Read Blameless in Abaddon for Free Online Page A

intractable vanity and affection for Sturm und Drang had made the relationship qua relationship impossible, she’d been a splendid campaign manager. “Now that you mention it, I could use some help with my reelection effort. Leafletting, door-to-door canvassing. . .”
    â€œI’m your man,” said Vaughn. “Who’s our opposition?”
    â€œSome goat-cheese-eating liberal lawyer from Oregon.”
    â€œWhat angle do we play up? Candle the family man?”
    â€œI haven’t got a family. I don’t particularly like children.”
    â€œHonesty, that’s our gimmick. Honesty and experience.”
    Despite the impromptu circumstances of his hiring, Vaughn Poffley proved as effective in the job as Brittany, inventing a memorable campaign slogan— CARTWRIGHT IS ALL RIGHT, BUT HE CAN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO CANDLE —and plastering it on hundreds of telephone poles and billboards throughout Abaddon Township. Without slinging mud or descending into sleaze, he handed Martin a winning margin of 2,418 votes.
    Upon hearing that his friend had cancer, Vaughn steered the conversation in a pragmatic direction, asking Martin whether he still intended to enter the upcoming election. When Martin answered yes, Vaughn urged him to keep his illness secret.
    â€œI’m not saying we should be deceitful, but November will be here before we know it. You’d be surprised how skittish voters get about cancer. They don’t like it one little bit.”
    That evening, Martin and Corinne made love. Although Blumenberg claimed that the implanted I-125 microcapsules would not contaminate his semen, Martin insisted on using condoms. Safe radioactive sex. In Corinne’s view, the encounter owed its energy to its illicitness: she was abducting her lover, she felt—stealing him from the embrace of his disease. For Martin, too, the night proved unprecedented in its intensity; their bed, it seemed, had transported them to a place of unbearable urgency—to a battlefield, or a burning forest, or a South Seas beach at the height of a typhoon.
    Â 
    USAir Flight 3051 from Philadelphia to Orlando arrived nine minutes early, touching down at 6:56 P.M. Upon entering the terminal—the first time he’d ever set foot in Florida—Martin encountered two gigantic posters, one of Mickey Mouse exhorting his fans to visit Disney World, the other of Jesus Christ bidding his followers to patronize Celestial City USA, neither image doing much to alleviate Martin’s depression. Shortly after retrieving their luggage, he and Corinne found themselves in a limousine zooming down Route 528, bound for the Buena Vista Hilton. Ranks of swaying palm trees zoomed past, fronds rippling in the wind like piano keys yielding to invisible fingers.
    To this day, some people argue that the Celestial City would have been a roaring success no matter where its founders had situated it. The original plan called for God and His accessories to be towed via supertanker from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico, then beached along the sparsely populated eastern shore of Tampa Bay, there to lie beneath the Florida sun while the great theme park emerged at His feet. But the stockholders of Eternity Enterprises would hear none of this: the carcass, they insisted, must be located in Orlando or nowhere at all—without the spillover crowds from Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, Sea World, and the headquarters of Tupperware International, the proposed attraction might fail to turn a profit. And so began the greatest engineering project since the Suez Canal. Thirty-eight steel gantries, each as tall as the World Trade Center, were built especially for the task. They performed splendidly, lifting the Lockheed 7000 cooling chamber from the waters off Cocoa Beach and slinging it landward. Next the chamber was placed atop a matrix of ninety-four railroad flatcars, transported for fifty miles along eight