the clank of the small steel can against the stone floor as his hand brushed against it.

“Okay,” he said, “but hold on a second longer. I need to clear away the broken glass if I can, so I don’t tear my hand up any more than it already is.”

He felt around on the cave floor and located a small stone, which he used to poke around the edge of the can, dislodging what remained of the shattered glass housing. He then carefully ran his fingers around all of the surfaces of the can and was relieved to find no cracks or openings. From the weight of the can and the sloshing of the liquid, he figured there was still at least two thirds of the fuel remaining inside. The only remaining question was whether the wick would function in the open air.

“Okay,” he said, “one second more. I’m gonna have a go at lighting this thing. I’m guessing it won’t be as bright as the lantern, but it should beat hell out of matches. Which it did, but not by much as it happened. With the scratch of another match, the wick took immediately. But even turned up all the way, the glow was only a fraction of what the lantern had put out when it was intact. The handle had gone when the glass housing had broken, so there was no way to handle the makeshift lantern now except by holding onto the bottom of the can. Russell did just this and aimed the low flame at his son and wife, neither of whom had said a thing during the relighting process.

“Well,” Russell said, “it’s not the most elegant thing in the world, but I reckon it’ll get us home. Shall we?” And then came that noise once more, longer this time and louder than before. That sound that wasn’t even an especially frightening one, just oddly out of context in the depths of a dark cave. It lasted for maybe five seconds, but it was curiously difficult to get a sense of the direction, what with all the sound reverberation. And then silence once more, or nearly so—just the sound of three pairs of feet making their slow uncertain way out by the faint light of a flickering lantern wick. Having correctly navigated their way back past the last of the branch points, but only with a good deal of searching for Russell’s chalk mark by the faint light of the wick, they were in a section of the cave with a sufficiently high ceiling that the light did not reach the top. Susan was bringing up the rear, so as to ensconce the boy safely between his parents, and she did not at first react to the dripping of something onto her shoulder and then hair, something more viscous than water, something that finally caused her to reach a hand into her hair. With no prior experience in caves, Susan had no basis for understanding what sorts of substances might reasonably come to be on an explorer. And in that moment, as she was touching with her fingertips the strange substance in her hair, the strange liquid movement sound came once more, so loud now that it seemed to be directly on them, or, more accurately, above them. Which is, in fact, where it was, as Susan discovered when a single strong arm, or appendage of some sort, grasped her upraised hand from above and lifted her shrieking from the cave floor and toward the ceiling with a speed so complete that by the time Russell and Eddie heard the sound and turned, there was simply nothing—nothing but a new sound, a much more frightening sound, one of faint muffled cries mixed with a sound like twigs snapping. The two men were in too advanced a state of shock to even cry out in response to what had happened. They simply stood gazing upward into the blackness of the cave ceiling, Eddie standing, Russell on his knees behind, holding his hands over the boy’s ears. They did finally cry out though, when small bits of flesh and bone began to fall from the ceiling onto the cave floor. Eddie didn’t seem to understand, but Russell did and he gripped the boy’s hand as tightly as he knew how and turned to race away and toward the cave entrance, still more than twenty minutes away under the best of conditions.

Russell tried his best to run, but it was a dicey affair with his twisted ankle, needing to hang carefully onto the barely burning lantern base, and guide the boy all simultaneously. They made it far enough ahead so that the horrific sounds were now nearly faded into the distance. And they might just have made it out, except that at the next branch, Russell struggled to find his chalk mark in the faint light of the lantern wick. And as he and the boy searched, there came again that viscous liquid sound, eventually seeming to approach so close that the men gave up on the chalk and simply made a choice of which branch to take. And they chose wrong.

After perhaps five minutes of intermittent running, stumbling, and stopping to catch their breath, Russell realized they had erred when the tunnel they were in came to an abrupt dead end.

“Aw Jesus, Eddie,” he said, “looks like I messed up. We gotta go back.” And as they turned to retrace their steps, once more the liquid sound, faint, but slowly gaining in intensity and frequency. Russell stopped and knelt before the boy.

“Eddie, I need you to listen to me and listen very carefully. That branch back there, where we went the wrong way, if anything happens to me, you take this tank and the box of matches,” he slid the matchbox into Eddie’s pants pocket, “and you run like you’ve never run before. You find the chalk marks, and you get out.”

