by William Preston

* * * *

William Preston’s first two stories for Asimov’s, “You Will Go to the Moon” (July 2006) and “Close” (February 2007) were about quiet, intense characters who found themselves in deceptively ordinary scenarios. In his latest tale, the author upsets any expectations we may have formed by plunging a character as bold as a pulp hero into an adventure where nearly everyone seems to be . . .

For most of those inactive months I believed he kept me in mind yet didn’t need my specific talents. Perhaps what he’d termed “the Work” had progressed, though the world seemed just as fraught with troubles, even as the Cold War staggered to its undramatic close. Stories still surfaced about him; not front-page matter as had been the case mid-century. His exploits faded behind the conjoined twins of popular news—terrorism and celebrity, which seemed to me, trained in the study of human cultures, only exaggerated aspects of the same mortal vanities: the need to make a mark; the belief that you alone matter.

What allowed me to marry, in fact, was a growing sense that I’d invented the old man. Some three dozen adventures I’d had with him over ten years, but often I’d not known my own purposes, and sometimes the center of action proved to be several thousand miles from where I and other assistants were engaged. During that decade, the world appeared to be a gigantic machine, every human action tied to another and watched over by the old man, who seemed always intent on saving the planet, or some part of it, from destruction. The distance of years gave me a different impression: everything I’d done was either tangential or utterly beside the point. On quiet, solitary nights, scenes from that life came to me vividly; the rest of the time, real life obtruded. I had, after all, no artifacts from those events except, on soggy days, a left leg that ached—and quarterly dividends from several South American mining companies.

And so love, personal intimacy, a household: these seemed saving graces—for Claire and me, if for no one else. When the sun swelled and drowned the inner planets, or when our fragile world with all its weapons went under in its own fires, there would at least have been our simple joys for a little while under the sky.

* * * *

The morning after the wedding, Claire and I went through the presents at my Brooklyn apartment. Seated on the sofa, my legs stretched onto the coffee table, I jotted down each gift and giver as she reported them. She knelt on the other side of the room among the boxes.

“No name on this one,” she said. Once, when my life bubbled with mysteries, that would have caught my interest, but I merely said, “Hm” and waited for her to say more. The wrapping paper was a flat silver; she tore it off and held up, so I could see, a brown box. The lid unsecured, she opened it and peered inside. “What are you?” she asked.

“What.”

She pinched her brows together, then plucked out a bent piece of metal about the size of a cheese knife. Claire twisted her hand to change the angle. “It’s signed,” she said. “Or inscribed.”

“What’s it say?”

“Come see. My legs are numb.”

I made a face and grunted to standing. I thought to say something about being old and hating to move, but the decade gap in our ages didn’t seem like the best subject on such a day.

She held it out to me. I saw what she meant: a cryptic signature inscribed into the metal; above it, the word “Believe” stamped in block letters, followed by a date from ten years before. My eyes rolled upward to track the day, and I remembered the fallacious alien invasion, meant to conceal a program of human trafficking, and the craft we’d blown to blazes—mostly for our own satisfaction—in the desert outside Tempe. “Believe” indeed.

My wife asked, “Why are you smiling?”

* * * *

I’d been lecturing to first-year anthropology students in a cold room of beige brick. The windows, most of them missing their blinds, were old and let in the winter; often, my eyes watered from all the white light behind the students, who sat in curved tiers.

I noticed the unfamiliar young man at the back because it wasn’t that large a class.

Lecture done, he lingered, stepping down from each tier so gradually it was evident he was waiting for us to be alone.

“Can I help you?” He wasn’t looking at me, but at the next step. “Young man?” His head came up.

He dawdled down the stairs until the last students were out the door and I’d gathered my satchel and gym bag from my chair.

“I’m here to deliver a message, Professor Lanagan.”

“Is that so?”

“Really,” he said, and held out a piece of paper. “My . . . boss likes people to connect in a personal way.” He blinked at me as if he’d lost the right words. “Otherwise he’d have just sent you a letter.”

The paper was folded twice. “What is this?”

“Please just read it.”

I did. Twice. “Why would I take this seriously?”

“I also have information to deliver verbally,” he said. “Last year, a student entered the offices of the financial aid department carrying an explosive device.” Muscles in my midsection clenched. “You happened to be there at the time, having seen him arming the device while in the bathroom. You stopped him before he could proceed any farther, contained him, and contacted the police. You asked the authorities to keep you out of the story, which they did.”

“How do you know that?”

He nodded at the paper, which I’d kept open. “Who else would know?” For the first time, his bland visage cracked: he gave a wry smile and tilted his head slightly toward the shoulder that shrugged. “He just knows everything. Anyway, that’s the place and time, and there’ll be other people to meet. So.” He hesitated. “Nice to talk with you,” he said, and left me standing there.

I stayed like that until I found myself looking at the paper’s blank side—as if it contained a hidden message telling me how to proceed.

* * * *

I never felt comfortable saying his name; such intimacy seemed less than appropriate. The nickname some of the early assistants, and the newspapers, applied didn’t seem to suit him. Instead, I adopted the term employed by most of the assistants I’d met: the old man.

Stories—the pulpy ones I read as a teen, passed to me by my father, and the news pieces the wire services ran in our more global age—had provided me a picture, but actually being in his presence made the stories seem like hand shadows, cast dimly on a wall, aimed at telling tales of the gods.

Before he emerged, though, I met many of those who would be my compatriots.

“Slim Jim” Rogers introduced the others, all of whom sat on the arms of the chairs in the office, which looked like a library with a tremendous inlaid desk at one end. Slim Jim stood a few inches taller than I, and I was six feet. I noticed his long fingers, too, when he shook my hand.

“I’m mostly a language guy,” he said, “but the military taught me some things about electronics and combat, so that’s why the old man keeps me around.” He opened his big hands flat.

“I see,” I said, in the absence of a better response.

“You did some terrific work on the Tergen.”

I looked at his mouth, then in his eyes again. “You’ve read those papers?” The rainforest-dwelling Tergen spoke one of the nearly nine hundred discrete languages particular to Papua New Guinea. Like many of their neighbors, the Tergen held tight to a language lacking antecedents connecting it to other Papuan languages, but even among the regional tongues it sounded unprecedented; theories about the Tergen’s distinct development and origins abounded, some more in the realm of science fiction than philological or anthropological speculation. I had focused on their use of natural sounds in the construction of their language: clicks and whistles that came from animals, a sound like rushing water on verbs of motion, and one phoneme like trees rubbing together. They were the most obscure people I’d studied. The work had come somewhat as an accident; I’d signed up with two other anthropologists tracking malarial propagation and treatment in the region.

“Not all, but enough,” Slim Jim replied. “The old man has done some work there himself.” He leaned toward me in mock confidentiality. “Nothing he’s published, of course.”

“Of course...”

“His father lived among them for a while, I’m told.”

“...Really...”

“Panzer here—” he began, indicating a short-haired blond woman waiting to greet me.

“Christ!” she said. She had a German accent. “Can’t someone learn my real name first?” Firmly shaking my hand, she hit Rogers on the shoulder with the open palm of her other hand. “This place is too much like a boys’ club,” she said.

