Wherever I look I see Zun’s face. It won’t go away, while all around him the intense heat and the eccentric wind spews radiation into the atmosphere.

“I’ve got to stop a minute,” Grady says. He collapses among the ferns and the mosses, his back to us, inaccessible.

“What about my father?” Valerie says.

He lies there wrapped in sweat and silence. Finally, “The whole place,” he says, “it was like a moonscape, like the end of the world…” Slowly he turns to face us. “At first I couldn’t understand—we had taken every precaution against accidents. I figured it must have been some flaw, some internal failure of a reactor.” He brushes a lump of earth from his forehead with a shaky hand. “But it wasn’t a failure,” he says, “and it wasn’t an accident.” Suddenly he flaps his hands on his thighs, on his buttocks, on the patch pocket of his shirt. He pats his forehead. “Shit!” he blurts savagely, “I must’ve lost my glasses.”

How long will it be before somebody’s satellite catches a whiff of the poison? A matter of hours. In a few days the helicopters of a dozen energetic nations will charge in to drop wet sand, lead, and boron over the site. In less than a week physicians and scientists from the West will arrive at a catchment center far from Assama to which the victims will be flown. They are tireless men, these missionaries alleviating pain, but they themselves cannot agree on the life span of thermonuclear particles or the extent to which they are absorbed in human tissue.

Whatever my life span, I owe it to Zun, to Yussuf Chapouk, the ratcatcher, the interpreter of entrails, to those people back there, his supporters, whoever they are, who kept me alive. Are they dead? Dying? Has the nausea, the vomiting, the hemorrhaging already begun? Are they lying somewhere, unaccounted for? Will they soon be etherized on an overtaxed operating table, tapped for bone-marrow transplants? Or are they still on their feet, moving among the people to help those less fortunate than they?

“If it wasn’t an accident…” Val says, “what was it?”

For a moment, in silence, Grady squints at her. The wrinkles around his eyes etch a scowl. “Your father,” Grady says, “started the whole mess. Trying to move a goddamn domino by blasting it with his horns and clappers and Meistersingers. What he blasted was my instrumentation. It went berserk.”

“How,” I ask, “could an increase in volume, no matter how intense, cause that kind of backlash?”

“If could if it was loud enough. An airplane breaking the sound barrier has been known to shatter plate-glass windows five miles below.”