The boy looked back at his father in terror and confusion. “But aren’t we going back to get mom?” he asked. Russell stood and simply tugged on the boy’s hand, leading him out. Except this time they were moving toward the liquid sound rather than away. And as it drew closer, Russell finally realized why it had sounded so familiar that first time they’d heard it as a distant hiss nearly an hour earlier. It recalled a memory from his childhood, a childhood spent living in a small house on a mountainside where occasional heavy rains would cause mudslides to break loose and carry tons of mud and debris down the slope in a slow viscous flow. And while Russell’s childhood home had never been directly affected by these occasional mudslides, he had stood near them often enough, watching as tons of sludge and mud had crept along, moving inexorably over rocks and around trees, stopping for nothing and no one. And that was the sound in the cave, on a smaller scale but the same sound. Exactly the same.

They saw it from no more than fifteen feet away, attached partially to the cave ceiling and partially to one wall. The light from the wick was so poor that there was no way to be certain what they were looking at. But it was immense, the size of a small automobile, and it was all arms, too many to count, but all attached to a large central body of some sort, too nondescript to make out. All Russell could think, as he stared in horror, was that it looked for all the world like the biggest octopus he’d ever seen. At the moment, the thing was not advancing. It was simply hanging from the cave ceiling, the main body pulsing as though catching its breath, just as he and his son were doing. At least three of the immense legs dangled from the ceiling, each the diameter of his thigh where it met the body, tapering to a tip that appeared to split into multiple fingerlike appendages.

And then, in the flickering orange light of the lantern wick, he saw the thing that made his final moments on earth moments of complete insanity. He saw the arm, cleanly severed at the elbow, still clutched in one of the thing’s tentacles, the arm and the dainty white-skinned hand, and in the glint of the flame the reflection of a gold wedding ring.

“Eddie,” he said, turning to the boy with wild eyes, pressing the lantern base into his son’s terrified hands and draping the camera around his sweating neck. “Remember what I told you. When you see your opening, you run right past, and you do not look back, just keep running. And when you get outside, you find somebody and you tell them what happened. Do you understand me? No one else must come down here. Not ever.”

The boy nodded faintly, his eyes wide.

“You need to come right behind me. Then you run past and you stay as low as you can.”

Then, without a moment’s further thought, Russell Freeley turned, screamed as loudly and defiantly as he had ever screamed in his life, his cries echoing from the cave walls, and he ran with every once of strength and speed he had, leaped, and threw himself into the body of the thing on the ceiling. He had no weapon but his body and his determination and his love of his son and wife, and those would never be enough, except maybe to provide enough of a distraction for the boy to get past. And with his last clear second of sight, he saw the boy make it, at least initially. Eddie darted beneath the thing and had very nearly made it past when one of the great arms—one of the several that wasn’t engaged in dismembering Russell limb from limb—lashed out at the boy, gripping his arm for a second, but then losing that grip in its frenzy over the father. And Eddie ran. He ran so fast that at one point he blew the flame out on the wick and was forced to stop and relight it from the matchbox. He made it back to the branch where the two had taken their fatally wrong turn. And by taking care to find all the chalk marks, and by remembering that the way out was uphill and turning mostly to the right, Eddie Freeley twenty-five minutes later emerged from the cave and into the midst of an unexpectedly dark midafternoon sky, the very peak of the 1955 solar eclipse. The boy stopped at the cave entrance for a moment and looked upward to the black disc overhead and its brilliant corona ring. Then he returned his gaze to the ground and walked away as the sky began to brighten once more.

Many hours later, eight-year-old Edgar Freeley would be discovered walking slowly, aimlessly along the road that led from Benton to Wellington. The state police trooper pulled over at the sight of the boy by himself, the hour nearing sundown. Eddie’s clothes were dirty and torn in places and he had a camera around his neck and a small red can in his hand that looked as though it had come from a camping lantern. He also had what appeared to be a nasty large burn mark on his left arm above the elbow.

“Son, what are you doing way out here all by yourself?” the trooper said, standing before the boy. “Do your folks know where you are?”

But Eddie only stared back at the man in his smartly creased tan uniform and wide-brimmed hat. Eddie did not look away. And he did not say a word in response to the officer’s questions.

“I’m happy to give you a lift to wherever you live, son,” the trooper tried once more to elicit a response.

