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Walking beside him, I talk about the recordings of those old news stories. In a few crisp sentences, I try to recapture two days in class and the reaction of the important adults, plus my own raging scorn. "I mean, we had this window on the past. And what did the adults do? Destroy it. They didn't see any value in the disks, only danger, and they destroyed them before anybody could figure out how to make copies. So these kids here today ... they don't know anything about what happened, except what their parents choose to tell them."

Winston seems to listen, but he refuses to even glance at me.

"Here's something funny," I continue. "When I was twenty-one, I left Salvation. There was this local girl named Lola, and I loved her as much as my mom hated her, and we decided to move into a solid old house up in the hills. Live with each other and our dogs, no idiot Believers within miles of our front door."

We reach the wheeled house. Winston grabs the door handle and pulls, the hiss of compressed gas helping it swing open. But as he takes one step inside, he hesitates. He can't help but look at me, asking, "Why in hell should I care about any of this?"

"My wife's smart, but in odd ways."

The boy is just a little curious now. But that's enough. He steps back down to the bricks and looks at the top of my head, asking, "So what?"

"We talk," I say. "All day long, we chat. But since we don't see other people, and since nothing important changes day by day, our best topic is the past. Our childhood. She didn't go to school with me, but she remembers the day when they burned the disks. She heard all about it from me. And a couple years ago, after talking it over a thousand times, Lola turned to me and asked, 'Don't you think it's strange? Why would an ordinary person go to all that trouble?'

'"Because it's history,' I told her. 'That's why.'

"'But it wasn't history yet,' she pointed out. 'It was just a plague in China when it started. Most of the world was still safe. Yet somebody started saving news stories about that disease. And they recorded everything about the vaccine, even when everybody else in the world thought that this was the answer to all of our troubles. Which is a crazy thing to do, isn't it? Unless of course you knew all along what was going to happen.'"

I stop talking.

Winston looks more like a boy than ever. His face is empty and pale, his mind pulled back to some private place, leaving me almost nothing to see. But before I go on with my tale, he asks, "Where were those disks?"

"In a box," I tell him. "Unmarked and probably left behind by mistake."

"No. What house were they in?"

"I don't know."

"My grandmother's?"

"Probably not," I admit.

He gives a deep snort before telling me, "You don't know anything."

"I know the old lady saved the world."

Winston moves closer, looming over me. "She's nuts."

"No, she isn't."

He licks his lips and says, "Forget it."

I say nothing.

Then he remembers where he was headed. Again, one of the big feet steps up into the RV, and just to be sure that I know it, he tells me again, "Grandma is crazy."

"Was she a scientist?"

He keeps climbing.

"It must be tough," I say, stepping up after him.

He turns, surprised to find me sticking with him. "What's tough?"

"Being stuck with them: a senile woman who saved the world, and your father who grew up with a legend. Because he's always known, hasn't he? Families can't keep secrets. And you grew up hearing how grandma helped build the bug or the vaccine, which were good things. Great things. Without them, there would have been too many people in the world, and civilization would have crashed just the same. But with the climate in every worse condition, everything was falling apart in ways a lot worse than what we got."

The boy's face grows red again. I make plans about what to do if he takes a swing at me. I'll jump down the stairs and run - that's my heroic scheme. But he doesn't lift a hand. Instead, he says, "You don't know shit."

"Billions murdered, and that old lady is partly to blame." I smile