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Martin’s eyes filled with tears He felt a terrible light in his chest For aout of hiave him a white silk purse and directed him to a booth with a white velvet curtain Inside, silence Diht Martin opened the purse and pulled out the chalice—a plastic cup with measurements printed on it, just like Grud said With it lay a few old photographs—women from before the ith so much health in their faces Martin could hardly bear to look at theht Statistically speaking, that woman with the black hair and heart-shaped face and polka-dotted bikini is dead Vaporized in Seattle or Phoenix or Los Angeles That here they used to irl is dead

Martin couldn’t do it This was about life Everything, no e, was toward life He could not use a dead girl that way Instead, he shut his eyes Heinside him The chauffeur with her pink cheeks and white hair The minister with kind voice and brown eyes and her shriveled hand, which ful, but wasn’t she alive and good? Tairl from the Victory Brand Capsule Garden coirl with red hair who lived two blocks over and was so pretty that looking at her was like getting punched in the chest He drew in bold, bright lines the hoer than the war, as big as the world

Martin’s body convulsed with the tiny, private detonation of his soul His vision blurred into a hot colorless flash

BLAST WIND

Sylvie’s ether in a long pearl-colored Packard and did not speak Sylvie had nothing to say Let her mother be uncomfortable A visceral purple sunset colored the western sky, even at two in the afternoon Sylvie played the test in her head like a fil to her, it felt no more real than a picture on a sheet

The e frohter Tierney, a pioneer in the program, one of the first to volunteer Our numbers have been depleted by the Germans, the Japanese, and now the Godless Russians Of the A only 12 percent are fertile But we are not Coate, wasteful, decadentWe must maintain our e from the world your mothers knew—at least on the surface And with time, what appears on the surface will penetrate to the core, and all will be restored We will not sacrifice our way of life

A e Tierney had dredged up out of apocrypha to the apocrypha, about the rods and the flowers, and Sylvie had never felt it was one of the Gospel’s more subtle moments Thefor the Dove

The doctors omen One was Mrs Drexler, who lived on their cul-de-sac and always e She was kind She warloves for her, white gloves for le She turned her head to one side and focused on a stained-glass la their frosted breasts with their beaks She went somewhere else in her mind until it was over Not a happy place, just a place Somewhere precise and clean without any Spotless Corp products where Sylvie could test soil samples methodically Rows of black vials, each labeled, dated, sealed

They took her blood A butterfly of panic fluttered in her—will they know? Would the test show her lish until her accent ca froh there was no one left to shoot at her? Only half, white enough to pass, curling her hair like it would save her? Sylvie shut her eyes She said her mother’s na that only they together knew Hidaka Hanako Hidaka Hanako Hidaka Hanako Don’t be silly Japan isn’t a virus they can see wiggling in your cells Moo off in the centrifuge

And none did

She whizzed through the intelligence exams—wha

t a joke Calculate the drag energy of the blast wind given the following variables Please Other girls milled around her in their identical lace dresses The flowers in their hair were different Their sashes all red Red on white, like first-aid kits floating through her peripheral vision They went fro They nodded shyly to each other In five years, Sylvie would know all their nae They would plan block parties They would have telephone trees Some of them would share a Husband with her, but she would never knohich That hat let the whole civilized fiction roll along You never knew, you never asked Men had a different surnahborhood knew it all, the knots and snags of the vital genetics Would she share with the frosted blonde who loved botany or the redheaded enius who made her own cheese? Or maybe none of theirls would score low in their academics or have soreat forking family trees pruned by Mrs Drexler and the rest of theet Husbands in overalls, with limited allowances They would live in houses with old paint and lead shielding instead of Gamma Glass Some of theet Husbands in grey suits and silk ties, ent to offices in the city during the day, who gave them compression chamber diae

Results were quick these days Every year faster But not so quick that they did not have luncheon provided while the experts performed their tabulations Chicken salad sandwiches—how the skinny ones gasped at the taste of mayonnaise! Assam tea, watercress, lemon curd and biscuits An impossible fairy feast

“I hope I get a Businesslittered with illegal setting spray “I couldn’t bear it if I had to live on Daisy Drive”

“Who cares?” said Sylvie, and shoved a whole chicken salad triangle into herHer silence bent for one second and out coet her remembered