Once more Eddie said nothing, made no expression, no attempt to turn away or run. And so the trooper opened the passenger door of his cruiser and placed the young boy inside, uncertain what to do with him. For now the best he could manage was take him to the state police barracks and leave it to one of the administrators there to try to locate his parents or relatives. All the way to the barracks seventeen miles away, the trooper tried to engage Eddie in conversation, but the boy never said so much as one word, nor made a sound of any kind. In fact, Eddie Freeley would never utter another word for the entire seventy-four years that remained of his life.

March 18, 1963

“Reverend, you picked quite a day to be out here trying to do that all by yourself.”

Cyrus was so engrossed in what he was doing that the sound of the car coming up the long driveway, the press of tires on gravel muted by the first leavings of the snowstorm, had barely registered on his senses. He was standing atop an extension ladder in front of the chapel door, doing his best to maintain balance while holding above his head the eight-foot-long board that was about to become the chapel’s nameplate. The weather to which the approaching visitor had alluded was most decidedly not helping Cyrus in his efforts. A mid-March snowstorm had been forecast to begin today and was expected to dump as much as ten inches by the time it abated tomorrow evening. It was now approaching noon and the slate sky had begun unloading right on schedule, with already a half inch on the ground and the flakes getting noticeably bigger with each passing hour. But for Cyrus, there simply was no choice. Snow or no snow, the chapel’s inaugural service was scheduled for this coming Sunday—just six days away—and he was determined that there would be a name on the chapel before folks arrived, regardless of whether the assembly comprised two or two hundred. At the moment the stranger had driven up, Cyrus was balanced precariously atop the ladder’s top rung, doing his best to hold up the awkward sign board while securing it with a screwdriver and leaning back as much as he dared to ensure that the result would be level. Without turning to acknowledge the speaker, Cyrus replied.

“Do me a favor, sir, and tell me if it’s straight or not.” He did not dare to look back over his shoulder to see with whom he was speaking.

“Bring your right side down a skosh,” the man said. His voice was deep and carried clearly through the crisp midday air. Cyrus had been a Wellington resident for barely more than a month, but he had a pretty good idea who he was conversing with without even looking.

“By any chance,” he said, lowering the side of the sign a the man had indicated, “do I have the honor of addressing Pastor McKinsey?”

“Your perspicacity is exceeded only by your ambition,” McKinsey said. “I can only assume you’ve been forewarned about me by some of my parishioners.”

With a final twist of the screwdriver and a quick tug to ensure that the sign was secure, Cyrus thrust the screwdriver into his pocket, gripped the top of the ladder and turned to have a look at his visitor. It was the first time he’d laid eyes on McKinsey, but the reports he’d received from Ruthie and a handful of others he’d come to know in town had been dead-on. The pastor was an imposing, borderline intimidating, figure, well over six feet and well above two hundred fifty pounds, even taking into account the heavy winter coat he was wearing. Cyrus had on nothing more than a heavy flannel shirt, despite the twenty-degree weather.

“Son,” McKinsey said, “you’d best come down from there before you catch your death.”

Cyrus was only too happy to oblige. He descended, offering the big man an outstretched hand before pulling down the ladder and placing it for the moment to one side of the chapel entrance. He opened the front door and gestured McKinsey on ahead of him.

“Much warmer inside,” Cyrus said. “Our nice new furnace is finally getting a workout.” He drew the door closed behind them and stomped his boots hard on the newly installed entry rug. It would not do, he had thought a couple of weeks back, to have the nice new burgundy runner tracked up with winter snow and mud. Numerous accouterments had been added since Cyrus initial visit with Frank five weeks earlier. There was a long row of coat hooks across the back wall and a table for the display of church bulletins and other pertinent documents and handouts.

“So, to what do I owe the honor?” Cyrus asked, leading McKinsey down the center aisle, the larger man looking around and nodding approvingly as they walked.

“Oh, I just figured the time had come to stop by and check out the competition,” McKinsey said. “Been meaning to get out here for a week or more, but you know how things get trying to run a church.”

“Well, I’m certainly learning fast,” Cyrus replied.

He opened the door to his office and gestured McKinsey in ahead of him. There were now bare but functional furnishings, including a desk with lamp, a few chairs, a bookcase, and a small side table on which sat a welcome item on a day such as this—a coffee maker.

“It’s not much,” Cyrus said, pulling out a chair for his visitor, “but at least I can offer you coffee.”

