Matthew 24:36 Chris Lawson You're listening to Radio Y2K, serving the Valley this millennial eve. We'll be taking you through all 25 hours of the Big Change. Erwin Humboldt furrowed his brow, thinking. How could it be 25 hours? He was about to stop the engine on his ute but left the motor running and the radio on, waiting to hear the explanation. That's right, folks, 25 hours. You see, some of us countries in the Southern Hemisphere are on daylight savings, which means the first time zone to hit midnight will be an hour early. Humboldt laughed. He might have figured it out if they had given him a few minutes, but he doubted it. Coming up, we'll go through the list of New Year's Eve celebrations in the district. We'll give you all the details of the Mayor's Ball in Wang, and lots of other public gatherings. Just remember that this is no ordinary New Year and to be back home with enough time to lock all your doors and do those last little security checks. He switched off the ute and the radio went dead. Humboldt muttered a few oaths under his breath. Nobody with half a brain would be out at a public celebration this year. There were always the drunken louts from Melbourne - never as bad as the crowd at Lorne, but still a bunch of yahoos - but this year it would all turn nasty. It was a matter of getting out before the fireworks started. He had not been able to convince the children. They insisted on going out for New Year's Eve, even though Hanna was only sixteen and Billy fourteen. Irene, being sentimental as usual, had taken their side. "Nothing's gonna happen 'til midnight," Irene had said. "We'll be back before then." What could he do? It wasn't like he could hold them at gunpoint. At least he had wrangled a promise out of them that they would go to the party at the town hall. There were always a couple of cops there, and one or two off-duty in the Shepherd's Crook up the road, and it was a dry party. The punch would be fruit juice and ginger ale. Humboldt grumbled about his lack of authority and threw in a curse at the baking sun as he heaved the cattle feed off the back of the ute. He had considered running sheep. It would have been a nice touch being a shepherd, but somehow modern farming practices, especially herding sheep by motorbike, lacked that Biblical sentiment. And it was good cattle country. 22:00 hr Auckland In the Valley it was almost always hot on New Year's Eve. The doors and windows were thrown open at the Town Hall and the fans were spinning fast enough to launch a Cessna, but the heat still plastered shirts to the skin of everyone in the hall. The young Humboldts slinked off to their teenage cliques as soon as they hit the doors. Irene scanned the crowd, but she only recognised a few of the faces. Detective Erikson was there. He waved. Erwin had helped him out last year when they had to organise a search for a missing kid. In another corner she spotted old Gordon, an electrical engineer who had moved up here to retire. Gordon was a bit of a local hero, having set up a demonstration telephone system for the school science fair and built the transmitter that Radio Y2K used. It was illegal, but since its broadcast range was only a few kilometres, nobody worried about it too much. Gordon was no survivalist; he just enjoyed building things. Erwin would have shared a joke with either man but Irene preferred quieter company, none of which was apparent right then, so she headed for the drinks. A long wooden trestle had been covered with butcher's paper, and the table was littered with half-empty bottles of soft drink, a few neat piles of clean plastic cups, and a straggle of crushed cups. There were stains of every conceivable food colouring on the butcher's paper. Hidden beneath the bench were several plastic bins filled with ice and bottles, one bin full of non-alcoholic punch and another of Tang. Irene played it safe and opened a bottle of lemonade. "It's home-made," said a voice behind her. Irene turned and saw a woman in a rag-hemmed velvet skirt, a tank top, a see-through shawl around her shoulders and working boots. Her navel was not only visible, it was pierced, presumably to match the self-mutilations she had inflicted on her nose and left eyebrow. She looked like she was in her late thirties, just a bit too old to be a convincing feral. Irene sipped the lemonade and was surprised at how refreshing it was to taste that sour citric slap in the back of the throat. "It's very nice," said Irene. "All organic ingredients." "Even the sugar?" asked Irene. The woman laughed. "Well, not that. I had to make some concessions. If I'd made up my crushed ice with celery juice, I'd be run out of town." Now that Irene looked around, she noticed that there were several of the organic brigade here. Like Erwin, many of the ferals were here in the Valley to escape the imminent collapse of Western civilisation. Irene introduced herself. "We live out on the flats. We run cattle, mostly." "I'm Polly. I've got a little place up on Baxter Hill." Once they