Radisson finds the topic of religion painful because his Christian mother died when he was 12, though he had prayed and begged God to spare her life. This may be what led him to study philosophy so in-depth that he ultimately became a philosophy professor, but his desire to now avoid the topic of religion does not mesh well with his career as a philosophy professor. His anger at God has him requesting his students quote Friedrich Nietzsche and, in exchange, he promises to allow them to skip the...

An impromptu goodbye party for Professor John Oldman becomes a mysterious interrogation after the retiring scholar reveals to his colleagues he has a longer and stranger past than they can imagine.

It was great to be alive, once, but the world was perishing. Factories were shutting down, transportation was grinding to a halt, granaries were empty--and key people who had once kept it running were disappearing all over the country. As the lights winked out and the cities went cold, nothing was left to anyone but misery. No one knew how to stop it, no one understood why it was happening - except one woman, the operating executive of a once mighty transcontinental railroad, who suspects the...