He poured two cups from the steaming pot, placed one on the table before his guest and took the other around to sit behind the desk. McKinsey removed his coat, placed it over the back of another chair, and took a seat before the desk.

“It’s a monumental thing you’ve taken on,” said McKinsey, lifting the cup, nodding at Cyrus, and taking a sip, “especially for such a young man. At least when I got here twelve years ago there was already a fully outfitted building and a standing congregation. My primary challenge was to not mess up what my predecessors had built. But starting from nothing, that’s quite a thing, quite a thing indeed.”

“Well, Frank provided me with a wonderful facility. I only hope I can do him proud, and the community as well.”

“And the name,” McKinsey said. “Saint Sarah’s. That’s an interesting choice. I’ve been in this business some time now, but I’m not familiar with that one. Must be a story there.”

“Yes, there’s a story, but I’m saving it for opening day. Actually, turns out there’s a real Saint Sarah—patron saint of gypsies if you can believe it. But that has nothing to do with why I picked it. Of course I’d invite you to come and listen, but I expect you’ll have other business to attend to on Sunday morning.”

“Quite so, Cyrus. I confess that I’m curious as to the nature of your theological bent. I’m aware you’ve spent some time at a Baptist seminary,” McKinsey said, with just a subtle enough emphasis on ‘some time’ to suggest to Cyrus that he had done a bit of research before coming to visit. “But I know, as well, that Frank Brentwood has been keen for some time to build a nondenominational church. How exactly would you characterize your interpretation of the scriptures and the way in which you mean to convey them to your nascent flock?”

Without waiting for an answer, McKinsey drew from his shirt pocket a folded yellow sheet of paper, which Cyrus immediately recognized as one of the several hundred flyers he had had printed at the local copy shop, a single page announcing the opening of the new chapel and inviting all to attend.

McKinsey unfolded the page and read. “A ‘free and unfettered celebration of God’s message to the world.’ That sounds just a bit … ambiguous.”

“Well, it is, of course, still a work in progress,” Cyrus said, placing a hand on the large black leather King James Bible that was lying on his desk. “My goal is to adhere to the Biblical canon, but to do so in what I regard as a more interpretive way, perhaps a bit more so than some of my instructors at seminary would be comfortable with. Forgive me, Pastor McKinsey, for not yet having made it to one of your services, so I’m not familiar with your particular style. The Baptist church I grew up in <go back and check – we said Methodist in earlier chapter> was all about fire and brimstone, carrots and sticks, the Bible as the literal inerrant word of God, and so forth. It is not my goal to frighten or threaten people into belief. I only want to find ways to help people draw parallels between their own lives and God’s words.”

McKinsey considered these words in silence for what felt a long moment. “You know, of course,” he finally said, “that each of us—Pastor Kent, Father Christie, and myself—each aspire to do just that, each in our own way, of course.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, Pastor McKinsey, I have no doubt that is the case. I suppose if there’s a difference between my approach and the more traditional faiths, it’s simply that I want everyone to have a voice in the proceedings, to feel as though they’re contributing to what the church is all about. I’m new and they’ll be new—however many eventually come—so I expect we’ll all figure it out together.”

“It’s an interesting approach, I’ll grant you that,” McKinsey said. “You know, Cyrus, I envy you in at least one respect. While your lack of official affiliation may limit your attendance, you certainly have the freedom to take this little … experiment of yours in pretty much any direction you choose.”

He drained off the remainder of his coffee cup, then rose and reached for his coat.

“You’ve got a lot on your plate obviously, so I’ll leave you to it and wish you the very best.”

Cyrus rose as well and stepped from behind the desk to accompany McKinsey out the office door.

“Allow me one piece of friendly advice, from a fellow who’s been at this for a while.” The pair walked down the center aisle, glancing out the side windows to see that the rate of snowfall had increased significantly. “Folks come to church to be led, to be instructed. They will look to you to learn how things are and, more importantly, how they ought to be. Like it or not, you’re an authority figure. Don’t lose sight of that.”

They arrived at the front door and Cyrus drew it open to see a fresh two inches of snow on the front porch.

“I appreciate your coming by, I truly do,” Cyrus said, “and I promise to make it to one of your services just as soon as things get settled here. I appreciate the advice as well. Don’t be surprised if I come by in the future looking for more of it.”

He extended a hand and McKinsey accepted it before turning to leave.

