“Good morning!” he said, smiling broadly, “and welcome to third period.” The man—tall but not too; in shape, but not quite enough—stood at the front of the room in gray blazer, black button-down shirt, khakis, and sneakers. Before him sat seventeen students, distributed roughly equally between boys and girls. They were silent, not acknowledging his greeting, only looking with dubious curiosity at a teacher they’d never seen before.

“You appear to be an astute lot,” he continued, pacing slightly back and forth, “and you will have noticed right away that I am not Mrs. Pendleton, your regular third period teacher.” He paused, giving them a moment to reflect on this statement of the obvious. “Rather, I am Rick Childs. Oh, and I will do you the compliment of not writing my name in large font on the board. Anyone incapable of remembering a single-syllable surname will gain very little indeed from what we are going to discuss this morning.”

The 6:00 a.m. alarm tears through Drew Benton’s dream, and he sits up in bed, heart racing, unsurprised to find himself alone. Kelly has always been a hard-core morning person, typically out of bed and dealing with the kids at least an hour before her husband’s alarm goes off. More often than not, she’s gotten in a full workout and eaten breakfast before undertaking the daily drama of getting their son and daughter up and ready for school. But this morning is different. When Drew, yawning loudly, walks out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, instead of a family of three seated at the breakfast table, there is only his daughter Kimberley, quietly eating a bowl of cereal and watching a cartoon on the small kitchen television. She glances up as he walks in. A thin dribble of milk creeps down the left side of her lip.

Growing up, there was this little creek down back of our house. Nothing special, maybe a foot wide, a few inches deep, but, good lord, I can’t tell you the countless hours I spent down there enwrapped in the throes of adolescent fantasy. The story, though, was pretty much always the same. I’d collect armloads of branches and buckets of mud, and I’d dam up the creek and then wait hours for the water to rise up behind my crude earthworks. In the meantime, I’d construct a small town at the base of the dam using Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and plastic model train buildings. Olive green army men typically populated this unfortunate village, unmoving plastic figures who had not the slightest inkling of the grim fate that awaited them.

“John, do you ever feel like there’s something just a little off about life?”

He sat, chair pulled up close to the kitchen table, spooning Frosted Flakes into his mouth while a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray adjacent his left elbow. January wind howled just beyond the single small kitchen window. The apartment was cold, but John sat uncaring, clad in a terry bathrobe the purple hue of which matched his cereal bowl with uncanny fidelity. My roommate was a big fan of purple.

“Well, let’s ponder that question for a moment, shall we, Matthew?”

Advance yourself, they said, for soon your tiresome but passably lucrative station in this life will be rent from you by the automaton. Raise yourself up or be tossed aside; the choice is yours. But what they didn’t tell us (for surely, who did not already know?) was that the race goes ultimately to the swift and that man is a fragile being evolving at a scarcely discernible pace, whereas the machines change and evolve seemingly at light speed, and do so, may God have mercy on us, through the designs of man himself. It was a race we were doomed never to win, a prize the pursuit of which could only exhaust us and render us yet riper for our eventual, inescapable defeat.

The doorbell to 182 Meadow View Drive rings once, twice, and the repairman from Pathways Cable Company quickly checks his handheld display to make sure he has the correct address. It is late on a Tuesday morning, muggier than usual, and a thin bead of sweat swells between the man’s eyebrows. He instinctively shifts his gaze for a moment to the houses on his left and his right, then feigns another glance at the device in his hand. It shows nothing at all and he reaches again for the doorbell button to make one final attempt. But before his finger can reach the button, there comes a rustling on the other side of the door, a scarcely discernible curse, and the door opens to reveal a woman, middle aged, not bad looking, and slightly confused at the imposition, which is, in this case, precisely how she is supposed to look.

The sun had only just begun its journey into afternoon as two men stood talking in the sort of jovial tones not commonly heard in the vicinity of Burns and Sons. One of the two was Ken Burns Sr. himself, proprietor of the town’s only funeral home. He had just entered his sixth decade and cut an impressive figure—tall, heavy set, dressed in the sort of dark heavy suit traditional to his profession. His interlocutor, Buster Craig, was half his size and more than twice his age. It was a curious pairing, the town’s sole mortician conversing so easily with its oldest resident, the sort of thing a passerby might take note of and likely remark upon later to family members or coworkers.

“Saw old Buster chatting it up with Ken Burns this afternoon. I expect Buster was explaining why it’s taking him so long to avail himself of Burns’ services.”

It always happens the same way. He stands tentatively before the marble fireplace and gazes into the painting for a few moments, wondering who created it (no signature) and when they did so (at least a hundred fifty years ago, that much is certain). Surprisingly, he long ago ceased wondering how the miracle itself works. No point speculating, he supposes. It’s a wondrous, impossible bit of sorcery, or perhaps arcane physics, in either event a thing he can never hope to understand. But he’s made the journey now several times, and it’s always the same, regardless of direction. The discovery was a complete fluke, or at least he imagines that it was. He had stood in this very spot, alone in the room, reached out his right hand, and placed a trembling fingertip on that face near the left margin of the picture, the face so tiny yet so terribly clear.

