Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (32 page)

“Radio’s dead, mister,” said the taxi driver, and at that instant a heavy vehicle bumped the cab’s left side, the taxi slid into a ditch and fell on its own right side. The highway was without illumination, and three cars followed the taxi into the ditch one after the other. The President and party were buried under the first vehicle and a half, meaning nearly two tons of steel and hysterical humanity, and it was a slow and painful, bloody and gasping death they had.

Before the dawn came, the sky over America and the whole temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere had turned a pale purple in which clouds of silvery hue rolled and played, rose and sank. The colorful atmosphere—lethal—had its beauty as it seeped into the Southern Hemisphere in long slow streaks, causing millions to flee from it toward the South Pole. Now trusty little satellites still orbited the earth or stayed in place, as if nothing had happened, kept taking photographs and sending them earthward, where no one was alive or in a condition to receive them, except a few lonely army stations in the South Pacific. Artists had depicted such scenes in the past, Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Tanguy to some extent.

The people of the Southern Hemisphere when not fleeing gathered in groups small and large (several hundreds of people), attempted to share food equally, made speeches about the necessity of having hope and courage (the Church did well here), which sounded quite good, even though ninety percent of the speakers, formal and informal, did not believe a word of what they were saying. The rotating Earth had become entirely too saturated by radioactive atmosphere, which its gravitational force held fast. There seemed less wind or winds than normal, the last curse of all.