Ben Bova - Test of Fire

“Vorkuta doesn’t answer either?” the general asked, his harsh voice almost pleading.

“No sir.”

“Bratsk?”

“No.”

Vasily heard a woman sob. General Kubacheff laid a weary hand on the captain’s shoulder.

Shakily, he said, “There’s no one left. It’s up to us. Send out the strike order. Keep sending it until every missile is launched. Every last one of them!”

“My mother,” someone was saying, in a dazed voice. “She lived in Rostov.”

Lived. Already they were thinking in the past tense. Vasily Petrovich Brudnoy unlatched the safety cover over the red button, his teeth clenched together so hard that he could feel the pain in his jaws. He leaned his thumb on the red button and looked up at his screen. If the Americans have knocked out our silos, he told himself, we have lost everything. But almost immediately the clusters of orange lights began to change to green.

General Kubacheff grunted behind him. “At least the automatic controls still work. Not even direct hits could knock them out, we buried them so deep.” Vasily smelled, almost tasted, the general’s final puff on his cigaret. “Well, that’s the end of it all. At least the American bastards won’t live to enjoy their victory.”

Human life also existed precariously on the Moon, buried under the sheltering rock of the huge crater Alphonsus. Airless, almost waterless, the Moon was a harsh habitat for the few hundred engineers and technicians who lived and worked there.

Douglas Morgan was also sitting at a console, watching a monitoring screen, deep beneath the 80-mile-wide crater. On the screen he saw three people in stark white hardsuits working up on the surface. The instruments flanking his screen on either side told him every detail of information about his three charges: their heartbeats, breathing rates, internal temperatures, blood pressures, more. Other digital readouts told him the temperature of the Sun-scorched lunar rocks, the levels of radiation out on the surface, the number of days to go until sunset.

Morgan was a big man, with broad shoulders and a thick chest, heavy strong arms and a shock of sandy hair that he kept brushing back from his Nordic blue eyes. He chafed at being confined to the monitoring task. He was happier up on the surface, out in the open, even if it meant being sealed into a cumbersome hardsuit.

The screen seemed to brighten all of a sudden, and he blinked at the unexpected increase in light.

Automatically he reached for the brightness control knob, but as he did three separate alarm buzzers came to life. His thick-fingered hands froze in mid-air.

“Lisa, Fred, Martin… get inside the airlock!” he shouted into the microphone set into the console.

“Now! Move it!”

The three figures in the screen hesitated, looked up, as if someone had tapped them on their shoulders.

Behind the heavily-mirrored curve of their visors, their faces could not be seen. No one could tell what expressions of surprise, or annoyance, or terror crossed their features.

But Douglas Morgan was no longer watching the monitor screen. With a single sweeping punch at the general alarm button, he bolted from his chair and raced from the monitoring room toward the powerlift that went up to the airlock on the surface.

The three figures on the screen brightened, the suddenly intense sunlight glinting off their hardsuits with wild ferocity. Harsh claxons sounded throughout the underground community, startling everyone, as Douglas Morgan loped in long, low-gravity strides through the corridors that led to the airlock.

By the time he got to the airlock and pulled on an emergency pressure suit, two of the hardsuited figures were already stumbling through the inner airlock hatch. He could not tell who they were.

“Lisa?” he called his wife’s name. “Lisa?”

“I’m here, Doug.” Her voice sounded frightened in his helmet earphones. But she was safe, inside, alive, sheltered from the fierce radiation of the flaring Sun.

“Fred’s still out there,” said Martin Kobol, the second of the hardsuited figures. “I saw him go down as we ran for the airlock.”

Lisa pushed her visor up into the top of her helmet, revealing an aristocrat’s fine-boned face.

But her dark eyes were wide with terror.

“We’ve got to get him!” she said, her voice low and urgent. “Doug… do something!”

But Douglas was staring at the radiation dosimeter on the chest of her suit. It had gone entirely black. Turning, he saw that Martin Kobol’s badge was black too.

“It’s too late,” he said, the realization of it making his insides flutter. “You barely made it back in time. He’s dead by now.”

“No!” Lisa snapped. “Get him! Save him!”

She started to pull the visor down again.

Douglas grabbed at her but she twisted free. It took the two men to hold her back from the airlock hatch.

“It’s no use, Lisa!” Douglas bellowed at his wife.

“The radiation! He’s fried by now.”

“No! Let me go! Let me go to him!” she screamed.

Others were racing up toward the airlock hatch now. Douglas and Kobol held Lisa grimly while she kicked and struggled in their arms. Slowly they backed her away from the hatch, while two technicians swung the heavy steel door shut manually and a third hovered helplessly, his head pivoting from the hatch to the two men struggling with Lisa Morgan.

One man died on the Moon when the Sun emitted its superflare. Billions died on Earth. The Sun returned to normal, shining as steadily and peacefully as if nothing unusual had happened. It had spewed out such flares before, in the distant past, before human civilization had covered the Earth with villages and farms and cities. In another hundred thousand years or so it might emit such a flare again.

The entire Old World was a scorched ruin, burned to a smoldering black wasteland. From Iceland to the easternmost tip of Siberia there was nothing but silent, smoking devastation. All the proud cities of human history were pyres, choked with the dead. The Eiffel Tower stood watch over a charred Paris. The cliff of the Acropolis was surrounded by a scorched Athens; the stench of rotting bodies rose past the shattered remains of the Parthenon, which had finally collapsed in the unbearable heat from the flare.

Moscow, Delhi, Peking, Sydney were no more.

For a thousand unbroken miles the tundra of high Asia was blackened, and the only animals that had survived were those who had been burrowed deep enough underground to escape the heat and the suffocating firestorms that followed the flare.

The whole of Africa was a vast funereal silence.

Men, elephants, forests, insects, veldts were nothing more than brittle blackened corpses, slowly turning to dust in the gentle summer breezes. The ancient Pyramids stood undamaged by the scorching flare, but the Western Desert beyond them had been turned into hundreds of miles of glittering glass.

The Americas had escaped the Sun’s momentary outburst, but not the rage of terrified men. Nuclear-tipped missiles had pounded North America.

Almost every city had been blown into oblivion under a mushroom cloud, and the radioactive fallout smothered the continent from sea to sea, from the frozen muskeg of Canada to the jungles of Yucatan. Alaska received its share of nuclear devastation; even Hawaii was bombed and sprayed with deadly radiation.

Latin America survived almost untouched, but cut off from the rest of the world by oceans and the radioactive wasteland that blocked migration northward. The great cities of Rio de Janiero, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Lima, soon began to disintegrate as their swollen populations drifted back to the subsistance farming that would feed them — some of them. Even in the lucky South, without the commerce of a worldwide civilization, the cities died. The old ways of life reaffirmed themselves: dawn-to-dusk toil with hand-made implements were necessary to raise enough food to survive.