Relentless

dinner,” Grimbald said, “you’ll tell us more about the house blowing up, what you know of the method, how it looked as it fell, the debris pattern.”
    “They came for guns,” Clo told him.
    “Did you see that in the basil leaf?” I asked.
    Pointing to the stone floor, Penny said, “I think she’ll tell you that she read the pattern of the water drops that fell from Milo’s raincoat.”
    “Exactly right, dear,” said Clotilda, pointing a wooden spatula ather for emphasis.
“So
—you finally admit I have at least a little of the soothsayer’s gift.”
    “What you have, Mom, is a gift for drama, for being enigmatical, and for caring.”
    “My daughter the skeptic. But I love you, too, dear.”
    At last putting down Milo, dropping to one knee, and helping the boy out of his raincoat, Grim said, “Guns? But I thought, Cub, you were against guns.”
    “I’m not against them for other people, Grim. But for me … I’ve just always had an aversion to them.”
    “And now?”
    “I’m getting over it.”

   From the main room of the stronghold, on your way to the armory, you pass through Penny’s old bedroom. For fifteen years, since she moved out, her folks have left it exactly as it was throughout her childhood and most of her teen years, when she spent the monthly lockdowns underground with them.
    Partly for sentimental reasons, they have not expanded the armory into her old quarters. They also hope that Penny and I will recognize the signs of impending Armageddon and will join them in this citadel of survivalism before a politician or a mad mullah, or a crazed dictator, or a group of angry utopians, or just the grinding work of the federal bureaucracy destroys civilization.
    I don’t rule out the possibility of one day taking shelter with them. Before I move in, however, I will
insist
that they remove from Penny’s room the poster of Jon Bon Jovi naked to the waist, as I do not want to remind her that she has settled for much less than her teenage dreams.
    The armory is next to the last major room in their subterranean complex. It contains a breathtaking array of weapons, as well as a supply of ammunition that would have lasted the defenders of the Alamo at least five years.
    Of course, back when Penny was Brunhild, she was raised with guns. Although she had thus far 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