The Blue Man's day-to-day routine was simple:
He rolled out of bed when he wanted to, had a leisurely breakfast of tea and stale donuts, then moseyed across the cylinder to his pit latrine, where he did his business while reading a paperback copy of Boswell's London Journal. After that he washed up, polished off a chapter of Cellini's autobiography, added several more pages of closely written script to his own extensive notes, and had a light lunch. Then, if he felt like it, he might leave the cylinder to make his rounds of the garage and the wider city. These could consist of something as simple as raiding the Mr. Donut Dumpster in the alley or fetching water from the sink in the employee restroom. Or they might require more stealth, such as making a run across the pedestrian overpass to the Biltmore Hotel. You never knew who might be watching.
The habits born of years of vagrancy served him well. Truly, not much had changed: He had been a fugitive before, and he was still a fugitive.
In bygone days, the man known only as Old Joe Blue had been a familiar figure downtown, and particularly well-known in transient circles, where he was even more an object of curiosity than he was in the world of "squares"-homeless society being necessarily insular and mutually reliant. But Joe wandered in and out of their company with the same ghostlike detachment as he did everywhere else, partaking of charity handouts, freebies, and day jobs, then vanishing back into the ether.
Where did he live? Who was he, and who had he been? Since Old Joe didn't panhandle or sleep on the street, the system generally left him alone, but what was wrong with him? Argyria-an overload of colloidal silver-was the official explanation, but how, when, and why? The man himself was not clear about specifics. One rumor was that he was a former silversmith from one of the old factories in the Jewelry District, and had developed metal toxicity from years of breathing the vapors. When the factory closed its doors (as so many had, in the age of Kmart, Wal-Mart, and cheap imports) he was thrown out like an old pair of shoes-blue suede shoes, they joked. This story was certainly more plausible than Joe's own explanations, which were rambling diatribes about doomsday and salvation-the man was a notorious crackpot. But few dared to contradict him, and anyone who did challenge that eerie shambling figure had an odd way of never being heard from again. So people left him alone, and the more superstitious ones crossed themselves in his wake.
"Wormwood," Joe might mutter, standing in a soup line. "Read your Book of Revelation. Most comets are like dirty snowballs, just ice and dust. But not that one, no, that comet there is a Trojan horse. Don't you get it? It shouldn't have come anywhere near us, it's on a whole different trajectory, but it changed, it zigged. Do you understand what that means?" When people started edging away, he would shake his head, mumbling, "Dodos-dodo birds."
Old Joe's lifestyle was flexible enough to accommodate not only the end of human civilization, but a guest to share it with. Noah didn't build the ark just for himself, Joe reasoned. So in his fits of hoarding he stored away enough provisions for at least two people to weather an extended siege-which was exactly what he had been preparing for all these years. The boy didn't eat much. With minor replenishment, Joe figured they were good for at least four months. Plenty of time for the last vestiges of the old world to be scoured away.
For it was only then that his life's work could truly begin.
"Here, look at this, look here," Joe said, showing Bobby his trove of old magazines. Pulling out a moldy issue of National Geographic, he said, "Take a look at this cover story about Saturn-the Cassini mission: 'On July 14, 2005, the spacecraft descended to a hundred miles above Enceladus's south polar region. Data indicated that plumes of material were erupting near the south pole. Then, four months later, Cassini made images that showed geyser like eruptions of water vapor and ice particles shooting far out into space.' Unquote."
When Bobby didn't react, he grew impatient. "Do you see what I'm saying? Enceladus! Here we thought it was only Jupiter's moon Europa that had liquid water and the potential for life, but now we learn that Saturn has its own salad bowl-the moon Enceladus. Picture it: an aquatic race living in perpetual darkness, in a hydrothermal ocean under miles of ice. It's a womb down there, a whole damn amniotic planet. They live and grow in that fishbowl for millions of years, competing against one another, developing tools and higher intelligence, until one day one of them starts to wonder what's above that frozen ceiling? Does it go on forever, to infinity? And maybe they kill that guy for heresy, and the next guy and the next guy, but eventually space starts running short-see, it's a very small moon, just three hundred miles wide-and they start thinking seriously about the possibility of other oceans in the ice, other worlds to conquer. Meanwhile, their science develops to the point where they can start drilling boreholes long enough to reach the surface. Eureka."
The old man sat back, nodding. "Do you see now? They send a ship. Not a ship of metal but a ship of ice. Ice! Forging it, smelting it like metal, building it up layer by layer like a beehive. An artificial comet. Maybe their whole race inside, a billion of 'em, who knows? We saw it being launched, we tracked it… and then we forgot about it. But not everybody forgot, oh no. Some have been keeping an eye on that thing. We saw when it used Jupiter as a sling-shot to accelerate, and when it altered its course. That's when we lost it, but the projections don't lie. Oh yes, it was always aiming for more temperate regions, and one hot spot in particular, the Florida of the solar system, with an ocean that could practically swallow up their whole planet.
"How do you fight something like that?" Joe said. "Even if it is only a regular comet, how do you survive against it-even if nothing else on the surface of the Earth will?"
The man was crazy, but he was all Bobby had. "I don't know," the boy said, uncomprehending.
"You make lemonade."
That night, as Bobby dreamed of running and running, his host sat upright a few feet away, comfortably ensconced in the reclining seat from a Lincoln Town Car. The old man was completely still, unblinking, stolidly inert as a wooden Indian.
Imperceptibly at first, something began to happen.
It was as if Joe was having a seizure of some kind, his back arching and his mouth opening so wide it stretched his jaw past its limits, so that the joints could be heard popping from their sockets.
Now a thing like a weird flowering plant began erupting from his upturned throat, a branching, ribbed stalk, followed by a glossy pink orchid uncurling its petals-no, two orchids: a matched pair of unspeakable bromeliads that were the old man's inverted lungs. They swayed in midair at the ends of their bronchial tubes like twin cobras from a snake charmer's basket, seeming to have a life and mind of their own, billowing up with every appearance of unutterable bliss. Not just lungs, but the whole glistening contents of the man's body cavity were flowering up and spreading forth like a blooming bouquet. His carcass turned inside out, bones and musculature rolling back like a thick foreskin. Bobby didn't awaken even as the grisly mass arched over him, its nodules and clusters and veiny membranes trembling with excitement.
Grotesquely slow as it would have seemed to the perception of an appalled onlooker, the ghastly efflorescence was over in a matter of seconds. Before Bobby could awaken or react, the thing was upon him, enfolding his face in its violent moistness, prying him open with velvet pliers, gently gulping the boy's life breath in one heaving spasm, a miraculous convulsion that transformed the boy and restored the old man to his seat. An instant later, there was no sign that anything unusual had occurred.