By longstanding tradition nearly everyone was known by a nickname. Gerta “Panzer” Pruner, whose father had, not coincidentally, commanded a tank division in the war, never failed to roll her eyes or punch the speaker in the shoulder, hard, whenever her unwelcome moniker was applied. Weapons expert Arthur “Tice” Tizzarelli would later train me so that I could cause impermanent though disabling damage with our unique non-lethal firearms. He was the only companion from those times whom I saw outside of a mission, our few meetings arranged by the old man. Wu, the only one present that night who lacked a nickname, was a chemical engineer, as was his father, a victim of the Cultural Revolution.

I didn’t know Panzer long. On our third mission together, she failed to open her parachute and plummeted into the heart of a dark forest. Nothing was wrong with the equipment. It had been an unlikely mistake, especially for someone trained by the East Germans, and I wondered, given her moods, whether she hadn’t chosen the time of her demise.

“Mairzy,” Mary Czekaj, joined a few months after that first meeting, and I unsubtly harbored a bit of a crush on her. If we’d seen each other more often, maybe it would have developed into something. I knew that my attraction was largely the result of shared intense experiences, so I felt mature in dismissing my feelings which, in addition, seemed improper.

As for “the old man”—by the time I’d come along, someone had turned it into an acronym, “Tom.” Wu and Tice had, rarely, taken to calling him that. The first time I heard Tice do it, the old man didn’t even blink, so it must have already been established. His real name surfaced on occasion. Often, strangely, there was no need to address him personally; you began to speak to him and found him looking at you already.

Evidently, information about me had been broadly disseminated in advance. Panzer asked about some papers of mine the State Department had put to use, and my answers were unforthcoming not from humility but surprise that anyone would care.

I was starting to ask Wu about the library’s availability—I’d spotted some volumes in my own field—when Tice said, “Evening, old man.”

It unnerved me, how someone that large could have entered without my feeling the air displace; an opening at his back, just to one side of the desk, slid shut before I got anything more than a glimpse of yellow light on a wood-panelled wall. His mildly furrowed brow made me think he already wondered why I’d been selected for his team; later, I’d realize this wasn’t a look of worry, but of focus. Once our eyes locked, he held me only for a moment. It would be a commonplace to say the moment lengthened. It did not; rather, it deepened, and I plummeted and had to steady myself. I suppose I felt myself tumbling into an unguessed-at future.

Though the old man wore only trousers and a loose beige shirt, sleeves rolled, showing the massive though magnificently tapering forearms, in my patch-elbowed corduroy jacket I felt underdressed for the occasion, and my hair, nearly to my collar in those years, seemed a horrible breach of etiquette. His own hair was nearly colorless, though it was hard to tell, so closely was it cropped, the bronzed tone of his head predominating. From what I knew of his history, he must have been around seventy, but except for wrinkles that looked to be the result of sun exposure, he appeared middle-aged.

Relatively speaking, I suppose he was.

His voice rumbled, “You’ve met the others,” though he barely opened his mouth. I stared at his lips and didn’t answer. A punch on the shoulder woke me, and I looked at Slim Jim, who barked a laugh and tilted his head as if to say, “Now you see how things are.”

The old man hadn’t moved an iota. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“They’re quite a group.” His eyes flicked about to touch on them all, with some bemusement, I thought, and everyone laughed lightly and stepped closer to the desk.

“You know something of what we do,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Do you think you’d want to work with us?”

I hesitated. Slim Jim tilted close. “Don’t worry about the details, Lanny.” And so my own nickname was set. “Everything’s taken care of from here on out. Trust me. Well,” his head bobbled, “trust him.”

I managed to say, “I’ll do what I can.”

Now the old man moved, smoothly, in a way that didn’t match his size, to slide a fat brown volume from the wall of books behind his desk. He settled the book while opening it, then quickly found the proper page. I’d noticed the fountain pen in its holder; with his left hand, he snatched the pen and tested it on the desk’s blotter. In letters somewhat like print, but joined together, he noted something in the unlined pages of the book; propriety kept me from studying it closely. I thought I saw the letters of my name.

He looked up, sweeping the group into his gaze. “Let’s discuss our next mission. Time is short.” He slid the pen back into its sheath.

* * * *

And for all the arcane weirdness most people associated with the old man, even our most bizarre cases had rational explanations—though I must say that my idea of “rational” expanded profoundly while in the old man’s service.

A flag on a nondescript building visible from my apartment informed me of my first few meetings. The flag at half-staff meant I was summoned. A bit morbid, I thought. My compatriots found out in other ways: a copy of an out-of-town newspaper delivered; a drape drawn in a nearby window. The old man couldn’t have done all this himself; he’d tasked others, and since the methods changed every few months, both in venue and style, and in the complexity needed to carry them out, he must have had a host of people upon whom to call.

In time, I appreciated what this meant. Engaged in secret activities that took me across the globe, I thought myself to be among a special breed. I was not. Whereas at first I’d passed along the city streets or ridden the subway with a feeling of detachment from those around me, later I looked at my fellows as if any of them might hide secrets of equal magnitude.

Maybe we were all in on it.

* * * *

How people with problems found their way to the old man remained something of a mystery. He didn’t advertise. Although some of our cases gained public notice and you could catch glimpses of us in grainy photos, in the age before the internet, we remained private, if not truly hidden. When we’d get summoned for a case, more often than not someone was waiting with the old man in the office. She or he would repeat a summary of events, then the old man would ask a few questions, send the guest to the outer office, get our reactions, and propose a plan of action. Then one of us would usher the person back to the elevator. In the earlier building, we had a private lift and our own floor; the gold plaque outside our entry said “Azimuth Enterprises: Search and Salvage,” but in the lobby, the name didn’t appear on the black felt. Later, in Tower Two, we shared the floor with some other offices and met in more modest rooms behind an unmarked door.

There must have been people out there whose sole job was to listen, to attune themselves to the sound of a human in need. They’d home in on the direst signal and push the person in the old man’s direction. Yet how did he choose which cases to take? Surely the wail of suffering must have reached those high offices even without the aid of others. And of course, he walked among us. He’d studied, near as I could tell, in every field of human endeavor. (He even had a fine singing voice, displayed once in my hearing at a party in Monte Carlo that ended with the host hog-tied and a kidnapping foiled.) It was as if time functioned differently for him. How else to explain his breadth of knowledge, his resources, his many involvements? He lived at a different speed; he lived between seconds like a man pausing a reel of film to consider every frame. He had all the time in the world—all the time and all the world.

But were we really doing all we could to stem the tide of evil? It was on this question that my own awful decision would finally turn.

A few times, we went into situations armed. Small caliber weapons only, some loaded with rubber bullets; the old man didn’t want any avoidable deaths, but violence in self-defense—enough violence to stop someone—was expected. As for himself, he never used a gun. A master of disabling the most solidly built enemy with a single blow, the old man believed in the nobility of the human spirit but saw the human body as a machine rife with “off” switches.

I expressed my amazement once, only to have the old man fix me with a look and say, “Want to know how it feels?” His wit was so dry, I’m not sure it’s right to label it wit. I declined his offer, and he bent as if the question hadn’t been asked, gathering from the concrete floor the saboteur who’d meant to bring down a nuclear plant.

