"Cannot scientists hope to tell?"
"Well—" it was beginning to sound like the seeds of one of our old arguments—"well, I suppose so. Pure research isn't much encouraged, these days."
"But it should be, you think?"
"Of course it should. The only hope of the world—" I trailed off. Through the trees was a bright, distant glare, and I had just remembered what it was.
"Is what, Tom?"
"There isn't any," I said, but only to myself. She didn't press me; she merely burrowed into my arm.
Perhaps the wind shifted, and the smell of the hemp fields grew stronger; perhaps it was only the foul thought that the glaring sky had triggered that contaminated my mood. But where I had been happy and relaxed—the C-bomb completely out of my mind for the moment—now I was too fully aware of what was ahead for all of us.
"Let's go back, Rena," I said. She didn't ask why. Perhaps she, too, was feeling the weight of our death sentence.
We caught the evening newscast; its story varied little from the early ones.