“Drive safe,” Cyrus offered in parting. “Getting nasty out there. Thanks again.”

With the weather well and truly closing in for the remainder of the day and evening, Cyrus’s plan to spend the afternoon distributing more of his invitation flyers appeared defunct. Even if he was prepared to trudge around in the snowstorm putting them on windshields, there would be precious few cars out in the gathering weather and any paper left out on a windshield for more than ten seconds would be ruined anyway. He had printed five hundred of the flyers and had already gotten more than half of them onto vehicles in town. He could distribute the remainder after the storm abated, most likely Thursday morning by the looks of things. He had also placed an ad in the local newspaper and shaken more hands at local restaurants and stores than he could count, each time proffering a personal invitation, feeling more like a politician than a pastor. Despite all of it, he had no solid way of judging whether this Sunday’s inaugural service would be attended by a crowd or no one. Still, he had committed to himself that so long as there was a single warm body in a pew, the service would go on as scheduled. For now there was little he could do but pour himself another cup of coffee and try to make a bit more progress on his projects in the cellar. He stepped to one side of the snow-covered porch and retrieved the ladder, its rungs each now coated with fresh white powder. He lifted the ladder, turned it on its side, banged the snow off and carried it gingerly inside. It was an awkward thing to get up and down the cellar stairs and as Cyrus wrestled it back down he wondered if with the coming of spring it might not be a good idea to consider constructing some sort of equipment shed.

In his first month of work, Cyrus had spent any spare time not studying and preparing for services down in the cellar. He was good with tools and especially good with lumber, something he had his father to thank for, a father who had placed a power circular saw in the hand of his five-year-old son, informing his horrified mother that it was never too young to start learning to be handy. Cyrus had already put up a couple of new walls downstairs, one directly behind the staircase that split the cellar roughly in two, and a second that partitioned off the furnace area. This left a small room in the front corner that turned out to be just the right size for an impromptu bedroom, for those long nights when he might not make it back into town to his apartment.

With the new walls complete, Cyrus had begun putting up floor-to-ceiling bookshelves around the entire perimeter of the larger open rear section of the cellar. As time went on, there would be no shortage of things to store—bibles, hymnals, pamphlets, and office supplies, as well as his collection of tools and materials. He had already completed the shelving along both side walls and would, this snowy afternoon, tackle the remaining task of constructing shelving across the front wall, directly beneath the upstairs pulpit. Since his quick tour of the cellar on that first day, Cyrus had not given much thought at all to the strange business of the warm center section of the rear cellar wall. But now, as he placed his bare left hand firmly against the concrete surface to brace himself for drilling anchor holes in the block, there it was again, a distinctly warmer feel in just this narrow section near the center of the wall. Later on, he’d be hard pressed to say why, but at this moment it occurred to him to explore this curiosity a bit more. He set the drill on the cellar floor and picked up a hammer. Carefully walking from one side of the rear wall to the other, he tapped with the hammer every few inches. Ten or so feet in from both sides, the only sound was the dull thud of concrete block backed by the frozen earth of a deep New England winter. But that center section, with its scarcely perceptible increase in temperature, admitted a distinctly different sound, just a bit more resonant and less solid than the rest. For Cyrus this had now advanced from a slightly curious anomaly to a downright intriguing one. He reached for the drill.

Figuring there was only minimal damage that a small hole could do, damage easily repaired with a bit of caulking, he began drilling into the concrete block in the center of the wall. The masonry bit was new and sharp and it took just a minute or so for the bit to bottom out in the hole. But the blocks comprising the wall were thicker than his bit was long. Cyrus did not have a longer drill bit and he was uncertain whether the hardware store in Wellington had one. In any event, the roads were in no condition to try driving into town to find out. He did, however, have a hammer and a masonry chisel, and he promptly set to applying these to the task of widening the initial hole to the point where the drill could be inserted more deeply.

The concrete blocks were new and hard and it took over an hour of chiseling and one twice-banged thumb before Cyrus had expanded his initial hole to a couple of inches in diameter, enough to allow deeper insertion of the drill chuck and masonry bit. This time the drill cut just a few more inches in before suddenly losing all resistance and pushing out the back side of the block. What Cyrus expected to see when he extracted the drill bit was some combination of frozen dirt and perhaps a few bits of fabric from the layer of weather insulation that builders place against the outside of a buried concrete wall before backfilling it. Instead there was nothing but the thick white dust of the ground concrete. He set the drill on the floor, flexed his strained fingers a few times, and lowered his head the small amount required to attempt peering into the hole. The drill bit was, though, just a half inch in diameter, and all Cyrus could see through the hole was blackness. Stepping for a moment to his collection of tools near the staircase, he selected a large carpentry nail, returned to the hole and gingerly pushed the nail into the hole, letting it fall out the back. It fell freely and made a faint metallic sound upon striking whatever was at the bottom of the other side of the wall.

