Humanity played with fire once too often. It was atomic fire and its ravages produced an almost complete annihilation, but there were survivors. The radiations had not been entirely malevolent in their influence. Genes and chromosomes danced like dervishes in the gamma bombardments, and settled back into fantastic new patterns. God-like beings strode proudly athwart the devastation. Half-human demons lurked in the shadowy ruins. The twilight of humanity faded into a new heroic epoch, behind which the forbidden secrets of the ancient atom gods bided their time...
Release date:
December 22, 2014
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
IT was as though Nature herself sensed that something was wrong. Strange, brooding heat of the late summer day was oppressive rather than pleasantly warm. It was the kind of heat that makes the flies gather round an abattoir. The air was filled with the noise of men and the noise of machines.
A train ran by along its lines, rattling and jolting over the rails. A bus wound its way up a hill, and the driver cursed because his handbrake was not of the best, and there was a level crossing at the top of the hill, and the gates were shut to the bus, to allow the train to pass through.
The driver of the train was three and a half minutes behind schedule, he was pushing his locomotive as hard as he could along that particular stretch of line.
Two guards, one off duty, the other travelling in an official capacity, were sitting in the van, playing a rather macabre game of nap on a coffin. As one of the guards said, it was a singularly useful kind of table, and in all probability the gentleman inside wouldn’t mind, even if he had been aware of what was going on. There were various people in the train, just ordinary people, and in their ordinariness they were too numerous to mention. It didn’t mean that they were unimportant, they were vitally important. Guards, drivers, porters, signalmen, passengers, men, women, children; all of them, vitally important, all of them living human beings, and none of them knowing that the End was very very close. The passengers in the bus; they were ordinary human beings, too, and they were just as important as the passengers in the train.
Bus and train passed very close to one another. A little boy in the train waved to a little boy in the bus, who promptly waved back, with the friendly cheerfulness and the innocence of childhood. An old man on a bicycle made his way slowly up the hill, decided that the incline was too much for his ageing legs, and wobbled rather precariously as he dismounted. The train passed and the old man moved his bicycle through the lych gate. The crossing keeper beckoned to him to come forward. The old man advanced, smiled gaily to the crossing keeper, passed through the second lych gate, remounted his machine on the other side and began descending the hill. The crossing keeper put his hand on the bolt that operated the gate. He was not destined ever to get the gate fully opened. The End was now very, very close.
The Cold War had reached a point where technology and balanced power had decreed between them that hovering over capitals and other important areas of the Great Powers there should be satellites. These satellites were filled with deadly explosives, nuclear explosives. This nuclear explosive was permanently ready, permanently fused, permanently capable of instant detonation. The balance was also such that should any one satellite move from its destined spot, then hell, in the form of atomic satellites, would come down with fury and with violence, and with only one possible result … and with only one possible consequence. Something had been overlooked, something so simple that it had really been overlooked because of its very simplicity. That something was a meteorite.
Very clever men had carefully calculated the odds against a meteorite landing anywhere near a satellite. ‘Landing’ was perhaps not the best term to use, striking a satellite; coming near enough to affect one of the satellites. Meteorites were few and far between and so were the satellites, considering the enormity of space. But the impossible had happened. There were a series of rather unhappy coincidences. Each of them would no doubt have been described as ‘regrettable’ in the language of officialdom. Between them they added up to the beginning of the End.
Automatic devices “saw” that the satellites of other powers were going down, and what was known in the text books of the politicians and the generals as “massive retaliation” also went down.
The first satellite was hit by accident, the others followed it automatically, like a flock of poisonous sheep following a leprous bellwether. There wasn’t even the old Music Hall joke about the four-minute warning. There was no four-minute warning. One or two people knew about thirty seconds before it happened, for it happened with incredible suddenness.
The state of balance in the Cold War had been so perfectly balanced since the satellite system, and the mutual threat had been established so well, that nobody had really been expecting it to materialise. The satellites had been regarded as the final peace-preserving deadlock. Now the final deadly rain was falling. Humanity sat in buses and trains; humanity worked in fields, and offices, and shops; humanity sat in cinemas and theatres, and around television screens, and humanity did not know that this was the End.
NOW the lucky ones were in what is known as the flash area. They died of incandescence, for want of a better word; they died by being volatilised, by being energised; by being turned from flesh and blood into part of an enormous incandescent something that swallowed everything in its path. It was so fast they knew absolutely nothing about it.
The areas nearby, close to the flash area, were known as the areas of total destruction, and here, too, the people were the lucky ones. They were killed outright, with speed and with certainty, that had about it a rather horrible mathematical precision. A mile or two further out from the point of impact was an anulus of very heavy destruction, and here there were practically no survivors, and those who were did not retain the title for very long. Some of them lay amid smoking, smouldering ruins, radio active ruins, for a few minutes. A few of the less fortunate ones actually regained consciousness and were aware of the agony of their own mangled bodies. But a mangled body was only part of the statistician’s units, it is not even a very significant part when the statistician is working in terms of mega-deaths.
As the waves of destructive horror moved further from the incandescent heart of the destructive atomic satellite, so the damage to man and property became less and less severe.
It was here in these fringe areas that the luck ran out; it was here that the real danger, the real suffering, began.
Some of these radioactive zombies staggered about for several days, in a nightmare world that almost beggared description. It was a world in which food and water were almost hopelessly contaminated, if they were available at all. It was a world that had become completely and utterly disorganised. It was a world in which there was no hope of tomorrow, and only a few blistered remains of yesterday.
Survivors began to die off like flies, mainly of radiation sickness, as the thick, poisonous clouds of death-dust moved over the surface of the earth.
There was a terrible feeling of hopelessness, they felt as men feel in the condemned cell. They felt nothing could save them, and ninety-nine per cent of them were absolutely right. Nothing could save them, nothing did save them. They were paying a slow agonising price for the Cold War that had suddenly gone mad … they were paying the price of statesmen’s folly, and man’s inhumanity to man.
The statesmen had also paid the price. They had been unable to go into the deep bunkers prepared for the favoured few. The End had come too suddenly. Politicians and people together had either been volatilised or blasted. Some had been bombarded with fatal doses of radiation. The Man in the Street, John Citizen, bad become a walking zombie. It was no consolation at all that his leaders had become zombies as well; he need not be jealous of the privileges of authority, or rank, or position, because in a conflict of this kind there were no privileges. The radio activity, like George Orwell’s Secret Police, in “1984”, was certainly everywhere.
As if radiation sickness wasn’t enough, bacteria and micro-organisms in general were having a field day! Death in the form of virus infection was no respecter of persons, and it was also a great leveller of the social scale. The virus was as ubiquitous as the deadly radiation. The virus, the microbe, and the gamma ray, between them, dealt such devastating blows to the tottering remnants of humanity that those optimists who had talked in terms of reorganization after atomic attack, saw, if they were still alive to see, just what arid foolishness their words had been.
The countryside was a poisonous yellow. The waters were polluted with dead animals and fish. The sky reflected strange colours like the funeral pall of a planet.
Animal life and vegetable life had been so scarred, damaged by the devastation of the explosions a. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
