The Aftermath

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When the comet struck, I was on a cruise with my father. It may sound ludicrous, irresponsible even, to be off on a cruise when the world blows up, but how else can I put it? That’s the way it was, just a year ago tomorrow, a date for the history books yet to be written—if we ever print books again—December 25, 2009.

Can you imagine the world being destroyed on Christmas? In olden days, when children hung stockings by the fireside expecting presents from St. Nicholas, some parents would fill the stockings of naughty kids with coal to teach them a lesson. Maybe that’s what has happened to the human race. Some lesson!

But then why, you might ask, wasn’t I incinerated, pulverized, or drowned with the rest of the human race? I guess everyone who survived has been wondering the same thing. How many of us are there? About twenty-five hundred from the cruise ship—fifteen hundred passengers and roughly one thousand crew—plus approximately twenty-five thousand people who were already residents of (he place in which we find ourselves. That is not very many out of a world population that had recently passed seven billion.

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