Well, thought Cyrus, I’m no builder, but that doesn’t seem right.

There was no flashlight in the cellar, but Cyrus had one in his car. Moments later, making his way back down the stairs, brushing snow from his hair, he was once more at the tiny hole, shining the light into the hole. It was, though, impossible to get both the light and his eye simultaneously aligned at an angle that would allow him to see anything. He was clearly going to need to go bigger on the hole. Before committing to this course of action, one more thought occurred to him. He rummaged once more through his assortment of tools but didn’t find what he needed. Climbing the stairs once more, he went to the back office and found a wire coat hanger on the back of the door. Back downstairs, he cut the wire and straightened it into a roughly two-foot length of heavy wire, perfect for prodding. He inserted it carefully into the newly drilled hole until a good foot and a half of the wire extended out the back of the block. There was nothing at all back there, nothing but air. With a doubtful glance at his single tube of caulking, he extracted the wire and reached once more for his hammer and chisel.

By focusing his attention on the mortar holding the blocks together, rather than on the blocks themselves, he was able to completely remove a single block with about an hour of additional work. One final vigorous blow of his hammer, and the entire block slid backward and fell through the hole, landing with a crash on whatever hard surface passed for a floor on the other side. The next surprise was that the air on the other side of the rectangular hole was distinctly warmer than what was currently outside. Also, Cyrus noted, placing his face close to the hole, it had a distinctly unhealthy odor to it. He couldn’t quite identify any distinct smell, but it was unquestionably worse than the good clean New England air through which the snow was falling outside the chapel walls. Cyrus’s next surprise came once he set down his hammer and chisel and again picked up his flashlight.

The flashlight was not an especially powerful one, but the batteries were new and it cast enough light to allow Cyrus to see something utterly unexpected when he peered through the now expansive rectangular hole. In the flashlight’s glow, he saw an immense black opening when he looked straight ahead, but to either side the rough stone walls of a cave of some sort. There was no way to discern its depth, as the light illuminated only the first ten feet or so of the opening. But a thought immediately occurred to Cyrus; there was no way this foundation could have been dug and the cellar walls installed without the construction crew having discovered and intentionally covered up this opening. He made a mental note to ask around in town and see if he could identify anyone who might have worked on the building’s construction. In the meantime, one thing was now beyond clear; it was unthinkable that his curiosity was going to allow him to leave whatever was back there unexplored.

With one hundred twenty seconds remaining, the lander detached itself from the main vehicle. It then fired a series of quick brief blasts from its maneuvering engines to reorient itself so that the main descent booster engine was facing the comet’s surface. For the duration of the landing, excavation, and ascent, the main vehicle would continue flying in formation with the comet, about one hundred meters above its surface. With twenty-five seconds remaining, the lander fired a series of brief bursts from engines atop the craft, so as to push the lander down toward the comet at a leisurely one meter per second. When the lander’s radar altimeter detected that the craft was just three meters from the irregular surface of the comet, a quick bit of image analysis verified that the chosen landing spot was sufficiently smooth to allow for a safe landing. Upon receiving this affirmative, the lander fired four harpoons at the surface, each connected to fine but strong cables attached to the lander. The comet was small and had only negligible gravitational attraction, so that this could not be counted upon to hold the lander securely to the surface for the duration of the excavation process. Instead, the lander would be held securely to the surface by the four harpoon cables. Once these had anchored themselves into the comet’s surface, small winches drew the lander down to the surface. When it came time to leave, the four cables would be severed by small explosive charges and the main lander engine would ignite for the two seconds required to provide enough velocity to make it back to the main mission vehicle.

The harpoon cables were also important to the stabilization of the lander, since the digging tool would exert a great deal of pressure on the surface in order to make its way the expected twelve inches into the surface. Absent any means of securing the lander, the push of the drill would simply push the lander back into space.