“It’s not really a conjecture, is it?” Sophie said, leaning forward from the back seat. “Conjecture means you’re hypothesizing about something that you don’t have any real data to support. You’ve got an ocean of data. Hell, just look around.”

Something that, in fact, everyone in the car was in the midst of doing—looking around, that is.

“Well, I’m not sure it exactly rises to the level of a theorem,” Clay replied. “I’m no mathematician or anything, but it feels more like a conjecture to me.” He was in the front passenger seat of the Audi 5000, a car that belonged to Trent’s father, who had agreed, with his special grudging brand of acceptance, to allow the four grad students to take the car into the city for the reception taking place later that evening on the Columbia campus. Trent van Sykell was a second-year grad student, working on a Ph.D. in Columbia’s math department (group theory and topology), and during the drive in from Hoboken, near the midpoint of the George Washington Bridge’s upper deck, the topic of parking had come up—specifically, what were likely to be the odds of their finding any once they got into the city.

The flight from Heathrow departed at 7:35 a.m., on time surprisingly enough, and arrived in Monrovia just after six p.m. Peering out the right side of the plane as we made our final approach, there lay beneath us the usual tropical scenery—verdant mahogany trees and low growth shrubbery, poorly-kept dirt roads, low cinder-block houses with corrugated metal roofs, and, in the distance, beneath a deepening blue sky, anvil clouds that looked to be within an hour of delivering heavy rain. It could have been any third-world destination. No sign of anything unusual, save perhaps for the notable lack of people milling about. Plenty of dogs and cattle, but very few people. I had made trips to this part of the continent several times in the past decade, generally as a volunteer physician, helping out my former colleague and medical school mentor, Miles Fenton. Now five years retired from full-time practice, his wife deceased and children grown, Miles had relocated down here more or less permanently, shuttling about West Africa as the crises—both natural and man-made—arose and abated.

“Why the hell are gas prices so high in this state? Christ, we’ve got more refineries up and down this highway than the whole damn Gulf coast. Gas should be dirt cheap here, shouldn’t it?”

The countless brilliant white lights of the ConocoPhillips plant reflect like galaxies off the windshield, as the dark grey Suburban rolls up the New Jersey Turnpike, drifts into the right lane, and slows slightly to take Exit 13 into Elizabeth. It’s just passing through dusk and the refinery lights gleam like eternal Christmas in the deepening purple of the Jersey evening, punctuated periodically by the hellish outrage of a gas flare hurling three-story flames into the air. Bill Preston stares out the passenger-side window and says nothing more for the moment. His breathing is labored and audible in the near-silence of the vehicle.

Wendy Sutter stood alone at the hors d’oeuvre table, slowly, methodically, arranging small bits of raw carrot and celery on a clear plastic plate and contemplating the funeral she had just come from along with the thirty or so others at the house. Henry Abercrombie had died two days earlier from massive pulmonary failure, and had done so while working his regular late afternoon shift at the Home Depot in Peterborough, two towns over. Notwithstanding his advancing age and what was reputed to be a solid retirement income, he had worked there in the store’s plumbing department for more than four years. And despite his generally slow work pace and not-infrequent, occasionally charming, tendency to steer customer queries in eccentric directions, he had generally been thought to be in decent health, both physically and mentally, so that when he collapsed to the floor while directing a customer to the three-quarter-inch PVC fittings, it had struck everyone as something of a surprise.

“He just fell over dead in mid-sentence, not two feet in front of me. And this on a day that had actually been relatively uneventful to that point, as least as these days go. Couple of inconsequential skirmishes. No casualties at all, in fact, aside from Flanders there spraining his ankle dodging a mortar round. We were all sitting around over by the depot, winding down a bit, but taking the usual precautions, you know—sand bags, trip wires, couple of lads on watch up top. Preston and I were just having a sit off to one side, drinking a bit of that awful coffee he made, him telling me about this boat he bought just before signing on, and how he’s going to go home and fix it up once we’re done sacking the regime. And he’s just getting to the part about how he’s going to muster up his nerve and make a run at some girl he knew from high school, take her out on the boat and what not, when for no reason on God’s earth there comes this hiss—you know the hiss—and the round takes him straight in the left ear.”

“What is it?” Adam said.

“What do you mean ‘What is it?’ What’s it look like?” Eve replied.

“I don’t mean the tree. I know what a tree looks like. What is it you want?”

“What I want is for you to explain to me,” Eve replied, “why all this awesome fruit should be off limits.”

“Why? How about because God Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, said so.”

“For heaven’s sake, Adam,” she said. “Are you sure God didn’t make me from a piece of your brain instead of your rib? It’s just a tree.”

“Excuse me,” Adam said. “This is not just a tree. This is THE tree. Knowledge … good and evil … ring any bells?”

“Fred Johansson, what in the hell are you up to this time?”

