By the Seawall

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It was Michas-IV’s bad luck to be on duty by the seawall the day the first of the suicides occurred. He was not really to blame for what happened, but he was reprimanded none the less. How could he have known? How could he begin to comprehend human motives?

His post along the seawall was exactly a thousand meters long. It was Zone KF-6 on the master chart, shown as a neat, elongated blue block. Since the total length of the seawall was six thousand kilometers, Micah-IV knew that he was responsible for precisely one six-thousandth of the entire length of the seawall. It was a somber burden, for did not the safety of humanity depend on the wall? Yes. But Micah-IV was watchful. He patrolled his kilometer twelve hours a day, ever vigilant. He did his best; but he was not omniscient.

The seawall stood sixty meters high throughout most of its length and was twenty meters thick at its base, tapering to a width of six meters at the top. It was constructed of blocks of gray-green stone, dressed and trued to the last millimeter and laid one atop another without need of mortar. The stone came from the Wyoming nuclear kilns, beetle-trucked across the continent to its place at the shore. Building the wall had taken the better part of two generations, even with mechanical help. It had been the great communal effort of mankind. Its vastness made a mockery of all earlier accomplishments of its sort. The Great Pyramid was a heap of pebbles beside it, and China’s Great Wall, a rivulet of sand.

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