Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

“As for the inhabitants of this area where we landed—assuming some have survived—they are certainly mixed: not only South African blacks and whites; but, from what I have learned, a surprisingly large number of Indians and Pakistanis, more than ten percent of the local inhabitants. The population of this world of the future is likely to be diverse with a capital D—and they may not all share your high-tech views, Mr. Tom Swift.”

“Is that a coincidence?” Sarah asked. “A multiplicity of races and cultures. A gene pool of amazing variety. I wonder…”

I looked at Sarah, who smiled and shifted closer to me.

As our debate ran its course, and the evening light dimmed along the beach, I found myself surreptitiously beginning to think about my own personal future. And almost instantly I decided that I wanted to marry Sarah. In the world that had existed until just a few days earlier; I would have carefully considered how to proceed. I was very much in love, yes, but there would have been so many practical considerations—schooling to be completed, career to be considered, Sarah in Pennsylvania, me in Georgia—plus the lack of pressure to marry, indeed the very opposite force at work, the pressure to remain single until later. Now there would be no “later” in the conventional sense. Education, career, homemaking, all were compressed into something that must be embarked upon immediately. In that previous life, at twenty-five years of age, I was just a kid. Now I was a mature member of the tribe, already past the time when I should have been starting a family.

And there was another factor that I suddenly found frightening. In that other existence, if through some terrible turn of events, Sarah should have been lost to me, I would eventually have gotten over it—would I?—and found somebody else, somewhere, out of the millions of suitable young women in the world. Here there was a limited number of young women, and the potential loss seemed vastly greater. How can I say that the woman I loved seemed more precious in a world suddenly become smaller? I will not say it; but I admit that the thought occurred to me.

Also, marriage in this coming society, the shape of which I could hardly envisage, loomed larger than marriage in the world we had left. Here, a partnership in survival entailed working together as part of an extended family, finding food and shelter, averting ever-impending hazards, striving to make a new world. I understood, as I never did before, the concept of marrying for the sake of carrying on the blood line, saving the farm—or the homestead, or the kingdom. I found myself thinking of Sarah as a mother, a breeder of a new race.

Sarah. What a name for this moment! Sarah, wife of Abraham, mother of Isaac. God vowed that she would become a “mother of nations.” What was I doing, thinking so much lately about the Bible? I guess it couldn’t be helped, what with fire and flood and the destruction of the world. Anyhow, putting it all together, I knew that I needed Sarah by my side. As I saw her looking at me, I could tell that she felt the same way.

The idea, unspoken, was spontaneously in the air. We all became silent. Sarah and I smiled at each other, as did Tom and Mary, as did Herb and Roxy. In an enchanted moment, it became apparent that each of the three couples had made a life commitment.

“Marriages are made in heaven,” I said later to Sarah, “and that’s doubly true for us, brought together by a comet.” I then observed that I was picking up her habit of quoting the classics. “I guess that’s Shakespeare,” I added, feeling smug.

“Close,” Sarah answered. “It’s John Lyly, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s.” Then, suddenly pulling me to her, she said, “And the full quote is: ‘Marriages are made in heaven—and consummated on earth.’”

In the long run, of course, even the most icily analytical engineer—my father to the nth power—could not deal with this disaster in the lucid form of logic. When the Focus Group met, we might start with reasoned debate, but would eventually resort to poetry and emotion—and silent reflection. There is no way in which we can rationalize what has happened and try to compare it with anything else. The world destroyed. We didn’t really absorb it that first day, or come to grips with it. How could we? How can we even now? But there it was, and here it is.

As the immediate threat lessened, and we found ourselves on this shore, warm and dry and with food to eat, tense vigilance among the survivors gave way to elemental relief, then quickly turned to something else among most people, something difficult to define—I can only call it shock. The destruction of the world is different from the loss of a loved one, unlike even widespread calamities such as earthquakes or wartime massacres. Everyone gone. Everything gone. Impossible to grasp. Carried beyond fear, grief, and anger to shock, we came inevitably to feel awe in the biblical sense, dread of the immense, powerful, and ultimately unfathomable universe.

I’ve said that I would leave the serious philosophizing to others, yet here I am talking again about awe and the Bible. Actually, my primary feeling—my primal feeling—was the joy of being alive, of having survived. I’ve read about the guilt experienced by survivors—soldiers in battle or people in concentration camps—individuals who were astonished to find that, when grief for others seemed called for, they were overwhelmed by relief at their own deliverance. I felt some such guilt, but not as much as I suppose I should have. I was pleased that my father was spared, and achingly sad that my friends back home were gone. But I could not subdue the exhilaration I felt because of the elemental fact of my own survival.

Of course, there was one major difference between the passengers and the crew, unspoken but momentous. Most of the passengers were together with their immediate families, husbands with wives and parents with children. Most of the crew came alone. Many of them are young, single, and adventurous, but not all. There was mourning aplenty, mostly private and subdued.

To give the full picture, I must also mention the suicides. At least, we all assume that’s what they were. Shortly after the full scope of the Event was known, while we were still at sea, three members of the crew disappeared, presumably overboard. Each of the three had expressed to friends their agonizing grief over having lost loved ones—and they explicitly announced their intention of putting an end to their own unendurable lives. There was no official announcement of these losses, but the news did get around. When the people and supplies from the ship reached the shore, and the captain announced that all on board were accounted for, he too was making the assumption that was universally shared.

Awe, grief, shock, wonder—all such feelings inevitably gave way to the immediate pressures of simply getting through each day. Most of the survivors—young and old, passengers and crew, workers and academics, leaders and humble laborers—found an effective remedy for melancholy in hard work. They turned the precariousness of our situation to advantage as an aid to personal healing.

After a five-day trek up flood-scoured hills, the expeditionary force reached Ulundi, or rather the place that had been Ulundi before the coming of fire and flood.

Deck Officer Gustafsson, speaking with Captain Nordstrom in his daily radio call, reported that the first people he had encountered were a group of Zulu youngsters kicking a soccer ball around on a muddy field. This tranquil scene, come upon suddenly after their journey through appalling wasteland, brought several members of the party to the verge of tears. A rugged master at arms dropped to his knees in a prayer of thanksgiving.