Ian Watson - Returning Home

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RETURNING HOME

By Ian Watson

Thank God, the runway was clear. An Aeroflot crew had apparently touched down just moments before

a radiation bomb went off overhead. But the pilot's nervous system lasted long enough for him to

steer his plane off the concrete onto grass-unless he had merely swerved.

Anyway, our landing was a pushover. As well it needed to be, with upwards of thirty million

displaced Americans pushing behind us. There were two hundred of us packed into our plane-with a

second Ilyushin to follow some hours later.

Most wonderful of all, there was no reception committee of Chinese waiting for us. So those

Canadian bastards hadn't been lying after all. The Chinese hadn't flooded over the frontier to

fill up this spur of the Soviet Union. And yet somehow we hadn't believed that the Chinese would.

It was as if the spirit that impelled us toward the East had promised us this

land and had preserved it for us.

Leaving Group Red at the airport, the rest of us rounded up some brand-new buses, got them going,

and drove in convoy into downtown Khabarovskending up outside the Far East Hotel on Karl Marx

Street, which seemed as good a place as any other to billet ourselves for the time being.

There weren't too many shriveled mummies in the streets. The streets themselves were reasonably

clean and neat. The human animal seemed to prefer to die in its burrow, if it could get there in

time.

I'd just told Hank Sullivan to take a fatigue squad round the hotel to clear all the bodies they

found into a single room and was getting the others organized, when Mary cried out, "Greg, come

over here."

She was waving the handset of an old-fashioned looking telephone, farther down the lobby.

I hadn't been meaning to bring Mary in on the first flight. Strictly the two hundred of us were a

technical spearhead, and Mary wasn't a sailor or mechanic or locomotive driver. But she was a fine

survivor, and if dishing up fish and chipmunk stew or nettle-and mushroom soup without a single

pot or stove isn't a technical accomplishment, then I don't know what is.

So when she'd insisted, we'd compromised by leaving little Suzie in good hands up in Magadan for

later delivery, and Mary came along as our provisions officer. She was still looking fairly gaunt-

as were we all-and her blond hair had all grown out a mousy brown. But I loved her even more

dearly after all that we'd been through.

"What is it?"

"The phone works, Greg."

I ran to her, while everyone turned to watch us, and it was then-when I got my hands on that phone

and heard it humming-that it really all came home to me: We had won through.

Because the goddamn lovely old phone was receiving power. No doubt from some hydroelectric scheme

that was still churning out electricity automatically.

"Hey, Billy Donaldson," I called across the lobby, "get your ass behind that check-in desk and

find another phone along there. Call out your number."

Hitching up his Soviet Army greatcoat, redheaded Billy stepped over the assorted wizened corpses

in their crumpled, dusty suits and dresses, careful not to soil the garments with his boots.

As the first pioneer group to cross the Bering Strait, we'd all got rid of our bark-and-straw

boots and our stinking dog- and cowhide coats as soon as we reached the first Soviet outpost. The

other scraggy survivors still converging on the tip of Alaska, this summer after the War, would

have to wait just a little longer for proper clothes.

The phone box had a slot for two-kopeck pieces, but I guessed that you didn't need money for a

call inside the hotel-almost as if the phone was telling me how to use it.

Billy bawled out a number, and I dialed.

"Hullo? Can you hear me, Billy?" I said.

"Sure thing."

And I saluted the phone. This was a real fantasy moment. I could almost believe that I was phoning

home to the States. Only, of course, there were no phones left over there. Or cities, for that

matter. But still!

"General Greg Berry reporting. We've reached Khabarovsk. We're on the route of the Trans-Siberian

Railway! Group Red will set up an air shuttle service to Magadan tomorrow. Group White will take a

train down to Vladivostok, and if there aren't any Chicoms there, either-and, so help me, I know

so deep down in me there won't be any, it's as though God has told me Himself-then Group White'll

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sail the biggest warship they can handle out of the navy yards up to the Bering Sea. And Group

Blue will get the locos rolling across the Siberian railroad. We're in business!"

