"Blow me. Hey, Lieutenant!"

"Lt. Grale! You gotta try this."

"I really don't," Grale said.

"He just doesn't want to see the words 'old age' in print."

Everyone laughed. An explosion and the sound of wrenching metal pealed through the open windows, a distant and painful reality check.

"Gearhead," Grale said, "Take ten men and go see who killed who."

"Yes, sir!" the skinny youngster said, snapping gum that'd been in his mouth since morning.

The rest of the men kept joking about the machine's one-line fortunes, and Simmons, with a half-smile plastered on his face, said, "Come on, Lieutenant. It won't hurt you to see what it says."

"Yeah, Lieutenant, come on."

A chorus of "come ons" and "yeahs" broke out, and Grale couldn't see the harm in a little fun.

He stepped up to the machine-it was such a humble thing-and Paula showed him how it worked. It reminded Grale of a slot machine. Maybe that was why it'd been in a casino.

A tiny slip of paper curled out.

Grale ripped it free, read it, stared at it for a moment, and then let it fall to the floor with a shrug. Like jackals, Grale's men fell on the sc.r.a.p and gaped at it, horror-struck. By nightfall, everyone on base knew how Lieutenant Grale was going to die.

The change came the next morning. Some of the men wouldn't talk to Grale unless they had to. Overnight, he'd become the most beloved and still (somehow) least-popular man on base. And anyone with something bad to say about Lt. Grale: Watch out!

Everywhere Grale went, his soldiers looked at him with wide, wet eyes and the color would swirl out of their faces. They'd utter "yes, sir," as if the post had arrived with a thousand pounds of Dear John letters.

What harm could a little fun be? Grale snorted at the thought.

Aside from bringing morale to an all-time low? Not a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing.

"I want that d.a.m.n machine turned into sc.r.a.p."

"Yes, sir."

"You hear me? If it stays on this base, it'll be reincarnated as a locker."

"Yes, sir."

"Now! I want to see you do it, Marine!"

That caused some grumbling. Word went out that ol' Grale was afraid of the death machine. "And who can blame him?" they'd say.

What the h.e.l.l did they know?

Grale crouched behind the billboard and watched the disaster unfold across the street. His boys (and girl), the whole lot of them, in an instant, decided that they were going to defy fate, to prove Grale's slip of paper wrong. He couldn't hear what they were saying over the gunfire, and they weren't signaling anything.

A bullet sliced through the sign and sent bits of brick from the building behind Grale into the air. The d.a.m.n thing almost parted his hair. He pressed himself against the ground.

He saw Gearhead on the radio. Calling an air strike. Good boy.

Simmons put a new mag in his gun and shifted his legs.

No, d.a.m.n d.a.m.n you, you, Simmons, Simmons, stay stay put. put. Grale gestured for him to stay down. Grale gestured for him to stay down.

He didn't.

"No!"

But Simmons charged around the corner. Gearhead looked across the ruined street at Grale and Grale shook his head. Gearhead stopped the others from following. Good boy.

Grale ground his teeth. Once, his daughter had left at seventeen hundred hours, back at the base in Germany, and never reported for dinner. She'd come home at oh-one hundred, drunk and battered. Grale knocked a few heads in that night, that was for sure. But the time between seventeen and oh-one hundred hours? That excruciating wait? That was how Grale felt when Simmons turned the corner and charged toward the ruins of the office building.

A crack shattered the other sounds of the urban fighting and Grale knew what'd happened, even before he heard Simmons cry out. Just like he knew what happened that night, so long ago, before his daughter had opened her mouth to start crying.

Grale peered over the sign. Simmons was down, hard. The sniper had shot his leg. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d was hoping to draw out more.

Grale made a gesture at Gearhead.

Gearhead shook his head.

Grale made ready to spring, putting his back against the sign and shouldering his rifle. This was his job, d.a.m.n it, these were his children. Screw that miserable machine and its miserable opinion.

"Covering fire!" Gearhead screamed. NATO rounds poured upward toward the office building. Grale turned at the edge of the sign and dashed into the street. Throughout, the sniper was silent. Good boy, Gearhead.

Grale reached Simmons, and winced. The boy's leg was mangled badly-he'd be lucky to keep it. Have Have to to carry carry him, him, Grale thought. Grale thought.

"Lieutenant?"

"Shut up. You gotta live so that cow can kill ya."

Grale squatted and hefted Simmons up. Boy could use a meal or two extra. d.a.m.n, it was hot out.

Grale's eyes were glued up to the building.

He saw the sniper.

