This is the Way the World Ends Read Free Page A

‘Will it really destroy the world?’ he asked.
    ‘Not by itself. There will be thousands like it, in many varieties.’ Nostradamus glanced at his parchment script. ‘ This Satanic lance is a Soviet SS-60 missile ,’ he read. ‘ Land-based. Intercontinental. Multiple warheads . Do you understand?’
    ‘No.’
    The candle in the picture-cannon flickered. Shadows trembled along the shaft of the missile.
    Nostradamus projected painting number two. ‘ This iron fish is a fleet ballistic missile submarine ,’ he read. ‘ The dorsal scales will flip back, and the spears will fly to their targets using inertial guidance .’
    ‘How can a fish have spears inside it and not die?’ asked the boy.
    Nostradamus projected painting number three. ‘ From hell’s hearth, a thermonuclear fireball —’
    ‘Is that Latin?’
    ‘I am confounding you, Jacob. It will be best, I can see, not to begin with the weapons. These pictures need a tale to accompany them, am I right?’
    ‘Tell me a tale,’ said the boy.
    Nostradamus sorted through the paintings, chose one, projected it. A vulture. Hunched, ragged, sallow-eyed, carrion-bloated.
    ‘This is about a vulture, a war, and a man named George Paxton. A common man in many respects, but also perhaps a hero, entrapped in Fortuna’s wheel and sent on a series of frightening and fantastic adventures.’
    The prophet projected another painting. A bearded man standing by a gravestone.
    ‘Until he saw the three children in white . . .’

CHAPTER ONE
In Which Our Hero Is Introduced and Taught the True Facts Concerning Strategic Doctrine and Civil Defense
    Until he saw the three children in white, George Paxton’s life had gone just about perfectly.
    Born in the middle of the twentieth century to generous and loving parents, people of New England stock so pure it was found only in northeast Vermont, he came to manhood in the tepid bosom of the Unitarian Church. It was an unadorned, New England sort of faith. Unitarians rejected miracles, worshiped reason, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, and had serious doubts about the divinity of God. George grew up believing that this was the most plausible of all possible worlds.
    By the time he was thirty-five he had been blessed with an adorable daughter, a wife who always looked as if she had just come from doing something dangerous and lewd, and a cozy cottage perched on stilts above a lake. He was in good health, and he knew how to prevent many life-threatening diseases through a diet predicated on trace metals. George took inordinate pleasure in ordinary things. Hot coffee gave him fits of rapture. If there was a good movie on television that night, he would spend the day whistling.
    He had even outmaneuvered the philosophers. A seminal discovery of the twentieth century was that a man could live a life overflowing with advantages and still be obliquely unhappy. Despair, the philosophers called it. But the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides – no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets to George Paxton.
    Now it must be allowed that not everyone in his situation would have shared his contentment. Not everyone would have found fulfillment in putting words on cemetery monuments. For George, however, inscribing monuments was a calling, not simply a job. He was in the tomb profession. He kept a scrapbook of the great ones: the sarcophagus of Alexander, the shrine to Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the Medici tomb at San Lorenzo, the pyramid of Cheops. Don’t you get depressed being around gravestones all day? people asked him. No, he replied. Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.
    Occasionally his wife accused him of laziness. ‘I wish you would go out and get yourself some ambition,’ Justine would say. But George’s world satisfied him – the pace, the simplicity, the muscles