Andrew shivered despite the fire at his back. "It's from here. The Indians. The Tankiteke. There were lots, my mother said. Her grandfather found it when he was little. My father-" He ended brokenly.

Howell nodded in wonder. "It works," he said. "I saw it work." Andrew swallowed and drew back a little, so that the amulet slipped from Howell's hand. "Like this," he explained, opening his mouth and slipping one finger beneath his tongue. "But you don't swallow it."

"I saw you," the old man repeated. "I saw you playing with my dog." He nodded at Festus, dozing in front of the fire. "Can you be anything?"

Andrew bit his lip before answering. "I think so. My mother said you just concentrate on it-on what you want. See-"

And he took it into his hand, held it out so that the firelight illuminated it. "It's like all these things in one. Look: it's got wings and horns and hooves."

"And that's how you hid from them." Howell slapped his knees. "No wonder they never found you."

Andrew nodded glumly.

"Well," Howell coughed. He sank back into the chair, eyes closed. He reached for Andrew, and the boy felt the old mans hand tighten about his own, cold and surprisingly strong. After a minute Howell opened his eyes. He looked from the flames to Andrew and held the boy's gaze for a long time, silent. Then, "You could fly with something like that," he said. "You could fly again."

Andrew let his breath out in a long shudder. 'That's right," he said finally beneath his breath. He turned away. "You could fly again, Major Howell."

Howell reached for the boy's hand again, his fingers clamping there like a metal hinge. "Thank you," he whispered. "I think I'll go to sleep now."

The following afternoon the plow came. Andrew heard it long before it reached Sugar Mountain, an eager roar like a great wave overtaking the snowbound bungalow. The phone was working, too; he heard Howell in the next room, talking between fits of coughing. A short time later a pickup bounced up the drive. Andrew stared in disbelief, then fled into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

He heard several voices greeting Howell at the door, the thump of boots upon the flagstones.

"Thank you, Isaac," wheezed the astronaut. Andrew heard the others stomp into the kitchen. "I was out of everything." Andrew opened the door a crack and peered out, glaring at Festus when the dog scratched at it.

Howell motioned the visitors into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Andrew listened to their murmuring voices before storming back into the living room. He huddled out of sight on the window seat, staring outside until they left. After the pickup rattled back down the mountainside, he stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.

"I didn't tell them," Howell said mildly that evening as they sat before the fire.

Andrew glared at him but said nothing.

"They wouldn't be interested," Howell said. Every breath now shook him like a cold wind. "Andrew . . . "

The boy sat in silence, his hand tight around the amulet. Finally Howell stood, knocking over his glass of scotch. He started to bend to retrieve it when Andrew stopped him.

"No," he said hoarsely. "Not like that." He hesitated, then said, "You ever see a drunk dog?"

Howell stared at him, then nodded. "Yes."

"It's like that," said Andrew. "Only worse."

Festus followed them as they walked to the door, Andrew holding the old man's elbow. For a moment they hesitated. Then Andrew shoved the door open, wincing at the icy wind that stirred funnels of snow in the field.

"It's so cold," Howell whispered, shivering inside his flannel robe. "It won't be so bad," said Andrew, helping him outside.

They stood in the field. Overhead the full moon bloomed as Festus nosed after old footprints. Andrew stepped away from Howell, then took the talisman from around his own neck.

"Like I told you," he said as he handed it to the old man.

Howell hesitated. "It'll work for me?"

Andrew clutched his arms, shivering. "I think so," he said, gazing at the amulet in the man's hand. "I think you can be whatever you want."

Howell nodded and turned away. "Don't look," he whispered. Andrew stared at his feet. A moment later the flannel robe blew against his ankles. He heard a gasp and shut his eyes, willing away the tears before opening them again.

In front of Andrew the air sparkled for an instant with eddies of snow. Beside him, Festus whined, staring above his head. Andrew looked up and saw a fluttering scrap like a leaf: a bat squeaking as its wings beat feebly, then more powerfully, as if drawing strength from the freezing wind. It circled the boy's head-once, twice-then began to climb, higher and higher, until Andrew squinted to see it in the moonlight.

"Major Howell!" he shouted. "Major Howell!"

