He turned his head as the surgeon came out again.

“Well?” croaked Viken.

The doctor sat down. “It’s finished,” he said. They waited for a moment, awkwardly.

“Odd,” said the doctor. He groped after a cigarette he didn’t have. Silently, Viken offered him one. “Odd. I’ve seen these cases before. People who simply resign from life. This is the first one I ever saw that went out smiling—smiling all the time.”

Prayer in War

Lord beyond eternity,
Fountainhead of mystery,
Why have You now set us free?

You, Who unto death were given,
By Yourself, that we be shriven,
See, Your world will soon lie riven.

After Easter, need we dread
Fire and ice when we are dead?
Hell indwells in us instead.

From our hearts we raise a tower
Wherein sullen monsters glower.
Save us from our hard-won power!

You Who raged within the sun
When no life had yet begun,
Will You let it be undone?

We have wrought such ghastly wonders,
Lightning at our beck, and thunders—
Help, before this poor earth sunders.

Lord beyond eternity,
Fountainhead of mystery,
Why have You now set us free?

Tomorrow’s
Children

On the world’s loom

Weave the Norns doom,

Nor may they guide it nor change.

—Wagner, Siegfried

Ten miles up, it hardly showed. Earth was a cloudy green and brown blur, the vast vault of the stratosphere reaching changelessly out to spatial infinities, and beyond the pulsing engine there was silence and serenity no man could ever touch. Looking down, Hugh Drummond could see the Mississippi gleaming like a drawn sword, and its slow curve matched the contours shown on his map. The hills, the sea, the sun and wind and rain, they didn’t change. Not in less than a million slow-striding years, and human efforts flickered too briefly in the unending night for that.

Farther down, though, and especially where cities had been—The lone man in the solitary stratojet swore softly, bitterly, and his knuckles whitened on the controls. He was a big man, his gaunt rangy form sprawling awkwardly in the tiny pressure cabin, and he wasn’t quite forty. But his dark hair was streaked with gray, in the shabby flying suit his shoulders stooped, and his long homely face was drawn into haggard lines. His eyes were black-rimmed and sunken with weariness, dark and dreadful in their intensity. He’s seen too much, survived too much, until he began to look like most other people of the world. Heir of the ages, he thought dully.

Mechanically, he went through the motions of following his course. Natural landmarks were still there, and he had powerful binoculars to help him. But he didn’t use them much. They showed too many broad shallow craters, their vitreous smoothness throwing back sunlight in the flat blank glitter of a snake’s eye, the ground about them a churned and blasted desolation. And there were the worse regions of—deadness. Twisted dead trees, blowing sand, tumbled skeletons perhaps at night a baleful blue glow of fluorescence. The bombs had been nightmares, riding in on wings of fire and horror to shake the planet with the death blows of cities. But the radioactive dust was worse than any nightmare.