got talking, Irene really took to her. It was amazing, she thought, how many similarities they had. They had both learned to grow crops without fertiliser. Polly was morally opposed to non-organic food, and Erwin was afraid there wouldn't be any commercial fertiliser in a few weeks and was teaching himself to live without it. They had both come to the country a few years ago to escape the city and learn how to survive the end of capitalism. Polly said something about dialectical materialism, while Erwin liked to talk about Jewish bank cabals and the millennium bug, but they both meant the same thing to Irene. Then Polly really surprised her. Part of her reason for coming to the Valley was to bring up her son, who had Down's Syndrome, in a supportive environment. And that was the surprise: that this greenie-feminist put enough value in the essential quality of human life to refuse an abortion. Erwin would have approved. "When my ex-husband saw the ultrasound result," Polly said, "he wanted me to get an abortion. I was beside myself. He's still alive, I said. He still has a soul. Like, how can you say he won't have quality of life? I refused point blank. Although we didn't realise it at the time, that was the end of the marriage. He couldn't stand living with us once Deepak was born, and we split up. He went back to his broking firm and I came here." Irene smiled. She finally understood. There was no way the ferals could really survive by living off the land. It was hard enough for tenth-generation farmers to get by - and that was dragging every ounce of potential out of the soil. The ferals used time-consuming organic techniques and many of them gave over large tracts of their property to the Land For Wildlife people. Their lifestyle was economically non-viable. The survival factor was alimony. Or an inheritance. Or a golden handshake. Whatever it was, their bread money came from outside the farm itself. "So how old is Deepak now?" "Fourteen. Speak of the devil," she said as Deepak pushed through the crowd to reach his mother. He was just under average height for his age. He had jet-black hair that fringed his brows, accentuating the almond-shape of his eyes. He wore school-uniform trousers and a grotty T-shirt with HAPPYLAND embossed on the chest. Because of his name, Irene had expected him to be half-Indian, and she was surprised to see his skin was as white as flour. "Hello, Mum," he said. "Can I go play with Billy?" He spoke with a breathy expression. "Who's Billy?" Irene laughed. "Small world," she said when she saw Billy emerge from the crowd. "Billy's my son." She felt a little uncomfortable for the briefest of moments. Deepak didn't look or speak quite normally, but she had raised Billy to treat people equally, regardless of shape, size, and chromosome count. "Sure, you can play," said Polly. Irene just nodded to her son and the two kids shot off into the heat and sweat of the night. At half-past, Irene had to go looking for the kids. Hanna was talking about the lead singer from silverchair ("no capital letter, Mum"), her favourite topic of the moment, but she was easy to peel away from her friends. Billy was outside with Deepak. "Come on, Billy. I promised we'd be back home by now. You know it's not safe to stay out any later." They bundled themselves into the Land Rover and headed home. "That went well, didn't you think?" Irene asked the kids, as they hit the town limits. "I'd never have thought all those farmers and ferals and townies would get on so well together. We have a lot more in common than I expected." "Not as much as you think, Mum," said Billy. "I worked out the difference. For Christmas, I got a Winchester. Deepak got a mushroom farm and an ocarina. He reckons he was ripped off." "He was ripped off. Those toys aren't suitable for a fourteen year old boy." "It's all right," said Billy. "We worked it out. We swapped Christmas presents." "What? You can't give away the Winchester. It cost your father a fortune." "No, not that. I mean old Christmas presents. Stuff we didn't want anymore." "Oh, right then." She had to admit sometimes she was proud of her son. The headlights swept off the road and pointed to midnight. 23:00 hr Fiji, Marshall Islands, Kamchatka The night air had not cooled off even though it was nearly midnight. The atmosphere was thick and humid and heavy with the sound of insects trilling and beating their wings against the viscous air. Dogs wore expressions of smiling exasperation as they hyperventilated on the coolest patches of earth they could find. Livestock clustered around dams and rivers. Erwin Humboldt batted aside the moths and mosquitoes which had been drawn to his lamp. He was trudging the length of the fence along the dirt road out front. The other boundaries did not need inspection. He had checked them earlier in the day, and besides, the neighbours on two fences were survivalists too, so he knew they would be well-stocked and self-sufficient and no threat to his family. Humboldt's only fear was the