He could see into the sniper's eyes, all the way from the ground. They were like brown gla.s.s, and the man behind them-the man behind the rifle-hated Grale, hated Simmons, and he'd hate anyone else that stepped into the street. The NATO rounds weren't keeping him down anymore.

Grale knew what was going to happen. He always did. He turned away from the sniper, Simmons curled on his shoulders, and started running back to cover. If the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was going to shoot Grale, he'd have to do it from behind.

A puff of dirt flashed up between Grale's legs, as if to say, "I don't mind that."

But Grale was almost there.

Gearhead and the others were still firing, trying to keep the sniper down. But the man behind the rifle had a pair made of bra.s.s. Another round zipped past Grale's ear.

Ten yards to go. Not even that.

But Grale could feel it. The muzzle of the rifle may as well have been pressed against his back. The sniper, he knew, wouldn't miss a third time.

A rocket streaked through the heavens. Half of the sniper's building caved in. As Grale turned the corner and set Simmons down, he heard Gearhead yelling into the radio.

"Kill confirmed. Repeat, kill confirmed. You got the b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Simmons looked up at Grale, his eyes beaming with grat.i.tude and admiration.

"But, sir, your paper said-"

"Some other sniper, son. Some other war."

Story by Bartholomew von Klick Ill.u.s.tration by John Keogh

HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE.

I MET MAGGIE AT A KEG PARTY IN THE BACK YARD OF THE HEAD CHEERLEADER'S HOUSE. The cheerleader didn't know I was there, and probably would have objected to my presence. I was a nerd. I didn't earn acceptance from my peers until we were too old and too jaded about high school cliques to care.

Maggie and I had been at the same school since junior high, but we had never really met each other before. She was a name on a roster, another face in the background noise. She was tall for her age, and had k.n.o.bby knees and a flat chest, and a nose that was a little too big, but I thought she was beautiful. Seeing her at the party again, in different and unusual circ.u.mstances, was like waking up and everything seeming smaller than it was before. I had seen Maggie every day for years, but suddenly she was the most wonderful girl I had ever seen. Before that moment, before I saw her laughing over the rim of a red plastic cup, I don't think I even noticed girls.

We got off to a good start. We talked awhile, and shared a drink or two in the freshly-cut gra.s.s, giggling. Later, I held her hair back while she puked in the kitchen sink. Maggie had too much Jagermeister, drawn by its sweet smell and licorice taste. She had always liked licorice. Between bouts of gut-twisting heaves, Maggie cursed the liquor companies for making the stuff taste exactly like her favorite candy. Childhood to adulthood, things don't change as much as they used to. Maggie blames commercialism and the corporations. I think I agree with Stephen Hawking.

I read his book during my soph.o.m.ore year. The other kids would have made fun of me if they hadn't gotten that out of their collective system in junior high. They were too busy getting laid and trying to get laid, and trying to get into good colleges. I had already been accepted with a big scholarship because I'd discovered a new kind of algae in the stream near my grandparents' house. It was just a science project to me, but to college admissions departments, it was as if I had rushed for a million yards last football season.

I had scholarship offers, and ended up going to the school that Maggie was going to. I told my parents that I had picked the state university because I had read that graduate programs matter much more than undergraduate programs, and that I should go to a big state school for undergrad because I needed the social acculturation that happens at those kinds of places. They agreed with me, or at least let me have my way, because that new kind of algae made them think I was smarter than they were.

I'm not as smart as everybody thinks I am. When I tell people that I'm not as smart as they think I am, they think I'm being modest. I keep expecting to wake up one day and know that I'm that smart and be comfortable with it, and be able to think my way through any problem and come to the right conclusion every time, like there's a door locked in my mind and if I could unlock it, everything would be fine, and I would be a modern-day Mozart. I'll never be Mozart, though. I played the baritone tuba in junior high band, and faked my way through it. I never even learned how to key or read the music. I just pretended. I wonder if Stephen Hawking tells people that he's not as smart as people think he is.

According to Hawking, all this certainty is going to be bad for us. We spent the first few billion years of our collective existence scrabbling through a random universe full of uncertainty, pain, suffering, and unpredictability. Hawking thought that if you put a little bit of order in the chaotic soup of human existence, then the order will crystallize and spread itself throughout the whole human experience. Life will either get very boring or very interesting, in the Chinese sense. There's some debate about what this would look like, because nothing like it has ever happened. Some people think Hawking is wrong and that a little bit of order in a whole lot of chaos is no more effective than an ice cube dropped in a lava flow. Others believe that it's going to be the social equivalent of metal fatigue, simultaneous across the whole planet. Civilization will shatter like an icicle. Too much order is worse than too much chaos. We evolved in chaos. We survived chaos. Life thrives in chaos.

