SPIN

"You consider this disloyal?"

"It is disloyal. I gave myself to Simon. Simon is my husband in the eyes of God and the law. If that wasn't a wise choice it was still my choice, and I may not be the kind of Christian I ought to be but I do understand about duty and about perseverance and about standing by someone even if—"

"Even if what, Diane?"

"Even if it hurts. I don't think either one of us needs to look any harder at the lives we might have had."

"I didn't come here to make you unhappy."

"No, but you're having that effect."

"Then I won't stay."

"You'll stay for supper. It's only polite." She put her hands at her side and looked at the floor. "Let me tell you something while we still have a little privacy. For what it's worth. I don't share all of Simon's convictions. I can't honestly say I believe the world will end with the faithful ascending into heaven. God forgive me, but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. But I do believe the world will end. Is ending. It's been ending all our lives. And—"

I said, "Diane—"

"No, let me finish. Let me confess. I do believe the world will end. I believe what Jason told me years and years ago, that one morning the sun will rise swollen and hellish and in a few hours or days, our time on Earth will be finished. I don't want to be alone on that morning—"

"No one does." Except maybe Molly Seagram, I thought. Molly playing On the Beach with her bottle of suicide pills. Molly and all the people like her.

"And I won't be alone. I'll be with Simon. What I'm confessing to you, Tyler—what I want to be forgiven for—is that when I picture that day it isn't necessarily Simon I see myself with."

The door banged open. Simon. Empty-handed. "Turns out di

"Thank you" I said. "That sounds nice."

* * * * *

The eight adults sharing the farmhouse were the Sorleys, Dan Condon and his wife, the Mclsaacs, and Simon and Diane. The Sorleys had three children and the Mclsaacs had five, so that made seventeen of us at a big trestle table in the room adjoining the kitchen. The result was a pleasant din that lasted until "Uncle Dan" a

Dan Condon was the alpha male of the group. He was tall and almost sepulchral, black-bearded, ugly in a Lincolnesque way, and by way of blessing the meal he reminded us that feeding a stranger was a virtuous act even if the stranger happened to arrive without an invitation, amen.

By the way conversation flowed I deduced that Brother Aaron Sorley was second in command and probably the enforcer when it came to disputes. Both Teddy Mclsaac and Simon deferred to Sorley but looked to Condon for ultimate verdicts. Was the soup too salty? "Just about right," Condon said. The weather warm lately? "Hardly unusual in this part of the world," Condon declared.

The women spoke seldom and for the most part kept their eyes fixed on their plates. Condon's wife was a small, portly woman with a pinched expression. Sorley's wife was almost as big as he was and smiled prominently when the food drew compliments. Mclsaac's wife looked barely eighteen to his morose over-forty. None of the women spoke directly to me nor were they introduced to me by their given names. Diane was a diamond among these zircons, conspicuously so, and maybe that explained her careful demeanor.

The families were all refugees from Jordan Tabernacle. They were not the most radical parishioners, Uncle Dan explained, like those wild-eyed Dispensationalists who had fled to Saskatchewan last year, but nor were they tepid in their faith, like Pastor Bob Kobel and his crew of easy compromisers. The families had moved to the ranch (Condon's ranch) in order to separate themselves by a few miles from the temptations of the city and await the final call in monastic peace. So far, he said, the plan had been successful.

The rest of the table talk concerned a truck with a bad power cell, a roof-repair job still in progress, and a looming septic-tank crisis. I was as relieved when the meal ended as the children evidently were—Condon directed a fierce look at one of the Sorley girls when she sighed too audibly.

Once the dishes had been cleared (women's work at the Condon ranch), Simon a

Condon said, "Will you be all right on the road, Dr. Dupree? There are robberies almost every night now."

"I'll keep the windows up and the gas pedal down."

"That's probably wise."

Simon said, "If you don't mind, Tyler, I'll ride with you as far as the fence. I like the walk back, warm nights like this. Even by lantern-light."

I agreed.

Then everyone lined up for a cordial good-bye. The children squirmed until I shook their hands and they were dismissed. When her turn came Diane nodded at me but lowered her eyes, and when I offered my hand she took it without looking at me.

* * * * *

Simon rode about a quarter mile uphill from the ranch with me, fidgeting like a man with something to say but keeping his mouth shut. I didn't prompt him. The night air was fragrant and relatively cool. I pulled over where he told me to, at the peak of a ridge by a broken fence and a hedge of ocotillo. "Thank you for the ride," he said.

When he got out he lingered a moment over the open door.

"Something you wanted to say?" I asked.

He cleared his throat. "You know," he said finally, his voice barely louder than the wind, "I love Diane as much as I love God. I admit that sounds blasphemous. It sounded that way to me for a long time. But I believe God put her on Earth to be my wife, that this is her entire purpose. So lately I think it's two sides of the same coin. Loving her is my way of loving God. Do you think that's possible, Tyler Dupree?"

He didn't wait for an answer but closed the door and switched on his flashlight, and I watched in the mirror as he ambled down the hill into darkness and the clatter of crickets.

* * * * *

I didn't run into bandits or road pirates that night.

The absence of stars or moon had made the night a darker and more dangerous place since the early years of the Spin. Criminals had worked out elaborate strategies for rural ambuscades. Traveling at night dramatically increased my chances of being robbed or murdered.

Traffic was therefore sparse during the drive back to Phoenix, mostly interstate truckers in well-defended eighteen-wheelers. Much of the time I was alone on the road, carving a bright wedge out of the night and listening to the grit of the wheels and the rush of the wind. If there's a lonelier sound I don't know what it is. I guess that's why they put radios in cars.

But there were no thieves or murderers on the road.

Not that night.

* * * * *

So I stayed in a motel outside Flagstaff and caught up with Wun Ngo Wen and his security crew in the executive lounge at the airport the following morning.

Wun was in a talkative mood on the flight to Orlando. He'd been studying the geology of the desert southwest and was particularly delighted by a rock he'd bought at a souvenir shack on the way back to Phoenix—forcing the entire cavalcade to pull over and wait while he picked through a bin of fossils. He showed me his prize, a chalky spiral concavity in a chunk of Bright Angel shale an inch on a side. The imprint of a trilobite, he said, dead some ten million years, recovered from these rocky, sandy wastes below us, which had once been the bed of an ancient sea.

He'd never seen a fossil before. There were no fossils on Mars, he said. No fossils anywhere in the solar system except here, here on the ancient Earth.

* * * * *

At Orlando we were ushered into the backseat of another car in another convoy, this one bound for the Perihelion compound.