He says he had little recollection of starting up the car. He set off toward Topeka, racing down the road, lurching from side to side, water running in sheets over the windshield. When he was about halfway there, he jerked the car to a stop in the middle of the road; and with the downpour making him blind, he saw that it was with him just as it is with us. He’d lost. He’d lost absolutely. Just as we have. We’ve harnessed the power of the sun; we can fuse atomic nuclei, and what has it brought us? Twenty-eight levels of war. Twenty-eight levels! This idea is Herman Kahn’s – a brilliant man, a modern Clausewitz. At this twenty-eighth level we and our enemies end in ‘spasm war’: total mutual annihilation. Jonathan died before I was born, when nuclear fission was only a dream, fusion not yet even that, but sitting in his Saxon in the middle of the road all those years ago, he was right up there at that twenty-eighth level, and he knew it.

‘Ain’t nobody here at all,’ George had said. ‘Just us chickens.’

Chickens, Jonathan said to himself, thinking of College and long ago. That goddamn chicken. Then in spite of himself he began to laugh. Why did it cross the road? To get to the other side. Just to get – why didn’t I see it before? It’s so obvious . . . He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and his chest hurt. Just to get to the other side! No more reason than that. He held his breath to stop the laughter, failed, and laughed again.

He was back in Topeka by ten, in time for the morning’s meeting on the last day of that year’s congress. That evening the paper carried the headline, SENATOR STOKE ASSASSINATED! INSANE FANATIC SOUGHT! The story mentioned a state-wide alert, police searches, roadblocks, but Jonathan could not work up enough interest to finish the article. The next day he set out on the trip back to the northwest.

As he approached the Kansas border he saw a police car across the road and slowed down.

‘Roadblock. Where you going?’ the officer said.

‘Washington state.’

‘How come?’

‘I live there.’

‘What you doing in Kansas?’

‘Attending the Methodist Congress in Topeka.’

‘You a preacher?’

Jonathan nodded.

‘Gee, I’m sorry, Reverend. You just drive on through.’

‘I take it you’re here because of the senator’s death?’

‘Yeah. We’ll get the guy. Don’t you worry.’

‘And you don’t think I’m responsible?’ Jonathan said.

‘Well,’ said the cop, smiling, ‘if you’re going to get through life at all, your faith’s got to start somewhere, don’t it?’

Behind Jonathan lay the cornfields of Kansas, ahead of him the cornfields of Colorado, the boundary between the two marked only – and only for today and maybe tomorrow – by this solitary policeman with faith. ‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan said at last. ‘Faith will probably serve as well as anything else. Is the road ahead clear?’