Free Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich Page A

on FutureWorld stationery, his pen chiseling deep indentations into the page. It was impressive stationery—a significant improvement on Fitzsimmons Sherman’s thin-grade, laser-printed stock. The paper was a cotton and hardwood blend, with deckle edges, the open window logo embossed in magenta dye at the head and, in the center of the page, a faint “FW” watermark, visible only when you held it up to natural light. It said FW, but it communicated Brumley Sansome.
    “It’s curiosity that’s my problem,” Mitchell continued. “I wish I didn’t want to know the first thing about plate tectonics or nuclear war, but I do. So I learn more. And the more I learn, the more I find there is to fear.”
    In the following weeks, as July collapsed into August, letters began to arrive nearly every day. Neither of them waited for responses before sending a new one. So several dialogues were conducted simultaneously. But the conversation, in a certain sense, remained the same. They both had information that the other craved.
    Mitchell asked questions about Ticonderoga in the hope that Elsa would explain why she had decided to risk her life for the privilege of living on an isolated farm like an Okie homesteader. But she didn’t disclose her secret. Instead she sent news of solar tubes, bidirectional net meters, and metal flashings; lists of crops and the seasons in which they would be planted; and long-range plans—they were replacing the tennis courts with gardens, repairing the pump in the artesian well, insulating the administrative buildings for use during the winter months. It soon became clear that it wasn’t only a change of scenery she was after, or a desire to get closer to nature. No, Elsa had higher ambitions. She said she wanted to develop an entirely new way of living. “Rationality has made a mess of this world. Rationality isn’t helpful or useful, and it’s certainly not exciting. We want to trust our impulses more.” But what were those impulses? What were they telling her to do? Were they like the voices telling Marshall Applewhite that in order to ascend to the alien spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, he and his followers had to swallow applesauce spiked with phenobarbital?
    In his own letters Mitchell made a point of listing the virtues of metropolitan life, primarily the attractions of total convenience: the way the city handled essential services such as food and waste with optimal efficiency, leaving you with more time to do, well, whatever was important to you. He tried to introduce her to some basic econometric principles—Markov systems in particular—that might help her make decisions more logically, but he encountered resistence. It didn’t matter; his point was simple: they had urban farms in Brooklyn and rooftop gardens all over Manhattan, if that’s what she wanted. He didn’t mention that the most idyllic moments of his childhood were spent floating, carefree, in a canoe across Little Elkhart Lake, where for three summers he attended a wilderness camp for boys. (At the age of eleven he left that for the Young Scholars mathematics camp at the University of Chicago.) Nor did he mention New York’s doctors, the hospitals, the world-class cardiologists—but he figured he didn’t have to. Wasn’t it clear what they were talking about?
    This theme kept recurring, an undertow that threatened to tug them out to deeper waters. Elsa asked, for instance, why Mitchell kept plastic sandwich bags filled with cash hidden in his freezer.
    “In case ATMs stop working. Say there’s a massive blackout. Or a bomb. Or an electromagnetic pulse radiation. Awfulness can happen at any time. That’s what’s so awful.”
    These were the words they used, but what they were really after went unspoken. Mitchell wanted to know how she defeated, or ignored, the fear of a death that would likely come for her soon. And Elsa seemed eager to prove her case to him, to persuade him that she had figured out how