To Howell the voice sounded like the clamor of vast and thundering bells. All the sky now sang to him as he flailed through the air, rising above trees and roof and mountain. He heard the faint buzzing of the stars, the sigh of snow in the trees fading as he flew above the pines into the open sky.

And then he saw it: more vast than ever it had been from the orbiter, so bright his eyes could not bear it. And the sound! like the ocean, waves of air dashing against him, buffeting him as he climbed, the roar and crash and peal of it as it pulled him upward. His wings beat faster, the air sharp in his throat, thinning as the darkness fell behind him and the noise swelled with the brightness, light now everywhere, and sound, not silent or dead as they had told him but thundering and burgeoning with heat, light, the vast eye opening like a volcano's core. His wings ceased beating and he drifted upward, all about him the glittering stars, the glorious clamor, the great and shining face of the moon, his moon at last: the moon.

Andrew spent the night pacing the little house, sitting for a few minutes on sofa or kitchen counter, avoiding the back door, avoiding the windows, avoiding Howell's bedroom. Festus followed him, whining. Finally, when the snow glimmered with first light, Andrew went outside to look for Howell.

It was Festus who found him after just a few minutes, in a shallow dell where ferns would grow in the spring and deer sleep on the bracken. Now snow had drifted where the old man lay. He was naked, and even from the lawn Andrew could tell he was dead. The boy turned and walked back to the house, got Howell's flannel robe and a blanket. He was shaking uncontrollably when he went back out.

Festus lay quietly beside the body, muzzle resting on his paws.

Andrew couldn't move Howell to dress him: the was rigid from the cold. So he gently placed the robe over the emaciated frame, tucked the blanket around him. Howell's eyes were closed now, and he had a quiet expression on his face. Not like Andrew's mother at all, really: except that one hand clutched something, a grimy bit of string trailing from it to twitch across the snow. Andrew knelt, shivering, and took one end of the string, tugged it. The amulet slid from Howell's hand.

Andrew stumbled to his feet and held it at arm's length, the little stone talisman twisting slowly. He looked up at the sky in the west, above the cottage, the moon hung just above the horizon. Andrew turned to face the dark bulk of Sugar Mountain, its edges brightening where the sun was rising above Lake Muscanth. He pulled his arm back and threw the amulet as hard as he could into the woods. Festus raised his head to watch the boy They both waited, listening; but there was no sound, nothing to show where it fell. Andrew wiped his hands on his pants and looked down at the astronaut again. He stooped and let the tip of one finger brush the old man's forehead. Then he went inside to call the police.

There were questions, and people from newspapers and TV, and Andrew's own family, overjoyed (he couldn't believe it, they all cried) to see him again. And eventually it was all straightened out.

There was a service at the old Congregational church in Kamensic Village near the museum. After the first thaw they buried Howell in the small local cemetery, beside the farmers and Revolutionary War dead. A codicil to his will left the dog Festus to the fourteen-year-old runaway discovered to have been living with the dying astronaut in his last days. The codicil forbade sale of the bungalow and Sugar Mountain, the property to revert to the boy upon his twentieth birthday. Howell's son protested this: Sugar Mountain was worth a fortune now, the land approved for subdivisions with two-acre zoning. But the court found the will to be valid, witnessed as it was by Isaac and Seymour Schelling, village grocers and public notaries.

When he finished school, Andrew moved into the cottage at Sugar Mountain. Festus was gone by then, buried where the deer still come to sleep in the bracken. There is another dog now, a youngish English cocker spaniel named Apollo. The ancient Volkswagen continues to rust in the driveway, next to a Volvo with plates that read NASA NYC. The plows and phone company attend to the cottage somewhat more reliably, and there is a second phone line as well, since Andrew needs to transmit things to the city and Washington nearly every day now, snow or not.

In summer he walks with the dog along the sleepy dirt road, marking where an owl has killed a vole, where vulpine tracks have been left in the soft mud by Lake Muscanth. And every June he visits the elementary school and shows the fifth graders a videotape from his private collection: views of the moon's surface filmed by Command Module Pilot Eugene Howell.

