The Day After Judgement Read Free Page A

race to evolve is mutation. Artificial radio-activity, and indeed even fallout itself, maybe
     God’s way of resuming the process of evolution for Man … perhaps towards some ultimate organism we cannot foresee, perhaps
     even towards some unitary mind which we will share with God, as Teilhardt de Chardin envisioned –’
    At this point, the General noticed the twiddling of Buelg’s thumbs.
    ‘Facts are what we need.’ he said. ‘I agree with you there, Buelg. But a good many of our lines to outside
were
cut, and there may have been some damage to the computer circuitry, too.’ He jerked his head towards the technicians who
     were scurrying around and up and down the face of R ANDOMAC. ‘I’ve got them working on it. Naturally.’
    ‘I see that, but we’ll need some sort of rational schedule of questions. Is the escalation still going on, presuming we haven’t
     reached the insensate stage already? If it’s over, or at least suspended somehow, is the enemy sane enough not to start it
     again? And then, what’s the extent of the exterior damage? For that, we’ll need a visual readout – I assume there are still
     some satellites up, but we’ll want a closer look, if any local television survived.
    ‘And if you’re now the president, General, are you prepared to negotiate, if you’ve got any opposite numbers in the Soviet
     Union or the People’s Republic?’
    ‘There ought to be whole sets of such courses of action already programmed into the computer,’ McKnight said, ‘according to
     what the actual situation is. Is the machine going to be useless to us for anything but gaming, now that we really need it?
     Or have you been misleading me again?’
    ‘Of course I haven’t been misleading you. I wouldn’t play games with my own life as stakes. And there are indeed such alternative
     courses; I wrote most of them myself, though I didn’t do the actual programming. But no programme can encompass what a specific
     leader might decide to do, War gaming actual past battles – for example, rerunning Waterloo without allowing for Napoleon’s
     piles, or the heroism of theBritish squares – has produced “predicted” outcomes completely at variance with history. Computers are rational; people aren’t.
     Look at Agnew. That’s why I asked you my question – which, by the way, you haven’t yet answered.’
    McKnight pulled himself up and put his glasses back on.
    ‘I’ he said, ‘am prepared to negotiate. With anybody. Even Chinks.’
    2
    Rome was no more, nor was Milan. Neither were London, Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Stockholm and a score
     of lesser cities. But these were of no immediate concern. As the satellites showed, their deaths had expectably laid out long,
     cigar-shaped, overlapping paths of fallout to the east - the direction in which, thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the
     weather inevitably moved – and though these unfortunately lay across once friendly terrain, they ended in enemy country. Similarly,
     the heavy toll in the USSR had sown its seed across Siberia and China; that in China across Japan, Korea and Taiwan; and the
     death of Tokyo was poisoning only a swath of the Pacific (although, later, some worry would have to be devoted to the fish).
     Honolulu somehow had been spared, so that no burden of direct heavy nuclear fallout would reach the West Coast of the United
     States.
    This was fortunate, for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle amd Spokane had all been hit, as had Denver, St Louis,
     Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit and Dallas. Under the circumstances, it really hardly mattered that
     Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and Washington had all also got it, for even without
     bombs the Eastern third of the continental United States would have been uninhabitable in its entirety for at least fifteen
     years to come. At the moment, in any event, it consisted of a single vast