THE INFORMATION

somewhere and sat in it sobbing and swearing and smoking cigarettes.

'You bastard,' said Richard. 'I thought we were in this together.'

'Three days ago. Hark at you gasping away. Couple of years I'll be having you six-love, six-love.'

'What's it like?'

Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalized his bond with cigarettes. This bond with cigarettes-this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn't be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn't being met.

'Actually it's a funny thing,' said Gwyn. 'I gave up three days ago, right? And guess what?'

Richard said long-sufferingly, 'You haven't wanted one since.'

'Exactly. Well, you know. Time. The future.'

'You've thought about it, and you'd rather live for ever.'

'Isn't that what we scribble away for, Richard? Immortality? Anyway, I think my duty to literature is plain.'

One more male ordeal awaited them: the changing room. The changing room had the usual hooks and benches and too few coat hangers, and steamy mirrors for men to lean backwards and comb their hair at, if theyhad any, and much effortfully evaporating male sweat (stalled in this process, and forming a furtive mist which slowed the air) together with competing colognes and scalp gels and armpit honeyers. There was also a shower stall full of pulsating backsides and soused and swinging Johnsons which of course forbade inspection: you don't look. Gwyn's new affectation of staring at things with childlike wonder remained unexercised in the changing room. You don't look, but as a man you mentally register yourself, with inevitable and ageless regret (it would have been so nice, presumably, to have had a big one) … Naked, Richard watched Gwyn, naked, and vigorously toweling his humid bush. Richard was excited: Gwyn was unquestionably nuts enough for the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

They walked back through the bar, which gave them time to start sweating again, and out into the late afternoon. Richard said carefully,

'You were saying? About immortality?'

'Well, I don't want to sound pretentious .. .'

'Speak as your heart tells you.'

'Milton called it the last infirmity of noble minds. And-and someone said of Donne when he was dying that immortality, the desire for immortality, was rooted in the very nature of man.'

'Walton,' said Richard. He was doubly impressed: Gwyn had even been reading about immortality.

'So you know. You're bound to have such thoughts. To flesh out the skeleton of time.'

'I have been looking again,' said Richard, even more carefully, 'at Amelior…'

The unspoken wisdom between them was as follows. The unspoken wisdom was that Richard, while taking a hearty and uncomplicated pleasure in Gwyn's success, reserved the right to keep it clear that he thought Gwyn's stuff was shit (more particularly, Summertown, the first novel, was forgivable shit, whereas Amelior was unforgivable shit). Oh yeah: and that Gwyn's success was rather amusingly-no, in fact completely hilariously-accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. Enthusiasm for Gwyn's work, Richard felt sure, would cool quicker than his corpse. Or else the universe was a joke. And a contemptible joke. So, yes, Gwyn knew that Richard entertained certain doubts about his work.

'First time through,' he went on, 'as you know, I didn't really think it came off. Something bland and wishful. Even ingratiating. And programmatic. An insufficient density of elements. But . . .' Richard glanced up (they had reached their cars). No question that Gwyn had been patiently waiting for that but. 'But second time through it all cametogether. What threw me was its sheer originality. When we started out I think we both hoped to take the novel somewhere new. I thought the way forward was with style. And complexity. But you saw that it was all to do with subject.' He glanced up again. Gwyn's expression-briefly interrupted to acknowledge the greeting of a passerby, then stolidly reas-sumed-was one of dignified unsurprise. Richard felt all his caution disappear with a shriek. 'A new world,' he went on, 'mapped out and reified. Not the city but the garden. Not more neurosis but fresh clarity. That took its own kind of courage,' he said, still weirdly capable of meeting Gwyn's eye, '-to forge a new art of the brave.'

Slowly Gwyn held out his hand. 'Thanks, man.'

Jesus, thought Richard. Which of us is going nuts faster? 'No,' he said. 'Thankyou.'

'Before I forget, Gal Aplanalp is off to L.A. any minute, so you'd better give her a call. Tomorrow. Morning.'

And then they parted in the car park, under the afternoon moon.

Out there, in the universe, the kilometer definitely has it over the mile. If the universe likes roundness, which it seems to do.

The speed of light is 186,282 mps, but it is very close to 300,000 kps. One light- hour is 670,000,000 miles, but it is very close to 1,000,000,000 kilometers.

Similarly, one Astronomical Unit, or the average distance between the earth and the sun, center to center, is 92,950,000 miles, but it is very close to 15,000,000 kilometers.

Is this arbitrary anyway? Is this anthropic? In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps have melted and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa.

Later still, the oceans will be boiling. The human story, or at any rate the terrestrial story, will be coming to an end. I don't honestly expect you to be reading me then.

In the meantime, though, the kilometer definitely has it over the mile.

'When entering a main road from a side road, you come to a halt, look left and right,' said Crash in his deepest and stateliest tones, 'and wait until you see a car coming.'

'Really?' said Demeter Barry.

'You engage first gear. When the car come good and close-you pull out in front of it.?

'I see.'

'And then you slow down to a crawl. And stick you elbow out the window.'

'Really.'

'Unless of course he try to overtake.'

'Then what?'

'Then of course you speed up.'

The thrashed Metro lurked in a dead-ended sidestreet off Golbourne Road. Beneath its roof rack of ads and L-signs Demeter sat strapped into the front passenger seat, while Crash was wedged behind the wheel. As he spoke he made intently carving gestures with his hands.

'Allow me to demonstrate. Here, let's-seatbelt on okay? There we go.'

It was true-what Steve Cousins said. Driving instruction was sustained by a deep scholarship of lechery, in common with many other callings in which men were obliged to serve unattended