Ashamed, I had to admit that I hadn't thought of it in the excitement of coming home to the islands.

     Jennie shook her head. "I hadn't thought about it myself, until now."

     "You said there's a telephone at the Harbormaster's office?" said Igor as we walked back to the Mary Q. "Why don't we go back right now, maybe he'll let us use it."

     "That old grouch! ...After what happened just now, Igor! Not in a million years will he let us use his phone," I said, "especially not for a long distance call." I must admit, I dreaded the thought of going back and facing him again. I was ashamed to beg once more, after we had just finished insulting the old sailor with an intended bribe.

     "Just go!" said Igor, "what have you got to lose?"

     "It would be worth a try," Jennie agreed. "Hasn't the man bent the rules already in our favor in allowing us to stay? Isn't this an indication that he's willing to forgive and forget?"

     Reluctantly I went back to his office: "The phone? Certainly you may use the phone," he replied. I had told him why we were so desperate to make the call. But when I mentioned that it was Denver I wanted to get to; his face changed. He mumbled something about this being impossible. He told us to sit tight and wait. He went into the back room behind his desk, a storeroom as far as I could make out. He didn't say why we should wait. Moments later he came back with the worn out page of an old newspaper.

     "Here, read this!" he said, as he handed me the paper and went quietly back to his desk.

     The heat in the office was oppressive, even at night, in spite of the open window. The page was from a local paper. It contained a map of the USA. The map was overlaid with a large gray band that extended from the Northwest all the way south to Texas, and north to Newfoundland. It covered the entire East Coast. I recognized the map immediately. I had seen such a map once before, outlining the Mt. St. Helens ash fall. Except, this one went further south. I was about to say that we already knew, but there was something else that caught my attention. A headline above it foretold a grim story that was explained in the text below: '100 million homeless, 14 million dead, 100 million trapped in a poisoned world.' The figures were gruesome. Also, the paper was nearly three weeks old.

     I stared at the map, at the headline, at the sailor, in total disbelief. The gray band extended across Colorado, across nearly all of it. It suddenly took on new meaning! "Do you see now why it is impossible to phone anyone in Denver?" said the sailor as he saw me staring at the map.

     I remembered the option I had been given when I phoned Honolulu that night. I could have flown missions in the East. That's what the coordinator had meant! My God, the whole country had become a poisoned land that needed to be evacuated, not just a city or two!

     The text beneath the map described that a 25-megaton blast over the nuclear-sub-base near Seattle. The paper said that all the forests and towns in the immediate seventy mile radius spontaneously ignited. The burning forest became all-consuming fire. Within minutes the burning forests became uprooted by the supersonic shock waves. They became fiery projectiles. The paper compared the blast to that of a much smaller test explosion in the 1950s in which eighty million tones of earth were evaporated. An entire island had been vaporized by that blast, leaving a crater a mile wide and almost two hundred feet below sea level.

     The paper said that the giant blast that eradicated the nuclear submarine base had triggered many of the nuclear warheads aboard the submarines stationed there, and in storage facilities, resulting in a giant 500-megaton explosion that sent shock waves through the San Andreas Fault. The shock waves had set off earthquakes as far away as South America. San Francisco had been totally destroyed. The big quake that had been anticipated for decades had erupted and virtually wiped San Francisco off the map. Los Angeles escaped the brunt with being just partly damaged. In the North, entire counties of Oregon and California were turned into rubble.

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche