It wasn’t long after Michael’s conversation with Theo, not more than a few days as he recalled, that he had happened upon the old logbook—“happened” being not quite the correct word, as things turned out. It was the quiet hour, just before dawn. Michael had been sitting at the panel in the Lighthouse like always, minding the monitors and flipping through Teacher’s copy of What to Name the Baby (that’s how desperate he’d become for something new to read; he’d just made it to the I’s), when, for some unknown reason, restlessness or boredom or the discomfiting thought that if the winds had blown a little differently his parents might have named him Ichabod (Ichabod the Circuit!), his eyes had drifted upward to the shelf above his CRT, and there it was. A notebook with a thin black spine. Standing there among the usual whatnot, tucked between a spool of solder and a stack of Elton’s CDs (Billie Holiday Sings the Blues, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, Superstars #1 Party Dance Hits, a group called Yo Mama that sounded to Michael like a bunch of people yelling at each other, not that he understood the first thing about music). Michael must have looked right at it a thousand times, and yet he couldn’t remember seeing it before; that was curious, the thought that gave him pause. A book, something he hadn’t read. (He’d read everything.) He rose and took it from its place on the shelf, and when he cracked the spine the first thing he saw, inscribed in a precise hand, an engineer’s hand, was a name he knew: Rex Fisher. Michael’s great (great-great?) grandfather. Rex Fisher, First Engineer of Light and Power, First Colony, California Republic. What the hell? How had he missed this? He turned the pages, crinkled with moisture and age; it took only a moment for his mind to parse the information, to break it into its components and reassemble it into a coherent whole that told him what this slender, ink-filled volume was. Columns of numbers, with dates written in the old style, followed by the hour and another number Michael understood to be the frequency of transmission, and then, in the spaces to the right, short notations, rarely more than a few words but heavy with suggestion, whole stories folded into them: “unmanned distress beacon” or “five survivors” or “military?” or “three en route from Prescott, Arizona.” There were other place names, too: Ogden, Utah. Kerrville, Texas. Las Cruces, New Mexico. Ashland, Oregon. Hundreds of such notations, filling page after page, until they simply stopped. The final entry read, simply, “All transmission ceasing by order of the Household.”