Long Voyage Back

Начало книги

This is not a ship’s log nor an official report. Although notes we have all taken over the last year have certainly helped, it’s also not our collective diaries and journals. What we’ve tried to do, for ourselves primarily, for some future readers if there are any, is to recreate what it was like for those we knew and for us, for this small family of people who are still survivors.

We make no effort to take a global view, nor have we any pretensions to being historians. We have no thesis. We are interested in people, in those who survived the initial holocaust, whom we met, knew, tried to save, in some cases failed to save; how all of us, the remnants, coped with the aftermath; how we were dragged down by it, so often failing.

Yet some of us survive. At this point that alone gives our story significance.

The room was crowded. Many of its occupants were scurrying from place to place in organized chaos. A gigantic video screen filled the north wall, showing a map of the earth with lighted and blinking symbols indicating the deployment of weapons, forces, counterforces. A second, smaller screen high on the east wall spewed forth printed messages with an inventory of warheads, explosive power, probable targets, and predicted casualties. Along the south wall were ten desk-size computers, each with a uniformed man watching it, just as ancient priests watched moiling entrails. Along the western wall was a long table at which thirteen men were sitting, all but one of them in uniform, listening to a man at the head of the table who was speaking to them in a sullen, lugubrious tone of the intentions of the enemy, .the probability of surviving various war scenarios.

Читать дальше →