Throughout the landing sequence and the thirty or so minutes of excavation, a continuous series of high-resolution photographs was being taken for subsequent analysis. But the main point of the mission was the sample, obtained through the expedient of drilling into the soft composite surface of the comet with a two-inch-diameter auger and then collecting the extracted material with what amounted to a miniature backhoe that scooped up the material and deposited it into a receptacle in the lander whose lid was hermetically sealed to ensure that the precious materials wouldn’t be contaminated upon their return to earth. Once filled with comet materials and resealed, the container would not be opened again until it was safely ensconced within the quarantined environs of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California some four years from now.

In the end, the mission went precisely as designed, and a cheer went up from the scientists and engineers at JPL and Houston Mission Control when the final confirmation came that the lander had separated from all four harpoon cables, ascended the hundred meters, and performed the complicated ballet of docking back with the main vehicle for the return trip to earth. It had been an engineering marvel, and all that remained now was for the craft to fire its engines to depart the comet and begin its long spiraling path back to earth.

*          *          *

“Are you one hundred percent certain?” Scott Fulton, principal investigator on the CSRM-1 mission stared hard at the laptop screen before him. He was trying to make sense of the result that one of his materials scientists, Raj Patel, had just brought to him.

“It is possible,” Patel replied, “that something has gone wrong with the measuring equipment in the sample storage module, but we have seen no anomalous readings from any of those instruments to this point.”

“And it’s an extra five grams?” Fulton said. “Versus what was measured at the time of the excavation.”

The anomaly under discussion was tiny, but in the context of the precision with which NASA missions are managed, it was an anomaly that demanded an explanation—except that none was forthcoming, at least not yet.

Fulton had a habit of verbally summarizing things when his brain kicked into problem solving mode. “So four days ago—June 12—Caesar touches down. It begins drilling into the surface, continues doing so for a total of one hour and seventeen minutes, extracting in the process a large pile of very fine material. The excavation end effector then lifts and deposits into the SAC a quantity of this material for earth return. This material while en route will also undergo numerous analyses, with the results of these tests transmitted to earth during the return trip. At the conclusion of the insertion of the material into the SAC, the very first measurement made is of the exact mass of the material taken onboard, partly for our records and partly because it matters to the flight dynamics of the vehicle to know how much additional weight has been added.”

Patel listens to his boss (actually his boss’s boss’s boss) and nods in agreement. Both men know these details of the mission in immense detail. The SAC is the Storage and Analysis Container. Caesar is the informal name the mission team has adopted for the vehicle, derived from the first three initials of the more formal CSRM-1. A career with NASA is one of acronyms and arcane terminology.

Fulton continues, rising from his chair, pacing and gesturing in the air with his hands, something else he does when trying to understand a problem. “This measurement indicates an extremely precise five point one six seven four kilograms. That fourth decimal point is considerably less than the mass of a single grain of sand. Then … then…” Fulton stops in mid-stride and raises an index finger. “Then, eight and a half days later, the mass measurement is taken once more, for no particular reason, mind you, since we already know the mass of what we’ve excavated and the craft is already well on its way back to earth. Only this time, the measured mass in the SAC is five point one seven two six kilograms. That is an increase of five point one six seven grams—just shy of one tenth of one percent. That is not nothing, Mister Patel.”

“No, sir. It is not nothing,” Patel responds. He only very rarely interacts with the mission’s head scientist and it is more than a little intimidating, particularly without his direct superior in the room and also without any apparent explanation for the anomaly.

“There are only two plausible explanations, Mister Patel. Either five grams of comet matter have spontaneously materialized inside a sealed storage containment or something is amiss with one of our two mass measurement data points. Mister Patel, can you guess which of those two alternatives I imagine to be the case?”

“Uh…” Patel hesitated, but only for a second. “I’m going to go with the bad measurement reading.”

“That’s why NASA only hires the brightest, Mister Patel. Occam’s Razor indeed. Kindly get with the instrumentation techs and find out what is going on with their equipment. If we cannot trust something as simple as weighing the damn stuff, how are we to trust the assays they’ll be doing over the next couple of years.”

“Absolutely, sir,” Patel responded. “I’m on it, sir.” He accepted the laptop from Fulton’s outstretched hand and exited the room as quickly as he could without appearing to hurry.