Author's Note: Nicholas Margalis's manuscript is in the archives of the National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

In memory of Nancy Malawista and Brian Hart

THE APHOTIC GHOST.

CARLOS HERNANDEZ.

Mountain Sometimes when a dies in Everest's Death Zone, it doesn't come down. Too difficult, too much risk for the living. Thing is, it's so cold up there, bodies don't rot. They get buried by snow periodically, but the terrific winds of the South Col reliably reveal them: blue, petrified, horned by icicles, still in their climbing gear, always forever ascending. They scandalize the Westerners who paid good money to climb Everest and who don't especially want to be reminded of how deadly the journey can be. But then their Sherpas usher them past the garden of corpses and, weather permitting, to the top of the world.

I am a Westerner, and I paid good money to climb Everest. But the summit wasn't my goal. I was going to get my son Lazaro off of that mountain, dead or alive.

Sea-Level Lazaro's mother, Dolores Thomaston, taught twelfth-grade biology at the same school where I taught AP World History: Bush High, right on the Texas-Mexico border. Lazaro was born of a dalliance between us almost three decades ago.

Dolores had an Australian ebullience and a black sense of humor and a seeming immunity to neurosis that made her irresistible to me. She could have been twenty-five or fifty-five, and I never found out which. She'd made a splash in the scientific world a few years before coming to Bush with a paper she coauthored on a deep-sea jellyfish that, interestingly, was immortal. After it reproduced, it returned to a pre-sexual polyp state through a process called cell transdifferentiation, and then become an adult again, and then a polyp, and so on. The layman's version is this: age meant nothing to that jelly. It only died if something killed it.

Dolores and I spent the summer together. I really believed we were on our way to getting married. That's why I wasn't worried when she started talking children. In fact, I was surprised to discover how much the idea of children tickled me. I had no idea how much I wanted to be a father until she put the prospect before me. I'd spent all of my adult life contemplating history, and now, suddenly, I was awash with dreams of the future.

She asked me what I would name the child, so I told her: "Brumhilda."

"Be serious," she said.

"I am!"

"Yeah? So what if it's a boy?"

I kissed her, the first of many that night. And then I said, "Lazaro."

Aphotic Zone Dolores didn't just leave me. She vanished right after we consummated our relationship. She left a note on her pillow that I promptly set fire to in a skillet before reading, then spent the rest of my life wishing I hadn't.

I didn't know she had died during childbirth, that she had opted for an ocean water-birth. Ocean-birthing. Of all the crazy trends. She never left the water.

I found all of this out from a young man named Lazaro Thomaston when he came to meet me. He was twenty-one, already a man. By then I'd missed my chance to be his father.

Sea-Level An hour since I'd learned I'd been a father for twenty-one years, Lazaro sat on the couch with me, showing me his portfolio. He worked as an underwater photographer and videographer. "It's second nature to me, being in the water," he said. "Really it's the ocean that raised me."

"Looks like the ocean did a pretty good job," I said.

He specialized in ultra-deep dives, descents into the bathyal region, which is the topmost stratum of the ocean's aphotic zone: lightless, crushing, utterly hostile. There he had recorded a score of species new to science; he'd made his reputation before he could take a legal drink. His images were haunting and minimalist, the engulfing darkness defied only by the weak bioluminescence of the sea life and, of course, him. Off-camera, he shined like a sun, illumining the depths like the first day of creation.

"These are incredible," I said. "You must he half fish."

"Got that from Mom," he said. And turned the page.

Mountain Rather than take a leave of absence from work to climb Everest, I retired early. Lost some money that way, but I had more than enough money to get to the summit, get back, and bury my son. After that, the future would take care of itself. Or go fuck itself. Either way.

I was old to climb the world's tallest mountain, but not as old as some. The ascent from the Southeast ridge is by mountaineering standards fairly straightforward, especially with today's technology. If you died it was because you were reckless, or bad weather surprised you, or your gave out and you probably should never have attempted it in the first place.

I was in reasonably good shape, but I needed work-strength-training, flexibility, cardio cardio cardio. And yoga: sixty years old, and I'd never learned to breathe. Guess it was time.

I learned to slow my heart. I learned efficiency, repose, elegance of movement. I learned to require less of everything: food, water, air, joy, meaning. I learned to sit.

