“Who did you save?” Val asks.

“Most of them. I got most everybody in the cargo plane…”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I came back for you and Judd and Abdul.”

“You came back for Abdul, period,” I say. “Because you figured if you saved his ass you could return with him, maybe in a year’s time, partners in the shit business.”

In a year’s time, two years, if the damage isn’t as fearful as my imagination foretells, then the radioactive emissions will, possibly, normalize. Nuclear carpenters will build an eight-foot chain-link fence around the colony, banishing four hundred square miles, twenty by twenty, from the face of the earth, as if it were an enclave of Hell. When the fogs and fires subside, will the rest of the country be safe for men and other living things?

“You’re badgering me,” Grady says. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Val answers for me, “maybe because I find no pleasure in your company.”

“You’ll have to accept it. We have a strategic dependency on each other.” He sniffs the wind. There is a faint smell of iodine and cesium in it. “Let’s move out,” he says. “We can discuss personalities and accomodations and other dazzling issues when we’re on safer ground.”

He walks off, assuming that we will follow.

“Where are we going?” Val asks.

“Northeast, I think. Uncharted country. Clean air.” And in that instant my mind veers off, embracing a reluctant notion. Painful and hazardous, it has been hibernating on the threshold of consciousness; now it pounces. I try to evade it, to think of something else. I think of my father.

“Once,” I tell Val, “my father thought Eden was somewhere out there.”

“Your father was mad. Although maybe he was right. We got the cast for it—you, me, and the snake.”

I’m not paying much attention to her. By next fall, I’m thinking, all the experts will be done with Assama, returning to where they came from. The doctors and the scientists, back at their computers, will establish new, improved, and redundant safety systems that somewhere, sometime will fail again. And Asso’s floodgates will be open to another wave of specialists, the banner-bearers of enterprise, the go-getters, the carpetbaggers, the leeches, the loan sharks, the hucksters, of everything from shit to Shinola. Here is a market to assault and a virgin race to ravish. But maybe not, that monitor in my head persists.

We stumble on. For about ten paces. I pull up short. Grady is already out of sight.

“What’s the matter?” she asks, and again I heed not her plaint but the disquieting voice in my head.

“The prospects,” that voice is saying, “are bleak. The pain may be unendurable, and that’s just for starters.”

“It’s not yet time,” I tell the voice, “to reach for the morphine.”