* * * *

Not much more than a year after I’d married, in the city to attend a lecture and have lunch with a former university colleague, I ducked into a used book store to get out of a pounding late-afternoon rain that kept whipping under my frail umbrella. Not wanting to appear merely mercenary in my use of the shop—and certainly open to the possibility of a purchase—I strode with feigned assuredness to the rear of the store. There, the smell of rain seemed to have gathered, so that the farther in I went, the closer I seemed to get to the source of the storm. I passed between rows of shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling, then turned toward a back corner.

There he stood, the old man, raindrops marking his steel-gray trench coat, his bulk and stillness mastering the tight space. He held a small book open in one hand.

“Hello, Lanny,” he said without looking up, possibly without moving his mouth. That famed ability to throw his voice—did he practice it even when he wasn’t about the business of confounding some villain?

“Sir,” I said, even after all our time together.

Then, shutting his book, he gave me his full attention. “Ever read any Anselm?”

“I don’t believe so.”

He waved the little volume before slipping it back into a space in the shelves. “To some people, the unseen world is just as present as the visible world.” He passed me a faint grin. “One needs reminding.”

I wondered whether he meant only himself, since he’d been doing the reading, or whether he meant me—any of us who neglect the life of the spirit. In my silence, I heard the rain on the street—the door to the shop was open all this time—and I felt that the visible world was full enough.

The old man asked after my wife, told me to take care, and then left. I forgot to thank him for his gift. I wondered if the volume he’d held contained a message, but then I couldn’t find the spot where he’d replaced it, and perhaps it hadn’t been a volume of Anselm in any case, but a writer referring to Anselm, or someone who reminded him of Anselm. The old man’s thinking had always been a mystery.

I thought of that shop a decade later when the towers came down. Living hours from the city, I watched from the safety of my sofa as the collapse pushed a gray cloud of debris down that very street; I read later that the shop had been one into which people had fled from the terror. How sharply that connection resurfaced when the authorities came to me for help in tracking down the old man.

* * * *

Mid-November, on a morning hazy with fog, I’d just started in on Camus when a man dragged over a chair to join me at my minute table.

“Mind?” he asked. He set down a gray homburg, which heightened both my curiosity—who wore a hat these days?—and hostility—why didn’t he leave the chair at the other table? He took in the face I presented him with and squinted around the whole diner. “Pleasant,” he offered by way of evaluation. His trench coat came off next, and I saw that it was unlined, a coat for warmer climes. I turned to look out the front glass and saw a car in one of the angled slots at the curb, squarish and American; I believe the man in the passenger’s seat looked back at me.

I let my book close, assessing the situation as I had not done in years. “What’s this about?”

He had trouble finding the right distance from the table for his chair. It rumbled back and forth on the tile, and until he got it right and seated himself, he didn’t answer. I had put down Camus and tensed my legs. The only hard object within reach was the sugar dispenser, three-quarters full, which would do. The chairs stood on runners rather than legs and could be easily flipped by a push at the front. Then there was the man in the car to consider . . . but my companion already had one hand in the pocket of his suit jacket. The jacket was open and fit loosely, so I could see that what he began to withdraw wasn’t a weapon.

“I’m with the National Security Agency,” he said, producing a wallet. He used both hands to open it. I read his credentials; his name was Ruxby. “Or I was. Really I’m with another department that hasn’t been officially formed yet. It’s a changed world, Mr. Lanagan.”

“Is it?”

He frowned at his wallet. “I think so, yes.”

“I don’t.” I judged him about thirty-five. “A young person’s memory isn’t much to go on.”

He finally met my eyes. “I appreciate what you’re saying.” He half stood and used one hand to scoot his chair forward, then sat again. “But people’s . . . people’s faith in things, that’s been shaken. That’s changed. Our sense of being safe.”

“What is it you want from me?”

He nodded. “We want to contact your former employer.”

I gave a half smile. “I was never employed by him.”

“Okay,” he said to the table. “Okay. We both know you’ve been compensated in some way, but okay. The thing is,” and here his head came up, “we think he could be an enormous help to us at this time.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, that’s our thinking. Would you know how to contact him?”

“No, I wouldn’t. And no,” I continued, anticipating his next obvious question, “I wouldn’t tell you if I did, but it’s the truth.”

His gaze shunted back and forth between my eyes, as if comparing them.

“Do you have some reason to distrust your government, Mr. Lanagan?”

“No more than anyone else,” I said.

“All right,” he said, too soon, and picked up his hat by the crease. “Well, if you have some idea where he might be, or if he contacts you, please let me know.” He produced a card that he pressed to the table. I didn’t touch it. He rose, his chair grinding back, then lifted his coat from the wall hook. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“The world is full of wonders,” I said, and he gave me the look I wanted, one with a hint of pique.

Only after that car had pulled away did I pick up his card. My coffee was cold, and I couldn’t summon the energy to open my book again. On my way out, I crushed the card and dropped it in the trash.

* * * *

Of course Claire and I had talked about my adventures; in bed at night, she’d ask me to regale her as she tucked against me. I had some thirty-plus stories to choose from, some more worth telling than others, relative to my proximity to the key events. I wished I’d kept some kind of record. Instead, I had unclear memories that mixed stories and left out decisive moments that I’d only recall when I neared a climax. Added to this were the stories I’d read in my youth, and sometimes, I’m sure, those supplied scenes that held together my fragmented tales.

“I’m so bad at this,” I said on more than one occasion.

Usually she dismissed this complaint and urged me onward. Once she said, “That’s part of the charm. They’re like stories from another life. Stories people pass on. They don’t always hold together. But they mean something. They mean something to the people telling them.”

I looked up toward the ceiling, unfocused, as if I could see farther. “But what do they mean to you?”

She thought about this only for a moment. “People’s lives can have purpose,” she said.

The day I met Ruxby, I didn’t say a word about it until we’d settled in for the night. It happened to be a night when she asked me to tell her something about the old man, asked whether there was something I hadn’t told her before. Instead I told her about my interrupted breakfast. By the time I finished, she was sitting up in bed, clutching her pillow to her chest.

“So you’re not going to help?”

“Is that what you think I should do?”

“I just asked what you were going to do.”

“He said something about compensation, compensation from the old man. He knows I get money from the mines. He knows we all get it. They could come after those assets, everybody’s assets. We’d be fine. Not the others, necessarily. And maybe they wouldn’t stop there.”

I watched her breathe in and out, twice. “All I asked,” she said, exasperated, “was what you’re going to do.”

I avoided answering. “It’s beside the point. The old man is dead.”

Claire studied me. “Why do you think he’s dead?”

I made a wry, unpleasant face. “What year is it?”

* * * *

Those of us who spent any time in his company talked about his age. We had theories: the old man was not the same man who’d had all those famous adventures in the thirties and forties; genetic mutation made possible both his intelligence and longevity; the reason he disappeared for weeks at a time was to immerse himself in some revitalizing fluids in his Arctic redoubt.

Allan “Randy” Randolph’s pet theory arose during a card game on a freighter deck. “Look at me,” he said, a smooth-skinned black man, very dark. He’d been an engineer with NASA and retired to New York, where his wife had opened a high-end jewelry store.

“What about you?” I asked.

“How old do I look?”

“Forty,” said Mairzy, holding her cards under her chin.

“Mm-hm,” he said, turning his head as if to admire himself in the mirrors of our eyes. “Not younger?”

