After the unthinkable has occurred, all out atomic war, the world, after much shock tries to reorganize itself. Who will survive in the sterile complexes and who will be chosen to occupy them. We find little has changed; the most intelligent are selected much to the anger of the large masses. Those who can contribute to Man's survival are obvious choices while the majority who contribute little are left to suffer from the radioactive fallout. The story follows the lives of two people who were attached to each other but are forced to live apart. The changes that take place through forced separation exsmines the fragility of a relationship when the ties move from physical to the abstraction of printed words and messages.
Download the prequel: Jerusalem - The Plan.
Excerpt:
“Jim Davis bought it last Thursday”.
“Jim, why I just saw him 3 weeks ago and he seemed no different than you or me?
“ The trouble is that you sort of get used to it, not the terribleness of course, but it’s like Oh yea; we gonna have rain again tomorrow.”
I don’t want to sound like a martyr cause I’m old now, but I had my chance to take chances; to try things that I knew were crazy but just being able to have the chance to do things was enough. What do these young people have? The fragile hope that mankind is as clever as it thinks it is ; like betting all your chips that someone (I don’t know who?) will have an answer. You know, it’s a joke. I was probably one of the many who thought that “white was right” and the other races were somehow holdovers from a time when Nature was confused. I was even for giving it to the Russkies and the Chinese, like let’s get rid of them once and for all. But now, I scour the newspapers for a few lines that say that hope lies in a group of natives living in the Brazilian Forests who seem to have escaped. They are collecting sperm and egg cells in the hope that maybe we will be able to keep going and given one more chance”.
“It’s no different from what they are doing in the Department of Agriculture, my son –in –law Bruce is up to his neck in work. They are testing every seed and trying to find one that will not be affected by you know what. They are going through seed species hundreds of years old.”
“Sure, and where do expect to plant these new seeds”?
“Don’t you know anything? Right now, at this very minute, they are constructing a gigantic. moving Belt to get the soil to the Grand Canyon.”
“You have to be kidding! You mean they are going to fill n the Grand Canyon?”
“According to the scientists, they are going to have to remove two feet of soil before they can even think of planting those new seeds we talked about.”
“Why don ‘t they remove soil that’s closer to the Canyon? It seems stupid to go to places like Kansas and the Dakotas when they have places that are close by?”
“Well, it has to do with infrastructure. You know, the farms now have roads, railroads where they shipped before, electric services, offices and so on. If they just went to a place because it was closer, it would cost a great deal more. “
“But to build this gigantic moving belt, it will cost billions”.
“It will not have been the first time man had to build gigantic works in order to survive. Take the Romans for example, they built hundreds and hundreds of miles of aqueducts to bring water to their cities. And the Chinese, building the great wall to protect themselves from the barbarians. Or even the Americans when they built the railroads to settle the whole land and to get rid of the Indians.”
“You know, the Colorado River runs in the canyon, what do you suppose they will do about that”?
“Probably let it run its course into Mexico. I don’t suppose Mexico will like that too much but you know, the rich will overwhelm the poor and after all, Nature’s way is the survival of the fittest; the big fish eating the little fish. You know, the most important thing is to get crops growing. We probably have enough uncontaminated food in stock to carry us for the year but then after that, its grow your own food or die. And water will be the most important commodity we will have to think about. I remember a number of years ago the rich Arab nations were thinking about towing icebergs to their coasts; melting the ice and then creating huge reservoirs for their people. Well, aside from the fact that most of the iceberg would melt, it was going to be really costly. I now read where they are drilling hundreds of feet below the surface in the Arctic to get to uncontaminated water. There are still some pure lakes under the ice. But they would also use thermal heat to melt the ice and build enormous pipelines to bring the water to the populated areas – which by the way aren’t so populated anymore.
