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Through all this, the Emergency Broadcast continued without interruption, relayed through the intercom. It was barely audible over the noise in the plane. It repeated the main points of its dreadful story, while giving advice about what types of shelters are useful at which distances from the blast.
"...There will be an immensely bright light for more than ten seconds," the voice said. "Be prepared! Don't look up! With the light comes a burst of intense radiation and heat, followed by a wave of high-pressure air gusts that can reach supersonic speeds. Past that, you will face fires. Keep water handy. You will become extremely thirsty and water will be hard to find. Also, it will become totally dark after the blast. You must remember not to expect outside help for several hours, or maybe days or weeks. You must be self-sufficient and do whatever you can to protect yourself! You have ten minutes.... God be with you...."
"Were you able to see Paul's plane?" Melanie asked a long time later.
Frank shook his head. "He might have come late and aborted his landing. He would go straight to Vancouver in this case. But where are we going?" Frank stood up. "Does anyone know where this flight is going?" he asked in a loud tone.
"Tokyo," a man replied in a dry soft voice.
"Tokyo?" Frank repeated. "My God, not Tokyo, not now!"
The man didn't comment. There was an icy silence between them in the chaotic tumult that Fiona alone ignored, playing quietly with her doll. By rights she should have screamed! Even a child must have sensed the dread and hopelessness everyone apparently felt.
Across the isle from them sat a young man with his wife and children who had brought him to the airport fifteen minutes before the broadcast began. He still was unable to control himself, biting the side of his cheek. He raved about what he would do to the Russians and their evil empire if he had the chance. He would....
It became too ugly. Finally, a husky man in a baggy suit stood up and slapped him in the face and told him in no uncertain manner to stay put and shut up, "or else...."
His wife clutched their little daughter, almost strangling her.
"That's all nonsense!" said another man, "you don't need to be afraid, nothing will happen to Seattle. Calm down everyone, relax, the Air Force will take care of it."
"Sure they will!" said another.
"They're magicians!" said a third man from behind Frank.
"I feel so helpless," said Frank to Melanie. "We all know it's coming, we know it's not too late yet, the people are still living in the city. You want to hope that there is some way that somehow something can be done to keep the people and the city intact. You want to jump up and do something. But you know that nothing, absolutely nothing can be done."
"I refuse to believe that!" protested a boy. "They could shoot an atomic bomb at the missiles. They could explode the warheads in space, or deflect them out of their path on re-entry. There are lots of ways...."
Someone in the crowd praised the boy for his "fine intelligent thinking."
"It would be possible," said Frank to Melanie. "Except we've got no hardware built for any of this. We've done the opposite, instead. We agreed multilaterally to give each other our cities as hostages to deter aggression. We call it Mutually Assured Destruction. No doubt, the Air Force will make some heroic effort. They may even launch a suicide mission of the nature the boy has suggested, like exploding a bomb in the re-entry path. But to get the timing right would require super human precision, a one in a million chance. They may very well take this chance, for the lack of anything else, which places us in great danger again."
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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