“Less than forty,” allowed Mairzy, and we all laughed. Tice put down the book he was reading. We were all waiting for the old man to emerge from a discussion with the captain. The ship would be making a detour.

“Fine,” said Randy. “I’ll take it.”

Mairzy proffered, “And you’re fifty—”

“Seven,” he said. “Fifty-seven. And our boss is how old?”

“Round about seventy-five,” said Tice, stepping into the little group. “He had to be at least twenty-five when his career started in thirty-three, but he was probably thirty.”

“So it’s obvious,” said Randy. “He’s got some black blood.” He passed his hand down his face. “Figure it: the complexion, the smooth face. The voice—that voice has soul.” To our laughter, he responded with his profile. “I’ll look just as good at seventy.”

We never found out how Randy would look at seventy. He died two years later. Heart attack while swimming at the Y. The old man made sure we knew about the funeral service; there were no calling hours.

The scene was a narrow Methodist church wedged between two much-taller concrete structures on the East Side. I saw some of my friends when I came in, but figured it wouldn’t do to sit together. At the rear of the church, a broad-shouldered figure sat hunched forward. The hair was the wrong color, and he wore small glasses, and his jaw looked lopsided somehow, but I’d swear it was the old man. When the funeral party passed by at the end, I saw that he’d gone.

After the service, we all gathered by a table stacked with hymnals in the back. I remember Wu saying, “Not every problem is solvable through the application of intellect and force.” I had a terrible vision of myself as Randy, feeling the heart attack mid-pool, punching against the water, feeling the numbness spread through my limbs, my body going down and the strange lights below the world of sound and sensation overtaking me.

* * * *

“I wasn’t staying,” I told him.

“Do it anyway,” he said. “I’ll be over here.” He chose the same table as before.

Ruxby wanted to know when I’d last seen the old man, and I told him about the bookstore. It was the truth, and the story seemed harmless. Perhaps I’d be left alone if that was all I had to offer. He sat back in his chair when I’d finished. He asked for the store’s location, and something about how he nodded made me think I knew his thoughts—so I followed up by saying how that street had been a flight path for pedestrians when the towers fell.

“You used to meet at the offices in the World Trade Center.”

Of course this was a secret, but with the towers gone . . .

“Tower Two,” I said into my coffee. Four bubbles clung in a little group to the edge of the mug. “He’d had other offices before that. I only saw him a few times there.”

“Sure. Sure. But you know something? This you’ll find interesting.” He scooted the chair forward. “He moved out of those Tower Two offices one month before the attack.” I kept my head down, but his hand came within view across the table, gliding over the surface. “One,” he said, tapping down next to my mug. “Month,” he said, and tapped once more.

I sipped my coffee. I felt the little bubbles that had held on slide down my throat.

“You’re drawing a conclusion from that,” I said.

“With someone like your boss, that decision was no coincidence.” Why did he smile throughout this? What about it was enjoyable? “It means something.”

Already, this business had exhausted me. “Why does it have to mean something?”

“Come on. I’ve heard the stories. Sometimes it was like the old man knew what was coming.”

“You said it: stories. You’ve heard stories.”

He pursed his lips and squinted with his right eye, as if he were actually thinking about this. “That’s why we’ve come to you. You know what’s behind the stories. You and your old friends. So we’re looking to find out what he knew. What he knows. How he knows what he knows.”

“What he knows?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re saying he’s alive.”

“I’m saying he’s alive. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. You’re saying he isn’t?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t heard. It’s been years—”

“You’ve just been cut off is all. The old man doesn’t talk to you any more.”

“That’s his way.”

“Sure. That’s his way. Comes and goes. Giant mystery.”

I summed up my thinking. “He only seemed to know the future sometimes because he understood the present. He understood people and where their actions might lead. He was a genius. A genius and a man of action.”

“Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. So: What did he know that we didn’t? What did he know that could’ve saved those people?”

This prompted long-buried reflections on the old man’s purposes. Active during WWII, he’d caught saboteurs and spies and people building even wilder bombs than the ones the Americans had built, but he hadn’t stopped the slaughter of the Jews. Why? Was he powerless? Despots, both major and minor, and much mid-century suffering—all had been present when the old man was at the height of his visibility. Had the supplications of the innocent been so manifold that they overwhelmed him? Did he know something we didn’t about the workings of the world, staving off even greater terrors than those that fleshed out history books? Wu had said once, “The old man doesn’t toil in those fields,” leaving me to think that the realm of war and international affairs lay beyond his scope. But this latest attack—this he could have prevented. These were the kinds of actions we often tried to stop: schemes to bring civilization to its knees; the works of madmen; evil at its most demonstrative. Parochial as I knew my thinking to be, I felt he surely could have prevented this assault on our old city, had he been alive, or capable.

Like anybody else, I played out in my head, then and now, at odd times, scenes from within the towers or the planes: there’s always blossoming fire. Sometimes, the end comes quickly. Sometimes I stumble through smoke and confusion, the search for an exit. Never in any of these terrible fantasies am I among those who survive. Always, at the end, the world comes crashing inward, collapsing to a point where both silence and darkness are absolute.

“What will you do if I don’t cooperate?”

“We need this information. You are among the few people we know of with access to it.”

“My family. You’re threatening my family.”

Still looking down at the table, his eyes went wide and he blinked rapidly. He laughed once, like a cough in his chest, then raised his eyes to me. “Mr. Lanagan, we’re not monsters. Neither your wife nor your mother is a threat to national security. You are. Your former colleagues are. We’ll be talking to them. The ones still around, anyway.”

“You think I won’t let them know you’re coming?”

He shrugged. “Let them know. Maybe one of them will think this through differently than you’re doing and decide to help us. But it’s true, we may have to use other methods than,” and here he swept his hand through the air to indicate the bakery, this public method for mining information, a soft approach, “what we’ve done here today,” he concluded.

“No one will help you.”

“Someone will tell us something.”

“People will lie.”

He nodded his head to the side. “Conceivably. You didn’t lie. You don’t know where he is. I believe you. Maybe no one knows. But you know something, something to make this simpler for everyone.” I watched his eyes move about as if he were thinking. Then he said, “Don’t hesitate to contact the others.”

I loosed a burst of laughter right at his face. They thought I would betray my colleagues—when, in fact, I didn’t even know how to reach them. Having regained some sense that I had the upper hand, I showed my cards. “We didn’t even know each other outside the old man. He brought us together. Apart—we were never in touch.”

This wasn’t entirely true. There’d been those few times with Tice.

“Blaine,” he said. “The woman’s phone number.”

“I— Who’s—”

Ruxby looked off to the right. He took a pen and card from his jacket pocket and bent over the table. Then I realized he was listening. All along, our conversations had been monitored from the car. He carefully formed the numbers on the card and read them back. “Right? Thanks.” He stood and put away his pen. “There’s Mary Czekaj’s phone number. And this is my card again, in case you lost the first one.” I must have been staring at what he’d written. “We know where every one of you lives, the few who are left. There’s only one person hiding.”

I recovered my voice and said, “Just because you can’t find him doesn’t mean he’s hiding.”

“Fair enough. But in times like these, mine isn’t the burden of proof. What can I say?” And with that, he left. When I picked up the card I saw that he’d tucked a ten under his saucer, enough to cover us both.