road, which was accessible to any vehicle, even the tiny Korean aluminiumobiles. He wished now that he had bought that property down Snake Gully Road. Even the locals laughed about that road and told tall stories about lucky escapes from the muddy, reverse-cambered, ravine-sided track. At least here he had town water and electricity, for all the good it would do him after midnight. He opened another shirt button to let the air in and the sweat out and checked the last stretch of the fence up to the Jenkins' property. When he was satisfied that the front fence was intact and all the warning signs were up, he went back to the homestead. He locked up the ute - including the fuel cap - and checked the water tank, then went inside where he locked all the doors, topped up the generator with diesel, turned on the external cameras, lowered the window shutters, opened the gun cupboard, and turned on the radio. There was a squirt of Radio National, which Humboldt recognised immediately and switched channels. It was a reflex. Why Irene kept listening to that neo-Marxist humbug was a mystery - all the more so since Radio National was paid for by taxes screwed out of their farm by Canberra bureaucrats. Irene used to say something about "liking their voices," as if their vocal refinement made up for the lies they spoke. He tuned into Radio Y2K and settled back. It's 11:37 now. Only 23 minutes to go. Our recipe for a Happy New Year is Radio Y2K on your stereo, a bottle of whiskey on your side-table, and a loaded gun in your lap. Coming up now is our musical interlude. By popular request, here is Richard Strauss's overture to Also Sprach Zarathustra, better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was a faint crackle and then the strings launched into Strauss's paean to Neitzsche. The drums chased the strings into the theme. Humboldt thought it was an appropriate choice: the music had an air of momentous occasion; it was associated with a film inspired by the third millennium; and it was an homage to a philosopher who believed in the emergence of individualism over populism, Superman over Mediocrity. How very millennial. Humboldt used the remote control to turn on the TV and switched it to the channel for the security cameras. The screen glowed green, the colour of night-vision, and started flicking from view to view every two seconds. The monitor completed its security round every eight seconds. Humboldt did not want to be distracted by the flickering screens, so he set the security system to show all four camera views, a quarter of the screen each. The resolution was not as good, but he would still catch any movement. Soon enough, the Land Rover pulled in at the front gate. Erwin saw it on the top right corner of the screen. He saw Billy get out, open the gate, and then close it again behind the Land Rover. Erwin checked the other cameras - all quiet - and unlocked the front door of the house. He heard the motor pull up beside the house and shudder to a stop. Billy and Hanna came through the front door, with Irene just behind. "Did you lock the petrol cap?" he asked. Irene stopped in her tracks, then headed back out to lock the Land Rover properly. A minute later, she came back inside and double-bolted the door. "So has it started yet?" asked Hanna. Erwin could sense the edge of sarcasm in her voice. She was spending too much time with her irresolute friends, but not for much longer, he thought. "It's not midnight, stupid," said Billy. Erwin gestured to him to shush. "It's midnight in Fiji. And Auckland went millennial nearly two hours ago." "So did frogs fall from the sky?" asked Hanna. "Any reports of six-horned beasts strolling the streets of Auckland?" "There's no need for that kind of talk," said Irene. Erwin muttered under his breath. It was one thing to be treated with contempt, even by your own daughter, but it was terrible to be dismissed for opinions you never held. "This is more than just prophecy. This time Judgement Day has been predicted by computer scientists and business consultants. If you go by historical record, the proper millennium is next year, 2001, and even that's wrong. Since Jesus was born in 3 or 4 BC, the real second millennium came and went in '97 or '98. This crash is all to do with the millennium bug and the cashless society and the way people stupidly put their lives in the hands of dumb machines. Scripture gives independent corroboration." "Matthew 24:36," said Hanna. She had been saying this to irritate Erwin, frequently with success. She had heard all the same stories five years ago, when some two-bit thinker had "decoded" the Bible and discovered an imminent social meltdown. Her father had been beside himself with fear back then, but when the prophecy failed to materialise it did not dissuade him from believing in prophets, it only steeled his resolve to be prepared for any future collapse of civilisation. The timing had changed, but the fear was the same. Billy rubbed his eyes with exhaustion, but before he headed off