It was all of a piece with his work on the Frisbees. It hadn’t been so long—Christ, just a few years—since we had watched the Apollo 13 movie on TV, and we had chanted the countdown together, because that, said Michael, was the magic you needed to make a spaceship go. Later we had talked each other through the dreadful loss of the Columbia. Now his enthusiasm was still endearing, but his depth of knowledge was startling. To him, the shuttle was no longer a magical chariot, but a piece of engineering that you could pore over and take apart and understand—and maybe even make a better version of one day.

I suppressed a sigh. After all that he was only ten years old. Childhood is so long when you live it, but so brief when you look at it from outside. And my visits, the brief forays across the Atlantic at Christmas and in the summer, so precious to me, amounted to no more than a few days in total, spread over that evanescent decade.

Michael suddenly sat bolt upright. “Look! Look, there it is!”

And so it was, right on time. Looking to the north I saw a spark of light, supernova bright, climbing, it seemed, out of the sea. Its trajectory was already curving, a graceful arc, and I saw how the spark carved out a great pillar of smoke in the dense sea air, a pillar that itself was brightly lit from the inside. All this took place in utter silence, but the sense of power was astonishing—like something natural, a waterfall or a thunderstorm—it was startling to think that this mighty display was human-made.

We both erupted into cheers and applause, and hugged each other.

When we ran out of cheers I could hear more distant noise, a kind of crackle like very faraway thunder, or even gunfire. It might have been the sound of people cheering, strung out along this coast, or it might have been the sound of the shuttle’s ascent. As the shuttle climbed farther its light spread over the ocean, and a hundred reflected sparks slid over the gently swelling surface, tracking the rising spacecraft.

In the pale rocket light the face of Michael Poole Bazalget was like an upturned coin, but his mouth was set with a kind of determination, his eyes shadowed. I felt unaccountably disturbed. I wondered what this child, and his own children after him, would do with the world.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

The little party of refugees straggled up the hillside from the road.

The farmstead was just a huddle of buildings, lost on the hill’s broad flank. There were no lights. Regina saw the gaping holes of unglazed windows, decayed roofs, fields sketched out by drystone walls but choked with weeds. Beyond the buildings a forest, dense and dark, coated the upper hillside.

The place was abandoned.