* * * *

On the walk home, I considered who they’d contact next and wondered who, of those I’d known, remained. Mairzy wouldn’t tell them anything. If she knew they were coming . . .

In a cufflink box in my dresser, I still kept the capsule. Mairzy, Wu, and I had been given them by a double agent helping us infiltrate a mountain-dwelling warlord on the Lao-Thai border. In case our covers as drug-running Americans were blown, we might have wanted to avoid the inevitable torture and simply end the pain. The old man’s brow tightened as we pocketed our poisons. Clearly, he’d never resort to such measures himself, nor succumb to torture.

Before we’d set out, the old man said, “It’ll never come to that. I’ll have you all in my sights and extract you at the first sign of trouble.”

As it turned out, we quickly learned what we needed to know, the old man and some sympathetic Hmong staged a nighttime assault, and we escaped in the resulting confusion.

Mairzy would have kept the capsule, as I had—as a souvenir, but also because the old man had taught us to be prepared for any eventuality.

* * * *

“Mairzy?”

A long pause. “Who is this?”

“This is Lanny.”

“Hello?” she said before I’d finished.

“I think there’s something—”

“Oh shit,” she said. “What’s happened?”

I waited a moment, then said, “This connection is strange.”

Again I waited. “My phone is being tapped,” she said. “But I’ve got this tricky little device. The old man gave it to me years ago. Reroutes everything so the caller can’t be traced. And it screws with their listening.”

“Well, that explai—”

“Yours must be tapped too. They—yes, that explains the delay. So. Wait. Where are you calling from?”

“I’m home. I’m calling from home.”

“I’m telling you, you’re tapped. They can probably hear your end of things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pressing the phone closer to my face as if it did and as if that accomplished anything. I paused.

“This number is unlisted. How did you—”

I forgot to allow for the timing delay. “Listen, they’re looking—”

“Oh, goddammit, Lanny. What have you done?”

“I haven’t—”

“I’m sure they are,” she said, “but I don’t know a damned thing.”

“I haven’t done anything. I’m calling to warn you. Obviously, I didn’t think this through. It doesn’t matter. They know where we all are.”

“I won’t even talk to them.”

“The times,” I heard myself say, “are different.” My voice echoed a bit in my ear, as if it hadn’t gone very far and simply bounced off a wall.

“Some things are constant,” she said.

“The old man is probably dead, so this could be a pointless argument.”

“No. If he’d died, we’d know. The world,” she said, and waited so long I thought the call had been cut off, but then she concluded, “wouldn’t make as much sense.”

“It makes sense?” I asked. I imagined my wife, out shopping, returning to stand in the sun-bright space by the sink. I saw her unpack the groceries, adjust her reading glasses as she studied the register tape. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out, because everything we’d said, for years, was overheard and recorded. Men could come to my house and take her away, separate us. This was the world now—and this was the world we’d always lived in. I said to Mairzy, softly, “I wanted to warn you.”

“And I want to warn you,” she said, and then the call did end.

* * * *

In all my years with the old man, what good did I do? Pretty much every case left me asking that, and pride pushed me, eventually, to consider every member of the group in light of that question. Sometimes the value of someone was evident. Other times . . . I didn’t question the old man, though, and most of the time, I was busy with my actual job.

Midway through my career with the old man, I raised the question with Mairzy. We’d been paired in a sojourn into a warren of caves. Conversing was hard: echoes, goggled eyes, the sweeping lamps of our helmets. “What exactly am I doing here?”

“Ha. What are any of us doing here?”

“No. I mean specifically me. I mean, I’m a professor. I write books. My specialty . . . you know my specialty. There are cases when the old man doesn’t call me in at all.”

“Just last month—”

“Right. For example. So there are cases where I’m clearly not needed. Then there are cases like this. I do what the old man tells me. I pull my weight. But . . . this isn’t my skill set. My particular focus in life. It’s not being utilized here.”

We stopped to lean against damp walls, opposite each other in a narrowing passage. In the headlamp beam, I could see the sweat running from under Mairzy’s caving helmet, and I felt the wetness running down my own face. I thought of the formation of limestone, the way liquids become solid, and by some reversal of process I imagined us both being reduced to pools by this adventure. Something crucial was taking place, something unseen.

“Here, you want an answer? You’re good in a scrape. How’s that?”

“No good.”

“I tried,” she said flatly, so much so that I couldn’t tell whether she was joking.

“I think I can objectively say that I’m not pulling my weight,” I said.

“You’re so wrong,” said Mairzy. “Don’t you see that?”

“What,” I said, putting out an open hand, as if she could deposit an explanation in my palm.

“The old man knows you better than you know yourself. Sure, you’ve got your studies, your papers, whatever. Your day job. I’ve got mine too. But who we are . . . that’s what the old man utilizes. He knows what he needs. He knows our true skills. They aren’t the skills that make us money, maybe. But they serve the Work.”

The Work. I felt my heartbeat and heard us breathing in the deep underground channel. I took a moment to slow my breathing. When she saw I was ready, Mairzy asked, “Okay?” and I replied in kind, and we proceeded in search of a passageway to a world we never did find.

* * * *

If the old man knew our strengths, he knew as well our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, how our humanity functioned. He knew what we would do in a given circumstance. I somehow found that comforting as I phoned Ruxby. Comfort also came from the thought that, if our beliefs in the old man were true, then he would never have allowed the attacks, and so he must be dead. If he was alive, as Ruxby insisted . . . So I would meet him and tell him everything I knew—really, the only thing I knew that might be of any use.

* * * *

Half a dozen years after marrying, I saw an old enemy, The Dismantler, at a theme park, holding the hand of a small child. This man’s specialty was devices that took apart buildings, planes—what have you—from the inside out. Any villain of more ordinary fascinations would have planted bombs; the Dismantler’s tools analyzed how a thing was put together and undid its assemblage as if time’s arrow were running backward. I have no idea of the mechanics of these devices. Their true horror was that they took the measure of whatever they encountered, so when a pair of squatters found a cache of these little box-like monstrosities just as they were activating, another trespasser saw through a window exactly what happens when a person is undone bone by bone.

The old man conjured a flashlight-styled contraption that put out a strobing yellow beam meant to befuddle the Dismantler’s weapons. Our raid on his subterranean headquarters was quite a light show, though my memories of the attack are visual fragments. Nightmarish, that event. When we all stood around the Dismantler above ground, in a fallow field, the old man kneeling on his back, I felt we’d returned from the underworld with a demon.

Seeing him years later, my first instinct was to rush him, knock him down. Instead, I froze with inaction.

“What is it?” Claire asked.

“That man.”

“You know him?”

I studied the little group, which I saw, as my sense of the scene widened, also included a woman and a stroller. They were standing on line for a ride. The man laughed at something the woman said, caught me looking, glanced my way, gave a genial smile to someone he believed was merely reacting to his amusement, then turned his attention back to the woman.

“Honey? You know him?”

“Not any more,” I answered, and took my wife’s hand with some desperation.

Surely it wasn’t that easy to make a terrible man—a sociopathic man—good. Surely the old man didn’t simply put people under the knife and slice away whatever kept them from being moral. That didn’t seem like how he’d work. The process would have been more . . . humane. More personal.