I thought about that a lot during our senior year. The chaos of high school and all the politics of it and the cliques sort of dissolved and became more permeable. n.o.body cared about that stuff anymore. They cared about college, and their new lives: High School 2.0. It was a kind of order of its own, though I thought it was kind of temporary. Maggie and I visited a few colleges together and it seemed pretty chaotic to me.

Maggie and I had s.e.x for the first time right before our birthdays, on December 31st. No liquor for us, no wine, no champagne. We hung out in the treehouse in her back yard, which had overgrown with spidery ivy and creeping, snaking tree branches. Her father was a contractor, so while it was in a tree, it was pretty well insulated, and two bodies in it warmed the place up pretty well, especially if those bodies were humping. I had heard that s.e.x for the first time was always messy and weird and gross, but it wasn't for us. I had researched it a lot on the Internet, but Maggie wasn't interested in the technicalities. She just wanted to be close to me.

"I'm scared," she said, after we did it, and we were spooning on the floor of the treehouse, wrapped in the blanket I had brought from my house. It was blue and white, in a pattern like a summer sky with clouds on it. It was wool, and scratchy and soft at the same time.

"I don't want to get my blood read."

"We don't have to," I said.

"Yes we do," she said. "My mom won't stop talking about it."

"Moms suck sometimes," I said.

"Especially mine," she said. "It's worse than when I had my period for the first time. She kept telling me it was going to happen soon. She bought me six kinds of maxi pads. I was afraid she was going to demonstrate how to use a tampon."

"Ew."

"Yeah. Boys are lucky." She sighed and grabbed my hand and squeezed. "I hope we get the same reading."

"Me too," I said. "But it's okay if we don't."

"I guess so," she said. "But what if I get CAR ACCIDENT and you get DROWNING? Or what if I get CANCER and you get OLD AGE?"

"n.o.body gets OLD AGE," I said.

"Sometimes they do," she said.

"It's an urban legend," I said. "Because n.o.body actually dies of OLD AGE. They die of cancer or something."

"That's not what my uncle says," she said. "His friend in college pulled OLD AGE. And he was killed by an old guy driving a car."

"I don't think that's true," I said. "It's too weird."

"Just because it's weird doesn't mean it doesn't happen," she said. "Things like that happen all the time. Like those people who pull STABBED, and they fall on some broken gla.s.s, or that lady who pulled HANGED, and got wrapped up in telephone wires when she jumped off her roof. That stuff happens."

"Yeah, I guess it does," I said. "But it's rare. If that were always true then n.o.body would get their blood read at all. People wouldn't be so secretive about their certs. There wouldn't be laws against having your blood read before you're eighteen. It would just be a joke, you know? Like a horoscope."

She didn't have an answer for that. I was the smart kid. People always thought my logic was perfect, even if they knew it wasn't, because I was smarter.

"I don't want to know how I'm going to die," she said, finally. "It doesn't seem fair."

"Everybody does it. They still live their lives."

"Some of them," she said, a reference to her uncle, the black sheep of her family. He had pulled GUNSHOT, and got scared and moved to the wilderness out west somewhere. He didn't live his life. He started living someone else's.

"We'll live ours," I said. "Together." I squeezed her tight, for emphasis.

"Yeah," she said. "Together."

If order really were crystallizing across the whole quantum stratum of human existence, then Maggie would have turned out to be my sister or something.

But that didn't happen. We had blood drawn at the doctor's office. Our families let us go by ourselves. I drove us in my mom's Taurus. The salt-stained tires ploughed twin ca.n.a.ls through the chunky, gray slush. The snow unspooled from the roof in loose, white ribbons.

Maggie and I had the same doctor. He had a machine in his office that did the readings. He drew a little bit of blood and put it into a little receptacle on the machine. It looked like a big laser printer, smooth white plastic and blinking, green lights. In a few minutes, the machine hummed and something inside it spun and the humming grew louder and shook the floor a little. He smiled at us, arms folded. The machine printed out the certificates on special paper, the same pinkish color as those new five-dollar bills. He put them face-down on a tray and handed them to us. Maggie and I sat down on the examination table, butcher paper crinkling and creasing under us, bunching between us as Maggie scooted closer. The doctor left us alone.

Maggie asked me if I was feeling nervous. I told her no, even though that was a lie and she could see it in my face.

"I can tell when you're nervous," she said. "You look like you're reading small print when you're nervous."

"I am now," I said. "Thanks."

"Oh, it's all right," she said, and put her hand on my leg. She was always misreading my sarcasm. If there were a chance I was nervous, she took it seriously. I was joking this time. I told her so. She nodded and held my hand.