to his room he asked, "So what happened in Auckland?" "Nothing yet," said Erwin, "but the bug won't necessarily cause breakdowns the instant the clock changes. And besides, I don't think they have computers in New Zealand." Billy laughed. "Wake me when the world ends." Erwin cocked his head, then decided Billy was not being sarcastic. Billy was a nice, straightforward kid. He would never think to say something he didn't mean. Hanna settled herself down on the sofa with her legs tucked underneath her. "Anything decent on the radio? Silly question, really. Nobody would dream of playing Pearl Jam out here." "Shush," said Erwin. "It's nearly time." The voice on the stereo was loud and clear. No sign of anything from New Zealand or Fiji yet. But we don't really expect any problems there. The millennium bug won't have much effect on countries that are just joining the twentieth century. Even Hanna laughed at that. There was nothing like a cheap joke at the expense of the Kiwis to unite a family. But now we're coming up on our own Big Clock. Get yourselves ready to sing Auld Lang Syne, or maybe Auld Lang Cosyne for those of you who are a bit twisted. It's time for the countdown. There's only fifteen seconds to go. Everyone ready? Ten…nine…eight… Whatever their differences, they were still family. "I love you," said Erwin. Irene took his hand. Hanna curled her lip, but nodded back. Seven…six…five…four… Erwin closed his eyes and whispered a short prayer. He knew the millennium would be terrible, but he couldn't fear it. It would be a clean break. Everyone's sins would be brought out into the open, and perhaps the survivors would be able to build a kingdom closer to God's. Even Hanna would have to respect him when he was the only thing between her and a band of roving brigands. Three…two…one…Happy New Millennium! 00:00 hr Melbourne, Sydney, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands "Well," said Hanna, "that was exciting. Are we dead yet?" Still, she waited another twenty minutes listening to the babble on Radio Y2K just in case the world ended. There were a few reports of drunkenness and urban violence, but nothing exceptional. All was quiet on the eastern front. Eventually boredom and exhaustion overtook her curiosity. She got up from the sofa to go to bed. As she stood, the lights flickered. The three Humboldts looked at the ceiling light. It settled back to its normal constant glow. Hanna gave a little giggle, then headed for her bedroom. When she was halfway there, the lights blacked out. She stood in darkness, disoriented by the sudden blindness. She was also in total audio silence. The radio had gone dead. Then there was a thump from the back of the house as the generator started up. After a few seconds, the lights came back on and the radio started again. It's OK, folks. Just a little blackout, but we have our own power supply. What about you folks out there in the Valley? Did you prepare? If you're hearing this, I guess so. If you're not hearing this, then good luck with the frozen meat! What's it like to eat a hundred kilos of beef in four days, I wonder? Hanna looked back over her shoulder. Her father wore an expression of - she struggled to put her finger on it - serene contemplation. He looked like a goddamn Buddha. She walked back to the sofa and sat down. 01:00 hr Brisbane, Guam, Port Moresby, Vladivostock 01:30 hr Adelaide Radio Y2K started to roll out the reports. The emergency services switchboard in Wellington had failed, so all the lacerated brawlers and drink-drive accidents had to wait for ambulances and police, sometimes up to ninety minutes. By the way, said the DJ, we've just heard that the entire Australian phone network has crashed. There will be no more phone calls, kiddies! Erwin checked. When he picked up the phone all he heard was a dull buzz. Punching the numbers had no effect other than making a strange tone. He looked over at Hanna, who refused to meet his gaze. He didn't push it. He knew he was right; there was no point shoving it down the throat of a sullen teenager. 02:00 hr Seoul, Tokyo, Yakutsk 03:00 hr Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Perth Riots broke out in Seoul, although there was always student unrest there and it might have had nothing to do with the millennium bug. Not much happened in low-tech Beijing, but its reclaimed territory of Hong Kong and the territory it would like to reclaim, Taipei, both fell to pieces. China was already working on an aid package to Hong Kong, and feeling mighty superior about it, and a food-for-reunification deal with Taipei, and feeling mighty superior about that too. Beijing politicians used the occasion to explain that the Western New Year was weak, while the Chinese New Year was the proven choice of all righteous nations. In Tokyo, the remnants of the Aum Srinyoko cult, which was still a legal religion, tried to break their guru out of prison. They failed, but killed three hundred people in the process. 