* * * *

Whatever the process, didn’t doctors do the same with pills: patch over the chemical or genetic wound in someone’s personality? We were not made perfect, any of us. And what did free will mean to a person obsessed, a person who had inherited a trait for sadism, someone whose early life had perhaps been a string of torments? Under the old man’s care, then, such a person would, for the first time, have a will that was free.

Though just how free was mine?

Whatever the process, rumor ran that the old man committed these surgical acts in his Arctic stronghold, what he referred to as “my northern retreat” and Slim Jim called “Camp Iceberg.”

I’d been taken only once, but understood that the old man spent a great deal of time there when he wasn’t on a case. We arrived after a plane ride to a small Canadian town followed by what amounted to a high-speed subway trip, traveling beneath the tundra in a tunnel constructed—when? by whom? The old man hadn’t accomplished such a massive engineering feat on his own. It was like no subway I’d ridden; frictionless, it reminded me of the pneumatic tubes that carried mail in old office buildings.

We emerged in a cold chamber sealed off from the rest of the structure. Inside, I caught only glimpses of the overall design: under a domed, distant ceiling lay rooms within rooms, a kind of funhouse approach with multiple openings off every room, every doorway showing split passages to other spaces, and all of it decorated in such a spartan style, nothing stood out against the ice-blue walls. Several rooms held books on sparse shelves, rugs and pillows for seating; we paused in the kitchen, where the old man threw down frozen slabs of fish, a meal for later, before leading us to an armory, gathering gear, and taking us then to the vehicles.

We rode two-man snowmobiles onto the packed surface, our eyes protected by thick goggles that pressed too hard against my cheekbones. I looked back and saw that we had emerged from the side of a small mountain.

The next day, having retrieved both the beacon and the two silent men we’d sought—both of them now slung unconscious across the old man’s vehicle—we returned by the exact same path from our polar adventure. I saw the features of the landscape more clearly then: the abrupt tower of ice, the plains of utter white on either side, a range of mountains like a sine wave in the distance.

* * * *

Ruxby met me at my summons. Snow had fallen late the previous day, and the morning’s slippery walkways slowed my progress. Turning the corner near the bakery, I paused to catch myself on the brick wall, then saw Ruxby emerge from the passenger’s side of his car; I avoided studying the other figure within.

I told Ruxby what I knew. He had me estimate size and distances. Two days later, I ducked into the back of his car. The other man was nowhere about. Ruxby opened his computer to show me satellite pictures and movable 3D renderings of the gray wastes and irruptions from those pictures. Three possible locations had been identified.

“That’s it,” I said of the second one, and seeing it, even like this, I felt the sled bouncing across the white land and the great joy of working for the old man that had filled me that day. And I also felt the terrible cold of that place. It snuck inside you like an assassin’s blade. For days after that adventure, I’d not been fully warm. Now I felt it again, the cold that wouldn’t leave.

Ruxby shut the computer.

“You’re coming too,” he said, then waited for me to leave the car.

* * * *

Clutching the straps that held me against the wall of the transport, under a helmet that dampened the sound, I felt a mixture of fear and bemusement, surrounded by highly armed men but half-convinced of the entire effort’s futility. If he was alive, if he was at the Arctic stronghold, if he wasn’t alerted to their approach . . . They were constructing a fictional narrative, and none of the plot points were believable. The closest I’d ever come to stories like this were in my time with the old man, and even those cases rarely played out in real life as perfectly or dramatically as these people seemed to imagine this would play out.

When the plane shuddered, the soldier next to me said, “Little turbulence.” He had to shout to be heard, and though he’d turned my way, he had his eyes shut. His mouth worked in an exaggerated way to chew his gum.

Ruxby, suited like the others in thick, dark fabric, swaying from strap to strap like a man moving down the body of a subway train, approached me, then waited until I acknowledged him.

“What?” I said, shouting over the high whine of the engines.

“I don’t want him hurt,” Ruxby called back, the plane jostling him. “I don’t want anyone hurt.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. Look.” He dropped to one knee and took hold of my shoulder strap to keep himself from pitching about. “Last chance to wrack your memory. Were there other exits?”

“Everything I know,” I said, “I’ve told you. But the old man . . .” I looked away, at the curving transport walls and the men depending from them, locked in their own thoughts. “No one knows what he knows,” I concluded.

“We’ll take out the tunnel right when we hit the retreat.” His eyes focused past me, picturing what would take place. “Then it should be too late.”

What could I say? Ruxby watched me watch him for a few moments, then got up and staggered away.

We came down on the ice more smoothly than I thought possible. When the rear of the plane whined open, the military men filed out while I dawdled with my straps.

Ruxby appeared again at my side and removed my helmet.

“We’re two miles away,” he said. “I want you in the second vehicle. You’ve seen this from the outside, so you’re best equipped to tell us where to enter.”

“I drew you a diagram,” I said.

“I still want your eyeballs.” It sounded like a threat.

Weak from the trip—and from more than the trip—I watched him unharness me, then watched my legs lift me to standing. “Wait,” I said. “What vehicles?”

Only when I stepped from the ramp at the rear of the plane, feeling myself shat upon the ice, lit by beams from inside our plane, did I learn that there was another transport. A hundred yards away, the ramp to a second plane dropped, and out rolled a pair of two-part tank-treaded vehicles for moving across the ice.

Several inches of snow had recently fallen, powdery and dry, and my boot went in up to the top of the laces. The soldiers dashed across the distance, snow notwithstanding. I was reminded of my one desert adventure with the old man, hunting for the remains of a lost German Panzer brigade. It involved a family secret and stolen paintings, though I confess the convolutions of the plot lost me, or didn’t interest me. Watching out for other forces engaged in the search, Mairzy, a few steps ahead, caught sight of metal. To run on the dunes was something like trying to maneuver here.

Ruxby grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he said, and he pointed as both vehicles headed our way. One stopped for the men from our plane, while the other continued closer, giving off a suppressed roar. As the other vehicle moved off, wind lifted the powder from its wake and threw it fifty yards into my face.

* * * *

The snow rover proceeded with unnerving steadiness. I sat in the cab, between the driver and Ruxby, all our eyes on the other vehicle ahead, headed straight for the blue-white glacial flank.

“It was supposed to be overcast,” said Ruxby.

“He’s not even here,” I said, managing some firmness.

“Oh, you’re wrong about that.”

“It’s a tomb now,” I said. “If he came here, he came to die.”

“You know,” said Ruxby, “it’s not like you’re privy to all the information I have,” and his confidence kept me from saying more.

* * * *

The Case of the Leviathan: my second year with the old man. I thought a vast inland lake on a volcanic archipelago had taken him. From the depths, a white tentacle—was it flesh or steel?—slid up, evident in the unnaturally clear water. The old man must have taken a breath before it yanked him down, though it snatched him before Mairzy could even exhale the breath that became a scream. Slim Jim grabbed a crowbar from the truck and dove in from the abrupt edge. Though the water was clear, the light was wrong to see too far. We all swore and shouted. We called out plans of action.

Only a minute must have passed before the water bubbled. The old man shot up from the water, emerging waist-high as if propelled, and when he bobbed downward we heard a gasp and saw Slim Jim come up at the ends of the old man’s arms. The old man released him and they both swam to the ledge-like shore.

