Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (60 page)

It would be years, of course, before all the data would be collected; much inevitably would be lost, and in vast expanses of the world, even parts of the "civilized" world, no records were even kept. But in the continental States, as winter moved into spring and spring moved into summer, no one really terribly worried about the data; there was far too much to be done digging out of the chaos. It was enough for the country, one day in midsummer when some semblance of communications networks were being pieced back together again, that someone speculated in official tones that on that morning something on (he order of seventeen million pairs of American eyes had greeted the dawn. Nobody really believed the figure; on the very face of it, it was really pretty unbelievable. And everybody was probably right, too.

It probably wasn't the right figure.