04:00 hr Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta Amongst the most flammable cities in the world at the best of times, Bangkok and Jakarta lit up like tinderboxes. By contrast, Hanoi was politically stable and largely ran on manual labour, so it slept through the night. 05:00 hr Almaty, Dhaka 05:30 hr Bombay, Calcutta, Colombo, New Delhi 06:00 hr Ekaterinburg, Islamabad, Karachi, Tashkent 06:30 hr Kabul Erwin woke up with a start. They had slept through the fall of the Indian subcontinent, only picking up bits and pieces as they dozed. You can almost see it sweeping across the globe, said the radio. Hour by hour, new time zones get swallowed by the bug. It's like a fire spreading from a fuse lit at the International Date Line, jumping from one zone to the next. Like fire, it doesn't take a straight line either. Some zones are half an hour out; others deep in the Southern Hemisphere are on daylight savings. That's what it's like: a patchwork quilt burning up one patch at a time. He quickly checked the security monitor and patrolled the house. It was all clear, but he admonished himself anyway. He should have organised some watch roster. He looked at Irene and Hanna, who were asleep on the sofa, and he checked in on Billy, who would need a bucket of water to be woken at this time of night. He would have to take the watch himself. He went and poured himself a strong cup of coffee. The sun was up, so Erwin flicked the security cameras off night vision mode. 07:00 hr Abu Dhabi, Tbilisi 07:30 hr Tehran 08:00 hr Baghdad, Moscow, Nairobi, St Petersburg The remains of the old Soviet Union fell even closer to the Stone Age. Two nuclear reactors went Chernobyl, and one secret nuclear warhead storage facility that Turkistan had failed to decommission lit up in a storm of neutrons. Meteorologists in London were rushing to model the fallout across Western Europe. But the Russians had more immediate problems: a sudden loss of power in the middle of a frozen night. Winter laid a new siege on St Petersburg. 09:00 hr Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Johannesburg The Australian government has announced a State of Emergency, said the DJ, although it has no way of systematically informing police and the military. A spokesman said that police and army officers had been briefed on the possibility beforehand and expect near universal compliance even if they can't be contacted in remote areas. Police have withdrawn from the riot at Flinders Street Station following the deaths of three officers and serious injuries to seventeen others. The Police Commissioner has asked the army to step in, and is waiting for a response. Meanwhile, armed gangs are terrorising the mansions of Toorak, Brighton, and Kew. Gangs from the city have already been seen in Shepparton and Bendigo. There have been reports of car theft and armed robberies from these reprobates exploit country hospitality and lack of security. Armed thieves killed a family of five in their home, ten kilometres out of Benalla. There was a brief pause in the transmission. When the DJ spoke again there was a noticeable change in his tone of voice. Now for some lighter news. The government has asked all television broadcasters to continue with their usual programming to reduce panic in the community. Your electricity may be down and your phone cut off and there may be gangs in the streets of Melbourne, but you just know it will be all right because the television that you can't watch is showing its normal programs. I notice right now that Channel Nine is showing Bugs Bunny cartoons. I feel safer already. Erwin briefly flicked over to the television. Sure enough, Wil E. Coyote was smacking into the side of a mesa while the Road Runner zipped off into the distance, just like it was any other Saturday morning. Erwin laughed, not at the cartoon itself, but at the inappropriateness of it. He flicked back to the security cameras. 10:00 hr Berlin, Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Vienna "What's that?" asked Hanna, pointing at the monitor. Erwin turned to look. Someone was climbing the front fence. Obviously it was a city dweller who couldn't even figure out how to open a gate chain. It never ceased to amaze Erwin how such a simple piece of equipment - a chain, a hook, and a metal plate with a shaped hole - could stymie even intelligent people. The young man was wearing a ragged denim jacket and black jeans. Then Erwin saw the long barrel sticking over the young man's shoulder. "Stay inside," he ordered the family. He took the illegal semi-automatic out of the gun cupboard, quickly checked the breech and the ammo clip and went out the front door. It was fifty metres to the front gate. A small rise blocked the direct view, so Erwin had placed the camera up under the eaves of the house. Erwin set himself behind the big gum tree and rested the barrel of his rifle in the crook of a branch and waited. A red cap appeared over the lip of earth, followed by the slung rifle barrel, then the denim jacket. As soon as the intruder's entire