Presently the voice came through the tube again. “The mechanism’s jammed or something. Try it from your side. We’ll work together. Turn clockwise. Repeat: clockwise.”
Hunter gripped the mechanism and grunted with exertion. It began to give, slowly, creakingly, then something gave way altogether, and he nearly fell to the floor with the sudden release, The door cracked open by inches, something or somebody battering against it from the other side in rhythmic assault. Then it opened completely, and two men lurched forward into the vault. They wore transparent suits, within which were nude bodies—nude, that is, but for tiny triangular scraps of cloth. A “ginch” had never looked so good to Richard Hunter.
Now another figure stepped into the vault, stately and graceful even in the protective clothing, and beautiful in the expose afforded by its transparency. “Mannclift!” Hunter cried, his voice muffled by the protective fibers of his helmet auditor.
She fell to the floor beside him, and they embraced awkwardly, then struggled to their feet and followed the two men out of the vault and up to the surface.
It was obvious to Hunter that there had been considerable digging. Steel beams had melted and twisted, some of them fused together by the incredible heat. The scene above ground was one of utter desolation—charred blobs of still-smoking rubble, an overhanging pall of wispy clouds obliterating the sky from what would have been rooftop level—but of course there were no rooftops in sight. There was nothing recognizable in sight.
It was a scene to test any new Olympian; Hunter found the subjective experience almost too overwhelming for Olympian objectivity. The small party made its way to a helicopter which was parked on a cushion of foam and covered by a jelly-like dome of the same foam.
“The Russians had very dirty bombs,” Mannclift’s muffled voice advised him. “The radiation level’s frightful.”
Hunter nodded. He helped her into the chopper and followed her inside, the two men close behind him. The door was quickly sealed. “Leave your suits on,” one of the men warned. “We’ll decontaminate after we’re airborne.”
A few minutes later what had been Washington was far below and behind, and the rescuers and the rescued were getting out of their protective clothing in a completely protected man-made atmosphere.
Mannclift moved immediately into Hunter’s lap, pressing her body to his in fierce embrace. Hunter gently disentangled himself and asked tautly, “How bad is it? The damage, I mean.”
“You saw Washington,” Mannclift replied. “Baltimore’s the same, New York is almost as bad. The entire Eastern Seaboard, from the Carolinas up to about Bar Harbor... It’s gone; all gone. Not too much damage inland, except in Arizona. They must have been aiming for the Titan sites there. Got them, too, I guess; and everything else in a hundred-mile radius.”
“That’s all?” Hunter asked unbelievingly. “Just the East Coast?”
“Well, no. California, too. Some submarine surfaced a few hundred miles out, nearly twenty-four hours after the first attack, and just about wiped out the West Coast from Ensenada to Coos Bay. There are radiation clouds adrift, but the East Coast fallout is drifting out across the Atlantic, and the western radiation’s funneling down into the Gulf of Mexico and toward the Caribbean.”
“How about the rest of the world?”
Mannclift shook her head. “Don’t know. There seems to be a communications blackout. Our engineers think it may be the result of a cosmic storm or something. The seismographs show unmistakable evidence of some secondary disturbances beneath the earth’s crust. It seems likely that Japan has slipped into the sea.”
The muscles in Hunter’s jaw were working spasmodically. “What’s the outlook for the American continent?”
“Pretty good. Canada caught it pretty bad-runaway Russian missiles, I guess. They were probably aiming for our Northern ICBM fan. The Russian missiles were terrible flops, I think. Our trackers say they didn’t even get half of them off the ground, and the ones they did, most of them, were just running wild.”
Hunter nodded grimly. “We caught them with their pants down; that’s why.”
“The Crags Observatory says the planet has slowed and speeded up several times in the past twenty-four hours. Almost imperceptibly, but it does seem to be staggering a bit.”
“No wonder,” Hunter murmured. “Anything to be alarmed about?”
Mannclift shook her head again. “Not so far. It does this now and then anyway; something to do with the ebb and flow of the polarities, I believe.”
“How long will it take this chopper to get to the crags?" Hunter wanted to know.
“Well leave the chopper at Akron, if it’s still safe there,” she replied. “And we should be home within a few hours.”
“We do still have a home, then.”
Mannclift nodded, smiling wistfully. “There’ll always be a home for the Olympians,” she told him.
“Home is where consciousness is,” Hunter stated feebly.
Mannclift regarded him with obvious surprise, her lips curling into a delighted smile. “Yes,” she agreed. “And there will always be a home for the Olympians.”
EPILOGUE
The written history of the Pre-Cataclysmic Period has little to say about the direct cause of or responsibility for the Earth Nuclear War. Most scholars of the brief post-war era were generally agreed that it was a long-delayed culmination of the earlier Second World War (circa 1940 A.D.), and was an inevitable product of the nuclear arms race which had divided the planet for several decades.
