Again, methodically, he goes through all his pockets, and again comes up empty. “I told him to knock it off,” he says. “But he was delighted that his nuttiness worked—he and his fucking gooks. They enjoyed the mess as much as he did—the guards couldn’t keep them out. He started prancing around for more evidence—maybe a couple of dice doing the Charleston—who knows what? And somehow when he came upon the reactor he got the idea that I was concocting some kind of nuclear bomb. Your father pulled a fire axe off a wall and started waving it like a madman.” He pauses, frowns. “There’s one thing, though… Maybe his rage wasn’t so sudden.”

“He planned it?” Val says.

“All I know, your father wasn’t as bumblingly eccentric as a lot of people thought. There was something… devious and creepy about his playing the clown. Plus he always suspected I was up to something he didn’t know what.”

“He sure got that right,” I say.

Grady ignores me. “So maybe,” he goes on, “he was looking for a way to foul me up, and here, at last, he damned well succeeded. He started hacking away at the reactor coils. The coolant spilled out—that’s what triggered the first explosion. Soon the whole damned complex was burning at temperatures of five thousand degrees which, if you don’t know, is twice that of molten steel. A goddamned inferno.”

He unscrews the cap of the canteen at his belt and, bringing it to his lips, hesitates. “I wonder if I ought to drink this,” he says. “It may be contaminated.” He screws the cap back on.

“Fucking gooks,” he repeats, “They liked your father, you know, and they seemed to… well, approve of what he was doing. By the time I stopped him the damage was done.”

“How’d you stop him?” Valerie asks.

“Me? I pulled him away… It wasn’t easy. He had an axe.”

“But you had a gun,” she says.

He stiffens. “You don’t think for a moment that I…?”

“I don’t want to, Grady, but…”

“Then don’t. Christ, I couldn’t save everybody.”

In a week, possibly less, a wave of technicians with their tools will swerve out of the polluted sky. I can see them in lead protective gear, more suitable for a lunar expedition than the solar blaze of Assama. They’ll wave their Geiger counters slowly, like wands, and hold them close to their eyes behind the filtered masks. They will stagger with the heat and the exertions of altruism.

I could wear a lead suit, like those technicians, like the engineers who soon will tunnel beneath the reactor, coating the underside with concrete in their attempt to protect the subsoil and the water table. Or will they entomb the entire complex (what’s left of it) in a steel and concrete sarcophagus, to seal it for centuries?