body was visible, Erwin knew that even if the young man threw himself to the ground, he would be in the line of fire. "Stop right there!" he shouted. "I've got a bead on you." The intruder stopped dead. "Drop the gun," Erwin called. The intruder swung the rifle off his shoulder. The bastard laughed out loud, a strange, almost ethereal laugh, and pointed the damn gun straight at him. The rest was pure reaction. The trigger pulled. The rifle kicked. The report stung Erwin's right ear. The stranger reeled backwards. A spray of blood spewed from his right shoulder. The man staggered and dropped the rifle. He started wailing and ran back the way he came, over the rise to the road. Erwin kept the rifle at his shoulder and moved forward, one short step after another. By the time he reached the top of the lip, he could see that the stranger had cleared off. A few small blood spots trailed down the driveway. "Consider yourself lucky," he said to the blood-spotted earth. "If I'd had the time to aim I would have had you through the heart." He looked down at the discarded rifle. "Oh God," he said as he reached down to pick it up. It wasn't a real weapon at all. It was an air rifle. Even if he'd been hit between the eyes at ten paces, it would have merely broken the skin. It could cause a nasty eye injury, but the chances of a direct hit were vanishingly small. He picked it up. It was worse than he thought. He recognised the air rifle. It was Billy's. Erwin had given it to him as a Christmas present two years ago so he could practice shooting. Erwin fell to his knees. 11:00 hr Greenwich, London, Casablanca, Lisbon, Reykjavik He smashed the radio with the butt of his rifle. The family begged him for an explanation, but he was in too much turmoil to speak. When the radio was no more than a pile of splinters and smashed circuits, he dropped the gun. Hanna was hiding behind the sofa, her hands over her ears. Billy knew that a sofa was no protection against a bullet, so he had scooted behind the fridge and was looking at his father with a shocked expression. Only Irene stood still in the middle of the room, arms out, waiting for him to turn to her. 12:00 hr Azores, Cape Verde Island An hour later, an HSV pulled up at the front gate. DSC Terry Erikson stepped out of the car, unlocked the gate, and walked up the driveway. At the top of the rise, he stepped behind a tree for cover and called out. "Erwin! We need to talk!" There was silence in return. "Listen mate, you can come out now or you can wait for the tactical response force to get here." The front door opened and Erwin shuffled out, hands empty. Irene followed, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Billy and Hanna came out soon after. "Jesus," said DSC Erikson when Erwin reached him, "I took you for one of the smart ones." 13:00 hr Mid-Atlantic "But the radio, and the electricity, and the phones." The interview room reeked of sweat and cigarette smoke. "Listen to me, Erwin," said Erikson. "The electricity blackout was due to a power surge when everyone came home from their parties and turned on their televisions and air conditioners. It overloaded the local substation. Why do you think you could still watch television? If the blackjout had been universal, the transmitter would have been down. Some computer hackers in Sydney who thought it would be funny to disable the phone system on New Year's Day. They were young and arrogant and didn't cover their tracks. They're already in custody. And as for the radio, they were tapping into a newsfeed, selectively reporting whatever suited them and inventing things when the reports didn't suit them. A few gangs went wild, but it wasn't much worse than any other New Year's Eve, apart from that poor family in Bendigo. There was no critical breakdown. Just a few hiccups and an over-excited pirate radio station. We're currently trying to work out exactly what charges we can bring against Radio Y2K on top of its breaches of the Broadcasting Act. OK? Now can I turn the tape back on and continue the interview?" 14:00 hr Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Godthaab 15:00 hr Caracas, La Paz 16:00 hr New York, Washington, Bogota, Lima 17:00 hr Mexico City, Saskatchewan, Tegucigalpa 18:00 hr Phoenix 19:00 hr Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tijuana 20:00 hr Anchorage 21:00 hr Honolulu A man in a crisp suit came into the cell. "I'm Garrison Davis," he said. "I've already talked to DSC Erikson. He's almost as upset about this as you are. Says you're a decent bloke. Can't understand why a sensible fellow like you would get carried away by this millennial rubbish. It's good he's on side. He might help us convince the DPP to go for recklessly causing serious harm rather than intentionally causing. That means the local magistrate's court instead of county court, and a much lower sentence range." He gave Humboldt a long, sweeping look, then took out his notebook. "First of all, get your Sunday suit dry cleaned. Keep shaving, no matter how depressed