Scott was a kid of thirty or so, his face hidden by a bushy black beard and thick Buddy Holly glasses. He was dressed, as she was, in a bright red survival suit and woolly hat. He asked now, “Are you okay?”

Now that, she thought, was a spectacularly dumb question, and she sat on a ledge of ancient, eroded sandstone and considered it. Not only was she being eaten up from the inside, not only had she become, without noticing it, a decaying old lady, but, according to the best of her information, some kind of dreadful global catastrophe was coming down. So: no, she was not okay, and never would be again.

Even if the quacks did say the bone disease she had contracted was a really “good” form of secondary cancer; even if the quacks still, absurdly, gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, despite the startling acceleration of her anatomy’s failure.

But it didn’t make a piece of difference as to what she had to do, to be the eyes and ears and scientific brain of the President of the United States, just a little longer.

Anyhow she let the kid off the hook. “I’m fine. Just let me catch my breath.”

He took a couple of steps closer to the rim. “You can smell it, even up here.”

“What?”

“The sulphur. And the ash. If you’re asthmatic—”

“I’m not asthmatic. Help me up.” She lifted her arm. “Give me a minute.”

“For what?”

She smiled. “To sight-see. I’ve never been out here before, to my shame.” And I sure as hell never will again.

He grinned and backed off. “Sure. I understand. This is why I got into this game, you know.”

“The scenery.”

“Uh huh. I get paid to be up here. Take all the time you want.”

She stepped forward, alone, her feet crunching on basalt fragments.

Jesus Christ, this was the Grand Canyon.

From here, on the northern rim, she could see the sweep of the land. She was in the middle of the Colorado Plateau, thousands of feet of rock laid down by the shallow seas and deltas that had once covered much of North America. On the horizon, to the south, she could see the smoothly swelling surface of the Plateau, flat and undulating, reminiscent of the sea which had given it birth. It was speckled with green, what looked like blades of grass spilling over the plateau walls. But each of those blades was a tree, a juniper or a canyon pine, each of them twenty or thirty feet tall.