|
Here Jennie turned to Jack. "You were right. One disaster won't prevent the next one from happening. We had Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that was the first kabooom. Now we had the second. When nothing inspires changes that will cause people to acquire a higher and richer standpoint for looking at themselves, the tragedies of the past will be repeated and it will go kabooom again. What happened in Seattle can happen again tomorrow some place else. As far as I can tell the game has not changed. We are too far into it. We have become blind to it. We have to deal with the mammoth and we have to deal with the fish that take its bait."
Jack sat silent for a while. "Let me assure you, I'm not a fish!" he came back at Jennie. "I'm totally aware of how deeply I was involved with killing thirty billion people in hundreds of simulated missions."
There was silence again. The atmosphere in the cockpit became more tense now, more electric!
"Yes! Go on, stare at me!" Jack broke the silence. "Stare at the monster who killed five times the world's population in cold blooded, calculated, deliberate acts. Our team scored a thousand times the casualties of all the wars in history combined. As soon as I realized this, I quit. I'm not the stupid fish you think I am!" he said firmly.
He also said that it was terribly painful to give up a prospective twenty-eight-year career with a total loss of pensions. But staying on would have been harder. You pay a high price as a person for being constantly manipulated into becoming insensitive to people as human beings.
"The Red Army murders its soldiers more openly," said Igor, "it tells them what to think, how to feel inside, whom to hate, whom to be loyal to, what their conscience ought to allow, what it ought reject...."
Jack tried to stop him.
Igor simply ignored him, saying that this kind of total subjection to authority is necessary to establish the 'discipline' that enables people to butcher one another in combat.
Jack's face lit up. He praised Igor. "You've been there?"
Igor nodded.
"Would you have dropped a bomb?" Jack asked.
"I was in the Navy," Igor replied.
"That's all the same," Jack insisted.
Igor shook his head. He pressed his lips together, then nodded. "Fortunately," he sighed, "I was never put into the position."
Jack said that he quit and went back into the ministry. He felt that only in this way could he really serve his country.
"That makes no sense at all," Igor came back at him. "You hated being manipulated, how can you turn around and subject others to the same rotten treatment."
Jack shook his head, and raised his hands. "Not in my church!"
"Ah!" said Igor and began to grin again.
"Igor," Jack said to him, "this isn't a laughing matter. The ministry has become exciting! My work focuses on the dignity of man in God's image, not in the image of slaves sacrificing their lives on the altar of institutions."
Igor interrupted him. "A likely story!" he grinned. "If this church were real, it would be the most explosive revolutionary force ever seen."
"Explosive!" Jack repeated. "You don't know what explosive is! You don't know what resistance is! I'm hitting at the very heart of the hierarchy, Igor, any hierarchy, any controlling system, including our own church authority. I'm out to deliver a deathblow at them for the sake of mankind!"
Igor shook his head and didn't say anything more.
A weather report came in. The hourly update for the Northern Hemisphere by the International Control Station at Gander, Newfoundland, was relayed to us through Fairbanks. The Fairbanks signal was weak. We could barely hear it over the radio noise from all the atmospheric disturbances caused by the blast. According to the report, our flight pass to the North would be clear. It looked bad for Alaska though, and for the entire West Coast! Storms and more storms were promised as the fires in the South had altered the continental weather pattern.
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
 |
Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
|
|
|