“Help Slim Jim,” the old man directed, his voice echoing across the still lake, and we did as we were told. Slim Jim had lost the crowbar and torn his shirt around the shoulder. Wu worked the shirt off, revealing a vicious gash. Someone else fetched the first aid kit.

“Good work, everyone,” said the old man. His breast pocket glowed. He’d found the crystal he’d sought for forty years. “Sorry for the scare.” He caught all our eyes, not pausing, and strode past us to the jeeps.

Later I learned that this was something of a tradition: leaving his assistants to believe he’d finally met his end, then shocking them with his miraculous survival. Sometimes he stretched out the performance past the point of hope, though I never saw that myself.

Sitting beside Ruxby, I thought how this time he’d strung us along for years. He hadn’t just survived an attack of superhuman force, an explosion at close range, a plunge from a shelf of rock; this time, he’d outlasted mortality itself. Only something mundane had caught up with him: a government in need of someone to blame or maybe just take down a notch. Even at that time, I realized that their very unbelief in what he stood for made their success possible.

* * * *

I told myself: Of course he had escape routes. Of course he had alternate plans. Of course the old man could fashion a thousand ways to escape. Because surely he’d known they were coming—even before they’d put their plans in motion. Whether or not he’d known about the attacks on D.C. and the towers, and whatever his reasons for being unfindable, he must have known, afterward, how his absence from Tower Two would be perceived, and that the outstretched arm of panicked desperation would, of necessity, reach for him.

As we headed across the tundra, I imagined his escape. Lost in the labyrinthine recesses of the fortress, the soldiers would blunder about. An absolute darkness would embrace them, false heat signatures would fool their night-vision equipment, the passageways would rearrange themselves as they advanced, an electromagnetic pulse frustrate their equipment, his voice thrown behind them leave them foundering against each other as he slipped away. Perhaps he had, like the clever German villain the Doppelganger, a bevy of articulated simulacra moving about the place; the old man would have made use of that technology even as he’d healed the brain of the man who devised it.

Capturing the old man? You might as well capture the wind.

* * * *

I did as they asked, guiding them closer, indicating the entrance. A hundred yards away, the first vehicle stopped and let out its complement of men, who spread rapidly across the ice under a smudgy gibbous moon.

“By now he’s certainly seen us,” I said, forgetting my established position that he wasn’t here.

“He doesn’t kill, right?” Ruxby exhaled into my face. “We’re pretty much counting on that. Or do you want to rethink that?” He paused, and did not pull back. “But I’m prepared for that contingency, too.”

He had me get out of the vehicle and join him. The men moved quickly, and no sound came back across the blank expanse separating us.

Maybe thirty yards from the entrance: that’s how close they got. I didn’t see whether a hole opened in the earth, but suddenly, between myself and them, something shot from the ground, silver and fast as a bullet is silver and fast, but the size of a man. The whine of the engine reached us after a moment, and by then I saw, as it struck the earth, hard, angling to my right, someone riding a compact kind of snowmobile. Everyone near the glacier immediately set off in pursuit.

I saw flashes, heard concussions. Guns lit and sent their punctuations across the ice. Ruxby grabbed me, though I hadn’t even known I’d jumped forward.

They had trouble getting a bead on the old man—if that’s who it was—as he zagged into the distance. And then a whirring from behind me spun me about, and I saw two snowmobiles emerge from our own vehicle. I figured they wouldn’t catch the old man, but they made up some distance, and at some point, between their weapons and those of the men on foot, the retreating snowmobile flipped violently over multiple times. A figure staggered upward and began to run; an odd light flared around him.

“That’s done it. They’ve stunned him,” said Ruxby through his scarf, binoculars covering the only exposed part of his face. I saw more flurries of movement out there; distance had, conversely, increased their consequence, as if something epic were transpiring, though in the deep past. Now Ruxby let me advance, as he moved too toward the action.

The soldiers reached him, but still the old man had not been seized. I saw men flung away, tossed aside as if they were only the clothing they wore. “Jesus Christ,” Ruxby said. Sparks flashed again across the sparkling ground, men swarmed, and at last the activity seemed to cohere into a trembling ball, settling.

All along, men had been communicating via headsets. Only now did a voice of some substance reach me, as someone called back, “He’s down! It’s done!”

Then the ground jigged, and from the direction of the old man’s hidden fortress came a monstrous sound, like churning rock. I heard Ruxby swear. Lights like birthing stars flared from under the mountain of ice, and then we all lost our footing as a great rush of air sucked us forward. I landed on my elbow. Men shouted. I righted my head to see the entire mountain disappear. I pictured it as from within: the domed firmament collapsing inward, the ice accumulated over geologic swathes of time filling the space he’d created for himself—labs, armories, a surgery, library. There would be a terrible smell as everything was consumed in an eccentric blast of his own devising. The sound I did not have to imagine. It came to me across the waste: a rumble and a cough, and what had been was simply no more, as if it were the result of an instant’s work and could be snuffed out just as fast.

As soon as I could right myself, I checked on the old man, but he hadn’t gone anywhere, evidently; the soldiers still knelt in a heap. Two hundred yards away, a black patch discolored the ice.

Ranting, swearing, Ruxby stormed out to where they held the old man, but his words flew away from me. Then they were carrying the old man past, swaddled so he couldn’t run or use his fists, and I turned away before he could see my face.

I headed toward my vehicle while they carried him to the other one, and as I touched the handle, my back to those men, I heard someone speaking from just by my right shoulder. “Well done, Lanny,” it said, high pitched and airy. No one was there. I felt the tears start as I jerked open the door to the vehicle and threw myself inside. The driver, who’d stayed behind, looked out on what had transpired. He glanced at me, blinked, and didn’t offer up a word. Our headlights caught the tiny bits of ice falling from the fuzzy sky. I wanted to be home. Then, when I’d rested, I meant to go in the stores and libraries and burn the books of the old man’s adventures, because what happened today had put them all to the torch.

The door by me flew open. “What was in there?” shouted Ruxby. “What did he destroy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve told you everything.”

“Gasses? Do you think we’ll need to check for toxins, chemicals? What the hell kind of blast was that?”

“I don’t know!” I shouted, screamed really, done with all of this, ruined myself, having brought down ruin.

Ruxby just cast a look toward the black print on the ice. “What a mess,” he said. “Here, move over,” he directed, and I shifted to the middle. He jerked a thumb toward the other vehicle. “What’s your view? Can he get out of there?”

I didn’t even consider the question. “Are you sure he’s even in there?”

His hand touched the lever on the door. “Hey, lieutenant,” he said into his mic. “You sure you’ve got him?” He glared at me. “He says he’s looking at him. Okay, thanks. Nice try,” he said to me.

Our vehicle jerked into motion and swung about to follow the other, and the whole way back to the planes I watched the rear of the vehicle ahead as if it might miraculously open and reveal a coterie of armed men staring into a bright and empty space in their very midst.

* * * *

Holding the door frame, however, I didn’t pull back enough, whereas she launched herself forward, following through dead ahead with her small and bony fist, so she caught me directly on the chin. I collapsed backward. My wife called out from the kitchen. I made to turn over, rather than putting up my hands for protection. When I was half on my side, Mairzy yanked me up by my shirt, and I naturally put my feet under me to get myself standing. Claire shouted from nearby, I started to say something to calm her, and Mairzy pitched me forward so my head slammed into the door frame.