The voice was distant, but I recognized without hesitation the mostly jovial but always slightly cynical tone of my neighbor from two farms over, Rogers Manning. He was easy to spot as he made his way across the field, being of far-greater-than-average girth and being, as well, clad in a nearly glowing red shirt. The combination of these attributes created the appearance, if one squinted, of a large crimson beach ball rolling toward me through the freshly cut grass. Prior to his exhortation, I had been languishing against the wood fence that delineated my yard proper from my twenty-acre north field. My arms were crossed and resting upon the top rail of the fence and I had been engaged in the surprisingly engrossing pastime of watching a man as he walked slowly around my back field holding extended before him a long Y-shaped stick, looking for all the world as though he was leading an invisible horse.

#237 sat at the cafeteria table across from #414. By an odd coincidence, they had ordered identical sandwiches—Virginia ham with Havarti cheese, lettuce, tomato, and Dijon mustard. 237’s sandwich lay untouched on his tray, while 414 worked at his with vigor. A small bit of lettuce clung to left side of 414’s lower lip. 237 could see it clearly but said nothing. It was the peak of the lunch hour, yet the cafeteria, which had a capacity of hundreds, was surprisingly empty. Aside from 237 and 414, there were perhaps two dozen other diners scattered throughout the room. It was nearing the end of the quarter and the pressure to make quotas was immense. People were skipping lunch these days, working at their desks, drumming up leads. Everyone in the cafeteria was dressed identically—floor-length heavy black robe with hood. It was the only officially sanctioned work uniform.

I inherited the restaurant from my father and, like him, I expect that someday I will die with a paper hat on my head and a spatula in my hand. He was Big Al, I am Albert Junior, and the shop is Albert’s World Hamburger Emporium. Lofty-sounding? Absolutely. Over the top for what is, in truth, a pretty ordinary burger and fries stand? Perhaps. But we are well known around the area, and the only decent hamburger place for five blocks in all directions that isn’t a national chain. Our section of town is what my realtor friends refer to as being in transition, which is a salesman’s way of saying that a great deal of money would need to be invested in order for it to be elevated to a position of mediocrity. I have worked at the restaurant for going on thirty-five years—twenty-one of those as the underappreciated son of Big Al, the remaining fourteen as owner, proprietor, and gustatory ambassador to a neighborhood that, best I can tell, genuinely appreciates my being here.

Weaverling looked up from behind his desk where, like most days, he sat in his wheelchair, poring over a crusty volume of Balzac with an enormous magnifying glass. “To which point, I could have sworn we agreed only two evenings ago that you were going to leave this Hemingway business alone once and for all. Only this morning, over breakfast, I receive a phone call from a book dealer in London indicating that, sure enough, Parker is back on the trail again, as doggedly as ever. Tell me, my friend, was it, in fact, you who I struck this agreement with, or have you a heretofore unseen twin brother you send out to participate in conversations whose outcomes you foresee and don’t much care for?”

“Well, I was thanking Almighty God when that one was finally over with, I can tell you that. Couldn’t wait to get home and have a nice long shower. Almost nine damned years ago and it still gives me the creeps. I swear, if I have to explain relativity to one more person in one more system, I think I’ll probably just put a gun to my head.”

“Oh, come on now, Grant, it couldn’t have been all that bad. You should be getting rather good at it by now. What was that, your sixth time?”

“Doesn’t matter. Six times or sixty, nobody gets it. Hell, I barely understand it, and I’m the one stuck shepherding it around the bloody universe. And it doesn’t make me feel any better knowing that it’s wrong on top of everything else. It’s impenetrable and it’s wrong.”

“It’s not wrong, Grant. It’s merely… incomplete.”

“Incomplete? That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Misleading, juvenile, borderline criminal—those would be other ways. So now, for the sixth time in as many centuries, I’ve got a civilization believing it’s impossible to travel faster than light.”

“A belief that will last them a good couple hundred years until they discover otherwise,” Hickok responds. “Oh, and lest we forget, if all goes well, it’s also a belief that will keep them from blowing up their feeble planet trying to do otherwise.”

I’m at something of a loss to dredge it up all again now, what with the details having grown a bit hazy from the ravages of age. But there is this one image, a starkly clear and terrible one that returns to me over and over, almost as if to taunt me, to ask of me why it is I do not remember more. I have a hypothesis about this which I cannot prove, but which I think applies rather well to this case. I believe the images laid down in our minds at very early ages have a far more lasting impact than those we experience as adults. This could be so simply because those early images are with us for a longer period. More likely, it’s because at a young age the mind is still in the curing stage, no more than a lump of moist clay that hasn’t begun hardening in earnest until sometime around early adulthood. In either event, this particular image has never left me, though I find that as I have aged, it does now go dormant for increasingly lengthy periods. It’s a banal image really, scarcely worth a mention absent the context of the original story—a single sheet of ordinary typing paper, fresh from the package. Only here’s the thing—in the corner of this otherwise unblemished sheet of pure white paper is a faint brownish stain that has no earthly business being there.