Under the Dome: A Novel (134 page)

She seemed surprised that he didn’t know. “She said what Kayla said. ‘Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress.’”

“She was talking about the brown sweater?”

She took his hand again. “No. About our lives. Our little lives.”

He thought it over. “If she gave it to you, let’s put it on.”

Julia pointed. “Look who’s coming!”

Horace had seen her. He put on speed and wove through the running men and, once he was past them, dropped low to the ground and hit fourth gear. A large grin wreathed his chops. His ears were laid back flat to his skull. His shadow raced along beside him on the soot-stained grass. Julia knelt and held out her arms.

“Come to mama, sweetheart!”
she shouted.

He leaped. She caught him and sprawled backward, laughing. Barbie helped her to her feet.

They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life.

Pity was not love, Barbie reflected … but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.

November 22, 2007–March 14, 2009

I first tried to write
Under the Dome
in 1976, and crept away from it with my tail between my legs after two weeks’ work that amounted to about seventy-five pages. That manuscript was long lost on the day in 2007 when I sat down to start again, but I remembered the opening section—“The Airplane and the Woodchuck”—well enough to recreate it almost exactly.

I was overwhelmed not by the large cast of characters—I like novels with generous populations—but by the technical problems the story presented, especially the ecological and meteorological consequences of the Dome. The fact that those very concerns made the book seem important to me made me feel like a coward—and lazy—but I was terrified of screwing it up. So I went on to something else, but the idea of the Dome never left my mind.

In the years since, my good friend Russ Dorr, a physician’s assistant from Bridgeton, Maine, has helped me with the medical details in many books, most notably
The Stand.
In the late summer of 2007, I asked him if he would be willing to take on a much larger role, as head researcher on a long novel called
Under the Dome.
He agreed, and thanks to Russ, I think most of the technical details here are right. It was Russ who researched computer-guided missiles, jet
stream patterns, methamphetamine recipes, portable generators, radiation, possible advances in cell phone technology, and a hundred other things. It was also Russ who invented Rusty Everett’s homemade radiation suit and who realized people could breathe from tires, at least for a while. Have we made mistakes? Sure. But most will turn out to be mine, either because I misunderstood or misinterpreted some of his answers.

My first two readers were my wife, Tabitha, and Leanora Legrand, my daughter-in-law. Both were tough, humane, and helpful.

Nan Graham edited the book down from the original dinosaur to a beast of slightly more manageable size; every page of the manuscript was marked with her changes. I owe her a great debt of thanks for all the mornings when she got up at six AM and took her pencil in her hand. I tried to write a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal. Nan understood that, and whenever I weakened, she jammed her foot down on top of mine and yelled (in the margins, as editors are wont to do), “Faster, Steve! Faster!”

Surendra Patel, to whom the book is dedicated, was a friend and an unfailing source of comfort for thirty years. In June of 2008, I got the news that he had died of a heart attack. I sat on the steps of my office and cried. When that part was over, I went back to work. It was what he would have expected.

And
you,
Constant Reader. Thanks for reading this story. If you had as much fun as I did, we’re both well off.

S. K.