Odds Against Tomorrow (36 page)

I am
scared
.

But she choked back the words.

“I’m fine,” she said at last. “I just need to get back to New York. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Also by Nathaniel Rich

The Mayor’s Tongue

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2013 by Nathaniel Rich

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

Lyrics from “All We Have Is Now,” by the Flaming Lips, used by permission of the Flaming Lips.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Nathaniel, 1980–

     
Odds against tomorrow / Nathaniel Rich. — 1st ed.

         
p.   cm.

     
ISBN 978-0-374-22424-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)

     
1.  Scientists—Fiction.   I.  Title.

  
PS3618.I3334 O44 2013

  
813'.6—dc23

2012028928

Illustrations by Oliver Munday

www.fsgbooks.com

www.twitter.com/fsgbooks
•
www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

I want to thank Yaddo, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Beatrice von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, the Danish-American Writers Retreat at Hald Hovedgaard, and the Kenneth Shapiro Studio in the Maine Woods for providing shelter during the storm. Readers Meredith Angelson, Sam Axelrod, Eric Brown, Joseph Kanon, MK, David Yourdon, and Captain Caridad annihilated microbursts of prose. To Sean McDonald, Elyse Cheney, and Emily Bell, a deluge of gratitude.

eIBSN 9781466836754