Alas, Babylon

by Pat Frank

the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one.

This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles.

Randy made himself a cannibal sandwich. Lib considered his habit of eating raw ground round, smeared with horseradish and mustard and pressed between slices of rye bread, barbarous.

Absolute filth

Says why worry about something you can’t see, feel, hear, or smell? Says it’s just as bad to frighten people to death as kill them with radiation, and I must say that I agree with him.”

Idiot

“You don’t prevent a war by starting one.”

Mark prayed that for the next two hours, at least, nothing more would happen. He held fast to the thought, so long as there was no war, there was always a chance for peace.

Children are precocious these days, aren’t they? They learn the facts of life before you have a chance to explain anything.”

Gazing at the glow to the south, Randy was witnessing, from a distance of almost two hundred miles, the incineration of a million people.

The sight of war’s roseate birthmark on the sky choked back their words.

The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushroom’s rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squall.

But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome’s. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else.

With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.

“Oh, the foul, life-destroying, child-destroying bastards! Those evil men, those evil and callous men! God damn them!”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Quisenberry,” she said, “but I can’t send this. Jacksonville doesn’t seem to be there any more.”

With perhaps half the country’s population dead, death itself, unless it took someone close and dear, was trivial.

“The strong survive. The frail die. The exotic fish die because the aquarium isn’t heated. The common guppy lives. So does the tough catfish. The house cat turns hunter and eats the pet bird. If he didn’t, he’d starve. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

The question of who won the war, or if the war still continued, who was winning, had replaced the weather as an inexhaustible subject for speculation.

The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he had learned this: they needed a man around.

Yeeeeesh