THE INFORMATION

dystrophy or Ebola or Lassa Fever or rat-borne hantavirus or toxic-shock syndrome or antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus. Or gangrene or leprosy. Nowadays he was sure he had them all.

That morning there had been some idle prattle between Mr. and Mrs. Tull-would they never learn?-about the possibility of Marco taking a day off home and paying a visit to that fabled location, school. After all his temperature was barely into the low hundreds; he had woken just twice during the night, and then for no more than an hour each time. Only one of his ears was aching. Only one of his eyes was actually gummed shut with conjunctivitis (the other wasn't nearly so bad and even had the odd patch of white in it). At around eight-thirty, though, in an interval between coughing fits, Marco succeeded in throwing up his breakfast and could be heard crying for help from the bathroom as Gina went off with Marius (perfectly yet insouciantly uniformed, with up-to-date homework pouch, junior tennis racket and football kit bag festooned with rosettes). Richard would have Marco until four-thirty. Then Lizzete came, when her own schoolday was done. They paid her extra if she played hooky, and money was tight.

He wondered about Marius. That morning the senior twin had approached him and said, 'Daddy? You're taking too much quack.'Marius often neglected to sound his rs. So he must have meant crack.

Feral: that's what the wild boy was. That was what Steve Cousins was. And Richard could defend feral: it had to put up with a lot of dismissive talk (which it didn't like-which it didn't like one bit) from those who claimed that it was just a fashionable synonym for wild or untamed. Ooh, it hated it when anybody said that. Because feral derived not only from ferus (wild) but also from ferox (fierce). Now, something wild need not be fierce, may even be gentle. And the lion can lie down with the lamb. The lion can and must lie down with the lamb.

People who look at dictionaries all day keep seeing words at the top of the page-words they don't like seeing. Syzygy, crapulent, posterity, smegma, toiletry, dystopia, dentrifrice, bastinado, ferae naturae.

Two old ladies who lived in Calchalk Street did strange things for money. Old ladies, who wore the ovine uniform of the good.

One of these old ladies was called Agnes Trounce. She didn't just look old: she looked middle class and reliable and comfortably off. She had that benignly pleading expression of the diplomatically elderly in a youthful Culture. Normally you could meet an old lady on a dark night- with equanimity. But you wouldn't want to meet this old lady, any time, when she was doing her strange thing for money.

The target is driving along. Without a care in the world, as they say. Although of course no one old enough to drive is without a care in the world. No one old enough to drive a trike is without a care in the world. Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit. That was one of the reasons why it was so easy to hurt people: they were never ready. More pain? Nobody needed that. Nobody thought they could possibly have room for any more, until it came.

Anyway, the target is driving along, feeling relatively happy, immeasurably happier, certainly, than he is going to feel in about ninety seconds. These moments will in retrospect appear golden-age, prelapsarian. So that's right: he doesn't have a care in the world. Intense and lasting cares are arriving, brought to him by Agnes Trounce. For many years, also, he will look back on this interval as the last time that his powers of concentration were any good.

So that's right: the target is driving along without a care in the world. He may be whistling. Perhaps he is listening to music; and because he is driving some of his mind is just plugged into the city . . . He reaches the end of the side street and slows as he approaches the traffic lights that guard a main road. It is evening and the bloodbath of sunset is daubed over the rooftops. No, it is darker, and on its way to being a dark night. In front of him before the red light is a wood-framed Morris Minor, gentlest of cars. The red light spells arterial warning; then red-amber; then green. And the Morris Minor backs into him-and stalls.

Mrs. Agnes Trounce, a widow, sixty-eight years of age in a little-old-lady hat and a gray-white shawl (nice touch), climbs flusteredly from her car and turns the target with her eyes benign and pleading. He climbs out too. Well, these things happen. But you'd be surprised how impatient, how non- understanding, people can be in such circumstances. None of this 'Dear oh dear-well, not to worry!' It's 'What are you doing on the road anyway, you fucking old cow?' And this makes things easier for Agnes Trounce. Because then the two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street. Then it's 'You rammed my mum!' Or, if you were using black talent, 'You rammed my gran!' And so on. 'That's my mum you're fucking swearing at!' Or 'That's my gran you're calling a fucking old cow!' Agnes Trounce gets back into her woody Morris and drives away. And in the other car the target's head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and the doorframe. It was just a motoring dispute that got out of hand and you know how people are about their cars.

The other old lady who lived on Calchalk Street was seventy-two andweighed three hundred pounds and provided sexual relief over the telephone. She was called Margaret Limb. Her voice was hoarse and weathered but also high-pitched and musical, even maidenly, what with all that weight pressing down on it. The siren song of Margaret Limb could lure leaden businessmen out of humid hotel rooms on dark nights. An endless narrative of fat, she lay on a sofa doing the concise crossword and talking dirty. On the other end of the line, men arched and shivered to her tune.

Which old lady would you rather meet, on a dark night?

Now here is something very sad to think about.

The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty- three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller . . .

Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun 'beyond all description bright'), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. For example, one solar week ago, man came stumbling out of the African rainforests. Herbiverous, bipedal-erect but by no means sapient. Four solar months ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth. One solar minute ago, we enjoyed the Renaissance. Having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, the sun will be with us for many solar years to come.

But it won't make old bones. Predictably, somehow (don't we see this every day?), the great decline will be presaged by increasingly hyper-manic activity (look out of the window, at the twanging joggers), by a frantic reassertion of once-infinite but now-vanishing powers. The doomed despot wants to leave nothing behind: its policy, then, is scorched Earth.

First will come the solar winds. It is not given to human beings to imagine the power of the solar winds. But we can make a start by trying to think of an ultimate hurricane consisting of heavy objects-things like trucks and houses and battleships.

During its life on the main sequence, the sun was never accused of being small or cold. Everyone knows that the sun is big and hot. Being big and hot is what it's always been so good at. Now, therefore, it gets even bigger and even hotter. It leaves the main sequence. The yellow dwarf becomes a red giant.

At this stage we give the sun about eighteen (solar) months-two years, at the most. In necrotic rage Chronos consumed its young. Now itretreats and shrinks and curls up and dies, a white dwarf, like all dead things, crystalline and embittered and entombed.

It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life.

'The History of Increasing Humiliation, dear sirs, proceeds apace.' 'Please don't fret. I have got dear Den ton out of Repton and into the Goldsmith. He didn't live very long anyway, so completion is more or less in sight.' 'Gentlemen: Worry not! The ice and cobalt blue of