The Day After Judgement Read Free

‘That was already on Rung twenty-one; Level Four – local nuclear war.
     But still only Chinese against Chinese’
    ‘But we were committed to them, right?’ Šatvje said. ‘President Agnew told the UN, “I am a Formosan.”’
    ‘It doesn’t matter worth a damn,’ Buelg said, with some irritation. It was his opinion, which he did not keep particularly
     private, that Šatvje, whatever his eminence as a physicist, in all other matters had a
goyische kopf.
He had encountered better heads on egg creams in his father’s candy store. ‘The thing‘s escalated almost exponentially in
     the past eighteen hours or so. The question is, how far has it gone? If we’re lucky, it’s only up to Level Six, central war
     – maybe no farther than Rung thirty-four, constrained disarming attack.’
    ‘Do you call atomizing Denver “restrained”?’ the General demanded.
    ‘Maybe. They could have done for Denver with one warhead, but instead they saturated it. That means they were shooting for
     us, not for the city proper. Our counterstrike couldn’t be preventive, so it was one rung lower, which I hope to God they
     noticed.’
    ‘They took Washington out,’ Šatvje said, clasping his fat hands piously. He had been lean once, but becoming first a consultant
     on the Cabinet level, next a spokesman for massive retaliation, and finally a publicity saint had appended a beer belly to
     his brain-puffed forehead, so that he now looked like a caricature of a nineteenth-century German philologist. Buelg himself
     was stocky and tended to run to lard, but a terriblesusceptibility to kidney stones had kept him on a reasonable diet.
    ‘The Washington strike almost surely wasn’t directed against civilians,’ Buelg said. ‘Naturally the leadership of the enemy
     is a prime military target. But, General, all this happened so quickly that I doubt that anybody in government had a chance
     to reach prepared shelters. You may now be effectively the president of whatever is left of the United States, which means
     that you could make new policies.’
    ‘True,’ McKnight said. ‘True, true.’
    ‘In which case we’ve got to know the facts the minute our lines to outside are restored. Among other things, if the escalation’s
     gone all the way to spasm, in which case the planet will be uninhabitable. There’ll be nobody and nothing left alive but people
     in hardened sites, like us, and the only policy we’ll need for that will be a count of the canned beans.’
    ‘I think that needlessly pessimistic,’ Šatvje said, at last heaving himself up out of the chair into which he had struggled
     after getting up off the floor. It was not a very comfortable chair, but the computer room – where they had all been when
     the strike had come – had not been designed for comfort. He put his thumbs under the lapels of his insignia-less adviser’s
     uniform and frowned down upon them. ‘The Earth is a large planet, of its class; if we cannot reoccupy it, our descendants
     will be able to do so.’
    ‘After five thousand years?’
    ‘You are assuming that carbon bombs were used. Dirty bombs of that kind are obsolescent. That is why I so strongly advocated
     the sulphur-decay chain; the selenium isotopes are chemically all strongly poisonous, but they have very short half lives.
     A selenium bomb is essentially a
humane
bomb.’
    Šatvje was physically unable to pace, but he was beginning to stump back and forth. He was again playing back one of his popular
     magazine articles. Buelg began to twiddle his thumbs, as ostentatiously as possible.
    ‘It has sometimes occurred to me,’ Šatvje said, ‘that our discovery of how to release the nuclear energies was providential.
     Consider: Natural selection stopped for Man when he achieved control over his environment, and furthermorebegan to save the lives of all his weaklings, and preserve their bad genes. Once natural selection has been halted, then the
     only remaining pressure upon the