We horsed around on the phone for a while like a couple of kids. But of course every word of it

was true. As Mary watched, the first grin in ages appeared on her face.

It was a damned shame about last year's war, but at least now we knew that we'd won it-and

forever.

As the culmination of the U.S. government's search for nondestructive nuclear weapons, which

wouldn't wipe out the treasures of the world, we'd just deployed the Super-Radiation Bomb-which

was as much an advance upon the neutron bomb of the Eighties as the neutron bomb was upon the

unwieldy hydrogen bomb.

The SRB produced hardly any blast or heat damage; if air-burst correctly, none at all. But its

short-term radiation yield was incredible-and without any residual radioactivity. One single SRB

detonated over Moscow would kill every living thing in the city and its environs-apart from

cockroaches and such-and

it would leave all the factories and apartment blocks, all the offices and shops, all the museums

and churches, in perfect condition.

The Soviets, of course, denounced this at once as the "Super-Capitalist Bomb," because it

respected property but not persons. And they in turn unveiled their own secretly developed super

weapon, which they called the "Socialist Bomb." We called it the "SOB."

The Devil himself must have had a hand in the design of this Socialist Bomb. Its effects were far

more cruel.

How exactly it did it, I don't know for sure, and we never had time fully to suss out the theory,

but basically it generated a sub-atomic vibration field, perhaps at the quark level, that affected

any inanimate matter that had in any way been manufactured, worked, or tailored by man, leaving a

particular "signature" written in it. The SOB had no effect at all on living tissue, or landscape,

or minerals in the ground, or even foodstuffs-though it put paid to the containers. But it burst

the continuum, for any "made" or "shaped" article within its field. It rapidly transformed the

particles in any target object into "virtual" particles so that they slipped out of existence,

perhaps reemerging somewhere else in our universe, or in some parallel universe. Within minutes a

thing grew soft, then foggy, then vanished away.

In other words, drop an SOB on New York City and very soon you would have no New York City at all,

only an empty space with millions of people wandering around stark-naked. Yes, we would be

naked to our enemies, forced to accept occupation and emergency aid.

Those of us, that is, who didn't get killed when things grew foggy. The Soviets had said that we

would have about four minutes to get clear, but how could that help the crew and passengers on an

airliner? They would rain down from the stratosphere. Or the office staff on the fiftieth floor of

a skyscraper? They would find themselves with no floors beneath their bare feet. Or sailors,

pitched into the ocean as their ship dissolved? Or the engineer of a speeding train?

These could amount to millions.

And there the cruelty was only just beginning. How many more would die in the following weeks of

cold or hunger-as food rotted away-or from lack of medical attention, or from a hundred other

things?

And they had the gall to call it a "humane" bomb! Even though it would destroy all civilization we

knew, all the paintings in the great collections, all the highways and gas stations, all the space

launch vehicles. Every laboratory, every hospital, every surfboard, oil refinery, and shopping

mall, every can of Budweiser and every TV set. The Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge,

Disneyland, the lot.

Who started the War? The Soviets, without a doubt. They must have thought they could sneak up on

us.

In less than an hour the U.S.A. and the USSR exchanged their entire arsenals of Radiation Bombs

and SOBS.

And the Soviets were all dead.

But we were left naked, without a single possession, except what we could make with our hands

subsequently from the countryside.

And nobody came to help us. God, how they must have hated us, for years! The rest of the world

shunned us. They treated us as a nation of murderers, when so many of us were dying, too. No

foreign ships arrived on our bare shores. No airplanes landed on our fields. The Mexicans spurned

us, I hear. The Canadians fenced off their border and built a wide electrified corridor running

all the way up through British Columbia into Alaska, like a double Berlin Wall. They told us to

get lost.

But God has got to have been on our side. Something, some divine force, clearly put it into all of

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