I sat down, glancing around me as I did so. No one was within earshot; and Martin struck me as the sort who would appreciate the blunt approach. “Very simply, sir,” I said quietly, “I’d like to know how you did it.”

His eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch, and for a long minute he gazed at me thoughtfully. I held my mental breath; and then the faintest wisp of a smile touched his lips. “My friends at the U.N. have mentioned you,” he said. “I’ve often thought that if I was ever ferreted out you would be the one who did it.”

I felt my heartbeat pick up. “Then the Peace Accords were your brainchild?”

He snorted gently. “Please. All that flowery legal language, those paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, mine? You flatter and insult me in the same breath.” He shook his head. “No, Mr. Kelly, I did none of the work drafting the Accords—nor any of the hard work since then that’s gone into making them mankind’s success story, for that matter. All I contributed was one, simple suggestion.”

I licked my upper lip. So the whispers had been right ... “And that suggestion was ... ?”

“What ultimately made the whole thing work,” he said, with neither false pride nor false modesty. “Tell me, do you have an insurance card on you?”

“Ah—sure,” I said, the change of subject throwing me just a little. “Health and auto both.”

“Show me.”

I dug out the little chip card, thumbed it on and handed it over. “Prudential,” he nodded, looking at it. “You know who owns Prudential?”

“Ah ... I think the Chubb Group bought it a few years ago—”

“And Chubb is owned by ... ?”

I had to think about that one. “The Anderson Portfolio?”

He nodded. “Owned by?”

I shook my head. “I give up.”

“Split, right down the middle by Citibank and the Exxon conglomerate. They also own Hartford and Century Casualty, by the way, through other channels. In fact, if you were to trace through the connections, you’d find that all the major insurance companies are owned by one or more of the multinationals. Corporations so big that together they control most of the world’s resources and wealth ... and a fair number of its governments, as well.”

I nodded. It wasn’t exactly a surprising revelation. “All right. And?”

He handed the chip card back. “Pull up the list of exclusions,” he instructed me.

Wondering where he was going with this, I complied. “Uh ... expenses not specifically provided for in the policy, pre-existing conditions, self-inflicted injury, confinement in a federal hospital, treatment covered under Worker’s Comp ...” I looked up at him, frowning. “And?”

He sighed; a patient, professorial sort of sigh. “Come, now—you’re certainly old enough to have had insurance policies ten years ago. So tell me: what’s missing?”

I stared at the list again ... and then it hit me. “Are you. saying ... ?”

He nodded. “Economic forces are the real king in this world of ours, Mr. Kelly,” he said. “For all their police forces and armies, governments really have very little of their old power left. But they had enough. Enough power to force the statutory elimination of one small phrase from all insurance policy contracts.”

I nodded. “The exclusion of payments,” I said quietly, “for injuries sustained due to war.”

It was unquestioningly the single most momentous interview of my entire career. Now, ten years later, the world almost entirely at peace, I still haven’t had the nerve to publish it.

The Terminal Beach

J. G. Ballard

At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, reminding him of the deep Atlantic rollers on the beach at Dakar, where he had been born, and of waiting in the evenings for his parents to drive home along the corniche road from the airport. Overcome by this long-forgotten memory, he woke uncertainly from the bed of old magazines on which he slept and ran toward the dunes that screened the lagoon.

Through the cold night air he could see the abandoned Superfortresses lying among the palms, beyond the perimeter of the emergency landing field three hundred yards away. Traven walked through the dark sand, already forgetting where the shore lay, although the atoll was only half a mile in width. Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of some cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.

Giving up the attempt to find the beach, Traven stumbled into a set of tracks left years earlier by a large caterpillar vehicle. The heat released by one of the weapons tests had fused the sand, and the double line of fossil imprints, uncovered by the evening air, wound its serpentine way among the hollows like the footfalls of an ancient saurian.