I bought more gear than I could possibly use in ten ascents, watched every mountaineering video I could find, moved for a season to Colorado where I took a course on mountain climbing specifically geared toward seniors.

I finished top of the class. My instructor said he'd never seen anyone of any age so motivated. But he also said mountain climbing's supposed to be fun. Why so grim? Why was I going to climb Everest if not to have one of the greatest experiences of my life?

I told him my son was lost on Everest and that I was going to find him, but of course it'd been months and I hadn't heard any good news, so he was dead. But I'd be damned if I was going to let my son's pose for eternity like a movie prop in Everest's death zone so that overprivileged jetsetters could get an extra thrill off of him. I was climbing to claim my son's body-if I could find him, if I could pick-axe his remains free from the mountainside-and bring him home.

But yeah, asshole, I'll try to have grand old time all the way up.

Sea-Level Lazaro and I had five good years together, during which time he told me almost nothing about his life prior to our reconnecting. I didn't take it personally. He wanted to sever himself from his childhood the way a lizard drops its tail to escape a predator. Whatever his past was, Lazaro wanted nothing to do with it.

I didn't pry. I figured he would tell me when he was ready.

But he never became ready. Instead, he anchored his life to the present, to me. And that happened to be more or less exactly what I wanted. I couldn't go back and be the father he'd never had growing up, but as consolation prizes go, this was the next best thing.

I'm a historian. I should have known better. Histories never stay severed. Like the tail of a lizard, they grow back.

Mountain There was exactly one guide who would attempt something as stupid as try to descend Everest with a dead in tow. He had a Nepalese name but a British accent. To dumb-ass tourists like me he went by Roger.

His main suggestion was that we needed as many Sherpas as I could afford to help search for Lazaro. I could sell all of my extra mountaineering equipment at Base Camp to the rich and underprepared. There's where I'd get top dollar.

"I was hoping it'd just be you and me," I told him. "I don't really want a lot of people around."

He sighed. "Imagine a needle in a haystack," he said. "Now douse the haystack with water, and stick it in an industrial freezer until it's a solid hump of ice. Now remove all the oxygen from the freezer. Now put fifty kilos of equipment on your back. Now go get that needle."

Point taken. But what would I tell all those Sherpas? How could I instruct them what to look for without them thinking I was crazy?

But truly, what frightened me more was the prospect that they'd actually believe me. The Sherpa brand of Buddhism is animist enough that, when I told them what they were looking for, they might accept it as true. Accept it, and then get the fuck off Everest.

Aphotic Zone I was leaving for Lukla in four days. My equipment had already left. It was too soon for adrenaline but too late to think of anything else. I sat in my living room and didn't read and didn't watch TV and didn't turn on the lights. My own little bathyal region.

Doorbell. I had ordered a pizza. I opened the door and it was Dolores.

She was twenty-five now, if that; there was nothing fifty-five about her. She was dressed for a Texas May: naked as the law allowed. Her was muscled and sleek, like a gazelle's. Her hair was a corona. And that smile. That tilt of the head.

"Oh my," she said. "It's so good to see you, Enrique."

She was so composed. She was waiting for me to digest what I was seeing. But there was mischief there too, that evil sense of humor, even at a time like this. It really was her.

When I didn't speak, she said, "I told you I'd be back one day. So here I am, love. I'm back."

I didn't respond, and she watched me for a long time not responding. Her face drained of mirth. "In the note?" she said like a question. "You got my note, right?"

"I burned it on the stove," I said.

"Ah." Then she laughed. "Now was that any way to treat me, after what we shared? You wouldn't even read my explanation?"

"Treat you? You left me, Dolores."

"And I explained why in the note, love. It was quite necessary. That's why I left it-so you would understand."

"You're the one who needs to understand. Seeing that Dear John on the pillow, it . . . it ruined me, Dolores. Until Lazaro came into my life I was in ruins."

She came close, then hooked her arms around my neck, and I let her. Hers was not the my remembered. It fit foreignly against me.

"Have you been working out, love?" she asked, lips puckered puckishly.

"Apparently not as much as you," I said. And then: "Lazaro. I assume you know?"