HE BROUGHT THEM BACK to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation’s boundaries.
Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. Billions, perhaps.
And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled brain failed to find the answer.
The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stoo
