Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.
The famine session left George quaking on the floor.
Thursday.
‘Five years have passed,’ said Morning. ‘And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.’
She worked the focus knob.
‘It’s time we dealt with pestilence,’ she said.
No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.
A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.
‘His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,’ Morning explained. ‘He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.’
The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.
‘If you were a disease – viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery – you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs – all these circumstances bode well.’
At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus…
Friday.
‘Infertility,’ said Morning.
The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.
A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. ‘The radiation,’ Morning explained. ‘They’ll never have children.’
They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.
A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. ‘Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,’ Morning noted, ‘and no good will come of it.’
‘You must tell me something,’ said George, reeling with nausea. ‘Who will treat your survivor’s guilt?’
The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, ‘I don’t know.’
For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.
Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. ‘Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.’ The cards rippled through his hands. ‘Deuces wild.’
George said, ‘Today through the periscope I saw—’
‘You saw, you saw,’ said Brat, sneering. ‘Jack bets.’
‘One dollar,’ said Overwhite.
‘I’m out,’ said Wengernook.
‘Raise,’ said Randstable.
George said, ‘Morning showed me—’
‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Brat. ‘How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?’
No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. ‘Ace bets.’
‘We saw it too,’ said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. ‘Jesus.’
‘Sugar Brook built that scope,’ said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. ‘Not my department, though – the command-and-control guys.’
‘Three dollars,’ said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.
‘I have a question.’ George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. ‘If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?’
‘Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,’ said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain. ‘It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.’
‘You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,’ said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. ‘It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.’
‘But it happened,’ said George. ‘Right on our planet.’
‘That’s just one particular case,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match. ‘In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and…’ He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.
‘First ace bets,’ said Brat.
‘And a much more desirable outcome,’ said Wengernook.
‘I’ve got it!’ said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.
‘Got what?’ asked George.
‘The solution!’ said Randstable.
‘To the war?’ asked George.
‘To the riddle.’ The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.
‘What riddle?’
‘Sverre’s riddle – why is a raven like a writing desk?’
‘Why?’
‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’
To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.
She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.
A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.
George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.
The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.