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our family without breaking the silence we’ve sworn to keep. I can’t tell the truth but I can tell a plausible lie, and I do have a separate savings account with enough money in it to build a shelter.
    So I babbled at Jerry while I was peeling potatoes: “A meteor shower. Something extraordinary. I’m going to build us a shelter, Jer.”
    â€œNell, I keep telling you, if you’d just put your trust in…”
    â€œShh,” I said, mock angry. “I’m not going to ask God to protect us when we’re able to protect ourselves. When you started getting religious, we agreed not to fight about it. You can pray away all the meteorites in the universe and I won’t mind a bit, but I’m going to build us a shelter.”
    When the two of us met and courted and married, we were fellow scientists. We stayed fellow scientists for five or six years, but sometime along in there, back maybe four or five years, Jerry gave up on science. I honestly don’t know whether he got religion first and gave up science out of religious conviction, or his career disappointment made him use religion as an excuse. Back then I was gaining a respectable reputation as a solid, workaday hack, who had made severalsmall discoveries and who had added some to the knowledge store of the human race by slogging away at it. That was fine by me. I’ve never had any huge aspirations; I just like astronomy.
    Jerry, however, has…had big ambitions. The Nobel Prize, at least. Or some cosmological theorem named after him. He didn’t like slogging, preferring innovative and highly flamboyant theorizing on the basis of very little, all of which tended to raise the hackles both of his colleagues who played by the rules and of the big names in cosmology who had totally invested themselves in other points of view. I’ve always known Jerry was egocentric, but he kept his ego mostly under wraps at home. Also, he has…had a lovely dry humor and I thought we were okay. I was busy, and I liked my work. He was busy teaching and writing and doing what cosmologists do, causing an occasional flurry but becoming no more an immortal in his field than I am in mine.
    Being an immortal doesn’t matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it. However, once Jerry turned religious it became clear that Jerry really wanted to be immortal, one way or the other, and if science wouldn’t do it for him, religion might.
    Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts. Jerry wasn’t interested in facts, so we didn’t discuss his belief in a near future apocalypse. I just went ahead and had the shelter built: reinforced concrete, buried under twelve feet of dirt with an escape hatch. I ordered dehydrated food enough for a year. In a separate pit there’s a fuel tank for lanterns and stove, tied in with flexible connector lines, disconnected until time of use. There’s an air filtration system run by pumping a bicycle and a water tank on heavy springs that can sway any which way without breaking. Also, in a survivalist catalogue I found a sort of hollow pipe with a folding windmill inside that can be pushed up into the wind and connected to a generator. Thereare bunks for four: one for Michy, who’s five, and one for Tony, who’s three, one for Jerry, one for Nell.
    During the construction, Jerry went around with his above-it-all smile firmly fixed on his face. His actions were as affectionate and sweet toward me as always, though they didn’t feel right. The only actual criticism I got was a kind of teasing: “The wrath of God Almighty approaches, and she wants to build a shelter?”
    Keeping the evasions to a minimum, I usually said something like, “As a parent, it makes me feel better to have