Selected Stories Read Free Page B

left a face perfectly composed again, and there was no movement in it; it was sleeping and vital while the music curved off and away to the places where music rests when it is not heard.
    Starr smiled.
    “It’s so easy,” she said. “So simple. All that is fresh and clean and strong about mankind is in that song, and I think that’s all that need concern us about mankind.” She leaned forward. “Don’t you see?”
    The smile faded and was replaced with a gentle wonder. A tiny furrow appeared between brows; she drew back quickly. “I can’t seem to talk to you tonight,” she said, her voice small. “You hate something.”
    Hate was shaped like a monstrous mushroom. Hate was the random speckling of a video plate.
    “What has happened to us,” said Starr abruptly, impersonally, “is simple, too. It doesn’t matter who did it—do you understand that? It doesn’t matter. We were attacked. We were struck from the east and from the west. Most of the bombs were atomic—there were blast bombs and there were dust bombs. We were hit by about five hundred and thirty bombs altogether, and it has killed us.”
    She waited.
    Sonny’s fist smacked into his palm. Bonze lay with his eyes open, quiet. Pete’s jaw hurt.
    “We have more bombs than both of them put together. We have them. We are not going to use them. Wait! ” She raised her hands suddenly, as if she could see into each man’s face. They sank back, tense.
    “So saturated is the atmosphere with Carbon Fourteen that all of us in this hemisphere are going to die. Don’t be afraid to say it. Don’t be afraid to think it. It is a truth, and it must be faced. As the transmutation effect spreads from the ruins of our cities, the air will become increasingly radioactive, and then we must die. In months, in a year or so, the effects will be strong overseas. Most of the people there will die, too. None will escape completely. A worse thing will come to them than anything they gave us, because there will be a wave of horror and madness which is impossible to us. We are merely going to die. They will live and burn and sicken, and the children that will be born to them—” She shook her head, and her lower lip grew full. She visibly pulled herself together.
    “Five hundred and thirty bombs—I don’t think either of our attackers knew just how strong the other was. There has been so much secrecy.” Her voice was sad. She shrugged slightly. “They have killed us, and they have ruined themselves. As for us—we are not blameless, either. Neither are we helpless to do anything—yet. But what we must do is hard. We must die—without striking back.”
    She gazed briefly at each man in turn, from the screen. “We must not strike back. Mankind is about to go through a hell of his own making. We can be vengeful—or merciful, if you like—and let go with the hundreds of bombs we have. That would sterilize the planet so that not a microbe, not a blade of grass could escape, and nothing new could grow. We could reduce the earth to a bald thing, dead and deadly.
    “No, it just won’t do. We can’t do it.
    “Remember the song? That is humanity. That’s in all humans. A disease made other humans our enemies for a time, but as the generations march past, enemies become friends and friends enemies. The enmity of those who have killed us is such a tiny, temporary thing in the long sweep of history!”
    Her voice deepened. “Let us die with the knowledge that we have done the one noble thing left to us. The spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet. It will be blown and drenched, shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live if that song is a true one. It will live if we are human enough to discount the fact that the spark is in the custody of our temporary enemy. Some—a few—of his children will live to merge with the new humanity that will gradually emerge from the jungles and the wilderness. Perhaps there will be ten thousand years of