that it wouldn't waft to the floor. If it was time to undertake a more careful inspection of the station – and she believed that it was – she might as well begin with the sleeping quarters. She lifted the other mattresses one by one, looking for a diary or another folded sheet of yellow paper, but she found nothing but a watch on a long silver chain and a couple of pornographic magazines. Most of the footlockers had been very loosely padlocked, their catches undone or their keys poking out like fingers. She opened them and sifted through the piles of clothing and toiletries inside. It was amazing how much you could tell about a person from what he concealed in the lower right-hand corner of his footlocker. Beneath all the underwear and reading cartridges and Bertelsmann devices, she uncovered multiple sachets of cocaine and marijuana, a box of sixteen porcelain Walt Disney figurines, an antique Bible with gold embossing and annotations written in Victorian-era English, a large tub of Vaseline with a spoon sticking out of it, bottles of antidepressant medication and steroids and serotonin, and a pacifier knotted onto a frayed piece of terry cloth that must have belonged to someone's son or daughter.
There was nothing, though, that might explain what had happened to the station's people, all those biologists and polar technicians who had eaten the food in the cabinets and rumpled the beds. Nothing that would tell her where they had gone or what, if she was right, had killed them.
The bathroom and the kitchen had even less to reveal – a jar of fine olives, a few containers of bathing salts, and that was about it. Everything else – the food, the dishes, the toiletries – she had already uncovered days ago. But she had explored the kitchen and the bathroom pretty thoroughly in the course of her daily routine. In the dining room, which she had rarely visited, she found a garbage bag stuffed beneath a wooden storage hutch and filled with curved pieces of broken glass and stoneware – coffee mugs and drinking glasses, from what she could tell. The only item that was still intact was a cream-colored mug with a pale brown ring around the inside of the lip, exactly the color of the secret messages she remembered searing into sheets of notebook paper using lemon juice and a lightbulb when she was a girl. She looked beneath the chairs and end tables in the living room and in the chink of space between the couch and the wall, but she turned up only a few buttons and paper clips, a broken yardstick, and a thin layer of dust. She pried the cushions off the couch and uncovered a wallet containing a photograph of a cocker spaniel, and a license with the name Lewis Mongno on it. She recognized the name from the duty roster posted above the transmitter.
Finally, in the bottom drawer of the computer desk, she found what she was looking for: a printed copy of the home page of a newspaper. The newspaper was out of Kansas City, Missouri – The Kansas City Light – and it was dated February 3rd.
Which was to say that it had been printed sometime between three and four months ago, if she hadn't lost track of too many weeks.
The headline was a single word, PLAGUE, with an outsized exclamation point. The subheading read: DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT 'THE BLINKS.'
Laura's first lover had been a journalism professor at Columbia University, where she had spent the summer after she graduated from high school taking a ten-week college prep course. She was there to study environmental biology – her prospective major – but she chose the professor's Introduction to Journalism course as her one elective. Though she dropped the class after a single session, the two of them continued to see each other for the rest of the summer.
He was a tall, strikingly intelligent man named Luka, with the quiet wit and prematurely graying temples of a movie scientist from the black-and-white era. Every so often, when he had been drinking or engaged in heavy conversation, a mood would come over him, and he would adopt the habit of speaking entirely in headlines.
'Phone Rings Three Times Before Laura Answers,' he would announce. ' It Was My Mother,' She Says.'
Or, 'Evening Winds Down. Fornication Imminent.'
Or, 'Sims Grows Bored with Discussion. Wanders Away to Bang Head Against Wall.'
She still thought of him – she couldn't help it – whenever she read a newspaper headline that seemed to call a certain sort of attention to itself, DEADLY VIRUS SWEEPS MEXICO, UNITED STATES. TENS OF MILLIONS CONTRACT 'THE BLINKS.'
She hadn't seen him since the afternoon before she left New York, when they'd had sex and ordered Thai food and then stood looking out over the city as they ate, watching the lines of traffic cluster and spread apart between the fixed chains of the stoplights. It was midsummer, and though the days were already growing shorter, the sun still would not set until eight-thirty or nine o'clock.
Luka lived on the thirty-third floor of the Future Building, in a two-bedroom apartment with a boomerang- shaped balcony that floated over the building's courtyard. The two of them liked to stand there at the rail and gaze down at the crowds. It was tempting to say that the people looked like ants from so far above. Tempting, but not quite true. The people came in brighter and more eccentric colors than ants, for one thing, with strange appendages like briefcases and grocery sacks and umbrellas. And they moved with far less order, far less mindfulness, than ants ever did. Their motion was more like the formless winding of water insects skating over the surface of a pond, she thought, though no one would ever say that the people looked like water insects.
She and Luka were standing side by side, their elbows propped on the ledge of the balcony. He asked her, 'So this time tomorrow, are you going to miss me?'
'This time tomorrow, I'll be in an airplane somewhere over about Iowa.' Laura dreaded the prospect. 'I'll be sick to my stomach, with a splitting headache, and I'll miss everything that's not fifty thousand feet in the air.'
'Including me, though, right?' Luka prompted.
'Including you, Professor Sims.' This was what his students called him. 'But it won't matter, will it? Because in a few months I'll tell my parents about us, and then I'll drop out of college and move back to New York, and we'll get married and live happily ever after. The end.'
Laura was teasing him in one of the few ways she knew how. He gave the sort of shallow, wincing laugh that people who don't want to admit a joke has embarrassed them give. Both of them had understood from the very beginning of their relationship that they wouldn't see each other again after the summer was over.
But because he was so much older than she was, and also because he had been her teacher – if only for two hours – he felt a certain amount of guilt about the affair from which she herself was immune. 'So much debauchery,' he would joke sometimes, shaking his head as she lay in his bed wearing only a T-shirt. And though she knew he was only kidding and she would always offer up a smile for him, there was a germ-sized speck of truth to what he said, just enough to put a note of real self-reproof in his voice.
'That's right,' she repeated. 'Married and happily ever after.' 'Well… I look forward to it,' he said.
'I'm sure you do,' she told him, and she patted his hand. 'God, I hate flying,' she said. 'I know you do.'
And then, to lighten the mood: 'Weren't we supposed to have teleportation devices by now? Didn't they promise us teleportation devices?'
'And rocket jet packs,' he added.
'And moving sidewalks.'
He pretended he was marching with a picket sign. 'What do we want? Rocket jet packs!'
'Teleportation devices!' she added. 'When do we want them?' 'Now!' she said.
'The future!' he said, and something about it struck them as funny. They began to giggle, and then to laugh, catching themselves in one of those loops in which they realized how meager the humor of the original remark was, found the meagerness itself funny, and laughed even harder than they had before. Soon they were laughing at nothing more than the fact that they were laughing.
The terrorist warning beacons on the roofs of the city's buildings flashed on with their blazing yellow lights, then went dark again after only a minute or two. It hardly mattered. No one paid any attention to them these days, anyway.
'Must have been a false alarm,' Luka said.
'Another one,' Laura said.
Her stomach was pleasantly tight from laughing. Luka took her wrist between his fingers and began to rub it up and down with his thumb, a hard touch that sent a shiver through her body.
Then something extraordinary happened.
A child who was cutting across the courtyard with her mother (at least they thought the child was a girl – it was difficult to tell from so far above) lost hold of the balloon she was carrying. It went floating out toward the
