Read 2020 for Free Online

bliss that mixed with relief down through my bones? No words can quite describe the sensation—but oh, the touch of her flesh, the warmth of her breath, that moment of slippery joy.
    * * *
    We went everywhere together for twelve hours, having sex. Like a lot of people. We wound up in the boardroom on the eightieth floor of the GD Tower. I felt wonderful, lying there on the slate table, my black Italian wingtips unlaced on the floor, a cashmere sweater rolled into a pillow beneath my head, Unix’s thigh inches from my teeth.
    On the wallscreen new infomercials for our Purgatorio offering produced by Fiat/Disney were running. I hadn’t quite understood the attraction of appearing periodically throughout eternity suffering one of the punishments of Purgatory, but when I saw the actress Candy Candiotti jogging around the Fourth Cornice to show her victory over Sloth, I realized that Purgatorio would sell out completely, too.
    Later that morning I showed Unix around corporate headquarters; for all the volume Max said we were doing, you’d have thought GD Inc. was shutting down. The business floors were almost deserted, the Angel® Imaging Center on skeleton crew, all but one of Resurrection Chapel’s Dial-a-Faith windows dark. The usual staff was working in Preparation, but the Motor Pool was quiet, and there were only two girls down in Floral. I’d called off my franchisee classes. I took Unix through the Professional Education wing, looked into the great room. When I saw the clock on the wall at eleven, I felt a pang of guilt, felt I ought to be working.
    It passed. Let the dead attend to themselves a bit , I remember thinking. Unix and I went up two floors and wandered into the Casket Selection Suite. We wound up unraveling a dozen bolts of satin and tunneling into a love nest of pillows. The funeral business, more so than other work, gives you an enhanced appreciation for life.
    In the late afternoon we were back up on the slate table again. The Obit Channel was still running on the far wallscreen.
    “Coop,” Unix said. “What’s that?”
    A news flash was crawling across the bottom of the screen, text shot through with a red comet icon:

     . . . authorities are investigating reports that changes to comet Virgilius Maro ’s trajectory may be linked to a bizarre “lights out” phenomenon in Puerto Rico on Sunday. Near Arecibo, an unknown hacker diverted the entire electrical supply of the island to the site of the SETI transmitter for more than thirty minutes. . . .
    * * *
    “Lance’ll fix it. He’s very sorry, but he and that friend of his down there . . .”
    “ Lance . What happened?”
    “It’s called a steering pulse, Uncle Coop, a microwave thing? Beam it up there. We heat up one side of the comet, see, fiddle with its spin. We needed to move the orbit just a tad closer to earth to get the resolution we needed? The one we contracted for with Fiat/Disney?”
    “So they miscalculated a bit,” Max said. “They’re just students. They’ll fix it, don’t get too upset. Hell, it’s unbelievably great for us. You see the Obit Channel numbers? We’re kickin’ butt.”
    By then society had ceased normal functioning; people stayed home from their jobs, construction projects went on hold, kids skipped school. But the cities were surprisingly peaceful. (Of course, it was still early in that historic week.) Those were the days when traffic thinned and industries all but shut down around the world and the air cleared. We all awaited the delayed launch from the Cape. A back-up was in position as well. We tried not to worry.
    * * *
    The business, you will appreciate, was entirely out of my hands. Cash and electronic transfer money flowed into GD Inc.’s accounts like water from a dozen fire hoses. On Wednesday I logged into the firm’s proprietary accounting program to see what Max had been up to with FEMA. In the face of disaster, he’d been playing the market both ends against the middle.