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deferred to my disinclination to own one, since our marriage she accompanied her parents twice a year to a shooting range, where they kept their marksmanship sharp.
I would have preferred to stay in the kitchen with Clotilda and Milo. But in defense of my family, if I truly did intend to overcome my aversion to firearms, I would have to look at one and even touch one sooner or later.
Penny and her father engaged in such technical discussions of the choices of weaponry available to us that although I tried hard to listen to them and to learn, I finally could make no more sense of their conversation than I could of the Gaelic with which Clotilda had blessed my son. Soon they managed to do what I would have thought impossible: They made guns seem less scary than boring.
I wandered out of the armory, into the final and largest chamber in the stronghold. Here lay the proof, if I had needed it, that Grim and Clo were not insane, that they were no worse than eccentric to the max.
Their survivalism was not just about the preservation of their lives in the event of universal destruction. They hoped as well to preserve the fundamental works of Western thought and art that had given the world—for a while—the only societies that believed every individual was born with a dignity and a God-given right to freedom that no one had the authority to deny or to abridge.
Books.
The classic works of Greek philosophy: Aristophanes … Aristotle, Plato …
The plays of Euripides. Plutarch on the lives of legendary and real Grecians and Romans. Herodotus on ancient history. Hippocrates on medicine. Euclid and Archimedes on geometry and math.
The masterpieces of the Middle Ages: Dante … Chaucer … Saint Thomas Aquinas …
From Shakespeare to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, from Dickens to Dostoyevsky …
Of works published in the twentieth century, which produced more books than any other, they preserved fewer than a hundred titles. Conrad, bridging centuries with Heart of Darkness. Bellow … Churchill … Orwell … O’Connor … Pasternak … Waugh …
They kept three copies of each book. Two were carefully vacuum-sealed in plastic, using a kitchen appliance designed to package leftovers for the freezer, but the third copy remained accessible for their use.
I am led to believe that the rumored other family strongholds have libraries of their own, that perhaps some have collections of reproductions of the great art produced before the decline of the West, when the purposes of art were celebration and reflection instead of transgression and negation.
There are times when even extreme eccentricity is not abnormal but merely irregular, and there are even times when it is wisdom. All that seemed obsessive about the Booms’ stronghold might on reconsideration be seen as prudent, and all that appeared selfish might be noble.
When I returned to the armory, Penny and Grimbald were closing a pair of metal attaché cases that contained the weapons and the ammunition that they had chosen for us.
Handing one of the cases to me, Grim said, “Penny can teach you gun safety and how to shoot. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say she was Annie Oakley in a previous life.”
My wife, the adorable gun nut.
Grim snapped thumb and middle finger. “Oh, right! And I’ve got those items Milo called me about.”
For a disconcerting moment, I thought he meant that our boy had requested weapons of his own.
“No, no,” said Grimbald. “A month ago he called me with a list of electronic items and highly specialized microchips.”
“But I always get him what he wants.”
Turning from us and lumbering deeper into the armory, like Thor trying to remember where he stored his latest batch of thunderbolts, Grim said, “Oh, you could never have gotten these things. They’re embargoed.”
“Embargoed by whom?”
“Government.” He withdrew a small suitcase from a cabinet. “You have to have contacts in the black market.”
“Why?”
Returning with the suitcase, Grimbald grinned and winked. “Well, let’s just say these items have … military applications.”
Penny and I exchanged ten thousand words of concern in just a glance.
Grimbald wondered, “What’s the nipper up to, anyway?”
“Something very different from an interstellar communications device,” I said. “That’s all we know.”
“He’s going to do something spectacular one day,” Grimbald declared.
“We’re half afraid of that,” I said.
When we returned to the kitchen, Milo was sitting on a stool while Clotilda, furiously cooking at the wood-burning stove, regaled him with what she had learned about the future from that morning’s coffee grounds.
When Grim told Milo that the suitcase