*          *          *

Nine years, four months, and seventeen days CSRM-1 had been away. Over nine years since the Comet Sample Return Mission had departed with a roar from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, only to be almost immediately forgotten by all but a handful of scientists working out of an underground lab at Cal Tech and a roomful of technicians at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. The comet Hadley-Kornikov had first appeared on astronomers’ telescopes just sixteen years ago, carving a trajectory which, while posing no threat to the inhabitants of earth, brought the six-mile-long aggregate of rock and ice to within just two million miles of the planet, so tantalizingly close and in such an unlikely but cooperative orbit that it immediately became a prime target for NASA’s first comet sample return mission. The optimal launch window for rendezvous had been tight, just ten months, and a quickly assembled team of contractors had designed and built the probe in record time. The launch had gone flawlessly and with little fanfare. The world had only awakened four and a half years later when the tiny probe had intercepted the comet, a feat described in numerous interviews by the auspiciously named program director Miles Kepler as not unlike shooting a high-powered bullet and hitting a second identical bullet over ten miles away. The world had been captivated for the forty-eight hours during which the spacecraft approached the comet, landed on its surface, and spent the next thirteen hours taking photos and collecting samples from the surface of the ancient object, a relic from the solar system’s original formation.

The following day the probe had launched itself from the comet’s surface and begun the five-year journey home, again forgotten for the duration of the long return trip. But now it was home and less than one hour from its final challenging maneuver, reentering earth’s atmosphere and being snagged out of midair by a specially equipped Navy helicopter. The purity of the samples was the paramount concern of the mission team, and even though the recovered materials were safely ensconced within the body of the probe, no chances were being taken with a water or surface landing. Once it had endured the searing heat of a seventeen-thousand-mile-per-hour reentry, the heat shield would be ejected, a parachute deployed, and the tiny probe would be plucked out of mid air, and deposited into a sterile container inside the helicopter’s cargo compartment. The unopened probe would then be delivered to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for what promised to be years of experimentation and analysis. At least that was the plan.

January 12, 2018, 08:46:15 GMT

“Descent angle nominal. Reentry velocity nominal. Altitude two eight zero thousand,” came the inflectionless voice of the flight controller.

“Roger, Flight,” replied the mission commander, Roger Peters, “all reentry parameters nominal.”

For the ensuing thirty seconds, chatter between the various control engineers in the Johnson Control Center was perfectly normal and professional. The probe fired its retrorockets precisely on schedule to orient itself correctly, then it streaked across the South Pacific, carving a path over Kwajalein and Kiribati Islands on its way to a rendezvous with a helicopter from the USS Essex about one hundred miles southwest of Tuvalu. The probe left a half-mile trail of flame across the sky as its heat-ablating shield dissipated the immense energy of reentry and slowed the tiny probe to the point where its drogue and main parachutes could safely deploy. It was right around the time the supersonic drogue chute was deploying—intended to slow the craft from Mach 8 to subsonic—that the first sign of trouble appeared.

“Flight, I have an uncommanded refire of number three control engine,” came the voice of the lead propulsion engineer. Can you confirm?”

At this point in the descent, the craft was in ballistic free fall with no planned firings of any of the probe’s six small control engines.

“Flight,” came the voice again, “I have a second control engine firing, apparently in an attempt to compensate for destabilization caused by the first misfire.”

At this point in the descent, with two control engines inadvertently battling against each other, the probe went into a series of increasingly severe oscillations that the probe’s structure was not designed to withstand.

“Flight, I have lost telemetry,” came the voice of the communication desk a few seconds later. “We have lost the downlink. Repeat—zero downlink.”

The probe was still at one hundred ten thousand feet high and traveling at Mach 8 when it began to come apart. The Marine helicopter crew, flying in a circular pattern twelve thousand feet above the carrier saw no recovery chutes, only a series of debris contrails far above and heading rapidly southeast. The carrier crew estimated that at its current speed and altitude, the probe—what remained of it—would likely end up in the Pacific someplace east of Fiji. But, in an unexpected bit of good fortune for the otherwise doomed mission, most of the significant portions of the destroyed probe ended up not in the ocean near Fiji, but actually on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu, about six miles northeast of Savusavu. Missing its intended landing spot by some seven hundred miles, the largest intact piece of the probe—charred and melted almost beyond recognition—impacted the ground at nearly Mach one, creating a sixteen-foot-deep crater and missing a small resort hotel on the island by just a hundred yards. It would be seven hours before the mission control engineers would receive news of the craft’s impact site.