The toll of the Earth Nuclear War is perhaps incalculable in terms of human lives. Estimates have ranged from one hundred million to one billion, the disparity among figures undoubtedly influenced by whether the estimator was dealing with direct or indirect effects.
Geopolitically, there is little argument that this war changed the face of the globe. It was being reported that raiding bands of man-like animals were roaming the Balkan Seacoast area, dressed in the furs of beasts and carrying weapons made of wood and stone, and nomadic tribes of relatively civilized peoples were observed in movement across the former political subdivisions of Germany, France, and Spain. It is generally conceded that these tribes were drifting toward the Asian continent, where populations had been decimated but not culturally deprived. The continent of Africa, it was reported, lay beneath a pall of radioactive dust for a period of seven years, but this has not been confirmed, nor has a similar contention concerning the continent of South America.
Of the entire geopolitical world, only the North American continent seems to have maintained vestiges of political organization. A population shift into a trough bounded east-west by the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, extending north to Canada and South to a line marked by the upper borders of the former states of Oklahoma and Arkansas, is considered to be responsible for the North American resurgence. This area, came to be known simply as “America,” remaining relatively stable throughout the balance of the Pre-Cataclysmic Period.
The man referred to throughout the preceding narrative as “Hunter” is, of course, our beloved Archer, Father of Olympia. In his thirtieth year he took to himself twelve wives, the Mother Mannclift reigning supreme in that mystic conjunction, and produced many sons and daughters. Archer was the Patron of America throughout its history, alleviating much suffering and sharing technological discoveries toward more efficient production of foodstuffs. There is, indeed, considerable historical evidence indicating that the generation of America that arose under the patronage of Archer looked to Olympia as the home of the Gods, and that many of these new Americans were admitted into the Olympian Society of Crags.
The beginning of the Cataclysmic Period, of course, in the year 2020 A.D. (or C.P. One), immediately and radically altered the geographic face of the globe. The radioactive lands of California fell into the sea. The Oregon and Washington coastlines crested to form the new (relatively) Olympus Ranges, boiling with continuous volcanic activity for an estimated 300 years. The At
lantic Ocean along the Eastern North American coast was rent by the emergence of new land masses offshore, and formed the inland sea of Atlantea. The land-bridge between North and South America submerged in the year 2023 A.D., and the Southeastern Peninsula of North America, once called Florida, disappeared. The Gulf of America was formed in that year also, extending from the Southern tip of Lake Michigan to what had previously been referred to as the Gulf of Mexico.
Earth-tilt occurred in the year 2060 A.D., with a shifting of the magnetic poles and a change to the present axis of rotation. Our present planetary equator traverses a line which, in Pre-Cataclysmic geography, would have extended in the Western Hemisphere from the island continent of Australia through Central America and Scandinavia. For more than 400 years the American Trough, as laid out for the Pre-Cataclysmic peoples of Father Archer, was the only habitable land area upon the planet, except for Olympia Crags itself, thus fulfilling the prophecies of First-fathers Brian and Winfried that Father Archer would be the savior of mankind. The thirteen states thus banded together as the new nation of Olympia have persevered through the Cataclysmic Millennium as the home of human consciousness in the Cosmos.
Eternal Olympia! Eternal memory of First-fathers Brian and Winfried! Eternal memory of Father Archer and Mother Mannclift! Eternal consciousness of the Cosmos! All hail the eternal Mind of God in Man!
ALL HAIL THE OLYMPIANS!
~End~
About the Author
Don Pendleton was most widely known for his original Executioner Series of action/adventure novels featuring his character, Mack Bolan; the Joe Copp, Private Eye Series; the Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Series; and as coauthor with his wife, Linda Pendleton, of the inspirational non-fiction book, To Dance With Angels. Don and Linda Pendleton’s other nonfiction works include Whispers From the Soul; The Metaphysics of the Novel, the Inner Workings of a Novel and a Novelist; The Cosmic Breath; the novel, Roulette: The Search for the Sunrise Killer; and a comic adaptation of The Executioner: War Against the Mafia, the first book in The Executioner Series.
A life-long metaphysical scholar, Don also had a career in science and aerospace engineering, and spent several years working on the ICBM and the NASA Moonshot Programs.
He published more than one hundred books in his long career and his life-long interest in philosophy, science, and metaphysics, inspired his many works.
A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet won the Best of Nonfiction in the 2002 Independent E-Book Awards.
Don died in October, 1995, at the age of sixty-seven. Learn more about Don Pendleton and his works at the official Don Pendleton web site, www.donpendleton.com
Kindle Box Set Edition, December 2012.
Don Pendleton’s Science Fiction Collection.
Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians) Page 47
