I was wrong.

In a terrible example of synchronicity in action, I found out a couple of days later that 16 people I had worked with for three years at the publishing company Risk Waters had died - along with around 70 delegates at a conference they were running.

One victim - about my age, I knew very well. Simon. Years ago, on the eve of his marriage, Simon had been kind enough to invite me to his stag do at Risk.

His pre-publishing career had been in the Royal Artillery (and he was still active in the British equivalent of the National Guard, the Territorials). As an ex non-com, Simon was eligible to use the facilities at the Honourable Artillery Club at the heart of the City of London.

So it was there myself and a handful of Risk employees were once treated to a glimpse of a Phillias Fogg world straight out of the page of Verne novel - acres of wooden corridors hung with muskets, Gormanghast-sized halls replete with Napoleonic mortars, musty leather chairs and stewards in Victorian military reds.

Needless to say, we all got very, very drunk - and these are the memories I'd like to remember of Simon, today. A short, vivacious man with a sense of humor honed by army pranks and a sense of the absurd that you can only develop in a job where dying in action is one of the career options.

How ironic - how wicked and cruel - that an ex-soldier should met his end in a publishing company conference. In another spiteful twist of fate, Simon leaves behind a pregnant wife and an unborn child who will never meet their father; a situation I cannot even imagine now that I have my own daughter.

The convention Simon was running was called 'Windows on the World', at the very top of the tower initially struck.

The thought that Simon might have been one of those gray wraiths pressed against the windows of the tower is almost more than I can bear.

So next time you cap a beer or pop open a bottle of wine, raise a glass to Simon, and remember a happy day when we supped port from a decanter that a British redcoat had once liberated from the table of Napoleon Bonaparte.

And if you want to make a more concrete gesture, you can visit the Unicef site and make an online donation to help Afghanistan's starving children. Tell them Simon sent you. I think he would have liked that.

Last month the science fiction movie flickering against the screen of life seemed to be Independence Day or True Lies - this month we've sadly moved onto the Satan Bug and the Andromeda Strain.

The quick shuddering of buildings & symbols into dust has been replaced by the slow, creeping dread of bio-warfare. I live in Britain - mercifully (so far) spared a direct taste of what our US friends and readers are now going through.

But it's not often these days I travel on the London subway without wondering if I'll hear the hiss of sarin or anthrax, or if being so far under the surface would save my life in the event of one of those seven missing Russian 1K suitcase nukes being detonated near the Bank of England.

So we're learning to live with a new, peculiar kind of fear; but you and I should give a hearty thanks to whatever deity you worship that while you read this, we've still both been blessed with life enough to drink, eat, love, sleep, work and yes, even feel a measure of apprehension.

These are those who cannot, and although I'm not a religious man, I'll be saying a prayer tonight that the ranks of the victims - on both sides - aren't swelled by more casualties of our strange, bleak, 21st century science fiction war.

(c) Stephen Hunt 2001