77 Shadow Street

suggested many possibilities.

He daily kept an eye out for news from Oshkosh, something like a boiler explosion at the main-branch library that, of course, would be the Ruling Elite terminating the innocent librarians in whose name Fielding had been conducting his investigation.

He didn’t want to think about those worse-than-death fates. He wasn’t a negative person. He thought of himself as an optimist: in spite of all the horror and evil in the world, still an optimist. He believed that he could defeat the scheming bastards one day, whoever they were, whatever their motivations might be, regardless of the unknown but surely hideous source from which they derived their immense power.

The Ruling Elite included none of the people who served in high public office or any of the rich CEOs running big businesses and big banks. They were mere tools with which the true masters of the world effected their ruthless will. Fielding wasn’t sure if the titans of industry and the politicians were unaware of being manipulated like so many marionettes or if they willingly served their faceless masters. He would eventually know the truth. He would triumphantly unmask the secret emperors of this tortured world and bring them to justice one way or another.

Now he took a break from the computer and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of homemade cola. He had reason to believe that off-the-shelf soft drinks were one of the media in which the Ruling Elite dispensed the drug—if it was anything as simple as a drug—that made the masses susceptible to the illusions and deceptions that passed for reality these days. To be sure that he could not be brainwashed, Fielding brewed his own soda; though it was not carbonated and though it tasted more like molasses and licorice than like cola, he liked it well enough. The important thing wasn’t the quality of his cola but that he could have both cola and freedom.

He had purchased and combined two apartments, giving him lots of space for worktables and filing cabinets where he assembled his damning files and stored them. He didn’t trust keeping his voluminous archives only in digital form, where they might be hacked and sucked to oblivion in mere moments.

His kitchen boasted every culinary tool and convenience, but he never cooked. He ordered takeout from numerous restaurants, cycling through them at random so that no pattern was established that might allow an assassin to predict his behavior and poison his pizza or his kung pao chicken.

As he poured a glass of cola from the jug, he heard tapping at the French panes and assumed that the rain must be mixed with sleet. He didn’t glance at the window because he had no interest whatsoever in ordinary weather, only in the superstorms that one day would scour cities off the face of the earth, the storms that might already be occurring in some parts of the world but were not reported by order of the Ruling Elite.

For twenty years, he had been passionately engaged in his quest for truth, since he graduated from the university when he was twenty-one. This was not just his vocation and avocation. This was his life, and not just his life but his meaning.

Fielding Udell was a trust-fund baby, an heir to wealth. When he had received his inheritance, he felt unrighteous, criminal, even depraved. Without working for it, he had all that he would need for the rest of his life, while so many had so little.

Guilt had pressed so heavily on him that he almost gave all his money away, considered taking a vow of poverty and becoming a monk, considered taking any job he could find with his university degree and settling into an ordinary middle-class life of small pleasures and humble expectations. But he had no religious faith, which made being a monk seem pointless, and to his surprise, his degree in sociology with an emphasis on gender studies opened no doors for him, zero, nada.

Although eaten by guilt, he kept his money. It was his curse, his albatross.

Fortunately, at the melancholy depths of this moral quandary, when he was still a tender twenty-one, he happened to see a TV report about the mysterious deaths of uncounted frogs all over the world and heard that leading scientists predicted the extinction of the species within six to ten years. Alarmed by the specter of a frogless world and by all that ominous development might portend, Fielding began researching the subject—and found his calling.

First he had discovered from the news that not only all frogs were headed for extinction, but also bees. Bees were dying not from the usual mites or diseases, but colony collapse disorder was taking them in large numbers for reasons no one could explain, though the consensus was that pollution or some other human-caused affliction must be the villain. Without bees to pollinate flowering plants, the world’s food supply would fall drastically. Indeed, some scientists had confidently predicted mass starvation by 2000.

How little he had understood then. How foolish he had been.

Now he carried his glass of cola back to his computer, through a series of rooms that were all given to his work. The tapping at the windows followed him and became louder, a rapping, as if the sleet were mixed with small hailstones. Rain, sleet, and hail perhaps concerned those who were not as enlightened as Fielding Udell, but those were such minor phenomena that he couldn’t be bothered to care about them even to the extent of going to the windows for a look at the storm.

In 2000, just as millions should have been starving because of the extinction of bees, Y2K loomed. The consensus was that all the world’s computers would go haywire at the turn of the millennium, causing a collapse of the banking system, the unstoppable launch of computer-controlled nuclear missiles, and the end of civilization.

When Fielding had looked to the past, to see if there had been as many threats to human existence then as there were in his own time, he found a seemingly endless number of menaces so alarming that he obtained through his physician enough sleeping pills with which to commit suicide if one day he woke to discover he was living in a Mad Max world of few resources and marauding gangs of psychopaths. The consensus had been that overpopulation and industrialization would lead to mass starvation, a die-off in the billions, the consumption of all the world’s oil and natural gas by 1970, the death of all the oceans by 1980, and therefore a steady depletion of oxygen until the planet’s air couldn’t sustain life. In the 1960s, the scientific consensus was, according to the media, that an ice age was imminent, sure to bury most of North America under hundreds of feet of glaciers within a few decades. Not only was the world forced to endure that threat, but now the prospect of global warming, of killing ourselves with the very CO₂ we exhaled every minute of our lives, had also brought human beings around 180 degrees to the opposite precipice and a new threat of extinction.

At first, as he researched all these impending catastrophes, Fielding had despaired. After he had worked so hard for his sociology degree, he had failed to find employment; and now, if ever he found a job, the world would not survive long enough for him to make his mark in his chosen—or any—profession.

Bummer.

Then he had a thought, an insight, a kind of theory that gave him hope. Many of these scientific consensuses seemed to have proved wrong over the years, which suggested that perhaps others would not be borne out,