you feel. When we get to court, I'll make sure the judge hears that you're a regular churchgoer and that you've even taught a few Bible school classes. We won't mention the name of the church." Humboldt wasn't really listening. He had his head in his hands. Davis reached out and touched his shoulder. "Kind of hoping it'll all go away, I bet. I understand. You probably can't accept that radio station was spinning a pack of lies and that the world outside had a few staggers but kept strolling on regardless. But you don't have the luxury of wandering about in a daze. You've gotta start working with me now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. I've got another five cases like yours to deal with and I don't have the time to mother you." Humboldt lifted his head from his hands and stared at the lawyer with bloodshot eyes. "Who the hell are you?" he asked. "Some legal aid hack?" Davis laughed. "You wouldn't qualify for legal aid. Not while you still have your farm and five dollars to your name. I'm from the Sporting Shooters Alliance. I do all their work for them." "So you're acting in their interests instead of mine." Davis leaned back. "I won't lie to you, Mr Humboldt. Ethically, I have a duty to represent you no matter who is paying the bills, but I know you're a sensible sort of fellow. Not the sort of guy to trust someone just because they can quote ivory-tower law-school claptrap Yes, I represent the interests of the Sporting Shooters Alliance. Having said that, it should be abundantly clear to you as a fully paid up member who ought to be reading the monthly magazine, that your interests are the same as the SSA's. The last thing we want is another gun control hysteria." Humboldt sat back and stretched in his seat. "Okay. I'm sorry. One decent cup of coffee and I'll be less frazzled." "You're in custody, Mr Humboldt, not a coffee shop." 22:00 hr Midway, Samoa The custody sergeant tapped on the cell bars. "Come on, fellas. It's getting late." What he meant was, the footy match on TV was about to go into the last quarter. He headed back to the television. Garrison Davis opened his briefcase and started shovelling notes into its mouth. "We'll go through all this again before the case comes up. Just remember to practise the things I told you." Humboldt nodded, but was looking away and fingering the gold cross he kept on a chain around his neck. It was sloppy of the police to let him keep it, and no favour. He would almost certainly have it stolen or taken by force his first day in the Remand Centre. "I thought it was all true," said Humboldt. "You're not the only one. You're not even the first. The same sort of things happened back in the first millennium. People selling their worldly goods for a song, or running off on pilgrimages and hiding in churches. It's all happened before and it will happen all over again." "I thought I'd read it in Scripture." Davis clipped his briefcase shut and called for the guard. He turned for a moment and said, "I think Scripture has been misinterpreted. I don't think the world ever ends." "What about Armageddon?" asked Humboldt. The cell door opened and Davis stepped outside. The steel clanged into place behind him. The sound of the television was turned up in the next room. The umpire whistled to commence the last quarter and the crowd roared in response. Davis turned to speak. "Armageddon," said Davis. "I think Armageddon happens to someone, somewhere every day." Davis walked away while Humboldt twisted the gold chain in his fingers. Twenty-five twists he counted into the chain, one for each hour of the new millennium. He tried to figure it out. Maybe, he thought, since there were twenty-two chapters of Revelation, it would take twenty-two hours. No, that had already passed. Maybe twenty-two days. That would make sense. Three weeks, roughly speaking, for all the Y2K bugs to accumulate. The industrial nations could patch a hole here and there, but after three weeks the number of holes would reach a critical level and collapse would follow. Or it could be twenty-two years. Or maybe it meant twenty-two centuries after Christ's birth, which would be around 2200 AD. Or maybe the number of chapters in Revelation was irrelevant. Maybe the answer was not in Revelation at all, but in Matthew 24:36. Erwin cradled his head in his hands. He was so tired - too tired to figure out the numerology of destruction in his head. Once the siren sounded to end the footy match, the sergeant switched off the television. He came by the cell to flick out the lights. "Don't worry, mate," he said. "At least the world is still here." Erwin did not even lift his head from his hands when he nodded back. He said nothing because he knew the sergeant would not understand, but in the darkness his lips mouthed the words. "I couldn't imagine anything worse." With thanks to Natalie M. for the legal advice, to Matt Johnson for his song "Armageddon Days Are Here (again)," and to Jeremy for the shortest deadline in the history of fiction. End