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kept her hands in position to defend herself against Tom’s occasional efforts to engage in what Nana called taking liberties. Midway through the second quarter, with Cornell already trailing badly, she decided she’d had enough of the game, or maybe of those liberties. She excused herself, citing the need to do research for her paper for Niemeyer’s class.
    “It’s not due for two months,” Tom protested.
    “I don’t like to wait for the last minute,” she answered.
    His eyes were already back on the field. “Pizza later? Usual place?”
    “Usual time,” she promised.
    The stadium was a cavernous structure of cut stone, with wooden benches and shadowed tunnels leading to walkways through the underbelly of reinforced steel struts. Margo never failed to marvel at the complexity of the edifice. She was on the ground floor now, her attention mostly focused on the architectural detail far above her head. As she waded through the crowd thronging the refreshment stand and the restrooms, a prickle on the back of her neck told her she was being watched, but when she turned she saw only a sea of faces, none of them staring. She sidled around a massive cinder-block structure enclosing a fire stair, and noticed, not for the first time, the green gunmetal door on the far side, bearing the black-and-yellow poster signifying a fallout shelter.
    She had been noticing fallout shelters more often since enrolling in Niemeyer’s class, probably because he enjoyed taunting his students with the likelihood that, were the balloon ever to go up, as he put it, there wouldn’t be enough room for all of them, and in any case the first group to arrive at the shelter would bar the doors and refuse to admit the stragglers.
    “Have you ever seen the inside of a fallout shelter?” Niemeyer had asked them. “Believe me, if it’s a choice between taking your chances in the open and spending a month or two in some airless basement, eating foul crackers and smelling the latrine, you’d rather be caught in the open.”
    About to head back toward the crowd, she hesitated. She glanced around, but nobody was looking. In truth, the answer to Niemeyer’s question was no: Margo had never seen the inside of a shelter. It had long been her habit to explore secret and forbidden places. According to Nana, who had often been called upon to punish Margo for various trespasses, the curiosity was inherited from her late father.
    She tried the door.
    It was locked, of course, a protection against looters and squatters and vandals: an illustration of what Niemeyer called the
Petits Paradoxes,
dilemmas that arose from overlooking the casual details of everyday life. The lock, sensible though it might seem, would make the shelter useless in an actual crisis, unless by some happy chance the man with the key could be found in time. In a perfect world, Niemeyer had pointed out just the other day, you’d be able to run for shelter, asthe British had run into the tunnels of the underground during the Blitz. At that point, some bold, foolish soul raised his hand to suggest that in a perfect world there would be no war.
    Niemeyer had snickered.
    “And are we intelligent in your perfect world? We are? Then your answer is not even wrong. As long as there’s intelligence, there will be invention. As long as there is invention, there will be acquisition. As long as there is acquisition, there will be war.”
    Remembering now, she wondered whether Niemeyer was right, and war was a necessary consequence of human nature. Unless he was wrong, the nuclear age might be the last age mankind would ever—
    “Hello, Margie.”
    She startled, and spun, but it was only Philip Littlejohn, whom Niemeyer had so badly embarrassed the other day in class. He was a junior, red-haired and swaggering, the creepiest and wealthiest member of her study group.
    “Hello, Phil.”
    “Tired of the game?”
    “I have work to do.”
    “That’s my Margie. Hey, know what’s down there?”