the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”
The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of the Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie, he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”
“I am here in this bunker with you.” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down gingerly on the bench opposite the businessman. “Cigarette?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for World War IV, or just a trailer.
A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”
Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.
VOYAGE
It’s a moonless night, and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the blue-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.
Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course, it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship—Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted, “We will bury you!”—and the flat-Earth daydream that followed, shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)
But back to the here and now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors—in a fit of uncharacteristic wit—named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.
When they signed up for the emigration-board tickets, Bob had joked: “A six-month cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to get back to work!” But somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the subarctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between