"Richard Wilson - Mother to the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Richard)

in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have
been working with closed systems; certainly any country with
a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers
were inhabited, too. I hadn't heard that any astronauts or
cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got
down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.
But I've listened to the rest of the world on some of the
finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn't been
a peep out of it. I've listened and signaled and listened and
signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave,
AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a
thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of
course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing
human.
I've sent out messages on every piece of equipment con-
nected to Con Ed's EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio,
the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI,
Reuters' world news network. The New York Times' multi-
farious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels' international reser-
vations system. Nothing. By this time I'd become fairly expert
at communications and I'd found the Pentagon network at
AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the
monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington
to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss
anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message
center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a genera-
tion ago.
This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circum-
stantial. But to Siss I say: "There's nobody left but us. I
know. You'll have to take my word for it that the rest of
the world is as empty as New York."
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds.
One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat
deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss?
What's the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us:
where do we go from here?
But don't tell me; tell Siss. I don't expect an answer; she
does. She's the one who went into the first church she found
open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you
know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for
mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers,
 and for me, and for all the dead people who had been alive
only yesterday, and finally for herself; and then she asked
why. She was in there for an hour and when she came out I
don't think she'd had an answer.
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. What do you want us
to do now, fricassee ourselves?
Late on the morning of doomsday they had taken a walk
down Broadway, starting from Cantwell's house near the
Columbia campus.