I saw white flashes and pitched over onto an end table, which then came down with me to the floor. Vaguely, I was aware of my wife screaming. Shrieking.

“Back off ! Back off !” shouted Mairzy.

I mumbled something to the effect of, “I’m okay,” but I stayed where I was, not that my body was giving me much of a choice.

My wife evidently didn’t heed Mairzy’s advice and joined me on the floor, grasping me across the chest. I kept reassuring her. I figured the worst was past, but she gasped, repeatedly, “Oh god! Oh god!” When she got me onto my knees, I saw that Mairzy had planted herself on the arm of a sofa in the front room.

I had to shut my eyes against the day’s brightness. “This is Mairzy,” I said. “Of the old man.”

Mairzy had me tell the story of what happened. She knew some of it; there’d been a vague wire service story in all the papers about a raid on a polar terrorist hideout.

Rage rimmed her eyes, and it made me defensive. Sentiment left me, and I recalled the reasons I’d cooperated.

“He was hiding up there, Mairzy. And why destroy the base? What purpose did that serve? What did he need to conceal?”

“You’re an idiot. I never would have thought it of you, but you’re an idiot. You’ve got everything backward. You think these men, this Ruxby, you think these people could be trusted with what the old man knew? You think they would always do what’s right? You think they’d be so careful about human life?

“Think about it. Think about his attempted escape,” she said sardonically. “Do you really think if he’d wanted to get away, he wouldn’t have? Why do you think he led them all out onto the ice, away from the base?”

“He . . . led them. . . ?”

“When the blast went off, was anyone inside?” She leaned forward. “No. Right? No.” She sat back. “He made sure no one got hurt. He surrendered so everyone would be safe. Everything he did was to protect people. If he hadn’t wanted to be caught, they’d never have found him. He knew—he knew you’d tell about the citadel.”

“Me?”

“Or someone. Not me, at any rate. He let them think that was the end of it. They’ll never come after us now. There’s no need. We didn’t know anything, and they’ve captured the old man, who even burned his secrets rather than let them get a glimpse. They’ll want to know those secrets. So their focus will shift to interrogation. Imagine what they’ll do. People are scared. There aren’t any safeguards. There aren’t any rules.

“But now,” she said, “. . . none of us is safe.”

“You just said—”

“I don’t mean you and me or any others who worked with the old man. I mean everyone. The people who came to the old man for help. Don’t you get that? Who’s looking out for people now? Where will we turn?”

Something in her words . . . Claire heard it too, and gave me a look. The woman sounded unstable; her thinking wasn’t clear. When I looked back, her hand was coming from the breast pocket of her shirt. Her fingers went to her mouth.

“What’s the world without him?” she said, then shut her lips firmly. As I bolted to my feet, her head snapped back and her body arched violently. The years had slowed me some, but even in my youth, my glory days, the days I ran with giants, I wouldn’t have been fast enough.

And she’d been right, in part. In the days that followed, everything seemed different: blanker, harder, and harder to bear. Though I hadn’t interacted with him in years before this misadventure, a belief in the old man and his secret labors had sustained me to an extent I had not appreciated. Now I felt it.

The old man had a pledge he’d composed for himself. I read it once; framed behind his desk and printed freehand on a small, yellowed piece of paper, it was labeled merely “My Oath.” My companions were talking, of all things, about the World Series. I don’t recall the oath exactly. There was something about helping anyone who sought his aid; a bit about applying every faculty he had toward humanitarian goals—and strengthening those faculties to their limits. The last lines had to do with the necessity for peace and a caution against undue violence.

Never in my years with the old man did any of us recite this oath or take a pledge of loyalty. We signed no agreement and were given no contract. It was understood, I suppose, that we would simply follow his lead—because he had judged that, despite our plentiful weaknesses, we would, in our best moments, do what was right, or at least learn to do better.

I was a retired, married man when I formulated these thoughts, standing one frigid night on the lawn behind my house. But I was not dead, and I was not deaf to the voices of people seeking solace.

Only, I did not know what to do.

And I came to see what Mairzy meant: The old man’s logic—the mathematics of his moral reasoning—was not my logic. He calculated the human cost in making the government continue the hunt. Like me, he must have taken into account the lives of his former assistants. The most reasonable gesture, seemingly, would have been surrender.

Yet neither was that what he’d done. He’d fought those men as if he were merely one of them, one of us, letting them play their part as successful captors, triumphant agents of the law who could tout their battle in the next day’s newspapers. Popular imagination needed to see a great battle being won in dramatic blows. The old man saw only “the Work,” a labor of days and lives, an abstraction constructed from unrelated events, in which every human act has value, even if, at the time, its worth cannot be gauged.

* * * *

Spring, three years later. I stood pondering the perennials along the front of the house when a delivery truck pulled up. A young man in the standard brown uniform hopped down, swinging his arms in a determined stride, a clipboard in one hand.

“Mr. Lanagan?”

“Yes?”

He indicated the truck. “I’ve got a delivery of encyclopedias for you.”

I blinked. “People still order those?”

“Um. You did.”

“Well, actually, I didn’t. Can I see that?” He handed me the clipboard with its list of deliveries attached. “That’s not—” I started, then shut my mouth. I’d been about to comment on it getting my name wrong. Instead of “Brian” . . . it said “Lanny.” I looked at the truck as if it contained explosives enough to lift the neighborhood into the sky.

“What do you think?” asked the delivery man.

I checked his face for any signs of deceit. He wore an open look. It was a bright, warming day, and he seemed a part of it. Perhaps he was who he appeared to be, and perhaps not—either way, I felt, it was all right, and I let my scrutiny slide away.

“Sure,” I said, handing back the clipboard. “Bring them in.”

A box the size of a washing machine teetered against the straps on his handtruck as he wheeled it up the slate walk, then turned and bumped it up the two steps into the house. I directed him to leave the box in the middle of the living room. Following the arrows on the box exterior, he lowered one long side to the floor.

I held out a twenty.

“We don’t get tips,” he said.

“I don’t usually get deliveries. Humor me.” He took the bill, touched his cap in a quaint gesture, and left, shutting the door softly. I watched through the picture window as the truck drove off, unremarkable and remarkable both.

Naturally, the return address was a watery blur. With the letter opener from my wife’s desk by the stairs, I slit the tape. I found myself looking down at the top of a small bookcase. I wedged the letter opener into where the cardboard edges met, jammed in my fingers, and tore the thing open. There stood a case of unmarked volumes. I got down on one knee and pulled out one of the perhaps two dozen fat brown books.

I opened randomly to a handwritten page and read the date: “February 7, 1968.” I read the words—rather, I sounded them out. Except for the dates and names, everything was recorded in phonetic Tergen. I set the open book on the floor and sounded it out in my head, hearing the whistles of birds, the movement of air in trees, the sound rocks make when they shatter. I drew out a later volume, which ended too early, and then another. I scanned the pages until my own name appeared. I sat back, the bookcase the only thing I saw.

He’d left me few permanent signs of his existence: my unreliable memories; the wedding gift, mounted on my mantel, etched with one vital word; and these journals encoded with the tales of the elect. And yet the world seemed, suddenly, in what was seen and unseen, too full.

—for my father