As his plane lumbered through the troubled skies over Rome, he wondered how many of them up there at this moment were male, and how many were female, and how, if they all found a safe haven to land in, they would go about reconstructing a society. Probably most were male, in the middle to upper economic bracket, which meant they would possess skills that were relatively useless if they returned to an earth where all the working men were gone. Managers with no one to manage, accountants with no one to account. It might be a good idea if a few planeloads of maintenance men and construction workers were kept aloft at all times so there would be ample muscle to begin again. Wasn't it Mao Tse-tung who said it? It is the country with the best maintenance men that would best survive a holocaust.

The plane's hydraulics wheezed beneath his feet and Thorn extinguished his cigarette, gazing out at the lights dimly visible below. With all his traveling in recent months this had become a familiar sight, but tonight it brought anxiety. The telegram he'd received in Washington was twelve hours old and by now whatever had happened was over. He would find Katherine fulfilled at last, in a hospital bed nursing their newborn child, or in a state of hopeless despair at having lost it once again. Unlike the other two pregnancies that had ended after just a few months, this one had gone all the way to eight. And if this time something went wrong, he knew that Katherine would be lost.

They had been together almost since childhood, he and Katherine, and even then at the age of seventeen, her instability was plain. The haunted eyes, begging for someone to protect her; the role of protector suiting his needs as well. It was this that formed the very core of their relationship, but in recent years as his responsibilities began to extend far beyond her, she had been left behind, lonely and isolated, unable to cope with the duties of a politician's wife.

The first signal of her distress had gone almost unnoticed, Thorn expressing anger instead of concern when he returned home to find she had taken a scissors and fairly butchered her hair. A Sassoon wig covered it until it grew out, but a year later he found her in their bathroom making small cuts in the end of her fingers with a razor blade, dismayed herself at why she was doing it. It was then that they sought help; a psychiatrist who merely sat in bland silence. She quit him after a month, deciding that all she needed was a child.